The Blonde (13 page)

By Fifty-Seventh Street he had closed the gap between them, and then they turned abruptly at the corner and paused, waiting to cross. Afraid they might notice him, Walls busied himself at a nearby newsstand, pretending to study the cigarette selection. In his peripheral vision, he watched them cross toward him and then cross away, so they were again on the opposite side of the street, walking west this time. Though he didn’t smoke, he thought it wise to complete the conceit, and purchased a pack of Marlboros before moving along parallel to the women with his hands in his pockets.

This street was wider, and the cars whizzing in both directions separated them. A huge red box of a truck came to an abrupt halt, blocking his view, and began to reverse to enter a garage. He stepped off the curb, watching for the two blondes to emerge. But only one did, and it wasn’t Marilyn. The girl was smiling, as though a suave fellow had just complimented her ankles, and Walls began to follow her because he didn’t know what else to do. Irritation burned in his chest, and he looked about wildly for Marilyn. But she wasn’t behind him or ahead of him, and there was no shop along that stretch that she might plausibly have gone into.

She was simply gone.

Walls was startled out of his confusion by the rude wail of a horn from a car he hadn’t noticed hurtling in his direction. He jumped to the sidewalk, so annoyed at losing her that he felt no relief at not being run down, and then, experiencing a premonition of uselessness, the coming weight of a long, pointless evening, made a sudden decision.

“Excuse me, miss?” As he touched the sharp point of her elbow he thought to put on the boyish, eager smile that he usually concealed.

The girl jumped a little. When she was facing him he saw that she had flushed so that her cheeks almost matched her plum lips. “Oh!” she exclaimed. “Do I know you?”

“No. I don’t
think
so, it’s only that—well, I guess you looked familiar to me, and I was wondering … Are you by any chance an actress or something?” He averted his eyes, as though embarrassment had gotten the better of his courage. “I’m sorry, this really is uncouth, I’m sure you get asked all the time. You’re probably plenty sick of random men interrupting your day to tell you how pretty you are.”

He kept his eyes averted another two beats before glancing up to see her exhale in sweet disbelief and the edges of her lips curl. For another moment she tried to keep away her smile, and then stopped trying. “No.” She giggled and pressed the large, black bag she carried to her chest. “I suppose there are times when I daydream about … But you must have me confused with somebody else.”

“Oh, well.” He let his focus drift to the intersection and stepped off the curb. “I’m very sorry to have bothered you, then. Have a nice evening.” He strode forward, advancing halfway across the avenue before he paused, put his hands on his hips, and took a deep breath of air—as though it had just occurred to him that it was a lovely evening in early summer, when anything might happen and risks ought to be taken—and turned around. The girl was still standing on the corner, shifting uncomfortably, unsure if she was supposed to wait for him to disappear before she, too, moved on. “Say!” he called out to her. “What are you doing?”

She looked away and looked back at him. “You mean, right now?”

“Yes.” He smiled wide. “What are you doing right now?”

“I don’t know, I guess.”

“Would you let me take you for a drink?”

She glanced right and left, as though for someone to approve or disapprove. Then, when the light was about to change, she called “All right!” as she dashed toward him and, laughing, they ran together to the far side of the avenue.

The elation of running evaporated as they walked to one of the dives on
Fifty-Second Street. Awkwardness grew in its place, which he strategically allowed to remain even as they settled into the bar. He took her black bag from her, noted its heaviness, and hung it on the hidden hook. When he ordered a dirty martini, the girl, who had introduced herself as Anna, asked for the same, and he took sidelong notice of the way she tried to hide her squeamish reaction to the first taste. Their stilted small talk dried up, and she took two big sips of the drink—probably more than she’d intended—and a sheen came over her eyes as though she might cry.

“Do you have a cigarette?” she asked nervously.

His mouth was already forming a “no” when he remembered that, contrary to his custom, he did have a pack in his pocket. Wordlessly he undid the wrapping and lit a match.

The drag relaxed her, and her confidence seemed to improve now that she had an object to occupy her hands. “Aren’t you going to have one?”

He was about to inform her that he didn’t like cigarettes, but he realized, almost too late, that the person he was pretending to be did. After completing the ritual of lighting and exhaling with what he believed to be convincing smoothness, he began the line of questioning that was his reason for taking her out. “So what do you do with your days, Miss Anna?”

“I’m a makeup artist.”

“You are?” He grinned like he’d never heard of anything so enchanting. “For who?”

“Oh, I work at the counter at Bloomingdale’s, doing makeovers mostly.”

“Is that all?”

“Well, I’m only just starting out,” she said, a little defensively, and drained her martini.

Walls, realizing that he had moved unskillfully, signaled the bartender for two more, and asked her instead about her childhood and schooling and what kind of books she read, while the crowd grew around them. The notion that she was perhaps Marilyn’s regular makeup artist excited him, and for a
while he was certain that if he only got Anna drunk enough, she would spill confidences that he’d never glean listening in on Marilyn’s phone. But as the girl’s speech got faster, and then slower, and her eyes became unfocused, he began to worry that even if Marilyn
had
confided in her, she was too empty-headed to remember anything of significance.

It was around then that she bit her lip, leaned in close—the divulgence pose—so that he smelled her briny breath. “Remember how you asked if I was an actress?”

He nodded and reached for his glass.

“Well, I wonder if I didn’t have some fairy dust on me, or maybe something a little Hollywood that you were sharp enough to pick up on, because—because you’ll never
guess
who I met tonight.”

His eyebrows drifted upward. “Who?”

She propped her elbow on the bar, brought her nose even closer to his. “Mar-i-lyn Mon-
roe
.”

“
No
.”

“Yes!”

“What was she like?”

“Oh …” Anna shrugged as her eyes went dreamily to the ceiling. “She was divine. Divine. Just like you’d think, except better. I mean, even sweeter and funnier, and much
much
more beautiful. She didn’t even need makeup, she really didn’t, which is what I told her.”

“Really? My, you’re brave. How did she respond?”

“You won’t believe it, but she was so humble, she seemed genuinely surprised that anybody would like her better au naturel. But then she told me I was too good at my job to try to put myself out of one like that.” She laughed and lifted her second martini unsteadily. “Isn’t that clever?”

Walls nodded.

“And after I was done, she said I did such a good job that she would keep my number and call me whenever she was in New York and needed her face
done, that she felt I was her friend, and that she would even ask if her usual makeup man needed an assistant on her next picture. I mean, isn’t that just
thrilling
? Can you imagine me on a movie set?”

“Yes,” he replied with directness that made her blush. “Was she very grand?”

“Oh, no. I mean, her apartment was nice and everything, but it wasn’t how you’d imagine a movie star living. Really, she was just like anybody, except of course much more beautiful …”

“Did she say where she was going tonight? Who she was meeting?”

“No, and I didn’t ask. It seemed rude somehow…. I know it’s funny, she’s so much prettier and richer than I am, and she knows so many more interesting and powerful people, but I felt like I wanted to protect her. Why do you think that is?”

Walls shrugged. “Was there anything else?”

Anna shook her head in wordless amazement, as though the experience was so complete and almost sacred that she might tarnish it by saying any more. “Nope.” She sighed happily, and lifted her empty glass to her lips.

Walls rested his hand on her upper thigh, meaning to invite her to talk more. But as she slowly raised her blurred gaze to meet his, he saw that her interest had shifted. That he’d loosened her up, and it would be cruel to go on hammering her for information that she probably didn’t possess. Anyway, he’d only been using her to try to salvage his night’s mission, which he should have admitted was a bust hours ago. Meanwhile Elvis Presley had started singing “Blue Moon” from the jukebox, and Walls felt tired of pretending, and realized that just for a little while he wanted the warmth of a human body near his. He took Anna’s hand, and led her to the back.

Now that they were against each other, he could feel how hot she was, and he wondered if she wasn’t used to drinking, if dancing with a strange man in a bar late at night like this was something she might not otherwise have done. If maybe she was acting freer than she really was. Her head was on his
shoulder, and she was humming softly. He promised himself that he would offer to call her a taxi after the next song, or maybe the one after that, and then he closed his eyes and put his hands on her waist.

“Oh!” she gasped, and giggled when she realized that her voice was louder than she’d meant it to be. She pointed her small chin up so it almost met his. “I just remembered something. Another thing about Marilyn.”

“Oh?”

“When we were coming down in the elevator she said: ‘If we’re going to be friends I ought to have a nickname for you,’ so I said ‘all right,’ and she thought a minute and then said, ‘I’m going to call you Anechka.’ ”

“Did she?” Walls whispered into Anna’s hair.

“Yes! I mean, isn’t that something, that Marilyn Monroe has a nickname for little old me?” She giggled again, and pressed her face against his chest happily, and meanwhile Elvis’s voice swelled to a hungry, tropical wail. “And isn’t that very original of her? Like in a Russian novel, like I was Anna Karenina or something. Anechka,” she repeated in wonder, “Anechka.”

TWELVE

New York, May 1960

SHE kept the motor running and idled slightly away from the other black town cars that swarmed the street in front of the Waldorf-Astoria. At first she’d found it disconcerting, this killing time out of sight, merely watching the action. In between her second and third marriages, when she’d finally come to believe that she could have her pick of men, she had been in the habit—if a date was late meeting her—of leaving with another man, a lesson no less effective for having led to fistfights. She had labored to make herself the one waited for, waited upon, but as the hours passed she discovered that she rather liked the anonymity of hanging back in darkness, becoming familiar with her own agitated breathing, anticipating any movement under the hotel’s pink-and-gold awning. Then he was there, suddenly, a flash of tanned skin and white teeth, and she knew she could not have missed him. A shudder passed through her shoulders (as always when a man came into view she had been with as she’d been with Jack). Otherwise she stirred only slightly, to put the car in gear.

Five minutes of handshaking and drunken congratulation followed, in which she feared he might escape without her notice, but then he parted from the others and, moving to board his limousine, lifted his top hat in a showy gesture of adieu. When the limousine headed uptown, she did, too, lagging at a safe distance. A Cadillac separated them for a few blocks, but she was no longer afraid of losing him. He was going to the Carlyle (so Alexei had assured her), and as she maneuvered the car across lanes she removed the chauffeur’s hat and then the oversized black jacket she had used to obscure her appearance and tossed them into the backseat.

The limousine stopped in front of the Carlyle’s marquee on Seventy-Sixth, and she double-parked down the block, in a shadow between streetlamps. She did a final check in the rearview mirror—the black cat-eye sunglasses that brought more attention than they deflected, the fuzzy white sweater she’d put in the dryer so that it would stretch just so across her torso—and was relieved she had when she realized a kerchief still covered the high, blonde helmet of her hair. Her blondeness was crucial to the mission. She undid the piece of silk, gripped the canvas tote, and pressed open the car door.

The sidewalk was purple except where it was tinged orange by the streetlamps, and her heels scarcely made a sound as they carried her over its rough surface. Not until she reached the yellow corona of the Carlyle’s entrance did she see how perfectly she had timed everything. The scene in front of her was a still life—the liveried bellboy gesturing to the revolving door, Kennedy with his head down about to move through it, the others in the black suits that were their expensive, nondescript uniform. One of the bellboys spotted her and took a step in her direction, but she averted her eyes, as though trying to go unnoticed, and went through the side door. Her agitation surged again, which made it easy to do as she had planned: One pointed toe met the other and she fell forward, stumbling and sprawling on the floor, her bag overturned, its contents spilled across the burgundy carpet. A Graham Greene novel went flying, a lace teddy hung out, an unmarked pill jar rolled, her sunglasses were crushed beneath her weight.