The Blonde (14 page)

“Oh, damn me,” she said in her little broken bird voice as she pushed herself up, so that she was sitting like an odalisque in the middle of the lobby. She whimpered and covered her face with her hand until the concierge came rushing toward her and, with the help of the bellboy, lifted her to her feet. “Thank you,” she whispered, keeping her face hidden, as the bellboy hurried to collect the spilled contents of her bag.

“Are you hurt?” the concierge asked. His kindness was professional, muted. In her peripheral vision she could see how he glanced at the well-heeled men
who had been coming in through the revolving door, and knew they were watching her.

“No,” she whispered. “No!” she sobbed into her sleeve. “I’m fine, I’m fine. I’ve had a fight with my husband, that’s all. I took a room to get away from him and then I went home to get some things and he was there, and we started fighting again, only worse this time, because …” She broke off, accepting the concierge’s handkerchief and loudly blowing her nose. “Thanks, honey.” She laughed bravely, and showed him her eyes, wet with emotion. “Everything’ll be okay in the morning, won’t it?”

“Yes,” he answered, more feelingly this time, as though he’d been swept up, too, and wanted nothing but for everything to be okay for her in the morning.

“I know it will.” She smiled, biting her lower lip. “In the meantime, there’s champagne. Send up a bottle, will you? I’m in room seven-oh-five.” Saying the number, her voice sank an octave and lost its breathiness. “Seven-oh-five, you got that? Thanks, honey.” With a shy glance, the bellboy handed her the bag. She patted his cheek as she took it, and sashayed toward the open elevator. As the doors swept closed she kept her hand shielding her eyes. But the unnatural silence that filled the lobby told her Jack had seen her, and that unless the trail was cold she’d be hearing from him soon.

The trail was not cold.

So she told herself, anyway, while she was obliged to wait a little longer. The champagne arrived, and she had a first glass, and a second, and let the tension ebb in her shoulders, before the knock came. A tanned face filled the peephole, but it did not belong to Kennedy. This man had gotten a lot of sun, too, but his grin, especially when distorted by the glass, was more feral than flirtatious, and his hair was gone on top. She’d considered changing into the teddy, or into nothing, but she was glad now that she was still wearing street clothes.

“Can I help you?” she asked, keeping the door between them. The man was half leaning against a room service cart. A domed silver food warmer sat at its center, beside a single pink carnation in a small glass vase.

“Hello, sweetheart.” His tone indicated that he wasn’t one to explain himself. He was taller than Kennedy, with a barrel chest covered by the tuxedo that he had worn, she assumed, to the Waldorf-Astoria earlier that evening.

“My room service order came already,” she said. “Forty-five minutes ago,” she added, pointedly.

“This”—he pushed the cart past her and into the room—“is a new order.”

“Oh?” Her eyes went innocently from the tray to him.

“Oh,
yeah
,” he replied, drawing out the “yeah” lasciviously so that she heard a hint of his Southern accent. He winked at her—a slow, significant wink—and without taking his eyes off her, backed out of the room.

Alone again, she lifted the silver lid and found a folded black-and-white maid’s uniform, with a note that read:
Put this on and get that great ass up to the penthouse
. Earlier she had wondered if the champagne wasn’t a mistake, if she shouldn’t have kept herself coldly sober for whatever encounter, but now she was glad to be slightly numbed as she shook out the uniform and held it in front of her body, checking in the mirror if it would fit.

Another hour had passed, and midnight had come and gone, by the time Marilyn stepped through the unlocked door to the penthouse and asked, in a low murmur that mixed hope and trepidation, disgust and desire, “Please don’t tell me
this
is your fantasy?”

She’d worn stupider costumes, was how she tried to think about it while she buttoned the top with the white Peter Pan collar and affixed the doily-like headpiece to her hair. There had been an apron, too, but
that
she had deemed a step too far. She felt even more ridiculous on the threshold of a vast and well-appointed room, all mirror and gilt and marble and walnut, the kind where powerful men did their business.

Jack sat on a stuffed, whiskey-colored leather couch next to the man who had delivered the maid’s uniform, whose gaze now settled on the place where the uniform’s buttons were having trouble meeting their buttonholes. The apartment was high enough that the tall, leaded windows required no curtains for privacy. They contained only darkness and perhaps, if she used her imagination, a few dim stars. Beneath was a grand, gleaming dining room table cluttered with platters of half-eaten sandwiches, and an ice bucket cradling a bottle of champagne. The coffee table, too, was strewn with folded newspapers and legal pads and beer cans, and both men leaned toward it, shirtsleeves rolled, elbows on knees, regarding her. Kennedy’s bow tie was undone, and hung loose around his collar.

“Hey, baby,” he said after a while.

She turned one pale, downy cheek to him and held his gaze, showing him how the fire left her eyes and was eclipsed by sadness. “I’ve already been treated pretty bad today,” she said, gesturing at her outfit. “Before you asked me to wear this.”

“I’m sorry, baby,” he said. “Gotta take precautions.”

“You weren’t so careful in California.” Her tone meant:
I want to believe in you, but I know I shouldn’t
.

“That was before I was a presidential candidate.” His eyes had a hungry sheen, and his mouth was ticked up on one side as though this were all a little silly and he was sure that she would forget the insult soon and yield to him. “What if someone recognized you? A famous actress, coming up to Kennedy’s suite—that’d make headlines for sure.”

She stared back at him, summoned emotion. She let her lids close for a long moment and pressed her lips together, before reaching for the doorknob. Holding on to the knob, she moved as though to leave. “I’m not just any actress, you know,” she said in a small, soft, brave voice.

For the first time since she had entered, Kennedy glanced away from her, to the balding man, and he jerked his head in the direction of the bedroom doors. “Bill, give us some privacy, will you?”

The man named Bill acknowledged this request by standing and taking a step in Marilyn’s direction. He wore an expression that Marilyn knew well and had learned to disregard. His face said:
No matter how this man is about to treat you, we both know what you really are
. She returned his gaze—trying not to show her real anger—and watched him retreat through the vast living room to the back of the suite.

“I’ve had a hell of a day, too, baby.” Jack wasn’t grinning anymore—his hands were clasped in front of him, and in Bill’s absence his eyes became serious and attentive. “Whatever happened to you today, I wish I could undo it, but see—that’s the one thing I can’t do. So why don’t you come over here and try and forget it, and let’s see if I can’t make you feel better in the here and now?”

“That’s a pretty pitch,” she mumbled. It was, too. If she’d heard that one in her own life she probably would have gone along with it, and she wondered that Arthur, who was so clever with words, had never said anything to her as simple and persuasive as that. But this was not her own life, and she could not make the mistake of letting him in too quickly again. Then he wouldn’t have to care, and he could put her away just as easily as before. He was a champion skirt-chaser—she had to remember that. Nothing he said was true, and nothing she said was true, either. All that mattered was that she stayed around long enough to get Alexei what he wanted.

In front of the Waldorf she had been agitated, but now she was calm. Her hands were dry as the desert, and she wasn’t even dimly aware of her heart. Outwardly her demeanor was helpless, conflicted, but inside she was deathly cool.

“Come on, baby,” he urged with a wink, “let’s not waste time. I have to go to Washington in the morning, and I’d give just about anything if you’d come over here and sit on my face.”

“Huh,” she exhaled, the ghost of a sad, knowing smile briefly animating her mouth. “You see, Mr. Kennedy, the thing is … ,” she began again, in a careful, halting, girlish manner, letting her hair fall forward, so that it hung
over half her face. “Well, I read the papers, so I know you had a big week, and I expect you want a little fun. And I think you deserve some fun. I do. But I know you already have a wife, and the last thing you need is to listen to any of my complaining, so …”

“What?” His shoulders were gathered around his neck. He spoke briskly but didn’t seem impatient. He seemed to want to get at her problem so that he could solve it. “What is it?”

“Well, it’s just that—” she glanced down, as though this were some agony for her to admit. “It’s just that I’m not your
maid
.”

“Oh.” He laughed. “Of course you’re not. I’m sorry, that rigmarole was Bill’s idea. He’s here to protect me, is all. Take the damn thing off, if it bothers you so much.”

“My own clothes are down in my room. I’ll just go and—”

“Oh, come now, don’t go and leave me lonesome. I’ve sent the others to bed so I could be with you—”

“The others?” Her eyes flickered to her left, where the suite receded into opulent shadow.

“Just Bill, who you’ve met now, and my brother Bobby. He goes to sleep early of his own accord, because he’s a real Catholic, you see, and doesn’t approve of my hedonism.”

Although his hedonism had been on plentiful display already, she was surprised to hear him acknowledge it with words.

“There’s a robe in the bathroom.” He pointed to the door and—when she hesitated—added: “It’ll cover you more than those clothes you were wearing when you walked in.”

Each breath she took, as she hesitated some seconds more, worked its way dramatically through her chest, and when she finally let her eyes rise from the ground to meet his, she saw that he was grinning, and she grinned back.

“In this bathroom over here?” She was still smiling as she began to
walk—slowly, for his benefit—across the Persian carpet. Watching her, his mouth fell slightly open and the focus of his eyes became fixed.

“Yes. That bathroom over there.”

She traveled across the room with exquisite languor, but that was just for show—once she was out of his sight, she moved purposefully. The large mirror over the sink was illuminated by a row of lightbulbs, just like in a dressing room in the movies, and she was grateful for them as she checked the work the girl had done earlier that evening. The girl wasn’t as good as her usual makeup man, but she’d been available on short notice. She’d blown Marilyn’s hair out into high, golden waves and painted her mouth red and drawn wet black lines on her eyelids, and it had all held, so perhaps she wasn’t quite the ninny Marilyn had originally taken her for. When Marilyn was satisfied with her appearance, she leveled her gaze and reminded herself that she was not to give in to any lousy little passions. That was what Yves was for, and the others like him, of which there were plenty, and she could go out searching for that tomorrow if she wanted.

“Hey, baby!”

“Yes?” she called back, rolling her eyes in the mirror.

“Come on, don’t make a man wait like this.”

Grabbing the robe, she strode back into the living room and found that Jack had rearranged himself, propping his head on the couch’s armrest and stretching his legs across its cushions. “But honey, you’ve waited all year practically. Won’t kill you to wait a few minutes longer, will it?”

“Might.” He grinned at her. “I’ve been campaigning so much I’ve forgotten how to be alone, and anyway, if you think time has made it any easier to be without that ass, there’s a thing or two I ought to explain to you.”

“Poor Jack,” she breathed.

“Hurry up and put that robe on.”

“I’ll just be a second.”

“Don’t go.”

“What about them?” Playfully, she indicated the bedroom doors where the men who traveled with Kennedy rested, or listened, or perhaps spoke quietly to their wives over long distance. Did Jack get a charge, knowing they were there and might walk in at any moment, or was he merely accustomed to attendants?

“Never mind them.”

“Okay.” She drew her bottom lip under her top teeth. “Okay, but no peeking.”

Obediently he brought his hands to cover his face above his mouth, which remained in an amused configuration as she undid one strained button and then another. She dropped the shirt and was bending forward to roll down her stockings when she noticed that his index and middle fingers had parted. He didn’t hide his peeping—and she didn’t pretend she didn’t know—as she rolled down her stockings and turned to unzip the tight black skirt. Before shimmying out of it, she brought the oversized white cotton robe over her shoulders and glanced back at him.

“Naughty,” she admonished.

“Me?” He laughed. “That’s a bit of the pot calling the kettle black, isn’t it?”

“I’m not black,” she deadpanned, eyebrows innocently aloft.

“No,” he admitted. “But you are what my people would call a very dirty girl,” he went on, grinning at his put-on brogue.

Her lips made a small, surprised diamond. “Irish, huh?”