The Blonde (18 page)

“Everyone else is dancing; shouldn’t we?” Jack seemed to vibrate with the charade—he enjoyed pretending they’d just met, even though they’d been circling each other for more than a year now.

“Your brother doesn’t like me very much,” she said as he led her down a few steps, into the sunken part of the living room, where the women were kicking off their heels.

“Bobby? Of course he does.”

“He’s got a funny way of showing it.”

“I’m sorry. If he was short, it was nothing to do with you. He’s put out over missing a meeting that I couldn’t have had him at, anyway.”

“But he’s your campaign manager.”

Jack grinned. “How did a little girl like you learn something important like that?”

She made her eyes like Betty Boop’s. “
He
told me!”

“Well, he would only have caused trouble at this one.”

“What kind of meeting was it?”

“Oh, god, I’m tired, can’t we talk about something else?”

So they talked about Frank Sinatra—the music, not the man—and the beach, and which movies they had seen lately, and other things people talk about when they have just met, or otherwise have known each other so long that there is nothing more to learn. Then Jack was called away to the telephone, and for a while she danced with Peter, and for a while with Jack’s youngest brother, who was still rather fat in the face and kept staring at her breasts. The music was rowdier when Jack came back, but it seemed everyone wanted to dance with him, and everyone wanted to dance with her, too, and hours passed where she couldn’t even catch his eye. Eventually the living room emptied out, and she saw Peter slumped on one of the couches in alcoholic slumber, and she remembered the real reason that she hadn’t wanted to go on a date with him. A party girl she’d been friendly with in her starlet days had been set up with him twice, and never been paid for her services. He was cheap, the girl said, which was captured perfectly by his drunken somnolence in the house that his wife’s money had bought. Meanwhile the bartender was cleaning up, and Jack had disappeared, and she wondered if he had gone to bed without saying good night.

She drifted across the various levels of the room toward the heavy, carved wooden door, which was ajar. Outside the wind roughed her hair, and waves crashed in the distance. The turquoise rectangle of the pool glowed like a jewel in those final minutes of darkness—already, the sky was whitening at the edges. Earlier, the kinds of girls who were not quite actresses and not entirely prostitutes had giggled and splashed there, but it was empty now. Peter must have sent them home—it had been a long night.

The tile patio surrounding the pool was separated from the beach by a high glass wall—to keep out sand, she supposed, and riffraff. Beyond that the ocean spread out stark and infinite, and the road north wound its lonely way through the hills toward Hearst Castle. She stepped out of her white high heels, and lay down on a lounge chair. To the south, the lights of the Ferris wheel at Santa Monica were visible against a plum backdrop, and she
felt sad, thinking how her mother used to describe youthful nights on the boardwalk in the tough, yearning manner of people whose best days are behind them.

“She’s still here,” Jack said.

Had she been asleep? When she opened her eyes, he had appeared on the chair next to her. He was wearing the same black trousers and white collared shirt, but his tie was gone and his shirtsleeves were rolled. His hair was less in place than before—it was reddish with the coming dawn, an unruly brush that seemed disproportionate to his forehead. Perhaps he was too tired to speak expressively, for he looked smaller, reduced from his earlier glory, and she could not tell whether he was pleased to have found her or not. She was tempted to tell him that it was always like this—that in the fury of performance, when you are vivid and grand beyond imagining, you believe you will always be so; and that the morning after, when the magic has left your body, is always a cold, desolate surprise.

“I didn’t have a way home,” she whispered, not reproachfully, as she pressed her head against the cushion of the chair.

“Yes, of course.” He nodded. “I’m sorry about that.”

“Must have been a pretty busy night for you,” she went on, curling onto her side.

“Yes.” He seemed to want to say more, but perhaps an actual response would have required too much energy, because he only glanced up at her and stared, his eyes lingering long on the slope of her waist and the rise of her hip.

“Where were you?” she asked, not in the demanding tone of a grown woman but in the small, breaking voice of a girl whose father has gone down to the racetrack for too long and forgotten about her. This was easy—especially late at night, when she was exhausted but trying hard to do the bidding of her father’s people, she was that girl.

“Upstairs, with Bobby.” He put his face into his hands, which made it
impossible to read his expression, although she could see that whatever they had discussed had made him tired, and guessed that it must be something important.

“He’s angry that I’m here?” she asked, the wounded worry that this might be true showing through the courage she’d summoned to pose the question. Earlier, she had been insulted that Jack had not picked her up himself, but now she saw what an opportunity it was, how she could play injured, encourage him to talk, press him to tell her what he and Bobby had discussed.

“No. He’s angry, but not about you.”

“About what, then?”

“Tomorrow the candidate for vice president will be decided, and he’s not going to like it. He thinks Symington looks right, but it’s not going to be Symington.”

“No?”

“Oh—I suppose everybody will know pretty soon, anyway.” He sighed and glanced out at the oyster sky. “Johnson’s going to get his way.”

“But you called him an animal.”

For the first time since he’d come out by the pool, he smiled. “You remembered that?”

“I try to remember everything you say,” she replied, which was the truth, although not in the way her earnest, childlike delivery implied.

“Well, he is—directly from the barnyard—but I don’t have a choice. I don’t like it, and I don’t trust him. But they got me in a corner this time.”

He worked his palms together and glanced at her, his eyes vibrant with mystery. Was he wondering what it was safe to tell her, or how best to have his way with her? Or was she in his thoughts at all?

“Should I go?” she said quickly, before he could think too much. “You must be t-tired,” she continued, as though disoriented by her own self-doubt. “Your family, I wouldn’t want them thinking that I—”

“Never mind about them, you’re staying,” he interrupted, not harshly but
as though this was the obvious way of things. He added, almost apologetically: “You aren’t the first, you know.”

If she played wounded by this confession, perhaps he would go on talking, and other details would shake loose, and she could thus please Alexei with all the information she was capable of collecting just by appearing empty-headed. But he had already told her what mattered, and the rest she could piece together. Tomorrow—or later today, rather—when the fatigue had passed and he had regained his strength, he might regret what he had divulged, and punish her or himself by shutting her out. In her interior calculations, she invoked Alexei, philosophizing on the long game. There was nothing she might learn at that moment that was more important than holding Jack’s attention, so she let a giggle blow away on a gentle exhalation. She lifted her legs showily and stood to kiss him on the forehead. “Oh, Jack,” she gasped, “you don’t have to explain yourself to me.
I
know what you are.”

Then she darted toward the pool on mincing, barefoot tiptoes, unzipping her dress as she moved, pulling it over her head, revealing the surprise that she had planned for him twelve hours ago—that she wore no under-garments—and pausing just long enough to give him a backward glance that was equal parts mischief and apprehension, threw her arms over her head, and dove in. She was underwater a long time sailing through the dense, silken water, and when she came up for air she saw that he had already followed her lead. He was coming toward her, a dark shadow across the pool bottom’s moonlike surface. She took a few easy strokes to the corner, and when she surfaced again she pushed the damp strands of hair straight back from her face. Blinking water from her lashes, she experienced the tingling of being watched, and for a moment she was sure there had been a figure on the second-story balcony. But then a light went out in a bedroom, and she saw that the balcony was empty.

Jack surfaced inches from her, his breath noisy and very close. They stared at each other for a few moments, and—curling her lower lip under her
teeth—she wrapped one leg and then the other around his torso and pulled him the rest of the way to her. They had never been like this together—completely naked, their bodies as slick and warm as seals. Her breasts floated between them, almost touching his chest, which was smooth and hairless as a boy’s. Then he lowered his head and pushed her mouth open. She murmured when he pushed the rest of the way in, putting her fingernails into the nape of his neck and catching his ear between her teeth, bracing herself as his weight pressed her into the concrete deck, slow and strong at first and then much faster, again and again. They were, however briefly, rather small in that corner of the pool, hanging on to each other, while the glamour of the sunrise broke over the hills and painted the surface of the water a gleaming, peachy orange.

FIFTEEN

Los Angeles, July 1960

FRIDAY morning was as balmy and pure blue as the day before, and the day before, and the day before that, and Marilyn knew that for once she could do almost anything—take her clothes off in the cake aisle of the supermarket, or shoot up on Hollywood Boulevard—and nobody would notice. Kennedy would be accepting the Democratic Party’s nomination that afternoon, in downtown Los Angeles, and even the movie stars, who ordinarily were the organizing principle of the place, had been transformed into giddy fans. She took advantage of this anonymity by borrowing one of the candidate’s white dress shirts, rolling the sleeves and tying it off at the waist, so it wouldn’t be quite so obvious that underneath was the same pink dress she’d been wearing when she left home two days ago.

As her taxi ferried her back to Beverly Hills, she realized how little she’d slept over those days, how wired her mind was and how heavy her bones. She felt anxious and disoriented, the white light washing everything out, but then the car door opened, and she saw Sal, the concierge, and her stomach relaxed. “Miss Monroe,” he murmured, taking her hand to help her to her feet. It was a relief, after two days holding herself rigid, vigilant, observant, to see a true friend. He added, a little dejectedly, “We would have sent a car for you.”

“I meant to, but I forgot, I guess,” she replied sorrowfully. “Next time.”

As the concierge took her arm to escort her up the red-carpeted steps, he lowered his mouth to her ear. “Your husband returned this morning.”

“Damn,” she muttered.

“And another gentleman arrived, half an hour ago, looking for you.”

“Oh?”

“Naturally I told him we had no guest registered under your name. He answered that he was perhaps confused about your lodgings, but that he’d most definitely arranged to meet with you here, this morning. Perhaps he is one of your colleagues in the film industry? In either case it is none of my business, but I put him by the pool until I could confer with you. If you want him removed from the property, I would be more than happy—”

“No thank you, Sal. I think I know who it is, and he’s okay. Arthur didn’t see him, did he?”

“Of course not.”

She pressed onto her toes to kiss the concierge on the forehead, patted his hand, and went on by herself through the carpeted halls and garden pathways. A tiny alarm bell rang when she saw Alexei, poolside. He was wearing the usual brimmed hat and sitting very primly at a round table under a striped umbrella, his legs crossed, a teacup in one hand and its saucer in another. The sunglasses he used to conceal the direction of his gaze were white plastic. For the first time in their acquaintance he wore no socks, and the bare ankles more than anything else made it seem off for them to meet this way, in the California sunshine, as they had only once before, a decade ago.

“Hello.” She dragged a chair away from the table and sat beside him.

A few other people lunched around the pool, none within earshot. Nobody seemed particularly cognizant of the new arrival. For a few moments they were quiet, gazing out at the tranquil brightness. “It’s remarkable,” he observed presently.

“What is?”

“They don’t notice you.”

“They’re used to pretty girls.”

“Perhaps, but that’s not it. You know how to disguise yourself. ‘A fool
tries to look different; a clever man looks the same and
is
different’—have you heard that one?”

“Guess I didn’t need to.”

“Apparently not. Tea, my dear?”

She shook her head. “You didn’t fly cross country to buy me lunch and give me tips on how to go incognito, did you?”

“Of course not. I heard you were absent without leave from the set, and I was worried about you.”

“I see.” Perhaps it was sleeplessness, which always leaves the skin a little thin, that caused her to feel irritated, rather than protected, by this evidence of his constant supervision. After all, it was at his behest that she had spent those many hours on edge, manipulating the desires of the most sought-after man in the country. Her clothes were rumpled—a mellowed body smell clung to the threads—and she wanted badly to be alone, and naked. “You’re not the only one. Arthur arrived, this morning. Trying to find out why I’d disappeared from his movie, I guess. So if you want to talk, we’d better go elsewhere.”