The Blonde (35 page)

But she was not as he expected her to be. Instead of the low-cut dress he had anticipated, she was wearing a fuzzy white robe with the hotel’s insignia on the breast and her hair, though still high and white, was somewhat wilder. The red tint on her lips was faded, and the black eyeliner was smudged. One of her hands was splayed against the wall for support, and she was half bending to pick up her key from the floor, where she must have dropped it. He
guessed she was pretty drunk—her movements were slow, and she seemed to waver like a puppet on strings.

“Oh!” she exclaimed. Her voice became slurred and mumbling as she said his name twice.

“Are you all right?”

“Think so.” She straightened suddenly, and, afraid she might fall backward, Walls took her by the arm. “I had a bad dream and I couldn’t fall asleep again and I thought I’d have a little nip of something, to knock myself out, and I went to the ice machine, and it’s sort of silly I guess, but I can’t seem to get my key to go …”

Walls felt almost sorry for her, catching her in so obvious and pathetic a lie—she didn’t have an ice bucket—but even worse for himself when he saw it there, a few feet behind her, sweating on the oak floorboards. Was it possible she had been in the hotel all along?

“Here, let me help you,” he said. As he bent to grab the key, he realized what had happened—he must have screwed up the lock earlier, while picking it, and if not for this she might have crept into her room silently and without his notice. He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to think fast. When he righted himself, he put his body between her and the door, so that she couldn’t see his hands—it was lucky for him she was drunk—and, quickly and subtly as he could manage, removed the pick from his pocket and leaned in to the lock. When it gave in a matter of seconds he was so relieved that he almost forgot to slip the pick under his sleeve, and out of view, before he swiveled and gestured for her to enter. “There! Just a sticky lock, that’s all. I’ll call down to the front desk and have them give it some oil tomorrow.”

“Silly me.” She gave a frail laugh and made her unsteady way into the room.

The light was on, and Walls peered over her head, looking for evidence that the room was as it had been earlier. But the door closed on him fast, and with surprising force. She stared at him through the crack of the doorframe,
and for a second it was impossible to think of her as helpless in any way. He was stunned by this glimpse. Her eyes shone with the fierce, multifarious spirit that must have been within all along. Then the view was gone, her lids drooping to obscure the glare. “Thanks, honey. I’ll be seeing you in the morning.”

She pressed her fingertips to her lips, so that a diamond bracelet he hadn’t noticed earlier caught the sconce light, blew a kiss, and shut the door. Walls remained in the hall a few moments staring at the place where she had just been, cold with the conviction that she was not only capable of treason but possessed a malignant intelligence he could not previously have imagined.

THIRTY-ONE

Miami, November 1961

“MISS Green?”

Being addressed in this way provoked a ripple of pleasurable associations in Marilyn, for Jack had given her the alias, and it was the one she still used when she called the White House switchboard. Of course, she’d told Alan Jacobs to reserve her suite at the Fontainebleau under the same name, so its use now might indicate any banal interruption. A waiter hovered at the bright edge of her cabana with a note perched on his silver tray. Behind him were the raked beach and the lazy clouds and the Atlantic Ocean gently lapping in every variety of turquoise.

After she read the instructions, she folded it twice and tucked it down the front of her navy tank swimsuit. “Thank you,” she said, reaching for her robe. “Is there a dress shop on the ground floor? I’m late, and I don’t have time to go all the way up to my room.”

This wasn’t entirely logical, as her room wasn’t far, and finding new clothes that fit right was never a swift proposition, but the waiter either saw it as part of his job not to question her or he was used to beautiful women and their elaborate justifications for shopping. The real reason was that she didn’t want to alert Douglass Walls, whose room was next to hers, to her excursion. His crush had seemed unremarkable at first—he was tongue-tied around her, and obvious about staring down her blouse—but she had been unnerved in Washington, the night she’d come back from taking a midnight dip in the White House pool, and he had leapt into the hallway wearing that expression of bizarre intensity. They had been regarding each other warily
ever since. Alexei had said he’d be watching her, and yet she found it incomprehensible that Mosey Moses’s son would be with the Russians, too. Even so, she was taken with the notion that he wasn’t really a publicist—he was too disdainful of fame for that.

In any case, he had no reason to doubt her stated purpose for traveling to Miami, which was to visit with her ex-father-in-law. Isidore wintered in Florida, and they’d dined together last night, at the hotel restaurant where everyone could see them, and afterward they’d watched a show at the Club Gigi. But if Alan’s boy had any suspicion regarding her and Jack, it would have been easy for him to discover that the president was in the vicinity—the
Herald
had run a large picture of the Kennedys descending
Air Force One
in Palm Beach yesterday evening, for a weekend away from the capital—and she didn’t want to risk his following her when she left the property. As it turned out, the dress shop carried an easy pink Pucci that she already owned and knew to be flattering, with a narrow waist and fitted below-the-knee skirt and a sleeveless, slightly blouson top with the sort of low back that worked especially well on her. She told the shop girl to charge it to her room, and changed in the bar bathroom on the first floor.

She left her bathing suit with the front desk clerk and asked her to have it laundered, adding—almost as an afterthought—that if her assistant called down wondering about her, they should say that she’d gone out for a walk. As she sashayed past the valets and the topiaries, the high hedges that did their clever work of disinviting ordinary passersby, she had a thrilling, reckless sense of being out in the world without anyone knowing her whereabouts, her face barely made up, her hair tousled from the wind and salt water, her feet strong against the asphalt in the flat, strappy sandals that she had worn to the beach in the late morning. For a few moments together she found it possible to forget all the fatal complications of her life. She lived for the hours she had with Jack now, assumed she was safe when she was in his orbit, and tried not to think too much the rest of the time.

The streets were full of rich men from the Northeast in tropical shirts, and Spanish boys with greased hair, and for a moment she thought she heard someone speaking Russian, but she twirled, as though overjoyed by the balmy breeze, and didn’t spot a tail. With her hair not blown out, and walking in a sure, fast manner unlike the one she used in movies, in a city teeming with women in low-cut dresses, she was not the object of any special notice. She found an empty side street, and reached the end without anybody following her. A few more blocks along the bay and she saw the boat docks she’d been told to look for, with a place called Earl’s—the kind with a thatched roof, and no walls, just hurricane shutters—overhanging the water. It was empty, except for a man in a nondescript black suit, sipping water at a side table. He responded to her arrival with a neutral glare, and led her out to one of the boats bobbing along the worn plank pier.

“That way,” the man said, as he helped her onto the waxed deck. She made her way around the cabin, holding on to its roof for balance, and found Jack arrayed on a blanket on the bow, wearing swim trunks and with his arms folded behind his head. He seemed so comfortable and relaxed in this posture that she almost didn’t want to disturb him, and stood watching while the current lifted and lowered the boat under her feet. Another vessel floated slightly farther into the bay, holding two men also clad in black suits incongruous to their surroundings. They were here to protect Jack, and she wondered what they would do to her if they knew what she really was.

“What are you gawking at?” he asked without opening his eyes, and she realized that he must have felt her shadow crossing his torso.
Well, at you
, she wanted to say, but even this felt too poignant to say out loud. She shouldn’t be there; she almost wished he would get tired of her already; she wanted to be brave enough to tell him how poisonous she was, with what duplicity she had started their affair, the betrayals already committed. The best she could hope for was that he would end it quickly—for Alexei would make himself known again, soon enough, and she would have to reveal things she didn’t
want to, or else risk being put away permanently. This was borrowed time. “Well?” he prompted.

“I was just wondering if your goons are going to follow us all night.”

He sat up, propped his elbows on his knees. The curve of his back was so tanned it appeared almost black in that light, except where the sun’s reflection made it white. His hair, too, was a summer color, except at the base of his skull, where it was recently trimmed and dark brown. “I wish I could stay all night.”

“Oh. I’m sorry, I didn’t expect …” She hadn’t expected to spend the night with him, but hearing that she wouldn’t put a knot in her stomach. “Of course.”

“Aw, don’t be like that. We only have a few hours before I have to get back, and I want to enjoy them.”

“Tell me.” She gazed out, above the heads of the Secret Service men, at the wide, gentle surface of Biscayne Bay. Everything appeared perfectly tranquil, but she no longer believed in appearances. “Tell me how we’re going to spend them.”

“Was there anybody in that restaurant up there?”

“They must’ve cleared it for you.”

“Good. We’re going to go sit there like two ordinary people and drink some beer while the sun goes down, if that suits you. I’d like to take you to a fancy place, or a big gala, but that’s impossible, and besides I’m rather tired of them.”

“Oh, I like the first story fine.”

“Good. But first I have to get this damned coconut oil off me.” He swung his head around to look at her, removing his dark sunglasses with sudden energy. “Fuck me, are you a happy sight.”

With an awkward, wincing motion he was on his feet. After that he moved quickly, pulling her behind him along the side of the cabin, up onto the pier. The men in the motorboat out in the bay shifted position, as she followed
Jack past idle boats and the occasional fisherman to the end of the dock where a wooden structure, grayed by the elements, housed a showerhead.

“Take that dress off,” he said when they were inside and he’d latched the door.

She turned away, showing him how she pulled at the zipper. Holding on to the straps, she stepped out of the dress, carefully so as not to dirty the hem in the drain, and hung it over the high wall. He grunted faintly at the revelation of her lack of underwear, and came up behind her, while turning on the shower, reaching around and grabbing her by the belly. The water broke over them from the side, the same temperature as the warm air, and as her hair got heavy and damp he put his face into her neck and she smelled the suntan oil he’d been wearing. She’d thought he was joking, but in fact he was fragrant with the stuff. The skin of his chest was slick against her back, pushing her into the wall, his hands sliding over her waist, one hand taking hold of a breast, the other gliding down her abdomen. Her own hands went up against the worn wood for ballast, and she pressed onto her tiptoes. They exhaled sharply, as one, when he nudged closer, and they hovered there for an exquisite, oxygen-deprived second before he slid the rest of the way in. Overhead, the sky was pure blue, and the mountainous, dramatically shaded clouds migrated south.

They were both quiet—they were very much in the world, but at the same time apart, and could hear the lap of waves, the snap of fishing line, the occasional shouting of one sailor to another on the other side of the shower wall while they went on silently moving into each other, against the rickety wooden structure, trying not to shake it too much. Light was refracted through the drops of water spilling over them, and she could sense how close they were to everything. When her mouth gaped she felt those droplets on her tongue, and shut her eyes to what waited outside.

Neither spoke for a while afterward. They turned to each other, and let the water wash over them, before drying off with the same towel. She put her
dress back on, and he his swim trunks and a blue dress shirt and the black sunglasses, and they held hands and went barefoot into the place called Earl’s at the head of the docks. Without being asked, the man in the black suit brought them two beers and then retreated to the doorway. They sat at the edge and looked out over the water. From behind, she thought, they probably appeared, in his blue shirt and her pink dress, like any wealthy couple who had left the children with their grandmother and gone in search of the slums of their youth.

“Did you know you can sail all the way down, to the tip of the state, without having to go onto the open ocean?” he mused. “All the way to the Keys. All the way back up north, too.”

“Uh-uh.”

“Ever driven down that away, through the Keys?”

She shook her head.

“Papa Hemingway has a house there. Or had, rather.” He sighed, let his fingertips drum against her knee to the Judy Garland tune playing faintly on the radio. “I suppose we’ll never go looking for Hem at the Floridita now.”

“I guess not.”