The Blonde (36 page)

“I still can’t believe it.”

“That he’s dead?”

“That a man who could write like that would want his head blown off. I suppose I mean I don’t
want
to believe it.”

“Well, maybe he didn’t mean to. Maybe he was just trying to scare himself and went too far. Maybe he was thinking about death, and wanted to see death’s face, you know? Just out of curiosity, kinda. About what he had coming. But then death called his bluff.”

Jack glanced at her as he pulled on his beer can. “What’s all this mystical mumbo-jumbo? Please don’t tell me you know of what you speak.”

She shrugged, and squinted at a sailboat out in the distance. “I didn’t grow
up like you, you know, surrounded by people who care what happens in your life. When nobody but you cares whether you live or die, you spend a lot of time thinking about death. But I wouldn’t be here now if I hadn’t chosen living.”

“You said you had an analyst.” He shook his head. “I usually don’t go in for crazy broads.”

She laughed. “Sure you do.”

“I like good-looking broads; is it my fault so many of them are off their rocker?”

“Well, Mr. President, it just
might
be your fault, at least in a few dozen cases in the New York and Washington areas. I bet you’ve messed with their pretty heads plenty.”

“Oh, come now. There haven’t been
that
many—”

“We were born under the same sign, did you know that? Gemini,” she told him. “So I understand. There’s a half of you that you show the world, and another half that’s yours alone. One part of you just wants to be loved, and the other part wants to know everything. But those impulses don’t go together very well, do they?”

He put his arm around her neck, spreading his hand over her breastplate, his teeth cold from the beer against her warm ear. “More mumbo-jumbo,” he muttered.

“All I meant is that sometimes the nicest things are the ones that can’t last.”

“I don’t like the sound of that very much.”

They had wandered dangerously close to her actual feelings, and her heart was as light and unmoored as a balloon loose in the atmosphere, and she changed the subject in the first way she thought of. “It’s that way, isn’t it?” She pointed south, across the water. “The little island that’s caused all the trouble.”

“Less than a hundred miles.” He drew away from her to reach for his beer. “It’s too bad. In a funny way I rather like him.”

“Like who?”

“Castro. Not his policies, of course, but he’s got wonderful flair. Under different circumstances, I think he and I might stay up all night arguing history. And his people actually matter to him; he’s not like Khrushchev. Khrushchev can talk about detonating a hydrogen bomb—about the possibility of a million fatalities, say—as though it’s totally acceptable to him. I don’t think he’d bat an eye. I used to think all people could be reasoned with, if you only figured out how to talk to them, but I don’t think that anymore. There have been times this year, I swear to you, where I just want to get out.”

“Get out of where?”

“This planet.”

“Well, couldn’t you just talk to him?” She glanced down, into the amber bottom of her beer can. She ought not to have asked. It was better for her not to know. But the rest of her life—the nightmares, the wired, paranoid days, the specter of Alexei, her face more etched with wrinkles every morning—none of that seemed real. The only thing that seemed real to her was this moment, this place, sitting with Jack, discussing the fate of the world. She liked talking to him like this—not probing him but actually curious—and couldn’t help lifting her gaze to him, and going on, “Castro, I mean.”

“No, no, too late for peace and love.” He waved off the suggestion, his troubled eyes focused out on the water. After a few moments of silence, he went on contemplatively: “I don’t want a war, nobody does. But we can’t look weak. We have to keep reminding them we’re stronger—that’s the only way another horror doesn’t happen. Anyway, Castro’s with the Russians now. It’s one thing to let them put up a wall—it’s not very nice, but that wall across Berlin is better than World War Three. It’s another thing entirely to let Khrushchev have his own satellite a hundred miles off the coast of Florida.”

“Don’t!” she gasped. Once he said
Khrushchev
, it was impossible for her to go on in this manner, as though her curiosity were innocent. “You said if we
took out their top man, they could take out ours—so if that’s the case please don’t tell me about it, it’ll only make me worry!”

“We have to …” His gaze was fixed out on the water, and he seemed not to have registered her plea to change the subject. “The old man says he made us look like fools. Like little boys. He’s right, too. And we
are
trying it. Every night, out of places like this, in boats smaller than mine. To get intelligence, lay the groundwork. There’ll be another coup, there always is. Has to be.” He spoke with worried excitement, and it was in that spirit that he drained his beer and put it down, hard and dismissive, on the ledge. She was relieved that he seemed to be through with the topic. “Anyway, enough about all that. I love this song, don’t you? There’s only a little time left, and I’d rather spend it dancing than talking about things that keep me up at night.”

“I do worry about you …,” she murmured as he took her by the hand and into a slow sway. The radio was playing Sammy Davis Jr.’s rendition of “September Song,” a sorrowful saxophone accompanying the mellow vibration of his voice.

She thought Jack might brush off her worry. Tell her how the men in the black suits were highly trained, that this was his job, that the American people were who he worried about, or any number of courageous, campaign-trail pronouncements. But instead he surprised her by singing along, in a clear, accentless voice, to those melancholy show tune words about a year falling away, days becoming short, and realizing who he wanted to spend them with. His voice was low so that the bartender and the Secret Service man wouldn’t hear, and his cheek pressed against hers. They were very close, barely moving, and the salt-eroded floorboards creaked under their shuffling feet. As he repeated the refrain, the surface of her eyes got moist with the pure joy of being held like this, and sung to.

THIRTY-TWO

Miami, November 1961

MARILYN walked back along the beach holding her sandals by the straps, and let the waves wash over her toes. The big hotels towered to her left, some with rounded, white edges and their names proclaimed in neon cursive, others with glass fronts that reflected the changes of the seascape. The places on her body where Jack had touched her tingled, and she thought she would be happy forever so long as she could conjure the memory of sitting with him at the edge of that ramshackle place over the bay, talking about life and death. This uncharacteristically serene mood lasted all the way to the crescent moon spaceship of her own hotel, and she was smiling as she crossed the boardwalk onto the property—illuminated at that hour by torches—and didn’t think to disguise herself in any way.

A man’s voice called to her—“N.J.!”—and put a swift end to her bliss.

She turned, trying to locate the source of a nickname that now filled her with dread. He was behind her, and she felt his hand on her arm before she saw him. When she glanced up, Alexei’s lips curled. She pulled away, jerking her arm out of his grip and almost colliding with an older couple strolling toward the beach.

“Sorry,” she muttered, as they hurried on.

“Come.” Alexei took her arm again, and though his posture was casual his fingernails dug into her skin.

She’d known this moment would come, had never successfully put it out of her mind long. But she had not imagined how completely the sight of him—even dressed, in panama hat and brightly printed shirt, to blend in
with vacationers—would flood her with the vile hopelessness of being locked up in the psychiatric hospital. The loss of Clark, too, cracked open again, and she couldn’t help but see Alexei’s features, however currently benign, as those of a murderer. Her breath was short, her stomach full of ice, as he pulled her along the hotel’s garden pathways.

“Have you eaten?” The old silken manner of address was gone—just a clipped request for information.

“No.” It was the only word she wanted to say to him.

“Where are you coming from?”

“Just a walk.”

“So you had the front desk tell the young man traveling with you,” he said, and did not have to add that he knew she was lying.

Her gaze flashed over the lawns of the Fontainebleau, its manicured trees, the fat, polished people eating alfresco, the pool illuminated at dusk, up along the curving wall of hotel rooms, some with their lights on and some abandoned already, trying to guess which one was hers. But she didn’t have to guess. It was the room next to the deck where the young man Alexei had just mentioned was standing, watching them through a pair of binoculars he was now pretending to look out to the sea with.
My god
, she thought,
they can get to anybody, even a hunky California boy, even the stepson of a studio boss
.

Alexei must have sensed her tension, because he softened his tone. “Let’s have a drink, a little something to eat. You’ll tell me what you’ve been up to.”

“Was Arthur in on all this? He introduced me to Dr. Kurtz—did he know who she really is?” She spoke with her true hostility, but followed his lead, walking easily arm in arm like any two people enjoying the night air. If Alan Jacobs’s protégé was in Alexei’s camp, then any of those darkened balconies might be the place she went to die, and she knew she had better think quick and make no sudden moves.

“No, no. Of course we knew some things about you, and were able to steer you in the right direction, because of his sympathies. But he did not
know of Dr. Kurtz’s other role, about me, that you were of any interest whatsoever. He was just a useful idiot.”

She’d never heard anybody call Arthur an idiot before, and was a little embarrassed to find that it relaxed her some, even at this moment of panic, when it seemed quite likely that every person she had ever been close to was in on a conspiracy against her. “How can I trust you?” she said instead.
Go along
, she told herself,
but don’t seem too easily won over, or he won’t believe you
. “That you won’t lock me up again.”

He did not answer, and she wondered, as they approached the maître d’s lectern at the outdoor restaurant, if his silence was an answer. If he was about to veer unexpectedly, then a bag over her head, her body shoved in the trunk of a car.

“Good evening, monsieur, madame. A table for two?”

“Yeah, thanks,” Marilyn answered.

“But of course, madame.” The maître d’s voice had changed, and she knew he had recognized her, which was a small comfort, to know that if she disappeared there would be someone to report her final sighting.

“You have no reason not to trust me,” Alexei said when they were alone. He picked up his dinner napkin and arranged it on his lap, not meeting her eye, as though he were disappointed, but willing to explain to her, one last time, the order of things. “I have always taken good care of you. I was the one who told you not to fall in love with Hal, and you see how he hurt you.” He looked up at her suddenly. “You can’t be in love with him now, can you?”

“No,” she said. The word stuck in her throat, as if she were wounded, and she summoned the sound of
fuck me, Jack, fuck me, Jack
, her emotions upon hearing that recording back in the wintertime. Of the cleaning-product smell in Payne Whitney, just like she would in Lee’s class, summoning a sense memory to deepen performance. “How could I? I mean, I knew he was a womanizer, but … I guess for a minute there I thought I was different
from the other girls. I learned, though. The way he dropped me—I saw what I was to him.”

“So you
haven’t
seen him?”

The waiter was approaching, and Marilyn was grateful for the opportunity to collect herself. “Just bring us a bottle of something white and expensive—this fellow is paying—and we’ll both have steak tartare,” she said and dismissed him with a wave. She wished she could tell Alexei she hadn’t seen Jack, that he was more guarded now he was president. But she thought of Doug up there on the balcony, what he must have gleaned from traveling with her, and decided it was best to stay close to the truth. “As it happens, I was just with him. Took a while, but you were right—I found my way back in.”

“And?”

“Well, he hasn’t forgotten me exactly. But it doesn’t mean it’s easy, now that I know how he—that stupid girl you recorded him screwing—and who knows how many other—”

But Alexei was no longer concerned with the charade of caring about her emotions. “What did you talk about?”

“Oh, you know,” she stalled. “How nice it is to get away a little, that kind of thing.”

“What is he doing here?”

“In Florida?”

Alexei cleared his throat and removed his panama hat, revealing the gray hair pushed back over his skull.

“His family has a place, in Palm Beach. I guess they come down on the weekends sometimes.”

“He didn’t say anything about Cuba? Perhaps something is under way. Plans for an invasion, or—?”

Marilyn leaned back into her chair and glanced across the other tables on the patio. “If there were, I don’t think the top guy himself would be here overseeing it, do you? I imagine he’d be in Washington, if there was
something big going on. My guess is they’ve decided that there’s nothing to do and they’ll just let Castro be.”