The Blonde

by Anna Godbersen

  She was about to ask him if he’d been calling a moment ago, but then she remembered the lessons he’d given over the last year. Never underestimate what an effective tool silence can be was one of them, or what you may inadvertently reveal with even the most casual utterance.

  “It’s lovely out now,” he went on, hopefully. “I’m down on the corner.”

  “I don’t have much time.”

  “Just a walk.”

  “Okay.” She took another sip of bourbon, in order to more effectively put the smile away, and hung up the phone.

  In the shadowy back corners of bars, he’d lectured her on various aspects of the clandestine arts, but she’d needed no lessons in the power game of tardiness. She moved unhurriedly through the quiet apartment, kicking off her heels and unzipping her pencil skirt and dropping it on the floor. Lena, her maid, would pick them up later. In the bathroom, she peeled the false eyelashes from her eyelids and turned the faucet on. The water felt good against her skin, and she lingered there taking off the face that she had put on that morning to say good-bye to Yves. When she lifted her head out of the sink she saw in the mirror—it still surprised her, no matter how much time passed—what they had done. How they had pinched the nose and shaved the chin. She still had fine, girlish skin, and without makeup she saw clearly the remains of her old face, that beautiful child everyone had wanted to touch.

  In the dressing room, she put on a loose-knit white sweater and black slacks, shuffled into her driving moccasins, and with her hair pulled back under the black headband she used to wash her face, she left the apartment. It no longer amazed her that people recognized her less, almost not at all, when she looked most like herself.

  The sky was turning purple, but the air was warm. She moved up the sidewalk at an efficient stride that did not invite stares. She was as anonymous as the day she was born, and as she came to the corner—to the pay phone where she knew she would find him—the world for once took no notice. They did not need to speak. He saw her and waited, and she managed to keep her smile subtle and mysterious as she accepted his offered arm.

  Without discussion they ambled toward the river. His trench coat was open, his blue dress shirt unbuttoned to the neck, and his tie put away. They might have been any couple, so pleased to be in each other’s company at the end of day that words were unnecessary. The only sign of their true relationship came when they reached the height of the pedestrian bridge that spanned the FDR and he glanced back. It was a casual gesture, but afterward, as they descended to the promenade, she felt safe in the certainty that they had not been followed.

  “Tell me how you’ve been,” he asked, in his real voice. The accent, at once both clotted and lyrical, seemed of a piece with the gleaming lavender surface of the river spreading out toward Queens.

  “All right.”

  “Really?” He nodded at a woman walking a standard poodle on a leash as she passed. When she was gone, he went on: “You seem tired.”

  “I look that bad?” A sad, soft laugh.

  “No.”

  “I’m done with shooting, thank god. Glad to be away from Los Angeles. I’ll have to go back soon—for The Misfits, this time.”

  “How is Arthur?”

  She exhaled. “I don’t know. We aren’t like that with each other anymore.”

  “Do you want to leave him?”

  “Sometimes.” She wanted to leave him, but she didn’t want to be divorced. “He pretends he’s too good for pictures, but really he’s jealous of what I can do and he can’t. He knows I’m his best bet to get into pictures, and he wants me for his movie. That’s all he wants me for now.”

  “But stay with him.”

  “What? I’m not some birdbrain twenty-two-year-old who’ll take whatever faggot the publicity department assigns her, you know.”

  “Of course not, but if you stay with him, you’ll seem less like the opportunist you used to play, and more like what you are—an artist, the wife of a great man. A woman whose mistakes, whose experience, have only burnished her beauty.” He paused, as though to let this flattery hit the bloodstream, and then asked gently if she had ended it with Yves.

  But she was still irritated, and spoke tersely. “I doubt I’ll see him again.”

  “And how are things with—”

  “You could learn more about Kennedy in the New York Times than you could from me,” she interrupted and turned her face out toward the water. Alexei already knew everything that had happened between her and the senator since they’d crashed against each other in the backseat of her car up in the hills, way back before he even announced his candidacy. A few missed connections, a voice on the other line for a few minutes after midnight, a wordless encounter one night in the powder room at Romanoff’s, from which she emerged without her panties. “He won the West Virginia primary, and they say that if he won there, he can win anywhere. Well, anyway, that being a Catholic won’t be the obstacle they thought it’d be.”

  “You must stop reading the papers. The American press is full of lies, and anyway, it’s better if Kennedy thinks you’re frivolous.”

  “Oh.” She let out an amused sigh. “Don’t worry about that. I’ve got that routine down flat.”

  “Have you seen him?”

  The question pained her, and she let it show in the twist of her face. Not because of the injury it did her ego, or anyway not entirely. As Alexei said, the great game was a long con, and so was seduction; she knew that she’d get close to Jack again, if only she could better concentrate her whole self on that goal. The pain was because of what it delayed for her. She wanted to rest her head on her father’s shoulder, and tell him all the trouble he’d caused her. Eventually she said: “Not since before January. He called once, but we didn’t talk long. He only said that he was thinking about me. Something like that, except less nice.”

  “Good. That’s good. He’s thinking about you.”

  “Oh, I don’t know if that man can tell one skirt from another. He might’ve read the wrong number from his little black book, and thought he was talking to some other broad.”

  “I doubt that.”

  She shrugged.

  “You’ve done a good job making yourself elusive. When he was less sure he would have been cautious with you—but after he has the confidence of the nomination, he’ll view you as his reward.”

  “Maybe,” she evaded. She enjoyed these talks, the careful coddling, the smooth manner in which Alexei discussed her pursuit of the senator. A firm, tender tone from a man always pleased her, especially when it came like this—paternally, without any undertone of a bedroom transaction. Not that she didn’t evoke that possibility now and then, in her own ambiguous way, opening her eyes wide, tipping her chest forward slightly, so that it might have been an accident. Sometimes, she almost wondered if Alexei were queer.

  “Maybe,” she said again, and this time the word had nothing to do with what she might, or might not, gain from the senator, and everything to do with the crumminess of the present moment. The light draining from the day, Arthur out in the city and no longer in love with her, the cruel and pretentious script he was laboring over in order that she might be complicit in her own humiliation, the vast gulf between herself and the still-unnamed man who’d abandoned her a lifetime ago.

  “I am sure of it.”

  They were crossing over the pedestrian bridge at Sixty-Third, she and Alexei, who seemed like her only friend, and she was struck by the desire for them both to have something better than this patient, strategic resignation. “Do you want to see her?” she asked.

  A couple was coming toward them, the man in a suit and his wife in a red dress as though they were taking a little stroll before supper at La Côte Basque or a night at the opera. Alexei flicked his gaze in their direction, and then back at her. “See who, N.J.?”

  “Her,” she whispered, but it didn’t matter what she said, because the gauziness of her voice, the sudden rocking of her hips, was the answer. She gripped Alexe
i’s arm and turned her face up at him and laughed with pure feminine delight. A happy sigh passed through her whole body, as though no one had ever been so satisfyingly alive as she was right then. “Good evening,” she said and laughed sweetly to the passing couple.

  They stared back at her, the woman’s mouth agape, the man’s gaze lingering somewhere below Marilyn’s neck, as the movie star and her escort glided on.

  “Did you see who that was?” the woman whispered, and Marilyn did not have to glance over her shoulder to know that her husband was still looking back, that he had just cheated with his eyes.

  Alexei went on holding her arm and though the pressure of his fingertips barely changed, she sensed he was holding her tighter now. As they turned the corner, he put an envelope into her free hand.

  “What’s this?”

  “It’s your room key. The key to your room at the Carlyle. Kennedy arrived today, from West Virginia. He is speaking tonight, at the annual Bronx Democratic fund-raiser, which, according to the peculiar custom of you Americans, is being held here in Manhattan, at the sort of expensive address the disadvantaged people of the Bronx will never know. The fund-raiser is at the Waldorf, but he is staying at the Carlyle. Go, find a way to run into him. He maintains a suite there, though it’s a well-kept secret. It’s time to remind our Jack what he’s been missing.”

  ELEVEN

  New York, May 1960

  NIGHTFALL did not lessen Walls’s discomfort with Sutton Place. Several times, as he loitered across the street from the brick building where Marilyn Monroe lived, he saw a woman with a Pucci scarf over her hair walking a little dog and thought he’d been spotted by the mother of one of his childhood friends. The fact that few of those women were on speaking terms with his own mother would not, he knew, deter them from greeting him with two air kisses and a personal yet detached line of questioning about which firm he was now with, and whom he ought to marry. Children were immune to the social strategizing of these women, or otherwise were regarded as pawns too useful to be sacrificed, and Walls knew that he would still be a child in their eyes, no matter the ominous trench coat he wore, or the low angle of his hat.

  When he had filed the travel paperwork, he had not considered that she might live like this, in a doorman building where people he had known in prep school were playing house with the Miss Porter’s girls they’d married. New York did not go in for pastel pleasure palaces, and yet he had expected the place where she lived to be some gargantuan, ersatz structure of milky pink and gilt curlicues. The first time she had left the apartment, at dusk, he had almost missed her because she was dressed like any East Side housewife, in slacks and a sweater and proper undergarments. It was only the way she glanced around, as though someone might be after her, that signaled here was the object of his surveillance.

  He had trailed her a few blocks to a pay phone where a man, dressed in a coat that might have been the same make as his own, greeted and wordlessly escorted her toward the low roar of the FDR, to a pedestrian walkway where Walls was obliged to ditch them so as not to become obvious. This he did most unwillingly, because he suspected the man owned the voice of the most mysterious character in Marilyn’s wide and exotic telephone companionship. Just as Hoffman had jokingly predicted, listening in on her calls had brought Walls into a land of raunchy pillow talk that would have scandalized the housewives who dipped their heads in peroxide trying to look like her. The fights with her husband had more or less put Walls off sex, and he’d stopped listening when Miller was her interlocutor. But of all the men she teased and pleased with baby breath, there was only one who had no name.

  Sometime over the last year he had ceased longing for a reassignment, and it was the presence of this nameless man in Marilyn’s life that had led Walls to believe that what he had witnessed between John Kennedy and the movie star was more than his ticket back to Washington. That, almost without his noticing, he had finally become embroiled in a matter of true consequence. As far as Walls could tell, she hadn’t seen Kennedy since that night more than a year ago, but his hunch was that the man without a name was trying to throw them together again, to some larger purpose. Walls had intercepted only three of their phone calls, in which the man without a name never identified himself, even while knowingly discussing her sundry romantic interests. Of these, there was only one for whom they never used a name recognizable to the casual reader of gossip columns but always referred to, cryptically, as Hal, an obvious alias. Once, when Marilyn sounded a little drunk, Walls thought he heard her replace the usual Hal with Jack, but she almost might have been saying it generally, a stand-in for all lovers.

  The man used an obviously put-on accent that conjured in Walls’s mind some wiseguy enamored with the movies—an anglophile from Red Hook. In their most recent conversation, Marilyn had mentioned that she was coming to New York, and that had been the lead upon which Walls had justified his own trip. His conjecture was that the man was using Marilyn to blackmail a presidential candidate, perhaps even force him out of the race just before the election. But maybe they were waiting, counting on him winning the White House, which would mean Walls’s assignment was momentous beyond his wildest imaginings. Walls had yet to figure Marilyn’s reasons for consorting with this fellow—despite the desperation he occasionally noted in her late-night ranting, she was still famous beyond his own conception of fame, and not, in his estimation, a woman who would be easily pushed around by a smooth-talking criminal. She and Arthur did, to his surprise, fight about their lack of money, but that seemed entirely too neat a motive.

  “Want a vacation, huh?” Bertram Toll, the special agent in charge of the Los Angeles Bureau, had razzed him when he filed the travel paperwork, but he had nonetheless given Walls his approval, and had not pushed him to explain a theory that Walls had feared would sound outrageous without solid proof. It was a bitter irony that as his conviction of being on to something grew, so did his anxiety that the Marilyn assignment would come to seem superfluous to his superiors—there had been a moment, back in September, when he was sure they’d shut his operation down, but then Marilyn was photographed shaking Premier Khrushchev’s hand, with a big smile on her face, and quoted as saying, “My husband, Arthur Miller, sends you his greetings.”

  When she returned to Sutton Place alone, Walls cursed himself for having not taken in more details of the man he referred to in his notes as “the Gent.” He had been certain they would go up to her apartment together, but this seemed preposterous now, and he could recall curiously little of their meeting. Only that the Gent was tall and slim, that his shirt was blue, that he’d had a courtly way with Marilyn, which most men did anyhow, and that he knew how to look out for a tail. By then the doorman of Marilyn’s building had taken notice of Walls, and he was obliged to walk around the corner and get lost awhile. He didn’t think this would screw the mission; Marilyn never went anywhere in haste. He found a diner where the waitresses wore mint-green uniforms, ordered steak and eggs for dinner, and returned with a newspaper to pretend to read in the front seat of the rented car he had parked across the street from her building.

  Walls chewed his nail, and reviewed what he knew about the Gent. He called Marilyn “N.J.,” a reference to her birth name, so perhaps he knew something of her past, and was blackmailing her as well? This didn’t quite square, for two reasons: 1) The relationship appeared too cordial to be built on that kind of strong-arming, and 2) Marilyn had weathered a public divorce and nudie photos with candor, so it strained Walls’s imagination to conjure a scandal that was both printable in the mainstream press and that she would not willingly admit to.

  Darkness fell, and he began to wonder if the paper wasn’t a poorly chosen ruse. Then she emerged from her building transformed. The skirt she wore fastened at the narrowest part of her waist and encased the exuberant rump below; the white sweater she’d chosen this time clung greedily to her bosom; the shiny, black sunglasses put sunny California in mind; and the pale yellow of her hair chimed beautifully
with the soft peach of her skin. She was unmistakably the woman who once talked, in CinemaScope, of how, during heat waves, she kept her underwear in the icebox. The only aspect of her appearance that surprised him was the girl with whom she walked arm in arm. The sight of her in the company of another female was inexplicably jarring.

  Walls stepped to the curb and closed the car door. From the opposite side of the street, and a quarter of a block behind, he trailed the women as they headed north. Their arms were still entwined, and Marilyn seemed to be talking to the other girl in an easy, intimate way. She was also blonde, although her bangs made her seem more innocent, as did the way her pony-tail bobbed at everything the movie star said. Was she a friend? Certainly not a relative—Marilyn’s claim of orphanhood, while not literally true, nonetheless described her familial status with fair accuracy. And yet, for all the hours of phone calls Walls had listened in on, he could not figure where a pretty, young, fashionably dressed but wholesome-looking girl fit in the dramatis personae of Marilyn’s life.

  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.