“Thanks,” Marilyn said again. “See you tomorrow.”
She hung up and took a step toward the bedroom.
“Marilyn.”
“What.”
“Call him back, and tell him you’re not going anywhere.”
Her hand was on the doorframe, and she paused to stare at Arthur, who half turned in the chair with his long, slender arm draped casually over the chair’s back. This easy posture enraged her almost as much as his paternalistic command.
“You’ve made the crew wait around for you enough already.” His tone was as equanimous as his posture; it was the way he spoke to his children on the phone when they wanted something frivolous for their birthdays. “You’ve got new lines to learn. When the crew comes back from Tahoe, you’re going to be ready to work.”
This interest in her weekend plans took her by surprise, and she wondered if he was truly concerned about her showing up Monday morning, or whether he was finally getting a little jealous of what she did without him.
“I’ve been slaving all week in hundred-degree heat, and I’m going to go swim in a lake this weekend, and hear some music.”
“I was talking to Dr. Kurtz earlier. She suggested that your procrastination might be closely correlated with your impulsivity—could it be that this fleeing the set on a whim is due to your fear that you won’t be good enough? Are you avoiding showing Huston, and all of us, what you are really capable of?”
“What do you care?” Marilyn said, her eyes focused furiously at the place on his oversized, birdlike skull where the hair had started to thin.
“I care because I am your husband,” he replied evenly. “And I gave Huston my word that I’d get you through this.”
She rolled her eyes and crossed toward the curving bay windows on the far side of the living room, rocking her hips for the benefit of the trim, androgynous person who crouched on the far side of Arthur, in a black sweater that covered her collarbones and her wrists. If Arthur wanted to make a power play when they had an audience, she was game. “I shot pool with Huston last night,” she said to the windowpane. “He doesn’t give a shit what I do when I’m not on set. I’m going to Tahoe, and you’re coming, too.” This had not been her plan, but as soon as she said it, she wondered why she hadn’t thought of it before. If Arthur came, then Kennedy would have to work to see her. Alexei had been right; someday it would be advantageous that she was married to a big-time playwright. His presence would stir Jack’s jealousy, make it a hunt again, remind him that he wasn’t the first Pulitzer Prize winner to share her bed.
“Why would I come?” He stood up, pushing away the chair. His height no longer impressed her much, but it did now for a flickering second. “Isn’t your lover going to be there? Isn’t that why you want to go, so someone else’s husband can make love to you in French? Or is Jersey Dago your new flavor?”
The photographer stood up suddenly, as though in support of Arthur’s assertion. Her hands clutched the camera that hung around her neck.
This belated acknowledgment of adultery, of all the betrayals and disappointments, did cut at her, and she let it show, let her mouth hang open wretchedly as he came toward her through the boxy furniture. She watched how his anger calmed him, amplified him, and she let him see how it did the opposite to her, how it shrank her down to a delicate and lovely nothing. “Yves is in France,” she said, neither admission nor denial, just the plain fact.
He took a cigarette from behind his ear and put it in his mouth. “Then why?” he asked as he felt in his pockets for a light. The fumbling alerted her that jealousy had finally done its work on him. “Why do you want to go?”
There was wetness on her eyes, and she didn’t wipe it away. Her face twitched, rabbit-like, and the tip of her nose went pink, and she coaxed her red lips into a brave smile. The smile that was slow and hopeful as the dawn, despite everything her life had been. The one the camera loved. “Because I want to have a little fun, Poppy. Don’t you want to have a little fun? Even now? Or maybe, I don’t know … maybe especially now.”
His hands were still groping in his pockets for the matches, and she could see that she almost had him. He was softening to her, remembering that she didn’t know any better, how she more than made up for it by brightening a room. His head lolled slightly to the side while he assessed her, the cigarette hanging from his full, damp lips. She smiled a little more before letting the smile fade away, letting her posture fall apart, as she revolved away from him, putting her fingers up to the window glass like a child at a museum. It was not difficult for her to conjure a wounded emotion. She had been summoning it all day, in order to do the scene that Arthur said was a metaphor for the whole damn story. A scene in which she half fell out of the little desert shack, was almost kissed by the character named Guido, and then broke free into a strange, drunk dance that culminated with her embrace of a tree.
“The tree symbolizes life,” Arthur had explained to her, sitting under the white umbrella that morning on set, gesturing with his long fingers as though he could thus convince himself that he was actually saying something. “Roslyn is clinging to life.”
You think I need that spelled out for me? she’d wanted to reply. But she hadn’t. She had done take after take instead, falling out of the shack in the same black dress she’d been wearing for weeks, the one with the cutouts around the chest and the low, scooped back, tripping over the grass, showing her ass to the cameras, throwing her arms wide and shaking.
She was about to turn to him and ask him please when she heard the shutter. Such was her habit that she couldn’t help but adjust herself, lengthen her spine so that her shoulder blades emerged to cast cinematic shadows over her pale, naked back, waiting for the camera to click twice more before she broke the pose and twisted to face Arthur. “What is she doing here?”
Inge was the woman’s name, and she had conferred with Arthur a great deal while Huston was shooting that morning.
“Are you fucking her? Is that why she’s here?” She had intended the accusation strategically, to put attention off her own infidelities. But as soon as she said it—as soon as Inge lowered the camera from her face, revealing the thin lips beneath the dark, focused eyes—she knew that it was true. Maybe they had already started sleeping together, or maybe she was as yet only enthralled by his genius, and had not yet committed anything in body. In either case, Marilyn had an unexpected glimpse of what was, and her face went numb with shock. They were all quiet for what might have been a long time, and then Marilyn’s nostrils flared and her lips pulled away from her teeth. “Get out! You fucking cunt, get out of my house, get out!”
With infuriating dignity, the woman collected her equipment, swung her canvas bag onto her shoulder, gave Arthur a pregnant look, and left the room. He closed the door gently behind her and turned slowly back, wearing that mask of poorly contained exasperation Marilyn knew so well.
Then the shouting.
They shouted and shouted, shouted themselves hoarse, and all the unsaid resentments and accusations accumulated over years came tumbling down. As always in these situations, she had little idea what she said, and for once Arthur didn’t, either. His usual command of words was broken, but not his anger, and she saw finally the seething cuckold she had made of him. They stopped only because they finally exhausted themselves, and by then a lamp lay sideways across the floor, its neck broken and its bulb shattered, and there was a dent in the plaster where a hurled ashtray had made its mark. In the aftermath she felt too weak to stand, and sat heavily on the couch with her face in her hands, further muddying the mascara tracks on her cheeks.
Without looking at her, he said: “I will go to Tahoe. I will put on a good show. We will get through this movie. But it’s over. You know it’s over. You know.”
“I know.” She was very tired. “Once the movie is over, we’ll make an announcement.”
He was right. They had not acted like husband and wife for years, and she would have left him already if Alexei had
not persuaded her otherwise. But now, in the dying light of the thing, she remembered how important he had once seemed. How, as Mrs. Arthur Miller, she had imagined that her life would be always protected and precious. She could not pretend with herself that she had even been trying to keep him; and she could not pretend anymore that she might someday have his brilliant babies. But even the fiction of a marriage gives some comfort, and she shivered, thinking of the stark road ahead.
EIGHTEEN
Lake Tahoe, August 1960
SINATRA had done his thing. He’d crooned, and told off-color jokes, and given the girls that criminal, azure wink, and everyone in the wigwam-like banquet hall had been left in a drunken, roguish mood. He’d sat the Millers to his right, for the supper that followed the show, and a long way from Kennedy, who was surrounded by a squadron of powerfully built men in black tie. Big Bill of the maid’s costume was amongst them, and Marilyn thought she recognized the mobster from Chicago in the entourage as well. Earlier she and her leading man had done as the publicity department wished, and danced with the local bigwigs and their wives, but Clark had since escorted his pregnant wife back to their cabin, and for Marilyn the night was just beginning.
She was in fine, glowing form. Several times she’d caught Jack staring at her, and when the waiter appeared at her shoulder, proffering a note on a tray, she figured it was from him. Only after she read the note and understood it was from Arthur—informing her he had writing to do, and was driving back to Reno for some quiet—did she realize he was gone. But the party was in full swing, and she didn’t wonder if he’d noticed the vibration between her and Kennedy, or pause to feel much at all about her husband’s departure. Instead she smiled at the waiter and asked him if there was any more of that good French champagne on ice close by.
Once her champagne glass was replenished, Frank leaned in and said, “Hey, sweetheart, the old man wants to dance with you.”
“What old man?”
“You know. Ambassador Kennedy.”
“Oh!” She rested her teeth against her glass and inhaled in a way that brought attention to her décolletage. “Which one is he?”
Frank came closer so that she could smell the cigarette smoke that clung to his hairpiece. “The one with the little glasses, over there with the low-rent Liz Taylor.”
“Isn’t he a Nazi or something?” she asked ingenuously.
“What? No! Why would you think that?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I guess I heard Arthur say something like that once.”
“Nah. He’s just tough old Irish Boston. Now come on,” he said, standing and taking her arm. “Don’t say anything dumb like that to his face, all right?”
Frank led them through the crowd, his shoulders hunched and his nose alert and charging as a bloodhound, pulling her after him and not noticing how she had to hustle in her tight-fitting dress to keep up. The bandleader spotted his boss on the floor, and started in on a new song, slow and sultry, as Frank led her into the dance. They both smiled like they had been taught to in the old days, big enough so the people in the back row could see all the money the studio had put into their dentistry. Poor Frank, she thought. He wasn’t meant to age, or else he was trying too hard not to.
“How’s Joe?” she asked, as Frank twirled her out and reeled her in so that her shoulder blades pressed against his chest. During her second marriage, she’d realized that there was a part of Joe DiMaggio that was the same as Frank Sinatra—the worst part—and she’d learned that the nights when they’d been drinking together were the nights she could expect to get it.
“Still likes it better up in San Francisco.” That smile, it could have withstood a hurricane. “Says the pizza dough rises better there.”
“Does he still miss me?”
“Sure. All the time. I tell him not to. But I understand, I’m the same way about Ava. Doesn’t make any sense, but that’s love, right? The thing that doesn’t make any sense.”
This sounded to her like the sort of pedestrian sentiment that worked only when you had a really good melody to float it over, but she just said, “Yeah, I guess so,” in a vague, sleepy voice.
“Perk up, sweetheart, here he comes.”
The old man and his brunette sidled up next to them, and Frank and Marilyn beamed their glistening, show business smiles. All four kept their feet light and laughed at little nothings. Flattering observations of the women’s clothing were exchanged, and playful put-downs were made regarding the appearance of the men, after which the blonde was transferred to the Kennedy patriarch. He was taller than Frank, and his sun-speckled skin, close-cropped white hair, and round glasses gave him the appearance of a college professor. But the way he carried himself was not remotely academic.
“Marilyn Monroe,” he said, the same way his son once had, as though he was beholding a national treasure for the first time and had to step back to appreciate the whole view.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Ambassador.”
“Believe me, the pleasure is all mine.” Pleasure he pronounced with an emphasis she couldn’t hope to miss. “My son told me you were a fine bit of stuff.”
“Did he?” Her smile must have been blinding.
“Yes.” Joe could dance, but not as well as Sinatra, and he compensated by keeping their bodies close. “He said you were just a sweet, innocent, really beautiful girl.”
“Well, isn’t that charming?”
“Indeed it is.” He lowered his mouth to her ear, and a surge of volume from the orchestra gave him the excuse to jerk his pelvis against hers. “Of course I don’t believe one damn word of that.”
She had moved in the world of men, played the desire game, long enough—she had heard put-downs that were come-ons and come-ons that were put-downs, she’d had her hair pulled and her head slammed against walls—so there was no chance that Joe’s snarling comment, as blunt and incestuous as it may have been, could rattle her. It did provide good cover, however, for the surprise she experienced a moment later, when she spotted a familiar but unexpected face at the edge of the crowd, and the rhythm of her heart became agitated. “Excuse me,” she said, and half ran from the dance floor, knocking Alexei’s shoulder with her own as she left the room.
Once she was in the halls of the resort, she relaxed her stricken expression and began to walk at a more controlled pace, her ears alert to any noise behind her, her breathing quiet and steady. She heard the footsteps in her wake, and matched her own to his, letting him almost catch up to her. She turned abruptly into the men’s room and walked down the aisle of stalls, where she positioned herself in front of the mirror on the far end. Although she kept her gaze steady on her own reflection, she noted from the corner of her eye how Alexei casually bent to see if there were any shoes beneath the stall doors as he approached. Satisfied, he placed himself at the sink next to her, turned the faucet, and let the water run.
“What are you doing here?” she said evenly.
“Why wouldn’t I be here?”
She lifted her chin and opened her mouth to laugh. “Everyone likes a little song and dance, you mean? Okay. But how am I supposed to make this whole scheme natural when there’s someone always watching me? He’s going to notice, you know, if you keep breathing down my neck. What’s next? You going to jump out from under the bed with a camera?”
“N.J., I am sorry if I’ve made you nervous. That’s not why I’m here.”
“Then what?”
“Our girl in Giancana’s organization, she told us he’s meeting with the old man this weekend. There are all kinds of Mafia about—it could be dangerous. Not for you, perhaps, but—in a general kind of way. And I wanted to be here. To watch over you. To make sure you’re safe.”
“Oh.” She nodded, taking this in, experiencing in the same moment that shivering comprehension of a danger she hadn’t known herself to be in, and the relief of learning that someone else was taking care of it. “Clark’s here,” she said sharply. “He looks after me.”
&nb
sp; “N.J., he’s not a real cowboy.”
“You didn’t worry before. In Chicago, I mean—”
“Of course I did, N.J. Of course I did.” He sighed, shutting off the water and picking up a cloth. Once his hands were dry, he put them reassuringly on both her shoulders. “I always worry about you. But you were less involved then. And of course you are much more valuable to our operation now, to the Party. To the people …”
Their conversation was interrupted by the sound of an object hitting the tiled floor, and they both turned to see one high heel under the door of the last stall. There were no feet visible—the woman must have been crouching on the toilet. A trill of feminine laughter followed, and Marilyn realized there were two people in hiding, because a man’s voice said, “Come on, let’s get out of here.”
A moment later the stall door was flung back, and by then Alexei had moved to shield Marilyn from view. Two people ran for the far side of the men’s room, and Marilyn glanced up in time to see the assistant makeup girl—wearing one high heel and holding the other, her crinoline bouncing as she pulled a man with light-colored hair in a black jacket into the hall—before quickly pointing her face in the opposite direction. The door sounded shut behind them, and Alexei moved to pursue the couple.
“Don’t worry,” Marilyn said. “That girl’s an airhead. She was so excited about seeing Frankie she couldn’t stop talking about it all week. She was probably caught unawares by the news she’d be sleeping in a bunk bed, and her boyfriend is trying to get what was promised him where he can.”
Alexei glanced in her direction. “Are you sure?” His blue eyes gleamed with urgency.
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