The Blonde
Page 17
“Yeah.” Marilyn was calm now, and she took the opportunity to fix her lipstick with the tube she kept between her breasts. “I’ll make sure she gets more drinks, and then she really won’t remember anything. Meantime, would you get lost? I appreciate your concern, daddy, but you can’t make love with three people in the room.”
Lipstick nestled back in place, she put a red kiss on Alexei’s forehead—it was going to take him a while to get that out—and swerved back toward the banquet hall, or wherever Jack was.
The telephone in cabin 3 tried to ring, but she answered before it got the sound out. In dreamland a private detective had been following her through the barracks of a dusty Southern California military compound—she had been wearing magenta, and holding the hand of an Iowan private first class—but she should’ve known that wasn’t real. Arthur would never send a detective, as Joe had, to prove what he could figure out on his own, a characteristic she knew she ought to admire. “Yes?” she whispered, curling away from the man who lay beside her.
“Mrs. Miller?” said a bright, inquisitive, female voice.
“Yes,” she answered, more tiredly this time.
“Your husband ordered a wake-up call. Good morning! Would you and Mr. Miller like breakfast in bed?”
She twisted, pushing a fistful of blonde fluff away from her eyes to glance at the sleeping man. “No.” She gripped the phone with both hands, becoming aware of the unease in her stomach, the drumbeat at her temples. Then she remembered the many drinks she’d had last night, which had obliterated several haphazard trains of thought and given her a clear picture of how to use Sunday morning. “No, but uh—could you fix us a picnic?”
“A picnic?”
“Yeah, you know, lunch in a basket. Sandwiches and coleslaw and potato chips and maybe a few cans of beer. My husband and I—we’re going canoeing today.”
“I’ll call the kitchen and see—”
“Good. Just have them leave it outside our cabin when it’s ready.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Thank you.”
If she were wise, she would have tried to rest a little more, but she knew sleep would only elude her, and anyway the pillows in that place were cheap. The agitation of her stomach, the discordant title Mrs. Miller ringing in her ears, the memory of the eyes on her last night—watchful Alexei, leering Joe Kennedy, menacing Giancana—kept her mind alive. She lit a cigarette and pulled a sheet over her nakedness, exposing the body beside her. Jack had not slept in the nude, as she had, but even so she could make out the morning wood through his striped boxer shorts, and she was not quick enough to banish the thought that he was rather beautiful in repose.
“What are you looking at?”
She tried not to seem surprised that he had been conscious all this time, and quickly put out the cigarette. Smoking did not fit with the girl she intended to play for Jack today, which was the sweet ingénue who shows up with a package full of good, simple things, and no thought in her head but how to make her man happy. A relaxing August interlude, before the campaign resumed its relentless pace. “At you.”
“You’re taking me canoeing, huh?”
“Well, I’d like to.” She put a hand on his tanned torso. “If you’ve got time.”
He leaned away to check his wristwatch on the nightstand, and disappointment rose in her, displacing the nausea. She reminded herself that it didn’t matter. If not today, there would be another day to coddle him into a chatty stupor, another day to impress the unknown men Alexei reported to. “Okay,” Jack said, putting down his watch and rolling over so that she was pinned and the mattress groaned, and she couldn’t lie to herself that she wasn’t relieved. “Take me canoeing. But we had better go before Bobby figures out where I am.”
So they went, with their wicker basket, across the deep brown forest floor, fragrant with loam and pine, and out onto the placid sapphire surface of the lake glistening in the morning sun. She paddled lazily, and Jack lay down at the head of the canoe, removing the dress shirt he’d put on and closing his eyes to the sun. There were no other boats at that hour, and they glided away from shore, so that the lodge looked like the silly little toy that it was, and she could see a long way through the clear water to the lake bottom.
“Think I can touch the bottom?” she asked.
Jack glanced over the edge of the canoe. “Must be a hundred feet.”
She grinned and pulled her white cotton sundress over her head and dove in. The water was bracing, and as she plunged down she realized he was right, the bottom was much farther than she’d guessed. When she broke the surface again it was with a girlish “Brrrrrr!” of shock.
“Pretty cold, isn’t it?”
She swam back to the boat, and folded her arms against its edge, affecting a smile of unself-conscious delight. “Come on in, honey. Water’s fine.”
“No thanks—I’d rather watch you.”
“Don’t you remember last time we were in the water together?” she asked with a wink.
“I think about it all the time. But my back’s killing me. There’s no way I’d be able to get myself out again, and I’ll not have a woman pull me.”
“Oh, all right.” She threw a leg over the side, and hauled herself up. When she dove in she had not considered that they hadn’t brought towels, and for a moment she sat opposite him, shivering in the clear sunshine. Then she knew she’d miscalculated. She had thought he would follow her in, but now she was the only one naked, dripping, her skin chilled and her hair bedraggled. She had made herself too vulnerable, and could not play the geisha now.
Meanwhile Jack whistled, reached into the picnic basket, cracked a beer. Closing the lid, he saw the tag that read Mr. and Mrs. Miller, Cabin 3. “How’d you manage to get rid of your husband, anyway? If I were him, I wouldn’t let you out of my—”
But he broke off. She hadn’t meant to respond, but the truth must have been in her face briefly. How it had choked her to be called “Mrs. Miller” that morning when the name no longer meant anything, or how ugly it was to be replaced so quickly after four years of marriage. Alexei had warned her to keep Arthur, that Jack would grow leery if she was just another desperate, unattached actress, but she had no choice except to play the situation for sympathy now. “Oh, that didn’t take any doing,” she whispered, making her voice small and sad. “He doesn’t care anymore, you know. It’s over. Once we finish the picture, everyone else will know, too.”
The boat rocked under her, and for several seconds Jack said nothing. She wished she could take it back, erase any mention of her own troubles, but it was too late. In a little while he would make an excuse, and she would bring him back to shore, and that would be the end. Perhaps she had done enough already, and Alexei would not deprive her further of the man she’d waited so long to meet. Perhaps. A few seconds passed, and she saw how Jack was watching her. She watched him back. She watched him as the fragile woman she was pretending to be, and also as herself, and they briefly became one and the same.
He didn’t speak. Only pushed himself up, took the dress shirt from where it lay, and carefully drew its sleeves over her arms and buttoned its buttons over her chest. Then he pulled her to him, so that he lay again in the curved bottom of the canoe, her body nestled in the crook of his arm. “Don’t worry,” he said eventually. “You’ll find another husband. Any man would have you.”
The sun was strong against her eyelids, and her hair was half dried already. Jack placed a hand on her head protectively, and for the first time she was able to imagine him as the father of a little girl, and knew that he had experience reading a child to sleep.
NINETEEN
Up in the air, October 1960
FLYING no longer troubled Marilyn. Especially this morning, when she left her bungalow and went, not to the United Artists lot as she was scheduled to, for reshoots of the movie that ought to have been finished by now, but to the small airport in Burbank, where she paid cash for a seat on a New York–bound flight.
The country passed beneath her in all its rough, gaudy texture as she traveled away from the life that had come to seem like a dream and to the place, and the person, that absorbed her true attention. She was not, she knew, the only one—the networks had put the presidential debates on television this year, and so sixty million or so souls had now seen for themselves, and in the comfortable privacy of their own homes, how much better that handsome face made them feel than the bushy brows and sweating jowls of the vice president. But the necessary secrecy about who she was to the candidate, and her own private motivation for keeping close to him, electrified the whole enterprise. As the airplane descended over the marshy, broken coast of the west end of Long Island she experienced the same thrill she had occasionally experienced at work, when her whole self meshed with the role, and she no longer had to strategize, or even to think.
She crossed the East River in a taxi and found Bill, as promised, at the far end of the bar at the Joy Tavern. His eyes scanned her from head to toe, and she was gratified to see that he approved of her appearance, even though her simple black crewneck sweater and slightly A-line skirt covered more skin than usual.
“Allow me,” he said. She handed him her suitcase and followed him underground.
The Carlyle suite was changed from May. The smoke of many cigarettes, the volume of competing conversations, obscured the Victorian opulence, and the Oak Room atmospherics were further effaced by the extreme youth of the men who occupied the couches, clustered in corners, worked the phones. Bill disappeared into the crowd, leaving her alone amidst the hubbub. She clutched the wrist of one arm behind her back with the opposite hand, until one of the young men drinking Schlitz came to her rescue.
“You can’t really be Marilyn Monroe?”
She glanced over her shoulder, as though he might’ve been talking to someone else. “Oh, yes,” she said after a moment, letting the blush highlight her cheekbones.
“Will you have a seat?” He shooed another young man from one of the leather armchairs by the fireplace. He was long and gangling as a farm boy, and his lips and nose seemed too large for his face, even in dress shirt and suit pants. Despite his slender arms, he exhibited sudden, unexpected strength as he maneuvered the ponderous chair.
“Thank you.” She beamed at him as she arranged her legs, knees close together, one bare calf draped over the other, high heels crossed.
He stared at her quite openly until embarrassment got the better of him and reddened that funny face. “Can I get you anything? A beer, or a sandwich?”
“Oh, I don’t know, I—” Her lips were painted deep fuchsia, and she let them quaver over the words as she considered her reply. “Ordinarily I don’t drink beer, but—if that’s what everybody else is drinking, I guess it sounds kind of nice.”
By the time he returned he was only one of many young campaign workers surrounding her, some sitting on pilfered couch cushions, others crouching excitedly nearby. “Yes,” she said, as the farm boy worked the can of Schlitz with a church key. “Isn’t it really exciting? That somebody so young and attractive and full of energy is going to be president?”
All around, heads bobbed in agreement.
“Thank you,” she whispered, giving the farm boy a private, bashful smile for having procured her beer.
“But what are you doing here?” he asked, emboldened by the smile.
“Oh, well, we’re old friends, Jack and I,” she improvised. “We met through Frankie—Frank Sinatra? My home is here in New York, and I’m just back from the Coast, and I got a call from somebody in Jack’s organization asking if I could give him a few tips for his debate. You know, like acting tips. Not that he needs it. He was wonderful in the first three. Don’t you think?”
They all nodded.
“Yes, I thought so, too. But maybe I can help a little. I do work in a business where appearance is everything. And like it or not, that’s true in the rest of America, too—appearances, I mean, they’re so much more important than we like to think.”
Hours passed without a sign of the candidate, and the boys explained various political matters to her—about the electoral college, and what genius it was that Kennedy had chosen Johnson, who would deliver Texas, about how their man didn’t need makeup but Nixon did, and other political details to which she nodded along, assuming an expression of grave concentration even while seeming slightly mystified by their fast speech and rapid recitation of facts. When Jack walked in, the whole room sighed in happy relief, and as she watched him, walking amongst his acolytes with a blazing smile and focused eyes, his light blue shirt in high contrast to his sun-darkened skin, she found herself wondering why she’d been so silly as to think that she could be with a man because he was merely very intelligent, or merely very strong. That any of her husbands could possibly have been enough for her. Of course, Kennedy was both intelligent and strong, but he was so hungrily alive besides, and she thought that if she ever remarried, it would be to someone as restless as she.
“You should have seen the parade yesterday,” the farm boy said. He wasn’t looking at Marilyn anymore, and she didn’t care.
“Must’ve been something, huh?”
“Hundreds of thousands of them. In downtown Manhattan, all the way to Yonkers. Oh, boy, did the women swoon …” He cut himself short, and perhaps it occurred to him that this was not a dignified observation of a presidential candidate.
“I’ll bet.” She winked to show him it was all right.
Beyond the fortress of shoulders surrounding the candidate, Marilyn saw Bobby, how his eyes roved over the scene, how he barked orders. After that the crowd thinned—the young men were ushered out the door, sent home or wherever they were staying, until only ten or so lingered on the stuffed furniture, drinking scotch out of cut-glass tumblers. Bobby was among them, and she kept overhearing little snippets of conversation, the word revolution a refrain in his conversation. She tried to look sleepy while she wondered if he were referring to Cuba, but then she realized that he was actually talking about television. The candidate was nowhere in sight, and none of the men in the room seemed particularly interested in her presence, and she was beginning to wonder if it was going to be another long night of waiting when the man named Bill appeared at her shoulder.
“Miss Monroe, the candidate is ready for your little seminar.” His voice was glazed with a formality that might have been Southern, or might have meant to mock; and if he was being cute, she couldn’t be certain whether it was to her, or the other men in the room. She collected her stole around her shoulders and stood up, proud and blank. To the rest of the company she may have seemed like a woman about to be led to a married man’s bedroom, but she knew from long experience that when she appeared clueless, that made it difficult for others to sit in judgment. Yet as she passed out of the room, the quality in Bobby’s eyes was like fire on a lake.
“Here,” Bill said at the door of the bedroom, handing her a stack of pink index cards that had been softened by much shuffling. “These are prompts for the debate tomorrow. See he does some work, too.”
She took the cards and slipped into a spare, masculine bedroom. The low rectangle of the bed was the main attraction, and adorning that was Jack, who held a newspaper over his face and wore nothing but checked blue boxers and a strange white contraption over his midsection. His clothes were in a pile on the floor, a navy suit jacket laying on top with its yellow silk lining expo
sed, so that she could see its print of tiny golden chevaliers.
“What is that,” she asked, “some kind of corset?”
He put aside the paper and folded his arms behind his head. A lit cigarette wagged between his teeth. “Let’s have a look at you,” he said.
“Because I saw you on television. If you ask me, you’re perfectly trim already.”
“It’s for my lousy back,” he said, and when she raised an eyebrow, he waved away her concern with an open hand. “You didn’t know? I’m the sickly second son, the understudy who got lucky.” She must have appeared stricken by the gallows humor, because he laughed and said, “Don’t worry, I have more fun than Joe Jr. ever did, god rest his soul. But don’t you go gossiping about it with your hairdresser—if the Republicans find out, they’ll smear me as a crip. Anyway, never you mind. Seems a lifetime since I saw you. Where was it? Houston, Miami? Come here to me.”
“Oh, no.” Her painted index finger tick-tocked. “You have work to do, and I’ll not be the reason America has to be lectured by Nixon’s grim mug for four more years.”
“You’re worse than Bobby. But at least I get to look at something pretty while I answer the same damn questions. I’ll do whatever you say, baby, only take those clothes off first. You’re dressed enough for Georgetown.”
Her lips pressed together and her eyes shone and she did as he said. The sweater came over her head, the skirt down her ankles, and then, wearing only her black slip, she perched on the edge of the bed. Close to him, but not close enough to touch. She made a show of getting comfortable, summoning seriousness, and cleared her throat. “Quemoy and Matsu.” She pronounced the two words unsteadily before breaking into giggles. “What are those, Mrs. Nixon’s lapdogs?”
Jack laughed and collected himself, made his face unsmiling and presidential and adopted the clipped diction he used when giving speeches. “As I have stated several times, this is not an issue in the campaign. My view is in line with the administration’s policy, and differs from the vice president’s only in regard to his assertion that he would defend these islands, only two miles off China, from a threat even if the threat did not include Formosa and the Pescadores …” She nodded, seeming not to understand, as he listed with bland confidence his congressional voting record on the matter. “How was that?” he asked, breaking character.