The Blonde

by Anna Godbersen

  “Oh! Well …” She bit her lip to summon the blush and turned the card over. “It says: Nonissue and also Senate Foreign Relations Committee and also 1958, whatever that means. Anyway, you sounded convincing to me, and I can tell you from experience that half your audience will just hear a confident man saying big words.”

  He grinned. “Good. Next?”

  “Fi-del Ca-stro,” she enunciated carefully. She had meant to seem not quite sure of the name, but in fact her unsteadiness was more a hesitation to prompt him on a matter of such international intrigue. Any casual reader of the newspaper knew that Khrushchev had taken an interest in the Cuban revolutionary’s nascent government—but then Jack’s answer would also be pitched to that casual reader, to anyone with a television.

  “Castro,” Jack repeated, switching to his speechmaking timbre. “Castro is not just another dictator, another petty tyrant bent merely on enriching himself and a few cronies. He represents nothing less than a threat to the whole Western Hemisphere!” He increased his volume as he went on: “Why, the administration has allowed a communist satellite to gain unprecedented power a mere ninety miles from our shores. Cuba under his control is not only a potential site for enemy missiles or submarines but a base from which Marxism may spread like a contagion through all of Latin America. The current administration did nothing to combat the bloody and corrupt regime that ruled the island previously, and they have done nothing to support those freedom fighters who even now are ready and waiting to take their country back and make it safe for democracy!” He unclenched his fist, and a dimple appeared in his cheek. “What are you smiling about?” he asked in his own voice.

  “Oh … it all just sounds so serious.”

  “Don’t tell me you like Castro.”

  She lifted her shoulders toward her ears. “He’s kinda cute, don’t you think?”

  Jack pushed himself up on his elbows, and with mock jealousy exclaimed, “I certainly do not. You’d better not, either. Not while you’re with this fellow. You made me sweat enough with Khrushchev.”

  She lowered her lashes. “You read about that?”

  “Of course. That old peasant! Why’d you say that stuff anyway, about your husband sending greetings and so forth?”

  She laughed. “He was on a tour of the United States, and wanted to see a film studio, and I guess I happened to be there that day, so the publicity girl had us take a picture together. And he was looking at me the way a man looks at a woman, you know? And I felt sorry for him with that big, bald head of his. I could tell he’d suffered in this life, and I thought he probably deserved to have a pretty woman flirt with him, just for a minute. And I don’t know, Arthur was being a bastard probably, and I figured maybe the FBI would shuffle things around in his office if I said something like that. Anyway, my name ended up in the paper, didn’t it? You’re not the only one who knows how to get headlines, you know.”

  “I do know.”

  “Anyway,” she went on, trying to strike the naïve chord again, “don’t you think there ought to be more understanding between our countries? I thought you were the candidate who stood for peace and all that.”

  “Sure, of course I am.”

  “Then why all this big macho talk?”

  The grin was back, and she could see that he was pleased about something and couldn’t help himself. “It’s a trap, baby.”

  “A trap?” she repeated innocently.

  His eyes shone as he explained it to her. How the current administration had planned a secret operation to take Castro out and save the island from communism, and since it wasn’t strictly legal they’d hired the boss of Chicago for the job. But the boss of Chicago was Sam Giancana, and he’d told Jack all about it, and Jack as a candidate was free to call for just such a strike, while Nixon, who had been officially briefed, was forced to remain silent on the subject. The end result (Jack told her with boyish glee) was that Nixon would come off soft on communism, while he looked tough, and meanwhile Giancana had delayed the operation until after the election.

  “And then,” she asked, eyes wide, “once you’re elected, you’ll call it off ?”

  The joking light had disappeared from Jack’s eyes, and they became miserable as he said, “Well, one way or another, Castro’s got to go.” The quality in his face just then was as complex and inscrutable as a sky threatening to storm, and her stomach dropped when she realized that, for the first time, he had told her something Alexei might truly value. Not something that he would have found out sooner or later from another source, or in the news, and not just insight into the candidate’s character. This was what he’d meant by timely, when he told her about Pilar Florist, the arrangement of irises, the children’s wing at Sloan-Kettering. What Jack had just told her was crucial to the cause Alexei had given his life to, the cause his masters waged war for, and she felt crushed by the weight of this knowledge. But Jack, meanwhile, had brightened. He reached for her ankle, encircled it with his fingers. “So don’t get attached—that bearded oaf can’t be your boyfriend long.”

  “Oh!” she exclaimed, finding herself incapable of responding in flirtatious kind. When he revealed himself to her, her heart had gone quiet as a winter dawn. She felt suddenly protective, wanted him never to tell her another secret—wanted never to repeat his confidences to Alexei again—and without thinking she ripped the cards in half, and then in half again, and tossed the pieces in the air like confetti, laughing while they fell around them as though none of it had anything to do with her. Then she lay on the mattress, facing Jack, on her side. “You ever been to Cuba?” she asked, not as though she was curious about Cuba but as though she was curious about him and the things he’d done before he met her.

  His hand was low on her thigh, traveling toward the hem of her slip, his fingertips gliding along her skin, creeping under the silk. His eyes were focused there, but they weren’t really focused at all. “Sure. You?”

  Hair fell into her eyes when she shook her head.

  “It’s paradise. At least it used to be. Those Spanish mansions in Havana, the narrow streets of the old town, the nightclubs, the way they dance. It’s so humid at night the women wear hardly anything at all. You know I met Meyer Lanksy there, in ’57, at the Montmartre? City smells like sex and money. You’d love it.”

  “I wish I could’ve seen it,” she whispered.

  His hand and eyes meandered upward, to the narrow of her waist, along her shoulder, where he toyed absentmindedly with the strap of her slip. “If I lose this thing, I think maybe I’ll kidnap you. We’ll go to Cuba and live in the mountains and wear fatigues and smoke cigars, and when we get bored of that we’ll get dressed up and go to the Hotel Nacional, or look for Papa Hemingway at the Floridita, or listen to hot music and drink rum with sugar and mint on ice. I’d like to show you off for real, you know, in a country where they know how to appreciate a woman’s figure.”

  All of a sudden his gaze met hers, and she returned it with a fearfulness that was genuine and an imitation at the same time. “But you are going to win this thing.”

  He blinked, nodded.

  His eyes stared into hers just as intensely, and for a few moments she thought he might confess to her things he’d never admitted even to himself. Her heart was a hammer, comprehending what he might unburden to her, and she was relieved when he instead spread his fingers under her hair, against her scalp, dragging her face to his. Whatever frightful realization or desperate thought had been in his mind a second ago was in his tongue now. She felt it and forgot the reason she had flown to New York, and—greedily, and quite simply—kissed him back.

  TWENTY

  New York, October 1960

  THE day she was to return to California she was awakened before dawn by the sound of an ambulance down on the street, and couldn’t fall back asleep. Instead she waited for the deep blue of her bedroom wall to become diluted, and knew that though she was scheduled to fly west that afternoon, she’d be there only temporarily. The city was where
she wanted to be, and once she realized that, she wrapped an old fur around her body and went walking. The predawn air chilled her cheekbones and enlivened her mind, and it made her happy to see, just by glancing at the windows of the apartments above, how many other insomniacs had given in and turned on their bedside lamps. A corner newsstand beckoned her with its neon glow, and when she picked up the early edition she understood why. She paid for a cup of coffee and the paper with Jack’s face on the front page, and as she turned away she was reading about his campaign stop in Ohio, and didn’t notice the cab trailing her at a slow roll.

  She remained oblivious until Alexei called out to her, using his customary nickname, and she promptly dropped her coffee on the sidewalk.

  “Never mind about that,” he said, stepping to the curb and holding the door open. His shirtsleeves were rolled, revealing ropey forearms, but otherwise he was dressed as usual—elegant in a way that no one would remember once they were no longer in the same room. He made a graceful gesture ushering her in, and waited patiently until she’d done as he wished. Less than an hour ago, she had been asleep. Her limbs tingled like they weren’t quite real, and she climbed into the cab as though still in a dream. “We’ll go get you some more.”

  There was no meter in the cab, and the driver appeared in no hurry to arrive any particular place, and these facts dimmed the pleasure she had lately taken in her restless, yearning, all-night city. They were heading crosstown, and the streets at that hour belonged to delivery trucks, and she wished that she had thought to put a real dress over her slip before she went out walking.

  “If I had known you were in town, I would have come to you sooner,” he said eventually.

  “It was a last-minute invitation,” she replied, too quickly. “Spur of the moment.”

  “But you saw Jack before the debate.” He glanced at her sidelong, warning her not to pretend otherwise. “And yet I haven’t heard from you since. Did you forget what I told you? About Pilar on Second Avenue, the arrangement of purple irises for the children’s wing?”

  “No, I didn’t forget.”

  “Why do I feel that you’re avoiding me?”

  She shrugged and looked out the window, at the heaps of last night’s garbage outside restaurants waiting to be taken away. “Do you feel that I’ve been avoiding you?”

  “You’re leaving today, aren’t you? It does seem likely you would have returned to Los Angeles without seeing me. Without informing me of your doings at all.”

  “I guess I might’ve,” she answered carefully. “Nothing much has happened. Nothing of note.”

  “The big event is less than a month from now, and Hal had you fly all the way to New York to be with him, and there’s nothing to report?” He exhaled, a sharp dismissal of everything she’d ever done for him. The driver pulled over—it was still dark out, and she hadn’t been counting the streets, but she guessed they were in Hell’s Kitchen—and Alexei’s tone changed suddenly. “Ah!” he said brightly. “Here we are. Come up, I’ll make you coffee, and we’ll get to chat a little before you go.”

  Nervousness dampened her palms, the skin behind her knees, as she climbed the stairwell of a tenement building that smelled of cigarette butts and rotting trash. Alexei was close behind her. She listened to the heels of his shoes against the metal steps, sensed the width of his shoulders, and knew that if she fell, or switched direction, he’d block her way.

  On the fifth floor, he unlocked the apartment on the street side of the building and stood aside for her to enter. “I’m sorry for not inviting you here before.” He kept his voice casual and flipped on the lights. “Perhaps you will feel more comfortable, find it easier to talk, in my home …”

  “Thank you,” she said, stepping inside the small studio apartment and glancing around. The Murphy bed was down, unmade, a thick volume of the complete Shakespeare spread open on the sheets. Where a kitchen table might have been, there was an easel instead, and the air in the room was sharp with turpentine. “Are you a painter?”

  His face slid into a self-effacing smirk. “Once, perhaps. I studied life drawing when I was a young man in Paris, and it was said I had great potential as a draftsman. That was a long time ago, of course. During my first years in the States, when I worked with Johnny Hyde, I posed as a backdrop painter at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and when it became necessary to run my operation out of New York, I found that being an artist is good cover. Neighbors are never surprised when an artist keeps odd hours, or is gone for long stretches of time, or disappears for walks to nowhere.”

  “I see.” Inside her coat pockets she made fists as she crossed the bowed, paint-splattered floorboards to look at the canvas up close. It was medium in size, all salmon-colored abstractions, the paint so built up that it made a kind of knobby landscape, although somewhere in the middle she thought she saw a nose, lips, heavy shrouded eyes. “It’s nice,” she said after a while. “Is it a self-portrait?”

  “I suppose you could say that.” The floor creaked as he approached, and came to linger at her shoulder. “I’ve been working on it for decades. But of course I have more important things to occupy me now.”

  “Oh?” She spoke breezily, but she knew what he meant, and her throat closed at the prospect of what came next.

  “Yes. Let’s have some coffee, see if we can’t help you remember if Hal did—or said—anything of special importance. Wouldn’t you like some coffee?”

  “No thank you.” She turned suddenly and walked across the room, almost to the entrance. She liked him, even after everything. Liked that he lived like this, and anyway she was accustomed to his protective shadow. But she reminded herself that he had not so much brought her close to her father as used the idea of him to steer her, and by then her heart was thudding, the blood coursing with such fury that she barely heard the words she did finally manage. “I don’t have time,” she blurted. “I can’t stay. There really isn’t anything to tell, anyway.”

  “What a shame.” He flinched, and it seemed the color of his eyes changed as he studied her. “I was sure there would be. Nonetheless, I am glad you’re here. I’ve meant to tell you how much Moscow appreciates your work. What you have learned about Hal, what you will yet learn of him, promises to unite our people. Strengthen our resolve. When the world sees that such a man—callow, corrupt, susceptible to blackmail, a hoarder of wealth earned on the backs of others—is so close to being elected leader of this country, it can only reveal our system as the more just. The system that shall prevail, and bring peace to the world at last. Already your intelligence has done so much, my dear. It is only the beginning.”

  “No—” Her voice faltered, and she wished she was gone already from that place. “It’s not the beginning—it’s the end.”

  “What?” He stepped toward her, his chin lifting to the left.

  “I won’t be telling you about Jack anymore,” she blurted. There was no going back now, she told herself, no matter the consequences. “What he tells me he tells in confidence, and I won’t betray that. I can’t because—because …”

  “Because?” His face was twisted at an odd angle, and his eyes were bright. Watchful. That pale blue you could almost see through, fixed on her, not exactly angry but no longer patient, either. They were eyes that didn’t miss much, but she supposed his perspicacity didn’t really matter. The way she was smiling, even through her fear—the sort of natural, dopey smile a girl just can’t help—would’ve made the reason she couldn’t betray Jack obvious to anybody.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, as she put her shoulder into the door.

  “Oh, N.J.” He sounded weary, and she knew he’d taken her meaning. He put his hands in the pockets of his slacks and looked away. Was he warning her, or overwhelmed with disappointment that he had to let her go? In either case, he didn’t chase her when she passed into the hall and ran down the five flights and into the street. Outside, dawn had broken, and the puddles were iridescent with the first rays of morning. The cabdriver without a meter w
as gone, and she felt relieved to have made it through the night. The difficult part was over. As she pulled the fur tight to her body and walked fast toward the avenue to find a real one, she found that she was wearing the same wide, involuntary smile.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Los Angeles, November 1960

  MARILYN had forgotten what it felt like, or otherwise she truly hadn’t ever known. How the world yawned gently open; how delicious almost any kind of food tasted, so that just a bite or two was completely satisfying; how she could subsist on late-night calls and sweet water from the tap. It was in this state of grace that she lost twenty pounds almost without trying, and in the first week of November, when filming in Nevada was finished and she owed The Misfits only a few more favors, she went to have still shots taken for the publicity department, and her costumes had to be pinned. The wardrobe girl asked her how she’d managed to reduce so quickly, and Marilyn replied in the frank, tough-gal manner that had been in vogue with all the big actresses when she was first coming up, “Same old studio regimen, iceberg and uppers.” But privately she thought: Honey, there’s never been a diet to beat falling in love.

  She cleared out the bungalow, packing only a few of the dresses that she’d bought or been given during her intermittent stays in California. The rest she sent to Anna, the makeup assistant, who had moved to Los Angeles with the idea that she’d keep working in movies but who had found herself rather adrift in a new city. Apparently her boyfriend had grown distant, and she was finding it difficult to get around without a car, and Marilyn—who knew the girl had remained loyal and defended her during the long months of shooting, even after every other member of the crew had turned against their star—thought that a box of hand-me-down gowns was the least she could do.