The Blonde

by Anna Godbersen

  “Ah.”

  “But he doesn’t love me back. It’s not my fault, I tried to keep him, but he’s on to the next, or otherwise he’s playing it safe now that he’s elected. I don’t know. He’s married, obviously, and his life is so public. I was stupid to have fallen in love. Anyway, I should try to forget him now. He’s forgotten me.”

  “We doubt that.”

  “We?”

  “In fact, we know that is not the case. He has had dates with a woman who is also an occasional lover of Sam Giancana—our Chicago source told us. If she can get to him”—Dr. Kurtz paused to snort—“surely you can. Unless you refuse. Unless you’ve lost your charm.”

  Marilyn put her knees together and let her torso hang pathetically. The information that Jack had a new lover cut her, and the realization that Dr. Kurtz, in whose Upper East Side office she had replayed the story of her orphan girlhood, spilled her misery, was one of the people who had been manipulating her in secret, made her feel woozy and wretched.

  “I won’t,” she muttered. “I can’t.”

  Taking a fistful of hair, Dr. Kurtz yanked her patient’s head back so that their faces were inches apart. Marilyn smelled the sea breeze of a tooth gone bad. “You will,” Dr. Kurtz commanded with sudden, shocking violence.

  A tiny, spiteful smile played at the edges of Marilyn’s mouth. “Can’t do much from here, Doc.”

  Dr. Kurtz released the fistful of hair disgustedly. “I will take that to mean you are at least theoretically open to behaving.”

  “Take it any way you fucking want.”

  Dr. Kurtz’s thick, pudgy fingers reached out, grabbing Marilyn by the ears and slamming her head hard against the brick wall so that the world went black.

  Marilyn dreamed.

  They were the variety of dreams that announce themselves as such but are too viscous to rise through, out of, into waking life. And so she was held there, underwater, unable to breathe. She was trying to swim upward, but the surface kept receding, and somehow or other she reached the shore first. She dragged herself from the bloodred sea onto a beach. Purple seaweed was tangled in her hair, and the sand scalded her hands and knees. The shade was close, but also unreachable. Then she saw Jack, under swaying palms, wearing horn-rimmed sunglasses flecked with gold, his chest bare. Was he sleeping? She called to him, but there was a wound in her throat. Did he see her? Perhaps he sensed her presence but couldn’t move, because of those flesh-colored snakes winding around his body. Then she saw that they weren’t snakes. They were two lithe women, with strawberry blonde hair blown out and styled in high bobs, caressing him with their mouths.

  When she reached him, he grabbed a fistful of her hair, and pushed her face into his lap, and she was grateful for the steadiness that came when he stiffened against her tongue. Seconds passed, or maybe hours, and when he pulled her head back they weren’t on a beach anymore but in a dimly lit nightclub, and Frank Sinatra was on stage, wearing a fedora, snapping his fingers. And she, and Jack, and the two girls, were lying at the center of the dance floor upon a pile of mirrored and tasseled pillows. He pushed her away, into the arms of one of the girls, who wrapped her legs around Marilyn and began to run her fingers through her hair, to whisper in her ear: “You’re so pretty, you’re so pretty, you’re so pretty.”

  But Marilyn couldn’t hear her. She was choked with horror. The other girl was on hands and knees, and Jack gripped her hips, pounding her from behind, causing those big breasts to swing like water balloons. All Marilyn could hear was that girl’s extravagant moans, the way Jack kept encouraging her, their ragged panting. Marilyn tried to cover her ears, but the girl whose thighs clenched her own body kept begging Marilyn to touch her. And the other girl kept wailing, “Fuck me, Jack, fuck me, Jack, fuck me, Jack!”

  “Make it stop!” Marilyn cried.

  Fluorescent light burst through her eyelids.

  She blinked, lurched. But her hands were fastened behind her back, and she lost balance. The concrete floor met her face like a punch.

  The sound was piped in from somewhere, filling the already claustrophobic room with “Fuck me, Jack, fuck me, Jack, fuck me, Jack!” And though he said nothing, she could hear him grunting and exhaling. There might have been a second girl, breathing heavily on the recording, but the one saying fuck me had decent range, so it was impossible to know for sure.

  “Make it stop!” she screamed.

  The door opened. Two sets of feet came toward her, and she was lifted backward onto the cot. The recording stopped.

  “What the fuck is this?” Not in the orphanage, not even when she worked in an airplane parts manufactory, had her skin been exposed to fabric this abrasive. Of course she knew what it was without being told. Her arms were wrapped around her middle, tied in the back, and the garment was fastened with a crotch strap.

  “You objected to our entertainment.” Alexei was wearing the same clothes as when he had picked her up off the street—the slacks were rumpled now, his shirtsleeves rolled to the elbows—although he was clean-shaven.

  “You had to be restrained,” Dr. Kurtz, at his shoulder, put in.

  “Your entertainment.” Marilyn bared her teeth. “Where’d you get that recording anyway? Some rotten little shop in Times Square? You really think I’m dumb enough to fall for that trick?” She wasn’t sure if she believed this or not, although her intuition was to argue with whatever her captors told her. Once she said it out loud, she realized it could easily be the truth. “How many whores in this town have pretended to beg some guy calling himself Jack to fuck them?”

  “Does it matter where we got it?” Alexei replied. His soft chin was drawn back into his neck, and he was bending toward her, examining the part of her face where she’d hit the ground. It stung, and she knew there’d be a bruise. He knew, too.

  “It was easy.” Dr. Kurtz smirked. “He’s a womanizer, you knew that.”

  “But why did you have to—”

  “We don’t want to hurt you.” Alexei stepped back and crossed his arms over his chest.

  “But we don’t want him to hurt you, either.” Dr. Kurtz came forward. “It is necessary for us to show you—remind you, actually—what he is really like.”

  “I don’t like seeing you like this. So unlike yourself. So … disheveled.” Alexei was speaking to her in that low, sweet manner, and she hated how she wanted him to go on, stroking her with kind words like he used to. “We want to get you out of here.”

  “But first you must see things as they really are.”

  “Oh?” She looked up blearily. “How are things, really?”

  “John Fitzgerald Kennedy is corrupt, a womanizer. The figurehead of an imperialist government. You cannot be blamed for being won over by his charm—charm is his most finely honed skill. But you are too good for him, and we are here to set you right.”

  “N.J.,” Alexei purred. “Don’t you want us to get you out of that thing?”

  This question provoked so many reactions. She wanted to spit on him, hurl herself across the room, tear at the straitjacket with her teeth. But a fear was taking hold that the only asset she really had, her beauty, would be ruined in this place, and she knew she couldn’t go on lunging and screaming without doing herself harm. In the end she just said, “Yes.”

  “Then show me. Show me you are willing to cooperate.”

  “If you’d just let me out of here, I promise, I’ll …”

  Alexei strode toward her. “We are not just going to let you out of here. Some proof, an act of good will. Show me you no longer harbor these feelings of ‘love’ for the president.”

  She swallowed and closed her eyes. Panic seized her throat. If she stayed another night the dreams would get worse, and who knew what would become of her face. “All right,” she whispered hoarsely.

  “All right?”

  “If I tell you, will you get me out of here?”

  “Tell me what?”

  The need to be free of the straitjacket was making her feverish
, but she tried to keep her voice steady as she related what Jack had told her, the night she’d ripped up his flash cards. “This was before the election, a few weeks, I think, and Jack told me about an operation that they were planning for Cuba. We were, I guess. America. Or the former president’s people. The mob was in on it, Sam Giancana and the Chicago organization. They’re going to invade the island, assassinate Castro—”

  Alexei snorted. “I thought you meant information.”

  “But that’s—”

  “The Giancana plot is off. Our source in Chicago, she says that—”

  “Oh, your source in Chicago says it’s off!” She was angry again, angry in a way she had no chance of controlling. “It’s not off !” she screamed. “They were only delaying the operation until after the election. ‘One way or another, Castro’s got to go,’ that’s what Jack said. So maybe your Chicago source is bullshit, consider that. Who is she anyway, Giancana’s third favorite Russian hooker?”

  Too late, she realized she was right. Not only was she right, but the operative in Giancana’s organization meant something to Alexei—he hated hearing her called a hooker. Then she saw the strap. An oily terror spread in her stomach. But she had been hit before, so she held his gaze, curled her lip into a snarl, braced herself for the blow and the darkness that followed.

  “Wake up!”

  A slap across the face, and she gasped and sat up fast into Alexei’s arms before she could stop herself. She was shaking with fever and could not feel her extremities.

  “There now,” he said, patting her arms after she realized her mistake and stiffened. “Here, have some water, some food.”

  Her eyes rolled to him. His lips pulled back from his teeth, and he nodded reassuringly at the standing tray that had been erected by her cot, a glass of water and a plate with saltines and slices of orange cheese. She picked up the glass of water, took a tentative sip.

  “Have something to eat.”

  “I don’t want it.”

  “But you must. You need your strength. Come.” Alexei took her hand and stood, pulling her gently to her feet. “Come, I want to show you something.”

  At first she couldn’t believe that he really would take her with him, didn’t want to let herself hope. But the door was opening, and he had her by the hand.

  The hall was even brighter than her cell, and it seemed to go on forever in either direction, with metal doors like the one that had trapped her lining the institutional pink walls. A stern-faced nurse passed them, her square paper hat pinned in the curve of her chestnut hair, leading a patient the same way Alexei was leading Marilyn, with an iron grip of the wrist. The patient’s hair was also brown, and might once have been neat and glossy, too—she did not look so old, or beyond vanity—although it was limp and stringy now and hung in her face. Her head was cowed, and her eyes were dead. She wore the same green hospital gown as Marilyn. As they passed, Marilyn glanced over her shoulder and saw the patient’s robe was open in the back, and in horror she glanced down and saw that her bare ass was equally exposed.

  With a shudder she turned, looked resolutely forward. No matter what they did to her she could not go dead in the eyes like that.

  “Where am I?” she whispered.

  “You’re at the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic at New York Presbyterian.”

  “You had me committed?”

  “Your analyst thought it best.”

  Meanwhile Alexei had chosen a door, and with a gallant gesture urged her inside. Her throat closed at the prospect of entering another small room, but there was no one in the hall—no one to hear her scream, or object if he forced her—so she did as he wished. But the room was not a cell. In fact, it was decorated rather like Dr. Kurtz’s office, with a Persian rug, two velvet armchairs, and a low walnut table where someone had left a carafe of water and two silver-rimmed glasses.

  “Sit down, N.J.”

  She did as he instructed, trying not to flinch when the door closed.

  “Have a glass of water.” Dutifully she poured a glass, drank, and then refilled the glass. Opposite the chairs was a window covered by a curtain. “It’s a mirror on the other side. To observe,” Alexei explained when he saw her staring.

  The chill started at the nape of her neck and traveled down her spine. “Who’s in there?” she demanded.

  Alexei gave her the faint smile—the one that mixed affection and amusement—and turned away. He flipped a switch on the wall, which pulled the curtain to the right and revealed a brightly lit room. Not the dim, warm light of the room with the armchairs, but rather the fluorescence under which she had passed—how many days now? There was a cot in this room, too, and a man sitting on it, his legs spread, his elbows resting on them, his head bent, his hands clasped together as though in prayer. He was not wearing a hospital gown but rather a denim shirt and denim pants, like a chain gang escapee. She rose unsteadily as Alexei knocked on the glass.

  The man glanced up. He pushed his overgrown gray hair back from his face, and stood. He crossed the room tentatively, and his tentativeness created the illusion that his face was coming slowly into focus as through a camera’s lens. She was glad of this—she would not have believed it otherwise. The face was so like hers she felt dizzy, as though she were uncovering some ancient evidence of herself, and couldn’t comprehend having the mystery solved so suddenly or completely. His skin was thick, worn and creased with age, and his hair was in truth a light blond chased with silver, especially at the temples. The narrow button nose, the wide eyes, the cleft, well-defined chin were her own. When he reached the glass she saw that he was tall, much taller than she, so that she had to gaze up at him. His eyebrows twitched, and his brow folded, as if glimpsing someone he longed for in the distance. Then he began to smile. She watched that smile grow, like a piece of music that she was conducting. His lips quavered, struggled, and opened—that brave, hopeful expression of yearning to be loved that she’d perfected long ago.

  “It’s him, isn’t it? My father.”

  “Yes.”

  “Can he see me?”

  “Perhaps he can make out a silhouette. He knows you’re on the premises.”

  “Can he hear me?”

  “No.”

  “He looks tired.” Inside she was soggy with tears, but she had a reason to be tough now. “Did you hurt him?”

  “He has been awake a long time, but no, we haven’t hurt him. Not yet.”

  “Please, can’t I talk to him?” she asked.

  Alexei was not smiling now. He flipped a switch, and the curtain was pulled quite suddenly over the window. With patient fingers, Alexei rolled down the sleeves of his shirt, buttoned them at the wrists. “That depends on you, as it always has.”

  Her eyes were bleary with hope, but he only stared at her impassively. “Tell me his name, at least.”

  “William,” Alexei said. “Your father was born William Summers.”

  William Summers, she thought to herself. William Summers, who are you? It sounded just like the kind of man who would father a girl like her. If she were writing a novel about her life, that’s what she would call the character who disappeared before she spoke a word. What she mostly noticed, through the one-sided window, were the features that were hers. The tip of the nose, the lantern jaw. But those were the parts of her face that had been improved a long time ago. And the way he smiled—it was as if he’d learned to smile from watching her in the movies. He was a fiction, which they had used to control her, and she was cold with the realization that he had never existed, and she was, as ever, the only one who could look after herself.

  She clasped her hands together, to show Alexei how moved she was. “Don’t hurt him, please.”

  “It all depends on you.”

  “Okay.” She nodded, swallowed. Summoned that old determination, a little girl refusing to die. “Just let me out of here. Give me some time, a good pair of high heels. I’ll find a way. I don’t know how, but I’ll find a way.”

  “G
ood.” Alexei took hold of the doorknob. He inclined forward in a courtly bow, and she was suddenly afraid of being left alone, locked in a room, maybe forever.

  “But you’ve got to get me out of here!”

  “We have done so much for you. It’s time you help yourself,” he said, pointing toward a telephone on the far side of the chairs. “The nurse will be here in a few moments, and if you are good, perhaps they will put you in a room with a window next. Don’t forget that we are watching.”

  When he was gone she sat down, tried to forget the days she had spent in the cell, the poor state of her skin and hair, the indignity of the hospital gown. Alexei had killed Clark, there was no reason he wouldn’t kill her, or lock her up again. She would have to seem to go along with him, for a little while. Until she got her wits together, until she had her strength back. What had Kennedy ever done for her, anyway? She reminded herself of that girl saying Fuck me, Jack, fuck me. She told herself: Honey, don’t trust a soul. Then she dialed the number that she used only when she was in real trouble.

  “It’s Marilyn,” she told the housekeeper at the DiMaggio residence. “Can I talk to Joe, please?”

  She felt a little better, knowing that in a few seconds she’d hear her ex-husband’s voice and that soon afterward he’d come to her rescue. What a rage he would be in when he heard how they’d confined and humiliated her, the hell he’d give her captors. Or those who remained on the scene, anyway. If only she had been a little smarter or a little dumber, she would have stayed with him and been safe forever. But the anger always came for you, too, eventually, and you had to make yourself small to stay out of its path. You had to numb yourself pretty good to be a woman who belongs to that kind of man, and numbing agents only worked on her so long. As she clutched the phone and waited for the housekeeper to locate him, she began to cry, softly at first, and then with the sorrow of all her years.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Los Angeles, March 1961