The Blonde

by Anna Godbersen

  The skirt she wore was mid-calf and tight, so that her thighs were almost bound together. When she tried to move forward it was a funny, off-kilter prancing, and she almost fell against Doug Walls trying to give him a kiss on the cheek. They were so close that he must have caught a whiff of her body, which had the smell of sex in the morning and drinking wine in the sun. “Thanks,” she whispered, biting her lip. “I’ll be looking forward to it.”

  He continued half supporting her until she had slid behind the wheel.

  “Thanks for lunch, Alan,” she said. “I’ll call you when I know my plans.”

  And, happy to think that there would be a man to protect her while she traveled, she put the car in gear and went in search of a dress for Jack’s dinner.

  THIRTY

  Washington, D.C., October 1961

  THE sloped bronze bowl of the concert hall was warm with the reflected light of the stage, where a cellist cradled his instrument. The faces of the audience were cocked at all angles, wearing grimaces of reverence, impatience, preoccupation, or trance. They were dressed in their finery, teardrop-shaped jewels hanging beneath the lower curl of the women’s coiffures, the men’s cuff links gleaming when they rested their chins on the heels of their palms. The music seemed to invite Walls’s emotions to take wing, sinking and soaring by turns. He was briefly distracted by the idea of returning to live in Washington, perhaps marrying some brisk, clean-smelling girl who understood Bach and knew how to host a cocktail party, and he almost didn’t realize that the blonde sashaying up the aisle was the one he was now charged by two masters with watching.

  Or one and a half, as he had taken a leave of absence from the Bureau in order to work for Alan Jacobs. He had not been able to shake his conviction that the Gent was a Soviet spy and that Marilyn was his operative, but neither had he chased away his anxiety that this was a lunatic theory, the pursuing of which would lead to his professional undoing. Yet he felt duty bound to either uncover, or definitively disprove, her traitorous secret self, and he feared that he would never know peace again if he did not learn the truth.

  His right foot came down to the floor. He was seated, according to his station, in the recesses of the hall, and so there was no one to notice how his eyes scanned the rows of the concert attendees to the box where Jacqueline Kennedy, in a sleeveless column the color of Key lime pie, was watching the performer with the same placid, aloof smile, even though the seat next to her was now empty. When had the president left his seat, and how had Marilyn managed to walk up the aisle and right past Walls without his taking notice? During dinner she and Pat kept slinking off to the bathroom together, not bothering to be discreet, and returning with the giggles and a strange quality in their eyes, big and black like porcelain dolls. Neither had subsequently seemed capable of keeping her voice down or walking a straight line. And so Walls, with some reason, had allowed his vigilance to lapse. He rose, irritated with himself, failed to notice the outstretched leg of the man next to him, and nearly wound up splayed across the aisle.

  “Pardon,” he muttered, before hurrying to the exit.

  For a moment she was there—the strapless red floor-length dress, the naked scapulas of her atypically covered-up back, the pouf of white-blonde hair reminiscent, from behind, of a giant speech balloon—and Walls relaxed. Then she disappeared around the curvature of the hall, and he saw the mistake that he had made in believing her to be as drunk and helpless as she appeared. He jogged the length of the hall but found it empty, the only evidence of her a faint trail of Chanel perfume.

  He hurried down the stairs, into the auditorium’s empty lobby, where there was not even the receding click of high-heeled shoes to guide him. Through multiple glass doors he could see that outside the world was slick and dark with rain, so he turned instead and headed deeper into the building, where the music reverberated through the floorboards. He quickly determined that she was in neither bathroom (he was so relieved that he had not met there with the shocked and disapproving face of some social doyenne that he almost didn’t mind the fact that Marilyn was on the loose). The coat-check room was unmanned, but he saw the boy who was meant to be guarding it halfway down the hall. His head, the close-cropped hair gone white in dramatic contrast to his black skin, was pressed to the wall listening to the concert on the other side.

  Inside, row upon row of furs greeted him, more mink, sable, otter, and ermine than he’d ever seen before. He was a little shocked by this display, by all those beautiful pelts. The sounds brought him back—a woman’s sigh transmogrifying to moan, the rustling of clothing, a man saying baby. Walls froze, not sure what to do. Of course, wasn’t this what he had been hoping for, definitive proof of Marilyn and the president? But he wasn’t really in doubt about that, and if she saw him now she was unlikely to want him near her again, which would make it difficult to find out what he actually needed to know, which was how she met with the Gent, who he was, and what they planned. On the other hand, his official reason for being here was to ensure that she received some positive notices in the press, and to keep her out of trouble. And trouble this certainly was—he would only be doing his job, and if she was irritated, he could always plead inexperience, good intentions, and the negative consequences of being discovered in a compromising position with any married man, much less the one whose job it was to safeguard the free world.

  With caution he approached the coupling, stepping around the last standing rack, his heart skipping when he saw that head of chestnut hair buried in her neck, how her stockinged legs wrapped around his black trousers as he kneeled on a sealskin. Three things happened very quickly: He saw the woman’s expression, rent with gratifying agony; it occurred to him that she was not the woman he’d been attempting to locate; and the man’s face turned up to him, his pleasure becoming fear. In the previous moment they had been people older and more sophisticated than himself, but now he realized that they were actually just kids in slightly disarranged ushers’ uniforms.

  “Oh, crap,” said the girl. Her moan had been throaty, but her speaking voice had the high pitch of a bobby-soxer.

  “We weren’t—” the young man started.

  “Terribly sorry.” Walls backed away.

  As he left the coatroom he saw that the attendant was no longer trying to feel the music through the bones of the building. He was returning, but with a quality of circumspection in his worn features, and when he met Walls’s gaze he held it apprehensively. From the opposite direction, and at a much more confident gait, came Patricia Lawford.

  “Well, hello there, mister,” she said, lowering her chin and raising her emerald gaze to meet his. The eyes were still rather dazed, and her lips had a lurid twist. “I was wondering where you’d gone.”

  “I was looking for Miss Monroe. Do you know where she’s run off to?”

  “Home. I expect she had a little too much, the poor dear.”

  “I should go check on her …”

  “Nonsense. If she wanted that, she would have asked.” Pat winked and interlaced his arm with hers, drawing him back up the stairs. He couldn’t tell if she wanted only to flirt with him, or something more, but he resented her attentions and how they stalled his progress. “Anyway, don’t go, it would make me so sad.”

  When they reentered the auditorium, the orchestra was in the midst of a passionate movement, and he felt that he was trying to contain a wild impulse to go where the action was, to catch Marilyn and Kennedy in the act. That if he had that information, maybe he’d at last be able to force her to tell him what she was up to. Her empty seat taunted him as they approached and Pat sat down, and he realized that he was meant to take Marilyn’s vacated spot. Scowling, he did as she wanted, and did not even try to conceal the jerk of his head when he glanced in the direction of the president’s box. His scowl dissolved in surprise when he saw that Kennedy had returned and was sitting beside his wife, her gloved hand rested affectionately upon his shoulder.

  The music no longer captivated Walls, and whe
n the concert finally ended it took another twenty minutes to extract himself from the Lawfords. Pat kept holding on to him, and Peter, who appeared even drunker than she was, had eyes for every woman who loitered in the lobby while plans for the rest of the evening took shape. She kept insisting that Walls should come with them to the Virginia estate—her brother Bobby’s place—where they were staying.

  “Jack won’t be there,” she said sadly, to nobody in particular. “That nag he’s married to insisted he accompany her back to the White House tonight.”

  Walls, disappointed by this information and disgusted by the prospect of a country game of musical beds, insisted that it was his job to locate Marilyn as soon as possible and make sure she was all right, an assertion which nobody seemed to take very seriously. In the end he slipped away without saying good night, after Pat was drawn into conversation with a Floridian senator she appeared to know well.

  Their hotel was quiet when he arrived, and the Victorian furniture, the large hydrangea arrangements, and the gilt-framed portraits of American heroes from the last century showed no traces of the woman he was seeking. He went to her room first—the larger of the two adjacent rooms he had booked himself as an employee of Alan Jacobs’s public relations firm. When she didn’t respond to his repeated knocks he glanced up and down the hall, with its striped gold-and-robin’s-egg-blue wallpaper, removed the pick from his tuxedo jacket pocket, and went to work on the lock. His fingers were jumpy with adrenaline, but the mechanism gave before he was discovered. He entered Marilyn’s room and closed the door behind him.

  A lamp glowed pinkly. Her red dress was thrown across the bed, and the rest of the contents of her suitcase were strewn on the floor. He proceeded to the bathroom, which was also empty despite the plentiful evidence of her recent presence, then crossed to the window and took in her view of the Potomac, moody at that hour with the reflection of midnight clouds, before cursing and leaving the room somewhat less carefully than he had entered it.

  In his own room, he undid his shoelaces, paced, poured a whiskey, drank it angrily, and then poured another before admitting to himself that he was not going out to find her. She might be at the White House for all he knew, which was the one place he had no chance of getting into. Or she might be at Hickory Hill with the others, and he had foolishly rejected the invitation to go along. There was nothing more to be done tonight, he told himself, and he sat on the bed and spread the afternoon edition of the paper over his outstretched legs.

  The news out of Berlin was as dreary as the day before. Ten U.S. tanks were still facing ten Soviet ones across the Friedrichstrasse checkpoint, the American soldiers with their guns pointed at the wall that had gone up in August to keep the young and bright from defecting to the West. The pictures depressed Walls—they reminded him of the Big War, which mostly seemed to him like a long-ago event with no relevance to his own life, a tragedy now suitable for movie entertainments. But he felt obligated to read on, and did so, wondering all the while whether Kennedy really could go to war, or whether he was bluffing, and what he was doing at this exact moment, whether or not he and Marilyn had managed to find each other.

  With a jerk he was awake again, followed by the sluggish comprehension that he had nodded off. His mouth was foul with the aftertaste of whiskey, his bow tie constrictive around his swollen neck. Somewhat slowly his attention moved on to the sound that had woken him—out in the hall a door was being jiggled, and a small metallic object had just fallen for the second or third time to the ground. For more than two years he had been following this woman, and he had a strong instinct that she was nearby. She must have returned from gallivanting with Kennedy. He threw aside the newspaper, and rushed into the hall.

  But she was not as he expected her to be. Instead of the low-cut dress he had anticipated, she was wearing a fuzzy white robe with the hotel’s insignia on the breast and her hair, though still high and white, was somewhat wilder. The red tint on her lips was faded, and the black eyeliner was smudged. One of her hands was splayed against the wall for support, and she was half bending to pick up her key from the floor, where she must have dropped it. He guessed she was pretty drunk—her movements were slow, and she seemed to waver like a puppet on strings.

  “Oh!” she exclaimed. Her voice became slurred and mumbling as she said his name twice.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Think so.” She straightened suddenly, and, afraid she might fall backward, Walls took her by the arm. “I had a bad dream and I couldn’t fall asleep again and I thought I’d have a little nip of something, to knock myself out, and I went to the ice machine, and it’s sort of silly I guess, but I can’t seem to get my key to go …”

  Walls felt almost sorry for her, catching her in so obvious and pathetic a lie—she didn’t have an ice bucket—but even worse for himself when he saw it there, a few feet behind her, sweating on the oak floorboards. Was it possible she had been in the hotel all along?

  “Here, let me help you,” he said. As he bent to grab the key, he realized what had happened—he must have screwed up the lock earlier, while picking it, and if not for this she might have crept into her room silently and without his notice. He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to think fast. When he righted himself, he put his body between her and the door, so that she couldn’t see his hands—it was lucky for him she was drunk—and, quickly and subtly as he could manage, removed the pick from his pocket and leaned in to the lock. When it gave in a matter of seconds he was so relieved that he almost forgot to slip the pick under his sleeve, and out of view, before he swiveled and gestured for her to enter. “There! Just a sticky lock, that’s all. I’ll call down to the front desk and have them give it some oil tomorrow.”

  “Silly me.” She gave a frail laugh and made her unsteady way into the room.

  The light was on, and Walls peered over her head, looking for evidence that the room was as it had been earlier. But the door closed on him fast, and with surprising force. She stared at him through the crack of the doorframe, and for a second it was impossible to think of her as helpless in any way. He was stunned by this glimpse. Her eyes shone with the fierce, multifarious spirit that must have been within all along. Then the view was gone, her lids drooping to obscure the glare. “Thanks, honey. I’ll be seeing you in the morning.”

  She pressed her fingertips to her lips, so that a diamond bracelet he hadn’t noticed earlier caught the sconce light, blew a kiss, and shut the door. Walls remained in the hall a few moments staring at the place where she had just been, cold with the conviction that she was not only capable of treason but possessed a malignant intelligence he could not previously have imagined.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Miami, November 1961

  “MISS Green?”

  Being addressed in this way provoked a ripple of pleasurable associations in Marilyn, for Jack had given her the alias, and it was the one she still used when she called the White House switchboard. Of course, she’d told Alan Jacobs to reserve her suite at the Fontainebleau under the same name, so its use now might indicate any banal interruption. A waiter hovered at the bright edge of her cabana with a note perched on his silver tray. Behind him were the raked beach and the lazy clouds and the Atlantic Ocean gently lapping in every variety of turquoise.

  After she read the instructions, she folded it twice and tucked it down the front of her navy tank swimsuit. “Thank you,” she said, reaching for her robe. “Is there a dress shop on the ground floor? I’m late, and I don’t have time to go all the way up to my room.”

  This wasn’t entirely logical, as her room wasn’t far, and finding new clothes that fit right was never a swift proposition, but the waiter either saw it as part of his job not to question her or he was used to beautiful women and their elaborate justifications for shopping. The real reason was that she didn’t want to alert Douglass Walls, whose room was next to hers, to her excursion. His crush had seemed unremarkable at first—he was tongue-tied around her, and obvious about stari
ng down her blouse—but she had been unnerved in Washington, the night she’d come back from taking a midnight dip in the White House pool, and he had leapt into the hallway wearing that expression of bizarre intensity. They had been regarding each other warily ever since. Alexei had said he’d be watching her, and yet she found it incomprehensible that Mosey Moses’s son would be with the Russians, too. Even so, she was taken with the notion that he wasn’t really a publicist—he was too disdainful of fame for that.

  In any case, he had no reason to doubt her stated purpose for traveling to Miami, which was to visit with her ex-father-in-law. Isidore wintered in Florida, and they’d dined together last night, at the hotel restaurant where everyone could see them, and afterward they’d watched a show at the Club Gigi. But if Alan’s boy had any suspicion regarding her and Jack, it would have been easy for him to discover that the president was in the vicinity—the Herald had run a large picture of the Kennedys descending Air Force One in Palm Beach yesterday evening, for a weekend away from the capital—and she didn’t want to risk his following her when she left the property. As it turned out, the dress shop carried an easy pink Pucci that she already owned and knew to be flattering, with a narrow waist and fitted below-the-knee skirt and a sleeveless, slightly blouson top with the sort of low back that worked especially well on her. She told the shop girl to charge it to her room, and changed in the bar bathroom on the first floor.

  She left her bathing suit with the front desk clerk and asked her to have it laundered, adding—almost as an afterthought—that if her assistant called down wondering about her, they should say that she’d gone out for a walk. As she sashayed past the valets and the topiaries, the high hedges that did their clever work of disinviting ordinary passersby, she had a thrilling, reckless sense of being out in the world without anyone knowing her whereabouts, her face barely made up, her hair tousled from the wind and salt water, her feet strong against the asphalt in the flat, strappy sandals that she had worn to the beach in the late morning. For a few moments together she found it possible to forget all the fatal complications of her life. She lived for the hours she had with Jack now, assumed she was safe when she was in his orbit, and tried not to think too much the rest of the time.