The Blonde

by Anna Godbersen

  “You have no reason not to trust me,” Alexei said when they were alone. He picked up his dinner napkin and arranged it on his lap, not meeting her eye, as though he were disappointed, but willing to explain to her, one last time, the order of things. “I have always taken good care of you. I was the one who told you not to fall in love with Hal, and you see how he hurt you.” He looked up at her suddenly. “You can’t be in love with him now, can you?”

  “No,” she said. The word stuck in her throat, as if she were wounded, and she summoned the sound of fuck me, Jack, fuck me, Jack, her emotions upon hearing that recording back in the wintertime. Of the cleaning-product smell in Payne Whitney, just like she would in Lee’s class, summoning a sense memory to deepen performance. “How could I? I mean, I knew he was a womanizer, but … I guess for a minute there I thought I was different from the other girls. I learned, though. The way he dropped me—I saw what I was to him.”

  “So you haven’t seen him?”

  The waiter was approaching, and Marilyn was grateful for the opportunity to collect herself. “Just bring us a bottle of something white and expensive—this fellow is paying—and we’ll both have steak tartare,” she said and dismissed him with a wave. She wished she could tell Alexei she hadn’t seen Jack, that he was more guarded now he was president. But she thought of Doug up there on the balcony, what he must have gleaned from traveling with her, and decided it was best to stay close to the truth. “As it happens, I was just with him. Took a while, but you were right—I found my way back in.”

  “And?”

  “Well, he hasn’t forgotten me exactly. But it doesn’t mean it’s easy, now that I know how he—that stupid girl you recorded him screwing—and who knows how many other—”

  But Alexei was no longer concerned with the charade of caring about her emotions. “What did you talk about?”

  “Oh, you know,” she stalled. “How nice it is to get away a little, that kind of thing.”

  “What is he doing here?”

  “In Florida?”

  Alexei cleared his throat and removed his panama hat, revealing the gray hair pushed back over his skull.

  “His family has a place, in Palm Beach. I guess they come down on the weekends sometimes.”

  “He didn’t say anything about Cuba? Perhaps something is under way. Plans for an invasion, or—?”

  Marilyn leaned back into her chair and glanced across the other tables on the patio. “If there were, I don’t think the top guy himself would be here overseeing it, do you? I imagine he’d be in Washington, if there was something big going on. My guess is they’ve decided that there’s nothing to do and they’ll just let Castro be.”

  “Why would you think that?” Alexei sneered, an expression she’d never seen him make before. “If he didn’t talk to you about it.”

  “Well, he talked about his worries in a general kind of way.” She spoke slowly, as though it were all very complicated and a little difficult for her to recall. “Berlin, and how deadly everything has gotten. He seemed exhausted to me, and he said something about wanting the situation to work out peacefully.”

  “Oh?”

  “I did say that I thought that wall in Berlin was pretty hideous, and I asked him what he thought about it. And he said that it wasn’t a very pretty solution, but that at least it wasn’t a war.”

  The waiter returned, made a grand gesture of showing them the wine. Marilyn saw that he had taken her at her word when she said “expensive,” but Alexei appeared untroubled by the excess, and after the waiter poured out their glasses and absented himself, he raised his in toast.

  Marilyn did not touch her glass to his. She took a gulp and turned her gaze out again, at the white tablecloths and candles, the way the restaurant’s glow turned the underside of the palm fronds orange. An orchestra played somewhere, but the musicians and their instruments were hidden by hedges. He didn’t trust her, and she didn’t trust him, so there was no sense in trying to seem cooperative.

  “Come now, don’t pout. This is a celebration.” He was acting kind again, but she suspected this was an attempt to disorient her. “I’m not disappointed—you are only just starting over. Now is the time to concentrate on getting close to the president again, and you must not worry about whether or not he is telling you anything of particular importance.”

  “I wouldn’t call it pouting.” She took another gulp and put her glass down on the table. “Pouting is what children do when their toys are taken away. You hit me.”

  “That was only to put you out. You said yourself, he is a cad—and it is almost impossible to talk reason, to change the mind, of a person deluded by love.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “You must trust me. And you will again, in time. Come, let’s drink to him.”

  “Him?”

  “To your father.”

  “Oh.” She winced at the old trick, picked up her wineglass, swallowed. She hadn’t thought much about the man in Payne Whitney, but she found now that Alexei was not entirely foolish to have used him. Even if he wasn’t her father she was still fond of him, wanted no harm to come to him, just because he looked like her. “Is he all right? That day, in the hospital, he was so …” She sipped again, as though overwhelmed with all the things they might have done to the actor they had hired to play her father. “So broken, I guess. You wouldn’t. You won’t? Like with Clark.”

  “Of course not. He is one of ours. So long you behave, all will be well.”

  “William Summers,” she mused. “Where is he? Where do you keep him? Tell me.”

  He shook his head—a show of kindly vacillation—and she saw how the greater the lie, the more gentle his manner became. “I cannot tell you that. Not yet.” Alexei inclined his head reassuringly, and this time when he raised his wineglass in her direction, she mimicked the gesture and met his eye. “To your father—who is very proud of you and is, I know, so eager to introduce himself to you.”

  She summoned a dreamy, far-away expression, like an unhappy child imagining a fairy realm. “I hope so,” she said and refilled her glass. She wanted to seem, and be, very drunk, very fast. Then she might actually sleep, and wake up tomorrow to some new idea of how to get out of this alive. “But he can’t possibly be as eager as I am,” she went on, closing her eyes and thinking of the only man she felt any loyalty to now. The one she’d watched the fading of the day with from a seedy joint on the bay side.

  “Soon we will all be together. In Moscow, perhaps.”

  “Moscow?” Her eyes were open, and she gave a sharp, dismissive laugh. “Honey, have you seen me? I wouldn’t last a week in Moscow.”

  “But you’re a traitor. You can’t stay here forever; you must know that. They’ll find out eventually.” He shrugged in a manner that would have appeared, to any of the other diners, quite casual, like shaking off a blanket when it is no longer necessary, but as he held her gaze she saw the hostility behind his eyes. “We have papers made up for you, my dear. You see? We do still need one another after all.”

  IV

  1962

  THIRTY-THREE

  Palm Springs, March 1962

  “YOU really love him, don’t you?” Marilyn whispered.

  Bobby glanced up from his deck chair, and was obliged to lift his hand to protect his eyes from the sun. His hair flopped over the creased forehead, and his lips pursed, forming a diamond shape around his slightly askew teeth. Although they were by the pool, and it was a Saturday morning in the desert, he wore pants and a long-sleeve, button-down shirt. “Oh,” he said. She and Jack had managed to meet pretty regularly for over six months, so he must know by now that she had not done as instructed and stayed away. “You.”

  “Can I sit with you?” she asked.

  He did not answer either way, so she lowered herself into the chair next to him and crossed her ankles. Under her robe she wore a bathing suit, but she had no intention of swimming. Stragglers from last night’s party were swimming lazily, or else positioned
to best absorb the rays of the sun, or drifting in and out of the main house of Bing Crosby’s place. Marilyn herself had slept in one of the small bungalows, on the other side of the property, with Jack, who had escaped for a weekend while his wife made a state visit to India. Jack must have got up early—the bed was empty when she woke. Now he was sitting on the diving board talking with a California businessman she had met the night before, wearing swim trunks, his toes skimming the pool surface. Both men glanced in her direction while the businessman made an observation that she was too far away to hear.

  “When did you arrive?” Bobby returned his focus to the bound report he was reading. Either it contained very fascinating information, or else he wanted badly not to look at her.

  “Last night. It was kinda late, I guess. Your brother-in-law brought me in by helicopter,” she explained, thinking how long ago that seemed now, driving to the Lawfords’ as she’d been instructed and boarding a helicopter with Peter on the beach behind his house.

  “Oh.” He turned a page. “That must have been after I went to bed. There certainly was a lot of noise into the early hours. Anyhow, to answer your question—Jack’s my brother; of course I love him.”

  “I just meant that I can see why you might not like me very much. You want to protect him. From scandal. And I understand that.”

  Bobby closed the report and dropped it on the pool deck. He leaned back into the chair and rubbed the heels of his palms against his eye sockets. “Scandal,” he repeated irritably.

  “I mean, you’re doing important work out there in Washington, you don’t want a little love affair getting in the way, and …”

  “I never said I didn’t like you.”

  She laughed quietly and wrapped her robe tighter around her body. “It wasn’t anything you said.”

  “Did you know the FBI has a file on you?” He straightened, and his tone became sharp with accusation.

  “Oh?” Her breath was short. For much of her life she had felt hunted, but it wasn’t just a feeling anymore. She had woken up happy, but the dire trouble she was in turned her stomach sour now.

  “I guess they started when you were married to that commie playwright, but they seem plenty interested in you, too. Thing’s thick as the Bible, and full of characters just as colorful.”

  “How do you know?” she whispered. She closed her eyes and pressed her palms together. “I mean, what does it say?”

  “The Director brought it to my office, gave me a little peek. Pretended like it was a friendly gesture, just letting me know the president was having an affair with a movie star, in case I might be interested. That you two went on a canoe ride in Tahoe during the campaign, and afterward lay around in bed talking political strategy. Must have had a bug in your room. If they have that, who knows what they have?”

  “Oh, dear …” Her face was slack, and her eyes darted to Jack. “He’s blackmailing you, isn’t he?”

  “Hoover? Fuck him. I’m the attorney general of the United States—I’m his goddamned boss.”

  “Then what does it matter?” she prodded, not wanting to know, and needing to know, how deep it went.

  The fury of the previous moment now dissipated with a sigh. “It’s all so much more complicated than that. The problem isn’t just that you’re screwing, though that’s inconvenient, I’ll allow. Jack must actually like you, the way he talks to you. He talks to you too much.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah,” he repeated sarcastically. “Maybe you relax him, I don’t know. But apparently he’s saying things to you he should only say to me.”

  “Shit.”

  “Shit is right. And that’s not the worst of it.”

  “What’s the worst of it?”

  “Hoover’s not going to do anything with that information. He just wants me to know he has it. But there are some other people interested in who the president is going to bed with, who he’s loose-lipped around—people who don’t have to worry about their future in politics.”

  Marilyn glanced at her feet—they were still there, relaxed against each other, the toenails painted coral—but she couldn’t feel them anymore. Beyond the white brick walls of Bing’s compound were the folds of the hills, gray brown with scrub brush, and above them the limpid blue of the sky going on forever, over the whole world. Which was a world she’d never move freely in again. Here she had come prancing up to the most important lawman in the country, thinking she could make him like her, convert him to her cause. Now she’d be leaving this place in chains. They were going to fry her on the chair. Could Bobby know everything? Alexei, what had really happened in Payne Whitney, that the mess in Cuba could be traced to her? “What kind of people?” she finally managed.

  “Mafia” was his brusque reply. Her lungs filled with the dry desert air. The word had never been so beautiful, and she thought perhaps it was in anticipation of this moment that she’d bestowed her little poodle with the name. “Sam Giancana kind of people, good pal of Mr. Frank Sinatra, who you seem to be awfully close with. That’s why I made Jack change his plans for this weekend, why we’re here and not at Frankie’s.”

  “Oh, poor Frankie. So that’s why. You know he had a helipad built for this visit? Peter said he took a sledgehammer to it when he found out we—I mean, you—were staying at Crosby’s instead.”

  Bobby tried not to chuckle at this, and failed. “Good riddance,” he said, once he’d managed to banish the smirk from his face.

  “Anyway, I thought Giancana was on your side?”

  Bobby exhaled in exasperation. “How did you know that? There you have it—he’s too chatty with you. Anyway, Giancana’s not on our side. The old man always knew how to talk to him, but since the stroke he can’t talk to anybody. I can’t talk to the boss of Chicago. I won’t. So it’s all a lot more complicated than it used to be, to say the least. And I can’t have my brother sleeping in a house where Giancana sleeps, where he might easily put a bug, especially not when he’s sharing a bed with a movie star who likes to ask him about world affairs—”

  “You know I’d never repeat anything Jack tells me,” she said quickly. Not anymore, she equivocated silently.

  “I know that. It’s not your big mouth I’m worried about.”

  “Then—?”

  “It’s all just awfully complicated, aren’t you listening? And I wish you would have stayed away like I asked you to.”

  If I could, I would have, she wanted to say, but that was more than she could explain to him, so she just nodded sadly and changed the subject. “I was sorry to hear about your dad.”

  “Thank you.” Now it was Bobby’s turn to glance away toward the landscape, for his eyes to become obscure.

  “I make him feel good, you know.”

  “Yes, I’ll give you that,” he conceded. His eyes roved, almost shyly, to the place where her robe parted over her thighs, though his mouth remained tight as a fist. “And that’s important, too, I suppose. Just be careful, all right? He can be reckless, but I bet he’d be less so if you—tried to keep him in line. Don’t have him at your house, or any place they might get a wire in.”

  “I think I could do that,” she replied, letting her fingers linger tentatively on the armrest of his chair. She’d have to, she knew, although the disappointment was briefly overwhelming. This realization that the little Spanish-style house she’d bought in Brentwood, gone all the way to Mexico for, to buy furniture that matched the rough-hewn beams in the sitting room and the curved red roof tiles, fantasizing that Jack would come and visit her there and maybe she’d roast a bird for dinner—something simple and wifely like that—was a place he’d never see.

  Bobby had been studying her fingers, and when he spoke again he was friendlier. “So you’re in the vanity business. Tell me something.” He shifted in the chair, making it squeak. “Who’s the handsomest guy you’ve seen in Palm Springs this weekend?”

  She gasped, bit her lower lip, let her eyes scan the scene innocently. There were twenty or so
people around the pool, all of them slender, tanned, easy in the quiet California splendor. “That would have to be you, Mr. Attorney General,” she said slyly, grateful for the opening he had given her, the chance to charm him, make him think of her as something other than a threat.

  “You tell all the fellows that?”

  “Maybe.” She removed her hand from the armrest and met his gaze. “But I always mean it.”

  A Secret Service agent was escorting a man with glasses and an old-fashioned leather doctor’s bag along the shaded arcade. The moment of flirtatious levity had passed; Bobby’s body stiffened and then hunched forward, his eyes metallic as he watched the newcomer. Meanwhile Jack had left the diving board and was ambling across the grass, in the direction the man with the doctor’s bag had gone.

  “Some quack who shoots Jack up.” Bobby shook his head and cursed under his breath. “Dr. Feelgood,” he added sarcastically.

  “Shoots him up with what?” she asked.

  “That I am pleased not to know. Something like cocaine, I would guess, but the doctor doesn’t give away his trade secrets, in any case. It’s unbecoming, if you ask me. Of the office of the president. Of a father.” He clasped his hands, worked them against each other. “But of course, he didn’t ask me.”

  “I wonder …” She squinted at the copse of orange trees where Jack had disappeared.

  “Well, as long as you’re here, go make yourself useful, would you?” She looked back at Bobby, and after a minute his mouth cracked open, and he gave her something akin to a genuine smile. “Make him feel good, if that’s what you do so well, so he doesn’t need those damn shots.”

  “You got it,” she said, rewarding him with a wink as she put her feet on the hot concrete.

  “Marilyn?”

  She had darted onto the grass, but turned at the sound of his voice. “Yeah?”