The Blonde

by Anna Godbersen

  “He used to love me, before she came around,” Vera confessed, in her slurred, muddy accent, when Giancana and Phyllis (the official girlfriend) were on the dance floor. “Now he only brings me out when he thinks there might be an orgy.”

  That she was fast friends with an even bigger star made Vera bold, and then chummy, and then intoxicated, and by the time Marilyn dropped that she knew Alexei—musing first that she used to have a Russian friend, and explaining, once it seemed safe, that she had worked for him, that they had cut ties when it seemed the FBI might be on to them, but that she had some big information now and needed to get in touch—she was sure Vera would help her any way she could. The idea that she and Marilyn Monroe had been secretly connected all this time seemed to fortify her, imbue her with fresh importance. She was certainly willing to whisper the address of the bungalow, south of the Los Angeles airport, where Alexei had told Vera he could find her, if she were in trouble.

  Marilyn closed her eyes, took a breath, listened to him crossing the bungalow’s main room, approaching her. Everything came down to this.

  “I’ve missed you,” she whispered, opening her eyes. There he was, filling the doorframe, his features in high relief with the end-of-day shadows. He was dressed to blend with the summer population, in blue jeans and a white T-shirt and a bomber jacket, but this only made him appear old. The translucent blue eyes watched her and revealed nothing as she took a last drag of the cigarette and put it into a tea saucer on the floor. “Isn’t that the way? Soon as you start looking out for a man, he’s nowhere to be found.”

  He glanced at the water on the far side of the mattress from her. “Poison?”

  She gave no sign of surprise at this turn, that he had so easily read her plan. It was only half her plan—the backup, in case her hunch was wrong. Instead she let her mouth quiver open, her eyes become wide and vulnerable. “Don’t you like talking to me anymore? Can’t we talk a little?”

  “You thought you would seduce me, and afterward, when I was spent and thirsty, I wouldn’t think before I drank. That I’d just reach out, and take the nearest glass.”

  Marilyn pushed her head into the wall, so that her back arched slightly and the shape of her breasts showed through the sheet. “There must be something you want? Something I can do to make things right between us.” Her knees swayed together and apart, and she let her hand slide down the inner slope of her thigh. She stretched her naked toes, held his gaze. “Let me repay my debt. I’ll show you what a good girl I can be. All this time we’ve spent together—you must have thought about it. Imagined how it would be. Tell me what it is. I’ll give you everything, anything you want. Only, let me try it my way—you don’t have to kill Jack, I can convince him of anything you say. He loves me, you know. He said he wants to marry me.”

  “Oh, N.J.” Alexei’s head swung disappointedly, and he could not meet her eye. He focused on the ground as he slipped his hand under his jacket. The gesture made her heart tick faster—but after that, she knew where to find his weapon.

  “You’re going to kill me?” Her voice broke over the question. She didn’t believe he would—his lack of desire told her he couldn’t—but saying the word let the fear in. Her breasts rose and fell with her frightened breathing, and for several seconds his hand remained invisible, inside the jacket, somewhat below his heart. “I didn’t think you had it in you. After you came to my house. When you had your chance, but didn’t take it. I thought you’d never. Not after all the time we spent together. Not before we—”

  “Can you even imagine a purposeful life?” He spit the words, but still didn’t lift his gaze off the floor. “Do you know the training I’ve had, how long I’ve been at this game? And you, you stupid girl—you thought you could climb in the bathroom window and put an end to me, just like that. After all I taught you—and you didn’t even remember to close the window behind you. Anybody could see it from the street.”

  Her face went white, and her heart beat a furious tattoo. “You really gonna snuff me out, then?”

  The room had become murky with sundown, but this only made the whites of his eyes, not directed at her, that much brighter.

  “You can’t, can you?” she went on. “I knew you wouldn’t. I know the reason why.” The tremble was still in her voice, but she was growing sure. She saw it all, the whole conspiracy—not what they had planned for the country, but what they had planned for her. He had known, before he ever spoke to her, the way her heart softened when someone called her my dear. The odd, far-away tenderness she held for the child Norma Jeane, whom she must once have been. How she reacted when someone said Norma Jeane’s name, seemed to care for the girl. She was almost sure now, and really he’d been telling her so all along, lodging the idea in her subconscious from the beginning. He knew how to pronounce those syllables better than anyone who had ever lived. “It’s the same reason you don’t want to fuck me. You’re my father. Aren’t you? That man, in the hospital, he was just an actor. An image, to give me hope. This whole time, it was you who was my real daddy.”

  He did not reply, but his gaze migrated slowly to meet hers. The grip he had on whatever was inside his jacket relaxed. She could see the vein in his neck, his blood pulsating.

  “It’s true, huh? That’s why I’m not like the others. Why you can’t kill me as they told you to. Or I guess maybe as you’d like to. That would be too cruel, even for you. I mean, to kill your own daughter.”

  “Yes, my dear.” A sigh worked down his torso, distending a belly she hadn’t known he had. He released the grip on the hidden gun so his hands could clasp together as though in prayer. After a moment, he spread them over his face. “I’ve wanted to tell you for a long time. But I ought to have known you wouldn’t need me to figure it out.”

  Tears surged unbidden to the rims of her eyelids, and she did not have to remind herself to make her voice girlish and scrubbed of guile. “You know how long I’ve waited? For—this?”

  “Yes.” His head tipped compassionately, and he opened his arms, beckoning her.

  With an arm across her chest to hold the sheet in place, she stood unsteadily. She kept the sheet up, but didn’t try to hide her nakedness, which she hoped would make him uncomfortable, make her seem delicate and hapless. “Do you know how hard it’s been?” she said as she approached. “How lonely and lost I’ve always felt deep down?”

  “Yes,” he said. He was watching her with a sympathetic light in his eyes, and when she reached him she found there was some part of her that wanted an embrace, and that made it easy to throw her arms around his middle, rest her cheek against his chest. One of his hands rested on the small of her back; the other stroked the crown of her head, and she turned her face to gaze up at him, just as she’d always imagined she someday would. He smiled at her, sadly, with half his mouth, and she smiled back.

  “I had it all planned, just what I’d say when I finally met him. You.”

  “What was it?”

  “I’d say …” She let her eyelids sink a little, and sighed as her fingers tiptoed down his chest, da da da da. “I’d say …” Without changing her soft, contented expression, she thrust her hand into his jacket, grabbed the gun, cocked it, aimed for his knee. Pulled the trigger.

  There are some things that happen in life, no matter how young, which the body does not forget.

  The force of the bullet knocked him backward, onto the floor in the hallway. He shrieked, a moan of pure agony that began high but soon became low and guttural. The sheet had fallen to her feet, and she stood, naked, every muscle tensed with the gun. For another minute Alexei screamed in pain, grasping at the place on his leg where his blue jeans were torn open and soaked with blood. Then he went quiet. His breathing was still ragged, but he had put the pain away somehow and focused his attention on her. Despite his injury, he appeared more wary than angry. “I’m sorry,” he managed, through heaving breaths. “I’m sorry.”

  “Fuck sorry.” She cocked the gun and pointed it at his face. If
he moved fast, he could grab an ankle; he was stronger than she, and surely he knew the best way to take her down. The sheet had fallen to her feet, and she hoped that her stark nakedness would unnerve him, give her some advantage.

  “Let’s talk. Don’t you want to talk? Remember how much you wanted to talk? I’m your father, N.J., isn’t there so much more we need to tell each other?”

  She regarded him down the shaft of the gun. “You’re going to tell me what they have planned for me. What they have planned for Jack. That’s all I want to know.”

  “N.J., don’t be a fool. Forget about that. Here I am. Don’t you want to know how this came to be?” The blood was spreading across the beige linoleum. He leaned forward, on his elbow, as though testing how close he could get to her.

  She stepped away, jerked the gun to show him she meant business.

  He nodded that he understood and drew back. “Listen. Be reasonable. I can help you, my dear. But I’ve got to call a doctor—I’m bleeding too much. Call him, all right? I’ll give you the number. After that, we’ll figure everything out. We’ll take care of you.”

  “Take care of me?” She exhaled sharply from the lowest point of her exposed belly. “I’m not calling nobody. Anyway, how can I trust you? What if this is just another lie? A lie you’ve trained me all this time to believe in.”

  “N.J., you don’t have any choice. If you kill me, I can’t shield you anymore. They’ll find you. You won’t last long on the run, you know that, don’t you? I’m your father—you were right, you sensed it. I could never harm you.” Again he reached out, the same tentative gesture, resting his hand on her foot. It was a gentle touch, protective, neither menacing nor carnal. “Think about it. How many men have had the opportunities I’ve had, and haven’t made a pass at you?”

  The metallic odor of blood was strong, and Alexei had begun quietly to stroke her foot. She relaxed her arms slightly, so the gun was no longer aimed at his head but a few feet away on the floor. He marked this change, and his hand on her foot became more reassuring, more intentional, as though he believed he had her.

  “N.J., my dear, give me the gun.”

  But the nickname, the “my dear,” had lost their magic. They made her sick now. She tightened her grip, narrowed her eyes, pointed the gun at his face. Fast as a cat, he yanked her leg out from under her, and she fell hard on her tailbone. She gasped in shock. For a moment they breathed in tandem, both watchful, making their own calculations. She had the gun, her only power. Another moment, and she wouldn’t have that. But if she killed him she’d never hear the story, how she really came to be. All her life seethed in her, every neglect, humiliation, every moment of desperation and of hope, the inescapable wound of her origin, which had led her here, to this forgotten bungalow. If he was her father, still he wasn’t, for what kind of father would do what he had done? And yet even after everything, she wanted to know. The who and the why, how he had become the person sprawled before her, about the blood spreading over linoleum, which was her blood, too. What he thought when he first saw her mother, the color of the dress she was wearing when she smiled at him that long-ago day. Then everything got very quiet, and her lungs ceased their fluctuation, and she heard the clear, high, determined voice of a child saying: “But I don’t want to know.”

  She braced herself and fired. The first thing she felt was how her palms burned. That part she had forgotten. Alexei was splayed on his back, arms like a cross, mouth ripped open, a smash of matter and bone at his temple where the fatal bullet had entered his skull. It’s over, she thought, aware that she could only afford to believe that one a few minutes longer.

  FORTY

  Los Angeles, August 1962

  THE gun went off once more before she left—to break the lock on the suitcase in the bedroom closet—and then she dressed quickly in the black slacks and loose black sweater she had left in the bathroom earlier. There was nothing else in the house: The cupboards were bare; the closet held only three pairs of pants and three white dress shirts. The shopping bag Alexei had returned with—a carton of milk, a dozen eggs, a loaf of white bread, the afternoon edition—remained on the built-in hutch by the entry. She plucked the newspaper before knocking over the other contents as she left, thinking that would give the impression of a struggle, a story for the investigators to chew on. She stopped at a pay phone a half mile down Highland, to call the police and report that while walking her dog down to the beach she had heard shots near the bungalow’s address. Then she merged onto the Pacific Coast Highway, sequined with taillights in the darkness, and drove north trying not to think the word kill.

  After passing through two more towns without any sign of a tail, she pulled into a liquor store parking lot. She tried Jack and Bobby from the pay phone, got the usual response, and in the backseat began to go through the contents of the suitcase: a leather-bound book full of notations she could scarcely begin to comprehend, the carefully organized and coded communications, the sheer quantity of cash, assorted personal documents. A sense of mounting panic came over her as the vastness of what they’d planned—were still probably planning—emerged. But the sight of her own false passport and birth certificate—using the names Sophie Mortenson, and Mrs. Ivan Lancer, and an old photograph from her brunette days—gave her a brief breath of calm. What could Alexei’s possession of these documents mean except that he had not given up on her, that his sense of paternal obligation was real, that despite everything he wanted to give her another life? And then, realizing that even in death he was able to tug at her loyalty, melt her to his purposes, she had to shove open the car door and be sick on the already dirty asphalt.

  It was while using Alexei’s newspaper to clean the vomit off the edge of her car that she noticed the small item about the attorney general’s trip to San Francisco that weekend. After that, she didn’t think much. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, started up the engine, and drove steadily, never more than five miles over the speed limit, to the Lawfords’, making a wild left turn across two lanes that elicited horn blasts from the oncoming cars.

  She knew the man who opened her door—he’d worked parties there before—but even so he didn’t immediately recognize her, dressed down as she was. “Miss Monroe—are you all right?”

  “Yes,” she said. Yes, even though every time she closed her eyes she saw her father’s mangled leg, his blank face. The body torn open and the spirit gone, the whole human mechanism revealed as so many fragile, unreliable parts. When the security man reached for the keys, she pushed down the lock and closed the door. “Leave it where it is, I won’t be long. Are Mr. and Mrs. Lawford here?”

  “He is.” He glanced at the other attendants nervously—there were too many of them, she thought, for an ordinary night at the beach house. “Let me park your car, and have you announced.”

  “No. No! There isn’t time. I won’t be long.”

  “All right, but—”

  He was still protesting when she hurried past the gate, through the interior courtyard and the rooms of the house, which was lightly populated in the post-dinner hour with a few hangers-on. She found Peter outside, waving a lit cigarette close to his ruddy face, legs crossed dandy-like, his cocktail balanced on his lap so he could use both hands to punctuate the story he was loudly telling a handful of guests overdressed for a casual dinner party. Behind them the surface of the pool glowed.

  “Peter—”

  “Marilyn!” He leapt to his feet at the sight of her, but was not so surprised as to spill his cocktail. “Jesus Christ, are you all right? You look like hell, baby. Where are your shoes?”

  “Uh … in the car, I think.”

  “Is that blood on her foot?” a woman lounging on a nearby deck chair drunk-whispered to her companion. There were six or so like her, staring at Marilyn with salacious pity, an expression she was pretty well acquainted with by then.

  “Fine, I’m fine. Is Pat here?”

  “She’s on her way to Hyannis. But now listen, Marilyn
—”

  “Bobby’s in California, isn’t that right? Is he coming here, too, Peter?”

  “I don’t know about that, baby. I think it’s a little family trip to San Francisco, with the children. You know, ride the cable cars, that sort of thing, probably no time to come visit us out at the beach …”

  “I’ve got to talk to him, Peter. Can you get him on the line for me? You could, couldn’t you? It would be better to see him in person, but the phone would be a start, and—”

  “Marilyn, you’ve got to stop this,” Peter interrupted her, wrapping his arm around her shoulders and drawing her away from the gawking guests, out of the glare of the upstairs windows and toward the beach. “You’re acting like a madwoman, you know that, don’t you?”

  “I’m not crazy, Peter, please, you’ve got to listen to me, this matters more than anything—”

  “Didn’t Pat have a chat with you up in Tahoe? She was supposed to. You have to pull yourself together, baby. I know you and Jack enjoyed each other, but that’s over. It’s gotta be. And whatever happened with Bobby—that’s over, too. There are already too many stories, and you know how once there’s a little scandal people love to fabricate on top of that. Of course you didn’t help yourself—that stunt you pulled at the Garden was practically pornographic.”

  “Forget the Garden. That was a thousand years ago, okay? This isn’t about me and Jack. It’s for Jack’s safety. We’ve got to do something before they kill him. Okay?”

  The muscles of Peter’s face pulled in strange directions—he seemed unsure whether to be amused or afraid. With some effort he removed her hands from his shirt collar—where they had, unbeknownst to her, assumed a furious grip—and began to lead her back toward the house. “You can’t say that kind of thing,” he told her with quiet intensity. “I’m going to send you home—someone is going to drive you—and tomorrow I’ll come around to check on you, all right?”