The Blonde

by Anna Godbersen

  “Yes?”

  The tiki torches that had been lit earlier by the Moseses’ live-in help waved in the wind, illuminating the figure of his mother, paused on the highest of three long, curving marble steps that led up to the house. She was unspeakably thin, and wearing a tight black top that was cut away to reveal the entirety of her shoulders as well as a good deal of chest, and a full-length black lace skirt, as though she were some sort of Spanish dancer. Her hair was pulled back tightly from her face, and collected above the nape of her neck in a shape reminiscent of an especially large morning bun. Happily for the mood of her party, several guests had already made a big show of acting shocked that she was old enough to have a son of twenty-five.

  “Dougie.” She lowered her chin and approached along the edge of the turquoise swimming pool, reminding him for perhaps the ten thousandth time that she was a woman who had taken the advanced class in how to walk. “What are you doing out here? Everyone’s gone inside.”

  “Have they?” he asked, as though that had not been his chief motivation in remaining by the pool.

  She sat down next to him. “The temperature drops maybe twenty degrees at night here. You didn’t know that, did you?”

  “When I came outside it was still warm,” he replied irrelevantly.

  “That’s because it’s the desert, darling.” She laughed the twinkling laugh that might, to strangers, sound unaffected. “Don’t be fooled by all the trucked-in greenery.”

  She leaned back on her arm, a kind of Harper’s Bazaar pose, and closed her eyes and inhaled what Walls had to admit—regretfully, and only to himself—was wonderful-smelling night air.

  “I’m so glad you’ve finally decided to come home,” she said and sighed. But the moment of contented contemplation didn’t last long. With a bat of her eyelashes, she extended her hand for him to take. “Come on in, darling, I want to show you off.”

  He might have informed her that he was not an accessory, or a dancing bear, or even—in a kinder, more patient tone—the little boy she’d once dressed in sailor suits. But he only said yes, rather affirmatively, and offered her his arm. Anyway, he was wearing the charcoal drainpipe trousers and pink collared shirt that she had laid out for him, so he supposed that in every meaningful way he had already lost the battle.

  The best he could do was to perform a small, interior rebellion by reviewing for himself the activities of the day, all in the service of a career choice that Mosey had always disapproved of, and now discovered a fresh reason to dislike: Walls was not only disinclined to discuss what he did professionally but not permitted to by law. In truth, what activity he’d done with regards to his new assignment, he had done grudgingly. This had consisted mainly of reading back issues of Photoplay and Variety, scanning for the name Marilyn Monroe; skimming through hefty transcripts of late-night telephone calls between Miss Monroe and her sundry confidantes (chief conclusion: She was an inveterate fabulist); and finally, when she went out, bugging her hotel room.

  Inside, a record of Nat King Cole singing in Spanish was playing, muffled slightly by the sounds of collective drinking, and he did not have time to be surprised that the object of his day’s labors was approaching from the opposite direction on the arm of Clark Gable. She was just there, quite suddenly and naturally, and white as the moon. Her mouth was a flexed, pink bow, and her drowsy eyes were acknowledging the other guests in as gently swinging a manner as Cole’s orchestra. Not only her skin but her clothes were white, and it was obvious that she wasn’t wearing anything underneath her filmy shirt. They were casual clothes, in contrast to the gowns the other women had worn to his mother’s “evening.” But she did not seem to mind, and in fact her presence made the other female garments in the room seem a little hostile, their underpinnings pushing and shoving to create artificially smoothed and excessively fortified peaks and narrows. By contrast Marilyn was so amply feminine that Walls felt overwhelmed, almost nauseous, and had to glance away.

  “They’re drunk,” his mother observed, reminding him of her presence. Of course they were—as soon as Mother said it, he saw that she was right. Clark and Marilyn weren’t stumbling, they were just lit up, sailing slightly higher than everyone else, their gestures loose and hungry.

  Those others—who had managed to come more or less on time, and were now scattered across several stepped levels of brightly modern décor—were not nobodies. Far from it; and yet they were all staring at the man and woman who had just arrived. Of course his mother had delighted in detailing the density of power in her house—among the assembled were a girl who was up for an Academy Award, a Polish prince, Jimmy Stewart’s publicist, a popular science fiction novelist, and a senator who was rumored to be after the presidency, and who was in talks with Lou about turning his book into a picture. (This last one surprised Walls—not the bit about the book, but rather that Kennedy was considered a suitable nominee, as Walls had once observed him at a lawn party in McLean heading for the bushes with a girl who was almost certainly on the wrong side of seventeen.)

  Meanwhile, someone had changed the record.

  A Negro’s voice intoned, “One … two … THREE!” followed by a simple, entrancing beat that was somehow a voodoo incantation and also at the same time a Viennese waltz. The blonde in white slacks and no brassiere who everyone was staring at laughed when she recognized the song, and went slinking away from the man she’d come in with, a theatrical, shoulder-rolling dance. He caught up with her a few steps later, twirled her under his arm, and then they tangoed together across the floor. Those few holders-out could no longer resist gaping at them. The voice on the record spoke, growled, shouted a story of possesive love that appeared to have the two movie stars in thrall.

  “That poor girl.” His mother shook her head, but she appeared to find the implied misfortune more thrilling than pitiable.

  “Why?” Walls asked.

  “She’s just a little lost thing, that’s all.”

  “Oh.”

  Soon everyone in the room was keeping the beat with raised, clapping hands, and Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe were hamming it up for their greedy audience. For a moment Walls wondered if she were having an affair with the old goat, but as the song came to an end he felt a strong instinct that they weren’t inclined to each other in that way. Gable was looking down on her rather protectively, and she kept closing her eyes and swaying, slightly off rhythm, almost as though she were dancing by herself.

  “I’m going to need your help in a moment,” Mosey breathed into her son’s ear.

  “With what?” He hoped he didn’t sound as much like a complaining teenager to her as he did to himself.

  “We’re going to have to break this up.”

  “But they’re having fun.” Walls surveyed the room, the forty or so people entranced by the movie stars making a spectacle of themselves. “Everyone’s having fun.”

  “Yes, but one song’s worth of this is enough.” She extended an index finger, and after the final chords of the song died out, a new record was put on—four white boys singing in harmony—and the excitement of the previous minutes evaporated. Mosey gave her son a gentle shove, and they both advanced into the room.

  Within seconds the hostess had Gable in a loose hold, and Walls, a step behind her, saw that Marilyn seemed confused by the change of music. She was still moving, but her feet were unsure now. He knew the thing to do was just to take her by the waist and start leading, but she looked so out of sorts he couldn’t help but handle her gently.

  “Miss Monroe, will you dance with me?” he asked.

  “All right,” she murmured, and fell against him.

  The skin between her brows quivered, and her expression oscillated: happy, sad, happy, sad. She was almost humming to herself, and though the song was fast, she kept slow dancing, and he had no choice but to accommodate her rhythm. At close range, the exuberantly curved line of black kohl on her upper lid and the false lashes were brutal against her beautiful, pale, childlike face. Then she tu
rned her eyes up to him and her bottom lip dropped, so that her mouth opened suggestively, and she took a breath that made her chest rise and fall and brush against him. Was he leading at all? He glanced around, embarrassed by her strange voluptuous naïveté and by his unexpected arousal, and saw that luckily for him most of the other guests had risen to their feet and were dancing now; he was not as conspicuous as he had feared.

  “What’s your name?” she went on in the same breathy whisper.

  “Douglass,” he replied.

  “Douglass.” The point of her tongue slid along her upper lip, as though she were tasting the name to see if she liked its flavor. “What a serious name! You don’t seem that serious to me, Douglass.”

  “No, I—” What had he meant to do, correct her? Disown the pink shirt, tell her about his gun, and that he had only a few hours ago violated her hotel room? “Not serious in the least. You must be a pretty good judge of character.”

  A humorous exhalation through her narrow nostrils. “Yeah,” she murmured, but he wasn’t sure if she was agreeing with him.

  She seemed liable to drift into her own thoughts, so he went on stupidly, “In fact, I’m quite the opposite of serious—I’m twenty-five, and living here with my mother, if you can believe it.”

  “Mosey Moses is your mother?”

  Her eyes were open again, so she saw when he nodded.

  “Never been married, huh?”

  He shook his head.

  “I’ve been married three times, but it never seems to …” She trailed off, but not in the daffy way she had before. A new energy coursed through her limbs—she was lighter in his arms—and her eyes shone at something over his shoulder that he wished to god he could turn and see.

  “It never seems to …?” he prompted.

  She was smiling again, and she had caught the rhythm of the song. Walls felt suddenly as though he had just been given a corner office, a shot of Benzedrine, and the spirit of Fred Astaire. They were doing an effortless Lindy; Walls had never danced so well in his life. When she kicked off her shoes he forgot himself and started smiling. And he was still smiling when he felt the tap at his shoulder, and turned to see Kennedy.

  “May I cut in?” the senator asked. Earlier, Walls had spotted him talking up Kim Novak, but Kim Novak was nowhere in sight now. He was smiling, too, but Walls knew it had a different effect than the boyish grin sliding from his own face.

  Walls glanced back at Marilyn, as though she might protest that she was enjoying herself with her current partner, and saw that she must have bent down to scoop up her pumps because she was now cradling them in her arms.

  “Will you hold these for me?” she asked Walls, as sweetly as though she were telling him she loved him for the first time.

  “Sure,” he said, awkwardly taking the shoes. With the heels pressed against his chest he stepped back, and then back again, until he was out of the thicket of swinging bodies.

  Once he was properly on the sidelines, he realized how dizzy he had felt in Marilyn’s presence, how unwieldy she was, and he knew that he ought to be relieved to be back where he could watch and observe. But bitterness tightened his throat. Kennedy had made a pass as surely as he might have ordered a steak. Walls’s sense of his own ridiculousness increased when he noted the senator’s navy slacks, the fine weave of his white shirt, the narrow black tie, the knot of which he’d loosened but not undone, as though to remind everyone that he was just a visitor in carefree California, and would be going back to the grown-ups’ table shortly. Walls did not have the body of a beatnik, and should never have allowed himself to be shoehorned into pink.

  In his peripheral vision, he saw the way Marilyn was talking to the senator, and was angry at himself all over again for continuing to feel like a jilted lover. He violently uncorked a bottle of scotch, and poured a double portion into a glass without ice. He took a long pull, and an idea hit him, and he swung his head to look over his shoulder.

  At this distance he couldn’t hear what Marilyn was saying, but he could see that she was chastising the senator in a flirtatious, joking way. They had met before—it was obvious by the knowing manner in which they were now bantering and moving lightly on their feet. There was a history, Walls was sure of it. He finished the scotch and glanced around for a girl to dance with so that he could get close enough to hear what they were saying.

  But he didn’t spot one right away, and when he did he wasted precious minutes trying to think of an opening line. In the end he just introduced himself to the brunette in the high-necked black linen dress, and asked if she was enjoying herself. “Very much” was her swift reply. She seemed grateful for his attention, and agreed to dance the moment he hinted that he might be willing. But by the time they were on the floor, swaying to a new record, Kennedy was dancing with Mosey. Walls’s gaze went around the room, but he couldn’t find Marilyn anywhere, and he knew this wasn’t because she had somehow magically started blending in.

  “Is something wrong?” the brunette asked. Her ski-jump nose turned a little pink when she asked the question, but she went on looking up at him with those doe eyes. She couldn’t have been much more than nineteen, and you could hear the Kansas in her speech, though she was made up to suggest a Smith graduate with a library full of banned books.

  “No,” he answered, mostly because he realized how rude he had been to ask her to dance and then cast his gaze everywhere but at her. But then he found he was smiling again, and when he said, “No, not at all,” he meant it.

  “I’m glad.” She was beaming.

  “Me, too.”

  In fact, he was glad. Of course it would’ve been better to overhear what Marilyn had whispered so sweetly to Senator Kennedy. But he knew that he had understood the gist of it, even without words, because they hadn’t really been using words. That she had disappeared so quickly was yet more confirmation to Walls that he had already procured his ticket out of California. The senator and the movie star had met before, were meeting now, would meet again. This was precisely the sort of blackmail material the Director had built his career on, and if Walls got proof of a senator’s dalliance with a movie star, he would be in favored position at the Bureau. Surely they would reward him for this—if he wanted, he could go back to Washington immediately, have his pick of assignments, and finally begin a life of consequence.

  EIGHT

  Beverly Hills, April 1959

  A half mile down the road, Marilyn pulled over and switched off the high beams. The street behind her was invisible around the bend—any drivers coming from that direction wouldn’t notice her car until they passed. There were houses nearby, but they were hidden away behind their high purple hedges. Her breath was agitated and music made her nervous, so she turned the radio off. After fixing her lipstick and fluffing her hair there was nothing she could do but recline, put her bare feet on the dash, and wait. He was the kind of man who would lose interest as soon as they finished; if she were wise, she’d guard the treasure box. So she thought about all the tricks she could use to draw it out, keep everything from happening too quickly, make him talk first. Then she heard the sound of a man’s dress shoes on the pavement, and knew she wasn’t going to use any of them.

  His silhouette was visible in the driver’s side mirror: hands in pockets, approaching at an easy gait, whistling a melody that sounded like “Summertime.” But he stopped whistling when he was almost to her car, and the quietness of the night swept over her. It seemed a long time she had to wait for him to open the passenger door.

  The door slammed. After that he didn’t take his gaze off her, and she could hear that his breathing was as short as hers. Ever since he had whispered in her ear, in Mosey Moses’s ballroom, that she should leave first and he would follow in twenty minutes, she had been imagining the things he might say to her—that he hadn’t stopped thinking about her since Chicago, that he had been asking everyone where she was staying, that his wife had had a private detective on his tail, or else he would have found her
immediately.

  But she liked that he didn’t make excuses or tell any stories now. His eyes burned as he took in the length of her, how she was sprawled across the front seat, and she returned his look, steady and unblinking. The line of his shoulders was tensed, but not in a deadened way. There was so much energy about him, as though he were more alive than ordinary people. The tie was gone, and his shirtsleeves rolled to the elbows, so that he seemed not quite so senatorial, more just plain rich. Then his hand had a fistful of her hair, and his strong tongue was opening up her mouth. Her hand fluttered helplessly, landing on the steering wheel, so that the horn blasted softly into the empty street.

  They were against each other, pushing and rolling over into the backseat. Already their clothes were in a tangle, her blouse shoved up above her breasts, his belt buckle swinging—then pushed painfully into her belly—her fingers nearly shaking as she undid his shirt buttons. She had his lip between her teeth, and he was trying rather unsuccessfully to pull her slacks down, an effort she would have helped him with if she weren’t pulling him to her with such fever.

  The slacks were off. He tossed them into the front, and lay her down against the backseat. The fabric of his trousers was rough on the naked skin of her inner thighs, and he fumbled for a minute, and then he was inside her with a thrust that she felt all the way at the back of her throat. A hoarse “Oh, god” escaped her lips. She didn’t want to hurry, but she couldn’t help it. He had a hand on her ass and one on her neck, and she was holding on to his back for ballast as she rocked against him.

  For some moments she moved, her hips locked with his. Then she thought to look up at him, and saw how intently he was staring at her. They gazed at each other, and his mouth came down over hers again, his tongue filling the space around hers, her fingers grasping for the back of his head, pushing through his hair. A quickening that shuddered up through her skull, sending her eyes rolling back into her head, as she shrieked a final “Oh, god.”