The Blonde

by Anna Godbersen

  She was still trembling when she felt his body convulse. Then he collapsed, his full weight sinking down on her. Their torsos were sealed together, so she felt how they both took a long breath at the same time. He lay his face against hers and kissed her cheek. “Christ,” he mumbled. “You are a fox.”

  When he lifted off her, she saw the disarray of the car. She was completely naked, yards of exposed flesh, while his clothes had remained more or less intact; her slacks thrown across the front seat, her blouse hanging from the wheel. The balance of the car shifted while he searched for and lit two cigarettes, passing her one. She closed her eyes and dragged, trying to enjoy the protective weight of his hand on her thigh rather than indulging the dismay that she’d given it up so easily, that he would very shortly disappear.

  “I’d have you any time.” She could tell by the timbre of his voice that he was studying her nakedness.

  A prolonged, smoky exhalation. “Is that why you came all this way, Mister Senator?”

  “You are definitely California’s biggest attraction.” He chuckled. “But the real reason I’m here is to talk about a picture deal.”

  “A picture?” She let her lids lift slightly.

  “Yes. Based upon a book I wrote.” His hand had drifted to the skin below her belly button, where he began to draw shapes with his fingertips.

  “Profiles in Courage, is that the one?” She exhaled and gave him a sly smile, as though she were a little afraid of what she was admitting to. “I read up on you, Senator.”

  “Yes.” He grinned. “That’s the one.”

  “I thought it all sounded kind of impressive. In Chicago I had no idea you were an author, too. I mean, a best-selling one. With a Pulitzer Prize.”

  “Yes, well.” His lips twitched, and he took a quick drag. “Father saw to that.”

  “That’s nice,” she whispered.

  He was gazing at her thighs now, his hand gliding gently over the seam between her legs. “Sure is.”

  Her eyes fell closed again, and she brought the cigarette back to her lips. She felt empty, and thought how nothing mattered anymore. “What does it feel like? To have a father,” she murmured dreamily.

  “A father?” In the previous moment his touch had been featherweight, but his fingers became heavy now. Several seconds passed, and then he said, “It feels like never being good enough.”

  “Oh!” Her eyes flashed open, but he had already opened the car door. As he climbed out he clutched at his lower back, and his shoulders seized as though he were in pain. But then his whole body appeared to lengthen, a show of force, and he took his cock in hand. She listened to him urinating and thought, Oh, well. Cigarette fixed between her teeth, she fished for her clothes, pulling on her slacks and shirt and using her fingers to brush her hair. In the rearview mirror she saw what a mess her makeup was, but there was nothing to do about that. She adjusted the lashes on her left eyelid, and sat down.

  It was another half minute before he reurned, and by then she was composed. He opened the door for her, grin in place, and she put her bare feet on the concrete. He held the front passenger side door open, closing it once she was seated, and without discussion came around the hood and started up the engine. With one hand he steered the car down the hill, and with the other he drew her to him, so that she could rest her head on his shoulder.

  They didn’t see another car until Sunset, and even there the passing headlights seemed disinterested and unobtrusive. As they pulled in front of the hotel, she realized how late it was, and knew the good world was asleep.

  “I’ll have someone drop the car off tomorrow,” he said.

  “All right.” She sat up and took her pocketbook out of the glove compartment. When she put it there some hours ago she’d been drunk, but she wasn’t the least bit drunk now.

  “I just figured it out,” he said.

  “Figured what out?”

  “What it is about you. You,” he said, vibrantly, “are a fox and a hound dog.”

  She smiled faintly, and turned away. Not waiting for him to come around again, she hopped onto the sidewalk and ran on her tippy-toes toward the grass, which was fragrant and pliant underfoot.

  “I’ll see you soon?” he called out.

  She twisted her chin so that it grazed her shoulder when she met his eyes. “Maybe,” she murmured.

  As she hurried across the lawn, toward the hidden gate that would let her into her bungalow, she said a little prayer that he was lying. That tomorrow Alexei would declare her a failure and dismiss her—she’d never had a father anyway, and never would—that she could forget this brief period of hopefulness, the desperate urge acted on in the backseat. Otherwise, she might grow to want Jack, and then she really would be in trouble.

  NINE

  Beverly Hills Hotel, April 1959

  “NO sleep for the wicked,” she said to herself in the mirror with a brazen, lipstick smile.

  Frowning theatrically: “Methought I heard a voice cry, ‘Sleep no more! Macbeth does murder sleep,’ the innocent sleep …,” but that was all she could remember.

  Then, resting her elbows on the sink and squeezing her cheeks with either hand, she let her eyes get empty and her mouth go slack. “No sleep for Marilyn.”

  So she had room service bring her cigarettes and bourbon and a boy to make the fire. She didn’t look at him the whole time he was in the room, and when he was gone she took off her white blouse and slacks and tossed them on the flames. She went into the bedroom and found her lucky bathrobe—she’d had it since before she was famous, and the terry cloth was so worn in places it was almost transparent. The fibers had a sweet, ripe smell—her smell—that no laundress would ever get out.

  She lit the first of several cigarettes, and drank the first of several bourbons, and watched the flames grow higher awhile and shrink to embers. Her eyes burned from looking into the fire, but then her insides burned, too, which was the best she could do to keep herself from remembering what had happened with Kennedy, how badly she’d muffed this one, the thing she’d lost by it, which was the only thing she’d ever really wanted.

  The embers were finally dying when it occurred to her how long the telephone had been ringing. But it was a ghostly ring—too far away to be the phone in her bungalow. She pressed her fingers to her temples, and wished the sound would go away. But it didn’t, so she poured herself another bourbon and went outside.

  The dawn was just beginning; it had no color yet. She blinked and tripped forward along the winding path toward the ringing. The telephone booth was obscured by bushes—in all her stays there, she had never seen it before, but she went ahead, opened the door, stepped inside.

  “Hello?”

  “N.J.,” he said. “I’ve been trying to reach you.”

  “Yeah, well …” She brought the bourbon to her nose, just to smell it.

  “We must be careful on the phone now; you never know who is listening.”

  “Oh?” she replied disinterestedly.

  “How was your day, my dear? You sound tired.”

  “It’s over, Alexei. You can snuff me out or ruin my career or whatever it is you’ve been planning. Kennedy’s a dead end.”

  He took a breath. “Are you sure? What happened?”

  “I fucked him. No pictures, no proof, no information. No state secrets, no honey trap. It’s over. He’ll move on to the next blonde tomorrow, and I’ll be useless to you.”

  “Hardly, my dear. We were never after anything so pedestrian. And you forget: There’s no such thing as a next blonde after you.”

  Ignoring this, she swallowed hard and said: “If you have a heart, you’ll tell my dad how badly I wanted to meet him, and that I did my best, but it’s hard, when nobody’s ever really loved you, to have the confidence to do a thing right …” And there she stopped herself, for fear she might cry. She’d been putting it on a bit, but found herself moved by her own performance.

  “You made love,” Alexei went on, without acknowledging her o
utburst. “A little soon, perhaps, but not the end of the world. You must have talked first? Or afterward.”

  “Not really.” She squeezed her eyes shut and took a gulp of whiskey. “Just some nothing flirting at Mosey Moses’s, and then we agreed to meet down the road. We didn’t talk at all before—and then afterward, I think I offended him.”

  “How?”

  “I asked what it felt like to have a father.”

  “And?”

  “And he said it felt like never being good enough.” Suddenly her eyes were open and her heart skidded.

  On the other end of the wire, a low whistle. “He told you that?”

  “Yeah, well … I think it just slipped out.”

  “Good work, my dear.”

  “Huh?”

  “He’s a Kennedy. They are extremely clannish; they never talk about family with strangers. But he did with you.”

  “You mean, that’s good information? Information you can use?”

  “Very good.” He was speaking to her as gently as he had that first day at Schwab’s.

  “I’m done, then.” Wonder filled her chest. “I can meet my father soon?”

  A faint sound, as though Alexei were clucking his tongue. When he spoke again it was still gently, but this time in the way people are gentle when they break bad news. “Oh, no, my dear. You’re the girl Jack Kennedy will talk to. This is only the beginning. But for now just try to get some sleep, all right?”

  “But I’ll meet him soon?”

  “Kennedy?”

  “My father.”

  “Soon enough. But in the meantime, proceed slowly, as you would with any man. When you are in New York next we will go over some precautions, some rules about how you and I should contact each other. As for Jack, the best thing you can do now is forget him. Spying is not unlike seduction, which you understand perfectly—if you move too quickly, you ruin the mystique. Always hold the thing your mark wants a little out of reach—a man is never so naked as when the thing he wants is just out of reach—and always let him come to you. Anyway, Jack will be most useful to us if he wins the presidency, and we must be careful that your affair builds slowly, not peter out before he reaches highest office. For now we must play the long game and be patient. Can you be patient, my dear?”

  What had she ever been but patient? She’d waited her whole life to meet her father, surely she could keep herself hard and cold a little longer. She was already hard and cold. She couldn’t feel her hands, but watched them put the phone back on its hook. Beyond a row of bushes she heard a girl laughing, and then a man calling after her, “Oh, baby, are you gonna get it!” The sound of one body’s splash as it broke the surface of the pool, and then a second one. Everywhere across the country, men were chasing women like that, and now she was one of them—a hunter.

  II

  1960

  TEN

  New York, May 1960

  THE apartment was empty, and the herringbone parquet stretched out from beneath the points of her high-heeled shoes, unprotected by the clutter of real life. Through the window of her taxi she had seen the trees blossoming on Park Avenue, the women strolling in slimming trousers with no socks. She had smelled the air—the dirty sweet mingling of chlorophyll and car exhaust that was the first warm gust of summer in the city. But the apartment was empty—she heard how empty when she set her suitcase down by the front door, crossed to the kitchen, and found the note pinned to the icebox with a magnet: Went out.

  Arthur had forgotten, or maybe just not bothered, to close the curtains to the daytime sun. The air inside was stuffy and hot, and she fanned herself with his note as she dropped ice cubes into a cut-crystal tumbler and poured bourbon over them. The apartment was not empty of bourbon—so perhaps he did love her a little still.

  Her shoes pinched her toes, but she did not want to take them off. It seemed romantic to her, or anyway appropriate, to stand there in the kitchen, the light fading from the day but none of the electric kind turned on, the props that made her legs look so especially feminine squeezing the blood away from her manicured feet. It was her birthday in less than a month, and she doubted she would be celebrating with her husband. Already the lonesome birthday blues played softly in her thoughts. She would be thirty-four—another year gone by, and what had it done, except tire her?

  There was no child, and no father, either. And while she still told herself that they would both be hers soon, these bedtime stories had taken on the tone of stale ritual. It had been more than a year since she met Jack Kennedy at Mosey Moses’s party, and she had only heard from him a few times since, and Alexei’s promise had begun to seem as illusory as the ones she made to herself. She’d had an affair with a costar, and though Arthur hadn’t accused her of anything, she had not bothered to hide it from him, or anybody else, for that matter. The movie had been called Let’s Make Love, and she and Yves had been good little actors and done like the title said, so who could be surprised? Perhaps Arthur truly didn’t know, but this was a possibility she shied from. That he was no fool was the reason she’d married him. Meanwhile, she had won a Golden Globe—not the Oscar she deserved, though it nonetheless should have counted for something, some confirmation of her years of slaving—but the award and the ceremony and the press notices scarcely seemed like events in her own life. Had she been happy, clutching her statuette, breathing into the microphone like a grateful idiot the names of all the people who had hindered her? The bourbon was cool down her throat and harsh in her sinuses; for both of these, she gave thanks.

  The day had begun in California, where she had briefly forgotten herself in the twist of hotel sheets and hazy morning sun filtering through blinds and the smell of a man clinging to her skin. Her troubles, and her obligations. The man himself had still been there, sitting in the armchair by the open front door of the bungalow, his dark brow in a pensive, Gallic knot. He had been smoking, thinking—no doubt, and also rather predictably—about his wife in France, where he would be landing sometime that night, and how to win her back. Marilyn had pushed herself up on an elbow, a loose, white-blonde curl in her eye and the sheet wrapped girlishly over her breasts.

  It would have been easy to bring him back. She’d seen exactly how to play it—with what winks and baby tones she could win his attention, draw him into bed, keep the game going another few hands. But he had never been more than a distraction to her, and in that capacity he was no longer useful. His mind was already ahead of their fling, and his guilt made him tedious. Anyway, she had mostly pursued the affair in order to distract Arthur, so that if he suspected one infidelity, he would be blind to the other, more consequential one—to the affair she intended to have with Jack, which he couldn’t know about.

  The phone rang just as she was refilling her glass. Ordinarily this would have been a welcome sound, the insistent trill of someone wanting her. But at that moment, with a fresh drink and the honeyed end of daylight making her loneliness seem almost gorgeous, she would rather have gone on like that forever, not knowing who was on the other line. It might be Arthur; perhaps he had secured a dinner date with someone important and wanted to show her off. Or maybe it was Yves—laid over at Idlewild and weepy with regret—calling for a final reassurance that he was only human and nobody could blame him. In fact, nobody could blame him. From the moment she’d seen Yves Montand’s one-man show she’d known exactly how she was going to use him, and then had gone about doing it so expertly that everyone was left with the vague impression it was he who had used her. Or maybe the caller was Joe, or Norman, or Marlon, or who knows, maybe it was even Kennedy, and she’d have a reason to roll on after all.

  Gripping her glass she went through the apartment, past its white walls and high, grand moldings. A real intellectual’s apartment, she’d thought when she first saw it, and that was how their parties had been when they were first married, everybody smoking and talking, a pot of something on the stove so that guests could help themselves when they got hungry. Now Arthur had removed much o
f the furniture, taken it up to Connecticut on some spurious pretext. Something about how it would be good for her to redecorate the place in her own taste, a nice project for her. And why should she care? It was almost comforting to think how she’d never had a home, and that she never would.

  The phone was still ringing when she sat down on the kitchen chair where Arthur must have had his morning coffee. The paper lay beside it, folded neatly and less the theater section, and she picked up the front page. The phone stopped. The headline was about Kennedy—she was only a little surprised to find the name of the person that her mind had been so concerned with of late, there in the news. She skimmed the article, and learned that her mark had won the Democratic primary in West Virginia. So: He had been busy, and she was glad, for the first time in weeks, that she had kept busy, too, with the Frenchman on the Coast.

  Suddenly she wanted to know who had been trying to reach her. But before she lifted the receiver, the phone rang again. This time she picked up right away.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s me.” The accent was disguised—he sounded jovial and blandly American. “Feel like a walk?”

  Her mouth flexed, and before she could help it she was smiling. When had Alexei become so reassuring to her, the placid diction she hoped to hear on the line? Even masked it was familiar and happy-making. There were times, over the last year, when she thought maybe she was getting rather more out of the bargain than he was. Once she’d mused aloud if she should worry about winding up in prison or something, and he had assured her that he would never ask her to do anything dangerous, or even particularly illegal. All he wanted, he promised, was to understand the psyche of the man who might run the country—that was how peace was maintained in a new kind of war, he explained, so in a sense what she did for him would benefit the whole of mankind. She had only to pay attention as she would in any love affair, learn his peculiarities and preferences, and in return Alexei would watch over her, protect her, care for her, and introduce her to the man she had been seeking her whole life. Thus far she’d only had a minor fling like so many others, and here was Alexei, like clockwork, concerned about her welfare.