The Blonde

by Anna Godbersen

  There were only three other people at the bar—a couple who had been pressed against each other since she arrived, and a man drinking by himself, who glanced over at her about the average amount. She could see Clark, beyond them, standing at the craps table. The glass of whiskey was in his other hand, but his grip had become indifferent. His attention was on the dice, and his brow flexed in concentration. The muscles of his face were strong and taut, and they were lit from behind by the ghost of experience. He looked very much like a father, the kind who is slightly beyond the law, especially when it is necessary to protect his family.

  Just then he glanced toward the bar, and smiled when he saw how Marilyn had been watching him. With the hand that held the whiskey, he gestured for her to join him. The thrum of slot machines got quiet as she floated through the civilian crowd of afternoon drinkers and hopeless dreamers and risk junkies, to the craps table, where Clark welcomed her by placing a firm palm on her shoulder blade.

  “Whoever he is, he’d better treat you nice.” Clark’s hand slipped to the small of her back, and he leaned in close, so that his whiskey breath warmed her ear. “If he doesn’t, you let me know, all right? And I’ll sort him out,” he told her in a low, gravelly voice, before kissing her softly, not quite on the mouth but not fully on the cheek, either. She closed her eyes to any longing the kiss—or the sentiment—stirred.

  “You ever thrown dice before?” he asked. Like that, the sweet haze of intimacy had evaporated, and for a moment she thought she might cry. She wanted to go back, have his protection again, the way his daughter, if Kay carried a girl, would have his protection.

  “No,” she replied.

  “Well, we’re gonna see if you’re as lucky as you look.”

  “Okay.”

  The dealer acknowledged her with a faint bow from across an illuminated stretch of green as Clark took her hand and brought her into the table. The dice were red, oversized like stage props, and as she looked at them she made a private promise that if they were lucky for her, then she wouldn’t need to go to Los Angeles, she would stay here, and everything would work out without her chasing around after Jack. Then she reversed herself, and decided that if she was lucky, that was a sign she should follow the lead immediately. But she shouldn’t have brought the dice into the matter, because she already knew what she was going to do. That brush of Clark’s lips had sealed it—she would go, as soon as possible, to the place where Jack was, to do Alexei’s bidding as best she was able.

  FOURTEEN

  Beverly Hills Hotel, July 1960

  “WHERE is everybody, Charlie?” Marilyn chewed her lower lip and leaned against the small corner bar at the Polo Lounge and tried not to seem like a woman being stood up, despite the fact that she’d been drinking alone for some hours already. She was wearing a simple candy-pink dress with a fitted waist, thin straps, and a U-shaped back that she’d had her dressmaker lower five inches. The bartender—a lean kid with a Latin look who’d been wiping his rag over the bar a few feet from where she sat—came in close. “I mean, it’s kinda quiet tonight, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah.” He folded his arms against his side of the bar and gazed at her. “Guess they’re all downtown, or watching on the television.”

  “Think they’ve made an announcement yet?”

  “There’s a radio in the kitchen,” he offered. And then, more enthusiastically: “I’ll go ask if they’ve heard anything!”

  Before she had the chance to tell him she’d appreciate it, he dashed off to procure her information, and she felt a little sorry for him when she saw that his efforts were to be in vain. The concierge appeared just afterward, tucking his graceful hands behind his back as he approached to tell her—so quietly that she might not have understood him if she didn’t already know what the message would be—that a man was waiting for her.

  “It’s Kennedy!” the bartender exclaimed, as he burst through the small door that led to the kitchen. “Kennedy won the nomination!”

  “Thanks, Charlie.” She smiled and dangled her fingertips as she left.

  Outside, the heat of the day had mellowed, and darkness descended over the protective flora that surrounded the hotel. The concierge indicated a silver Mercedes convertible with the top up, idling close to the high shrubbery.

  “You will call us if you need a ride home, won’t you, Miss Monroe?”

  “Yes, thank you, Sal.”

  The air was perfumed with night-blooming jasmine, and she inhaled and set her hips rocking as she proceeded to the snubbed-nose sports car. She climbed into the passenger seat without glancing at the driver, and from the corner of her eye she did briefly mistake him for Kennedy. When she realized he wasn’t, she let the dopey smile slide off her face. “Jack told me he’d pick me up,” she said.

  The driver’s only acknowledgment was a bob in his throat, and he turned his eyes away and put the car in gear. Anyone could see they were related—it was as though Jack’s face had been squished between the pages of a book, and come out thinner and slightly deformed. He was smaller, too, and less tawny, but he was also handsomer—the lines of his features were smooth and strong, like a statue, and his eyes were a clear, moral blue. His skin was much younger, except for his forehead, which was prematurely lined. When they took off down the slope toward Sunset, his foot was so heavy on the accelerator that her body got knocked back against the seat.

  “You must be Bobby,” she said, once it became obvious that he wasn’t going to be the first to speak.

  “I’m Robert.”

  “Uh-huh. How old are you? I mean, you’re just a baby, it’s kinda hard to imagine you’re old enough to be his brother.”

  “I’m thirty-four.”

  She gasped happily. “How about that, we’re the same age. You were born in ’26?”

  “’I was born in ’25.”

  “Oh.”

  His gaze was focused on the road, rather fiercely, and he did not seem to think the fact that they were almost the same age was remotely interesting. She didn’t either, and afterward gave up trying to make him like her, and instead watched the palazzos of Beverly Hills fall away as they sped west. They drove silently onward, and she wondered where they were going, and if he needed directions, and decided it was too much trouble to offer.

  After he’d turned onto the Pacific Coast Highway, he said, “I didn’t want to be the one to pick you up, either.”

  “Then why did you?”

  He shrugged. “Jack said you were important, and I’m his campaign manager.”

  They didn’t speak again. Having brought the car to an abrupt halt at a row of beach houses that fronted the highway, he stepped out and tossed the keys to one of the men—they were dressed like the help, but they were also broad enough to be muscle—and strode through the front gate. Marilyn waited in the passenger seat until the man who had caught the keys came over and opened the door for her.

  “He’s a real charmer,” she said.

  The man replied with a neutral “Yes, ma’am.”

  The sounds of celebration were loud enough to reach her on the road, and she was relieved to think that it was a big party. Behind her were the palisades, crowned with a row of gangling palms, and though the houses obscured the ocean, she could already smell its salt.

  The living room was crowded, but she saw Jack right away. His magnetism was destabilizing; the whole room bent toward him. There were plenty of movie people she recognized from around town, but there was another element, too—serious, fast-talking men in suits that were slightly too large, and women who dressed primly in red or white or blue and whose small, bright diamonds were only occasionally visible. The gathering possessed a special vitality, as though those present had been party to a momentous event, and knew themselves to be, for a short, blessed while, at the center of everything. She watched Bobby make his way through the rings of friends and sycophants to whisper in his brother’s ear. Neither Kennedy suffered bad tailoring—both wore dark pants and jackets that were fit
ted to the slim family build. They looked good next to each other, with those faces that had been made from the same stuff, and when Jack lifted his gaze and saw her leaning against the wall on the far side of the room, the smile she wore was genuine.

  “Marilyn, I didn’t know you were coming.” She glanced up at the sound of a lightly aristocratic voice, and recognized the ingratiating smile of Peter Lawford. A long time ago, before she was with Joe, he’d had his agent call her for a date, but she had thought him too pretty, and later she heard he’d married rich. A girl called Patricia Kennedy. Marilyn hadn’t known much in those days, and had promptly forgotten all about it. “You look marvelous,” he told her, kissing her on the cheek and showing her his hopelessly British teeth. Up close, there was a quality in his heavy brows and drooping mouth that wanted too much to be liked.

  “Thank you. It’s pretty exciting, isn’t it? I guess you’re here to celebrate with your brother-in-law.”

  “That, and this is my house.”

  “Is it?” She tried not to seem impressed, or to wonder at herself for never being smart enough to marry into money. Real money, not the kind you earn yourself.

  “Will you have a drink?”

  “Yes.”

  Peter forged a path through the thicket of bodies, holding on to Marilyn’s wrist in such a way that her bracelets were pressed uncomfortably against her skin. At the bar, he ordered daiquiris for both of them. “That’s what the candidate is drinking,” he said as he raised his glass to eye level.

  The drink didn’t square quite with her idea of Jack, but when she tasted the first sip of sugary, limey rum she understood. The room was full of people wearing Kennedy boaters at rakish angles, their good-looking faces aglow with inclusion. They had left downtown, the dreary Biltmore, and the homely conventioneers, and found themselves in California, which reflected some inner notion of themselves. “It’s wonderful, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Peter said.

  “I mean for all of us. He looks like us, doesn’t he?”

  “You mean, he’s a star? That’s what the old man always says,” Peter replied genially as he studied the party over the rim of his glass. “Of course, I’m supposed to stop saying things like that. That’s one way they aren’t like us, you know. They aren’t gossips. They can talk politics till the cock crows, but gossip they turn their sharp Irish noses up at. I keep telling them it’s the same thing, and they keep looking at me pityingly and saying, ‘Oh, Peter, do shut up.’ ”

  “That’s not very kind.”

  “They don’t really care about kind,” he replied, and though his tone remained jovial there was a wounded cast to his features that could not be covered over with jokes.

  “Where’s the senator’s wife?”

  “Back in Washington. She hates politics—it depresses her, she says, having to listen to all those normal people. She’s worse than the rest of them, a terrible snob, likes everything just so. That, and she’s knocked up.”

  “Oh?” What a bastard, Marilyn thought, and tried not to feel envious of his wife.

  “Yes, and Jack likes traveling as a bachelor. You’d never believe it, from all the photos of them in the press as a perfect family and so forth, but he is rather a ladies’ man. But there I go again. You know us movie people—can’t keep our mouths shut.” He gulped his drink, and raised his arm in salute. “Hey there, Jack!”

  Jack was approaching them, very slowly, his progress impeded by much backslapping. “Fine party, Peter,” he said, shaking Peter’s hand and patting his shoulder as though they were only casually acquainted.

  “Have you met Marilyn? She’s quite a chap.”

  “Not in person.” Jack beamed at her. Even close up he seemed magnified, shinier and more beautiful than everybody else. “Although I feel I know you from your pictures.”

  “Congratulations.” She returned his smile. “Didn’t you win some game show tonight or something like that?”

  “Yes, something like that. Peter, wasn’t there music before? Put on a record, would you?”

  Neither Jack nor Marilyn turned to look at Peter as he slinked away. They remained like that, eyes on each other, until a song started, the swelling of strings eliciting delighted yelps from Lawford’s guests. The host, despite his babbling, was an expert taker of hints, and Marilyn noted that he drew Janet Leigh onto the dance floor just as Frank Sinatra began to sing.

  “Everyone else is dancing; shouldn’t we?” Jack seemed to vibrate with the charade—he enjoyed pretending they’d just met, even though they’d been circling each other for more than a year now.

  “Your brother doesn’t like me very much,” she said as he led her down a few steps, into the sunken part of the living room, where the women were kicking off their heels.

  “Bobby? Of course he does.”

  “He’s got a funny way of showing it.”

  “I’m sorry. If he was short, it was nothing to do with you. He’s put out over missing a meeting that I couldn’t have had him at, anyway.”

  “But he’s your campaign manager.”

  Jack grinned. “How did a little girl like you learn something important like that?”

  She made her eyes like Betty Boop’s. “He told me!”

  “Well, he would only have caused trouble at this one.”

  “What kind of meeting was it?”

  “Oh, god, I’m tired, can’t we talk about something else?”

  So they talked about Frank Sinatra—the music, not the man—and the beach, and which movies they had seen lately, and other things people talk about when they have just met, or otherwise have known each other so long that there is nothing more to learn. Then Jack was called away to the telephone, and for a while she danced with Peter, and for a while with Jack’s youngest brother, who was still rather fat in the face and kept staring at her breasts. The music was rowdier when Jack came back, but it seemed everyone wanted to dance with him, and everyone wanted to dance with her, too, and hours passed where she couldn’t even catch his eye. Eventually the living room emptied out, and she saw Peter slumped on one of the couches in alcoholic slumber, and she remembered the real reason that she hadn’t wanted to go on a date with him. A party girl she’d been friendly with in her starlet days had been set up with him twice, and never been paid for her services. He was cheap, the girl said, which was captured perfectly by his drunken somnolence in the house that his wife’s money had bought. Meanwhile the bartender was cleaning up, and Jack had disappeared, and she wondered if he had gone to bed without saying good night.

  She drifted across the various levels of the room toward the heavy, carved wooden door, which was ajar. Outside the wind roughed her hair, and waves crashed in the distance. The turquoise rectangle of the pool glowed like a jewel in those final minutes of darkness—already, the sky was whitening at the edges. Earlier, the kinds of girls who were not quite actresses and not entirely prostitutes had giggled and splashed there, but it was empty now. Peter must have sent them home—it had been a long night.

  The tile patio surrounding the pool was separated from the beach by a high glass wall—to keep out sand, she supposed, and riffraff. Beyond that the ocean spread out stark and infinite, and the road north wound its lonely way through the hills toward Hearst Castle. She stepped out of her white high heels, and lay down on a lounge chair. To the south, the lights of the Ferris wheel at Santa Monica were visible against a plum backdrop, and she felt sad, thinking how her mother used to describe youthful nights on the boardwalk in the tough, yearning manner of people whose best days are behind them.

  “She’s still here,” Jack said.

  Had she been asleep? When she opened her eyes, he had appeared on the chair next to her. He was wearing the same black trousers and white collared shirt, but his tie was gone and his shirtsleeves were rolled. His hair was less in place than before—it was reddish with the coming dawn, an unruly brush that seemed disproportionate to his forehead. Perhaps he was too tired to speak expressively, for he loo
ked smaller, reduced from his earlier glory, and she could not tell whether he was pleased to have found her or not. She was tempted to tell him that it was always like this—that in the fury of performance, when you are vivid and grand beyond imagining, you believe you will always be so; and that the morning after, when the magic has left your body, is always a cold, desolate surprise.

  “I didn’t have a way home,” she whispered, not reproachfully, as she pressed her head against the cushion of the chair.

  “Yes, of course.” He nodded. “I’m sorry about that.”

  “Must have been a pretty busy night for you,” she went on, curling onto her side.

  “Yes.” He seemed to want to say more, but perhaps an actual response would have required too much energy, because he only glanced up at her and stared, his eyes lingering long on the slope of her waist and the rise of her hip.

  “Where were you?” she asked, not in the demanding tone of a grown woman but in the small, breaking voice of a girl whose father has gone down to the racetrack for too long and forgotten about her. This was easy—especially late at night, when she was exhausted but trying hard to do the bidding of her father’s people, she was that girl.

  “Upstairs, with Bobby.” He put his face into his hands, which made it impossible to read his expression, although she could see that whatever they had discussed had made him tired, and guessed that it must be something important.

  “He’s angry that I’m here?” she asked, the wounded worry that this might be true showing through the courage she’d summoned to pose the question. Earlier, she had been insulted that Jack had not picked her up himself, but now she saw what an opportunity it was, how she could play injured, encourage him to talk, press him to tell her what he and Bobby had discussed.