The Blonde Page 3
“Norma Jeane, this isn’t what you think it is. I won’t ever touch you that way.”
“Then what do you want?” she asked, trying not to sound insulted.
His eyes scanned the surrounding area and he bent forward, gesturing for her to do the same. “My name is Alexei Lazarev,” he began, speaking low and fast. “I’ve learned to speak this way, to comport myself this way, but in fact I grew up in a very different kind of world. My country and your country used to be friends—at least, we pretended to get along, during the war. But that is eroding now, and there are those of us who are here to watch, and to listen.”
“You’re Russian, aren’t you?”
He smiled as a professor smiles on a favorite pupil. “Yes. You’re a good watcher and listener already, aren’t you?”
She wished that the praise didn’t heat the skin of her ears. “Thank you, Mr. Lazarev, but I think I’ll keep trying my luck at acting. It’s the only thing I’ve ever been good at, and I’m too old to change my mind.”
“That,” he replied, as though for him the world held no surprises, “is precisely what we want you to do. And we know of a perfect role for you.”
The dangled role made her heart tick, but she didn’t let it show. She leveled her chin slightly, the way Bette Davis might. “How do you know my real name again?”
“These things are never difficult to discover, my dear. There are public records, of course, and your modeling agency used to send you out with that name. But we’ve been watching you longer than that. Marilyn is a good name for an actress, but I can’t quite seem to match you with it in my mind. N.J. is how I think of you.”
The revelation that he already thought of her intimately enough to have bestowed a nickname made her face cold. “I had better—” She stood to leave, and would have gone immediately, but he grabbed her forearm. In his fingertips, there was a superb lightness that held her more effectively than roughness would have.
“Don’t be afraid. We’ve been watching you only to protect you. As long as you are one of ours we will see that no harm comes to you.”
How long had she waited for someone to say words like that? With a deft hand, he guided her back to her stool.
“Tomorrow you’ll go to the William Morris Agency and ask for an agent named Johnny Hyde. He’ll look after you for me, for the time being.”
“But why?”
“Why?”
“I’m just a little orphan nobody. Why would you do this for me?”
“You’re not an orphan,” he replied quickly.
Those blue eyes stared into hers, and she swallowed hard, taking in how much he knew. About her mother—alive, if not exactly well, in the institution. That her father was not dead but had simply never claimed her. Her eyes flashed back at his. “No, I guess not. But I do know nothing’s free in this world.”
After that, he was easy again. “Someday, a long time from now, once we’ve seen to your success, when everyone knows your name, we will call on you, and you’ll do something for us.”
“Someday? I can hardly imagine tomorrow.”
“That’s all you should think about now. Just think about tomorrow. But someday I’m going to find you again. All right?”
“All right.”
When she stepped back onto Sunset she had been surprised by the daylight, as though she had fallen asleep in the afternoon and woken up to darkness with a dry mouth and hazy head. He’d glanced at her car disapprovingly, and then he had given her more money, and told her to look her best tomorrow. By the following day their conversation seemed a dream, but dreams were all she had in those days, and she had gone to William Morris the next morning, and Johnny Hyde had treated her exactly as Alexei had said he would. He had believed in her, and he had gotten her the role in Mr. Huston’s picture, The Asphalt Jungle, and all her other roles had come from that.
She was glad when Alexei came back with their drinks, if only because it put an end to remembering, returned her to the Subway Inn. She didn’t like to think of that time, when she’d had so little and been so desperate and done so many ugly things to get by.
“Here.” He handed her a drink and slid into the booth next to her. The decade that had passed since she last saw him hadn’t done much damage. The eyes were just as crystalline, and the new lines etched into the surrounding skin gave him elegance. The way he carried himself—confident and attentive, but so carefully scrubbed of desire that one might almost miss his presence—was the same as that day at Schwab’s. His lean frame was clothed in the same tasteful, understated style. She guessed he must be around fifty now, but he didn’t look it.
“You introduced me to Johnny Hyde,” she said, as though only just realizing where they’d met before. She could feel the cracks in the leather through her silk slip.
“Yes.”
“To Johnny.” She raised her glass to his. “It just about killed me when he died. He had such a big heart—sometimes I think it got overworked, the way he cared for me, and that’s why it gave out.”
“You know it wasn’t his heart.”
She took a sip of whiskey and laughed. “I knew he wanted to screw me, if that’s what you mean. He was a man, you know.”
Alexei ignored this. “I meant that it wasn’t his heart giving out that killed him.”
“Oh.” She exhaled audibly through her nose, blowing away her previous levity, as well as his insinuation. Tonight she had no interest in other people’s shadowy insinuations. “Well, that’s all about a million years ago, isn’t it?”
“Yes, a lot has happened.” Alexei folded his forearms against the table and smiled. The light in his eyes was just for her. “Look at you! A real star, like I always knew you would be. You’ve even exceeded my expectations—you’re an artist, my dear. Beloved by the whole world. I cried, you know, when I went to see you in Bus Stop.”
“Honey, I have publicity men and lawyers and husbands to tell me how wonderful I am and how I deserve it all and yada yada. They get paid pretty good for that service, too. But I’m low on funds these days. Why don’t you just tell me what it is you want?”
If he was taken aback by her directness, he didn’t show it. “You remember, that day in Schwab’s, when I told you Johnny would help you? I told you we’d call on you someday. Well, now we are.”
“You want a favor.” She winked decadently. She didn’t owe him anything—so many shysters had promised to change her life in those days that Alexei barely stood out; in fact, she had only thought of him once or twice over the years—but she didn’t mind doing for others when she was asked nicely. “What kind of favor?”
“There’s a publicity tour, for Some Like It Hot. They go to Chicago tomorrow. I want you to go with them.”
They had been speaking in hushed tones, but when she laughed at that—a mirthless, one-syllable laugh—it rose above the quiet barroom mumble. A few heads lifted off the tabletops. Alexei swiveled, watching the others until they looked away, and she knew he cared if they were overheard. That he cared, but she didn’t. “I haven’t been on a tour like that since I was a kid,” she snapped, her voice devoid of its usual breathiness. “I don’t do that kind of thing anymore. I don’t have to. I’m Marilyn fucking Monroe, and you’re just some funny foreign fellow I met at Schwab’s a lifetime ago.”
“But my dear,” he replied easily. “We made you.”
“Let’s say you did have something to do with it.” The anger was at a boil inside her now, and she leaned toward him so that he could see it in her face. “Just for a laugh, let’s say you did. What are you going to do about it now? Take it back? Make me not famous all of a sudden? I’d like to see you try.”
“Of course we could take it away,” he replied, quietly amused. “Though we haven’t the least intention of wasting a talent like yours.”
She gazed back at him, one eyebrow aloft. Her anger was under control now—she had it in a corner where she needed it. Without flinching, she lifted her whiskey glass and drained it. “Go
right ahead.” She put her coat over her arm and slid around the booth away from him. She was almost to the door when he called out for her.
“N.J.” It was that gentle intensity again, and this time he didn’t seem to mind the curious glances from the strangers in the bar. Slowly, with exquisite indifference, she turned toward him. “Don’t you want to know why we chose you?”
“I guess I seemed like the most desperate girl in Schwab’s that afternoon.” She rested a hand on one hip and put her weight on the other. “Is that it?”
With a shake of his head, he reached into the hidden chest pocket of his coat. He pulled out a photograph, too large for a wallet but not large enough to frame, and put it down on the table. Someone came in behind her on a gust of cold March air, and she stepped toward Alexei just to get out of the way.
By then her eyes were glazed with tears.
How many photos like that had she carried around, from one apartment to another? Black-and-white snapshots of men posing with automobiles or marlins or doing whatever they did when they became fathers. There was the one of the man named Stanley who people said had been her mother’s lover in ’25, and after that a picture of Abe Lincoln, an idealized stand-in, staring at her with all the fortitude and intelligence in the world. The pulsation of her heart was loud and rhythmic as she moved, trancelike, back to the booth and sat down. She picked up the photograph, and her lips parted.
“Who is he?” She knew what he was trying to tell her but she couldn’t believe it.
“Your father.”
Her hand flew to cover her mouth. The picture was black-and-white, the size of her palm, and it showed a young man wearing a white T-shirt smiling at the camera. He had a shotgun rested over his shoulder in an easy way, as though he had just been deer hunting, and he had a mop of light hair falling over his face. The way he gazed into the camera was the same way she gazed into a camera—searching, charged with life, and not to be looked away from. His face was so like her face she had to breathe deeply just to find a few words. It was like seeing your markings on another body and realizing you were part of a tribe. “But I’ve looked for him. I—I was sure he was dead. I’ve hired private dicks and spent I don’t know how much money trying to find him. I’ve made myself so conspicuous. I mean, what kind of person doesn’t seek out fame when they have the chance?”
“Yes,” he replied carefully. “What kind of person?”
She returned his stare blankly, tried not to show how much she wanted it to be true.
“Don’t you think if your father were some ordinary person at least one of those detectives you hired would have found something? He’s one of ours.”
“Oh, god. Is he in trouble?”
“He’s all right. He wants to meet you.”
“When? Wh-when can I meet him?”
“In good time.”
She felt faint with the thing she’d so long wanted, and before she could help it she had rested her head against Alexei’s shoulder. It was stronger, larger, than she had expected, and she let her eyelids drop and her muscles relax. She had gone through just about every emotion there was since waking up that morning, and already before that she had been exhausted for years. “But I’ve waited so long,” she said.
He kissed her lightly on the forehead. “I know. But first I want you to go to Chicago. Don’t fret, my dear—I think this is a trip you’re going to enjoy.”
THREE
Washington, D.C., March 1959
WALLS was alive. The bed was unfamiliar; the sheets fragrantly feminine; the face on the pillow next to him obscured by heaps of strawberry blonde hair. As he blinked, scenes from the night before filtered back: the cocktail party in Georgetown to which his cousin Lucy (Mrs. Robert Bennington) had invited him; how he’d had two drinks fast, told himself to slow down, and immediately forgot the directive; the girl in the full, teal-colored skirt; how bright her eyes got when she told him it was late and she really ought to be going; how quickly she had accepted his subsequent offer of a ride home. When he remembered that, he had to suppress his instinct to make a noise—some hybrid sigh/groan. He would have given a whole month’s pay to get out of that bedroom without waking her.
Her? She had a name, she must, and he was even confident that it was vaguely French. Renée, or Roxanne, though neither of those quite fit. In any case, she was a junior at Vassar, taking a semester at G.W. for reasons that she must have explained but were now lost to him, and her father, whom she plainly adored, was the principal of a New York advertising firm where one of his fraternity brothers was now employed. Her face, when she mentioned him, had led Walls to think precisely that: Her father, whom she plainly adored. It was a sign—though not the first, last, or most salient—that if he took her home (or rather, allowed her to take him home) he would regret it.
Walls (Douglass Everett Walls on his passport; Dougie to his mother; D.W. to his father; Doug to the world; but always to himself simply and purely Walls) was not in general so unromantic as the part of him that wanted to flee this girl, this bed. At New Haven he had been known as a ladies’ man, and in secret he thought of himself as the one true romantic of his acquaintance. Women were to him so delicate and lovely, and he held a strong belief that they should be treated right. He lived in fear of doing anything that might suggest he was falsely promising them the happy futures they so obviously desired—he doubted that he would ever be fully capable of promising any such thing—and this was the crux of the carnal paradox that kept him rather lonely most evenings since he’d joined the Bureau.
Except on the occasions when he couldn’t help it anymore, and called up the elusive charm bequeathed by his father. Almost always it worked, a little too easily to be fully satisfying. Most of the girls these days would let you use your hand, and if you did that part right, they were almost certain to submit to the rest. Then he’d find himself heaving over some debutante with silken hair, grinning like an ape as he listened for her dishonest sighs to yield to the real, unpretty moans, before ejaculating on her rosy, flat belly. That was more or less last night’s order of events; and so he couldn’t really be surprised by his current state of remorse.
Expertly, stealthily, he removed himself from the bed. The mattress barely registered its lightened load. Luckily he’d put on his underwear before falling asleep, and his under and dress shirts were on his side of the bed. The sleeves of the latter were over his arms by the time he was across the floor, and his pants were waiting for him by the door—as though they had been awake with the first light, and had been urging him to get on with it since. In the living room he found shoes, socks, and tie on the zebra-skin rug, near the glass coffee table where their half-drunk glasses of bourbon remained from the night before. His jacket, helpfully, was hanging on the brass coat tree by the front door. He almost couldn’t believe how nicely his escape was going.
Already he was in the hallway, stuffing his tie into his pocket, summoning the elevator. He leaned against the wall opposite, as though the casualness of his pose might exonerate him for fleeing. The elevator was mirrored, and as he waited he regarded himself—the fair hair bluntly cut, the arms still muscular from Quantico, if not quite so lean as in his tennis-playing days, the deep-set hazel eyes that (as one of the more self-consciously intellectual girls he’d known once said) were “difficult to read,” the serious, handsome features which appeared suddenly goofy and boyish when he smiled. He wasn’t smiling now. The odor of the girl was still on him, her Chanel perfume and the smell of her body it was meant to mask. On mornings like these, he saw how like his father he was, and disliked himself. To distract himself from this knowledge he quoted Chekhov in his mind—“And he judged of others by himself, not believing in what he saw, and always believing that every man had his real, most interesting life under the cover of secrecy and under the cover of night”—a favorite from his undergraduate days. But really he was still thinking of his father, and in the next moment, with a surge of dread, he realized the flaw in his getaway.
The hat. It was the same hat his father wore the year he came back from Spain with the limp, and went to work for Uncle Edward’s firm doing something mysterious and financial. (One night around Christmastime a few years ago, his father had explained that he had been in Spain running guns for the anti-Franco guerillas, and Walls had wanted to believe this noble, dramatic version of his family history, though he wasn’t sure if he should.) Those had seemed happy days to Walls, who must have been about seven years old—his father home at last, and not at risk of being sent off to Europe or the Pacific, on account of the limp, returning to Greenwich every night for dinner on the 6:15. Now he knew it hadn’t been a happy time. His father had hated sitting at a desk, and had used it mainly as a surface upon which to fuck his secretary (this according to Walls’s mother who, it must be said, possessed a vivid imagination). That went on for some months until Walls’s father absconded with what remained of his wife’s trust fund, squandered it magnificently on a month-long spree in Atlantic City, and returned mainly to demand a swift divorce. He no longer imbibed grain alcohol, which for better or worse made him a far superior gambler—he hadn’t worked in years—but Walls still preferred the version of him in the hat.
There was no choice but to go back in.
With a wince he turned toward the apartment where the girl in the teal skirt lived. He took five grudging steps away from the elevator, braced himself, and raised his fist. But the door drew back before he had the chance to knock. Several panicked seconds passed before he realized that he was not facing Michelle (there was her name!), but a different girl. A roommate, perhaps. She wore a powder-blue nightgown, and her hair was in curlers; he saw she was less pretty than Michelle, and felt oddly grateful to her for it.
“I guess you’re Doug.” As she spoke she lifted the grayish olive homburg, which rested on her open palms, as though offering him a tray of canapés.