The Blonde (3 page)

But she wasn’t single, and she knew she’d just be crazy and wide-awake as long as she stayed in the apartment with Arthur. She was careening through the rooms, her mind lit up with some heady combination of emotion and pills wearing off and a sweating need for a stiff drink. An old slip going over her naked body, and a navy fisherman’s sweater over that, and then the London Fog jacket she’d bought when she first moved east after divorcing Joe. She took Arthur’s hat from the hook by the door and put it over her hair.
Ha
, she thought when she glanced in the mirror,
I’m Sam Spade
.

“Fuck you,” she shouted at the living room as she went through the front door and put all her energy into jamming her finger against the elevator button, hoping he’d come after her, and hoping he wouldn’t. In her mind:
fuck you fuck you fuck you
.

The cool, quiet air did nothing for her anger, and she walked several blocks without thinking of direction or registering any faces. She thought about how ugly New York was, how California would be better. They had already discussed it—a trial separation—and Arthur had tried to pass the arrangement off as her idea. Maybe she really would go now, see how he liked it, how he did without having her body when he wanted it. Perhaps if she’d had a father, she thought, he would have warned her not to fall for creeps, and she wouldn’t find herself so often alone, on some street late at night.

She turned off an avenue and saw, through a canyon of apartment buildings, the lights of a barge on the water. Then she heard the voice, and wondered if she were hallucinating.

“N.J.” The voice was quiet, almost disembodied.

“What are you, CIA? FBI? Isn’t it enough you tap my phones?” She took three swift steps backward from the building’s shadows, not wanting to catch the stems of her heels in the gaps of the sidewalk. She couldn’t remember now if it had originally been Arthur’s paranoia or hers, that sense of someone always listening in, or if she had been born with the fear of a constant, hovering presence that intended no good.

“N.J., it’s me,” he said again, and this time she could not pretend with herself that that vaguely accented voice, with its touch of European courtliness, was not familiar.

“Fuck you.” She went toward the river, trying to loosen the fearful grip that voice had on her throat. But she wouldn’t run, she wouldn’t sacrifice the dignity of walking on the way she always did—ankles practically knocking against each other—just to get away.

It took no special effort for him to match her speed, and soon he was walking alongside her at barely more than an amble.

“N.J.,” he said as he laced his arm through hers. It was a gentle gesture, but firm, and she had no choice but to turn and look at him. Those sun-washed blue eyes, the nose like a downward pointing anchor carved of gypsum. He smiled with one side of his mouth, revealing a dimple, and as he gazed at her his exhalation relaxed his shoulders. “Remember me?”

“Of course I remember. Nobody ever called me that but you.” Her smile shone brilliantly through the darkness; the words were true, the smile false.

“It’s cold—you’ll catch cold. Let’s get you indoors.” She had forgotten this about him, the solicitousness. Unusual for her—when she noticed the impulse to protect in a man, she rarely forgot. Even now, there was a map of safe harbors fixed in her memory, men like Joe who were always willing to play hero when she was in distress.

“The Subway Inn. I like it there. Nothing fancy, but they treat me just like any other drunk,” she said with a wan, self-effacing smile.

“I know you do. You spend too much time there,” he said, with faint disapproval, and his arm swooped around her shoulder. “But it will do for now.”

TWO

New York, March 1959

SHE let him lead her past the neon storefront into the mostly empty bar. The air was dense with cigarette smoke, and the only bodies left belonged to true drunks, the kind who wouldn’t slow their march to oblivion by seeking trouble.

“I’ll have a double bourbon,” she informed him and crossed the tiled floor to a booth upholstered in cracked oxblood leather. There were no eyes to meet—nobody looked up. She threw her coat across the seat, but left her hat on.

Beneath the brim she let her eyes close, and for a moment she was in Schwab’s again, and everything was different. There was all that wonderful electric light, for starters, and the cigarette smoke was mixed with wholesome smells, like cheese sandwiches melting on the griddle, and she was hungry (she hadn’t eaten for days, and the hunger cut pleasantly into her torso), and she was desperate to catch anybody’s eye. All around her were people who worked in the movies, some of them big time. That was why she’d worn a skirt that was too tight and her fur stole, in the hope of being noticed. She was already Marilyn Monroe, but the name didn’t mean anything yet.

The hours passed and the crumbs of her grilled cheese got stale on the plate and the ice from her Coke melted in its voluptuous glass, and then she finished even that thin brown liquid. The boy behind the counter started watching her, and she knew he was beginning to suspect that she couldn’t pay for lunch. They liked her there—people usually did at first—but they could smell bad luck. Show business people are worse than baseball players
when it comes to superstition. The boy left the check in front of her without comment, and walked to the other side of the bar and put his elbow against the counter and started up a conversation with Joe Gillis, the screenwriter.

Seventy-five cents. She read the check like an indictment of every breath she’d ever taken. After her first divorce, when she was just twenty and it seemed every day a stranger told her how pretty she was, how the country needed a beauty like her to lift its war-trodden spirits, she thought if she could just get in the pictures she’d always be all right. Well, now she had been in the pictures. She’d done everything they told her to. She’d changed her hair and her walk and her name. She’d gone down on her knees on hard pool tile, and she’d let studio big shots poke at her with their geriatric cocks. But she didn’t have a job or a home. She didn’t have seventy-five cents for lunch, and if the collection people caught her, they’d take her car. The last time she’d had an audition her mind had gone blank, and the best she could do was mumble a little something and get out fast.

When she put her head down on the counter it was to forget what she had come for. She couldn’t be fearless again, the way she’d been at the beginning, because she had tried, and her trying had come to dust. She was twenty-two, and washed up. For a while she stayed still like that, imagining every variety of suicide, until her mind put together what she was seeing. A five-dollar bill had been placed on top of her check, and after a few minutes the boy made change. Now that change was glinting at her.

“Oh.” She straightened on the stool and made her features soft but no less sad. “I’m awfully sorry. That can’t be very nice, eating your lunch next to a mess of curls.”

“On the contrary. You have lovely hair, and I wasn’t in the least bit hungry.” There he’d been, with that prominent nose and the pale blue eyes with their intelligent, observant light. He spoke beautifully, in the kind of charming, unplaceable accent that a certain kind of man uses in the pictures. At first she’d thought it was put-on. His clothes had been nondescript, but they’d fit
him well—she had noticed that right away—the white dress shirt tucked into dark blue slacks. “I’ve seen you here before,” he went on in an easy, conversational way as he sipped black coffee. “Are you an actress?”

“I—I—I guess so.” Her posture went slack, and she put her weak chin against her fist. “I don’t feel much like one today.”

“I think you’d make a fine movie star.”

“That’s swell; could you tell Mr. Zanuck over at Twentieth Century-Fox? He keeps giving me these crummy little parts and then firing me.” She knew he wasn’t somebody—he wasn’t wearing anything flashy or expensive, and anyway by 1948 she recognized most of the big fish. He wasn’t the type she went after when she needed a job or to meet somebody important. He was the type she went to when she wanted to be held: fatherly, distinguished in a conservative way, hair graying, on the cusp of forty—old enough that he probably really was a father already. Anyway, he’d paid her bill, and that was what mattered.

“You seem like you haven’t been getting enough to eat.”

She shrugged. “I’m used to it. I grew up being packed off from one orphanage to another.”

“It’s a terrible country where a pretty girl like you could grow up so deprived.”

“Oh, that’s all right.” She winked at him. “Helps me stay trim, so I won’t complain.”

“Here, you keep this.” He took a quarter from the change on the counter, to leave as a tip, and pushed the rest to her. “Why don’t you use some of it to play a few songs?”

She made the most of her walk to the jukebox, moving slowly and with her slight, affected limp. She redid her lipstick with her compact, and then she put the Peggy Lee record on the juke and went back to the soda counter. After that it all happened very simply, almost too simply, like the first act of a picture.

The music was loud, and it created a wall of privacy around them.

“This was a good choice of song,” he said. “Mañana, do you know what it means?”

“Of course.” She closed her eyes and shimmied her shoulders. “It means tomorrow.”

“Do you believe in tomorrow?”

She giggled, but the giggle was faint with sorrow, and her eyebrows lifted when she replied: “Can’t be worse than today.”

“I think it’s going to be a great deal better.” He paused when the boy returned to fill his coffee cup. His back straightened and his face got serious, and he gestured for him to fill her soda glass, too. When the boy was gone, he went on: “What would you say if I told you that I could make you a star? The most famous movie star in the world—wealth, fame, glamorous friends, everything you’ve dreamed of. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

Suddenly the music was too loud. It shook her insides. Her body retracted and her throat went tight and her features got hard. “I’d say you must think I’m pretty dumb. And that you must be pretty dumb yourself. You could’ve found out I was an easy lay by asking anybody. You could have laid me for a lousy sandwich and a few songs on the jukebox. But I don’t like liars. I don’t like big, trumped-up lies like that. A child wouldn’t fall for that line.”

“Shhhh …” His eyes glittered, darted, his hand caressed her wrist, and she realized she’d been shrieking. “I know you’re not dumb.”

The tightness in her throat relaxed, but she didn’t respond to his touch. “Well, I still wouldn’t—can’t—” she mumbled and broke off.

“Norma Jeane—that’s what they used to call you, isn’t it?”

They still did in some places, but she didn’t like hearing it said out loud at Schwab’s. “How did you know that?”

“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.”