The Blonde (50 page)

He sighed, pushed his chin into the middle of his palm. “How did you …?” was the most he could manage to say. “You.” He shook his head. “
You
, of all people.”

“You mean, what happened to me that I should have ended up like this?” She leaned her shoulder blades against the wall. A vein pulsed in her forehead, and her gaze drifted off into the middle distance. “I was a beautiful child,” she observed. His face must have twitched as though in disapproval, because she quickly added, “That is not a brag, nor is it evidence of some sentimental attachment to the little girl I used to be.”

He sat back and listened while she spoke a long time. They were wary of each other at first, her words clipped and defensive, but she also seemed relieved to be telling all at last. At some point he went for drinks—the place was no longer a dive, and nowadays served champagne, but she asked for whiskey with soda on the side, and he was relieved to have the excuse to order a strong drink himself. As she went on she became more honest about what had been, and more elegiac, too. She asked him questions, and he answered, and their stories got tangled together.

Night had fallen by the time they were done, and the bar stools were
mostly occupied, although their own corner was still private enough. The evidence of several rounds of drinks cluttered the table, and they had filled two ashtrays, and his mouth was dry. He dropped his face into his hands again.

Seeing his fatigue, she seemed to want to comfort him with small talk. “And what have you done with yourself? Are you married, Douglass?”

“Yes—I was. Am, I suppose, technically. But Gloria is the dean of Columbia Law now, she doesn’t need me. For a while she came back to D.C. on the weekends, but she hasn’t made the trip in a long while. She has a friend in New York, I think. I wouldn’t want to ruin that for her by asking. You?”

She smiled faintly and shook her head.

“How did you get by?”

“Oh … It’s not so difficult, you know, to live underground in this country. Especially when you’re not greedy. Especially when you’ve already renounced so much.”

“Do you miss him?”

For the first time she had to glance away, and as she fingered one of the yellow petals on the roses that were wilting in the barroom atmosphere, he thought she might cry. But she didn’t. She put her drink on its coaster, stared into it for a while, and changed the subject. “You know what I keep thinking?”

“What?”

“That if I’d wanted to save him, all I’d have had to do was call you up, get the file you’d been keeping on me, and give it to one of the boys I was friendly with in the press wrapped in a big bow. Reporters were more discreet then, it’s true, but I don’t think anybody could have resisted it if they had documentation like that, about the man in the White House and Marilyn Monroe. If that had gotten out he couldn’t have been president anymore, and then they wouldn’t have had any reason to kill him.”

“But you can’t mean that.” Walls drained his drink. He was ready to go; he
wanted to sleep for a long time, if indeed he was still capable of sleep. “Politics was everything to him. I mean, think how hard he worked to become president. He was supposed to change the world.”

“Yeah, that’s true.” She must have divined his desire to retreat, because she reached out for his hand to stop him, lacing her fingers through his. The warmth of her palm against his was so unexpected that he forgot the instinct to run. She was stranger than he could have guessed, and the history that was between them two and nobody else was as ugly as he’d suspected. But who else could touch him now? What was the harm in staying a little longer? He closed his eyes, and listened to her say, “Anyway, the world
is
different. And wouldn’t there have been other work to do if he had lived? The scandal would have passed eventually, and maybe we’d have been better for it. All of us, I mean. I can’t help thinking how, you know—it’s not always our flaws that destroy us. Sometimes it’s our big, beautiful ideas.”

With her skin against his skin he felt pleasantly at sea—a sweet, rocking loss of control—and he didn’t even realize she had stood up until he smelled her perfumed neck and the whiskey on her breath.

“Douglass,” she said, and he knew why his mother had called him that. For the first time he heard its poetry.

“Yes?”

“I’m going to the ladies’ room to fix my lipstick.”

“All right.”

“We’re friends, aren’t we?”

“Yes.”

“Good friends?”

“Yes.”

“When I come back, let’s get out of here, find someplace quiet.”

He opened his eyes, so he saw the way she walked past the pool table to the back. He had no idea what “someplace quiet” meant, or what he expected, or even what he wanted, but while he waited for her return he had
no questions, only a sense that the answer to life’s riddle was simple, and that he had known it all along. Even after he realized too much time had passed, went in the direction she had disappeared, thrust open the bathroom window to see the empty alley behind the bar, and finally burst onto the sidewalk, he was not exactly perturbed.

He ran up and down the street like a fool, and the bums laughed at him. “Marilyn!” he called into the darkness.

“Marilyn,” the bums chorused. “Mar-i-
lyn
!” and then they laughed some more.

The image of her pale honey face was still vivid in his mind’s eye, the way her lips quivered before she spoke, making you eager for what she might say. But he felt hollow in her absence and weary with the years to come, as though by slipping out on him she had escaped their story, and left him to take it to the grave alone.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THIS book has some brilliant fingerprints on it. I am so grateful to my great friend and editor Sara Shandler, to Lanie Davis who brought the light bulb, to Josh Bank, Les Morgenstein, Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, Amanda Murray, Georgina Levitt, Katie McGee, Kathleen Schmidt, Kristin Marang, Julie Miller, Natalie Sousa, Liz Dresner, Heather David, Devorah Backman, Bob Levy, Polly Aurrit, Tom Colligan, and Maya Galbis. I am also indebted to Katie J.M. Baker and Claudia Ballard for early reads. And many, many thanks to Adrienne Miller and Maura Sheehy, who gave generously of ideas and support during the writing process.