The Blonde by Anna Godbersen Page A

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.

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 herselfthat 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