The Blonde by Anna Godbersen Page B

been more than a distraction to her, and in that capacity he was no longer useful.His mind was already ahead of their fling, and his guilt made him tedious. Anyway, she had mostly pursued the affair in order to distract Arthur, so that if he suspected one infidelity, he would be blind to the other, more consequential one—to the affair she intended to have with Jack, which he couldn’t know about.
    The phone rang just as she was refilling her glass. Ordinarily this would have been a welcome sound, the insistent trill of someone wanting her. But at that moment, with a fresh drink and the honeyed end of daylight making her loneliness seem almost gorgeous, she would rather have gone on like that forever, not knowing who was on the other line. It might be Arthur; perhaps he had secured a dinner date with someone important and wanted to show her off. Or maybe it was Yves—laid over at Idlewild and weepy with regret—calling for a final reassurance that he was only human and nobody could blame him. In fact, nobody could blame him. From the moment she’d seen Yves Montand’s one-man show she’d known exactly how she was going to use him, and then had gone about doing it so expertly that everyone was left with the vague impression it was he who had used her. Or maybe the caller was Joe, or Norman, or Marlon, or who knows, maybe it was even Kennedy, and she’d have a reason to roll on after all.
    Gripping her glass she went through the apartment, past its white walls and high, grand moldings. A real intellectual’s apartment , she’d thought when she first saw it, and that was how their parties had been when they were first married, everybody smoking and talking, a pot of something on the stove so that guests could help themselves when they got hungry. Now Arthur had removed much of the furniture, taken it up to Connecticut on some spurious pretext. Something about how it would be good for her to redecorate the place in her own taste, a nice project for her. And why should she care? It was almost comforting to think how she’d never had a home, and that she never would.
    The phone was still ringing when she sat down on the kitchen chair whereArthur must have had his morning coffee. The paper lay beside it, folded neatly and less the theater section, and she picked up the front page. The phone stopped. The headline was about Kennedy—she was only a little surprised to find the name of the person that her mind had been so concerned with of late, there in the news. She skimmed the article, and learned that her mark had won the Democratic primary in West Virginia. So: He had been busy, and she was glad, for the first time in weeks, that she had kept busy, too, with the Frenchman on the Coast.
    Suddenly she wanted to know who had been trying to reach her. But before she lifted the receiver, the phone rang again. This time she picked up right away.
    “Hello?”
    “It’s me.” The accent was disguised—he sounded jovial and blandly American. “Feel like a walk?”
    Her mouth flexed, and before she could help it she was smiling. When had Alexei become so reassuring to her, the placid diction she hoped to hear on the line? Even masked it was familiar and happy-making. There were times, over the last year, when she thought maybe she was getting rather more out of the bargain than he was. Once she’d mused aloud if she should worry about winding up in prison or something, and he had assured her that he would never ask her to do anything dangerous, or even particularly illegal. All he wanted, he promised, was to understand the psyche of the man who might run the country—that was how peace was maintained in a new kind of war, he explained, so in a sense what she did for him would benefit the whole of mankind. She had only to pay attention as she would in any love affair, learn his peculiarities and preferences, and in return Alexei would watch over her, protect her, care for her, and introduce her to the man she had been