The streets were full of rich men from the Northeast in tropical shirts, and Spanish boys with greased hair, and for a moment she thought she heard someone speaking Russian, but she twirled, as though overjoyed by the balmy breeze, and didn’t spot a tail. With her hair not blown out, and walking in a sure, fast manner unlike the one she used in movies, in a city teeming with women in low-cut dresses, she was not the object of any special notice. She found an empty side street, and reached the end without anybody following her. A few more blocks along the bay and she saw the boat docks she’d been told to look for, with a place called Earl’s—the kind with a thatched roof, and no walls, just hurricane shutters—overhanging the water. It was empty, except for a man in a nondescript black suit, sipping water at a side table. He responded to her arrival with a neutral glare, and led her out to one of the boats bobbing along the worn plank pier.
“That way,” the man said, as he helped her onto the waxed deck. She made her way around the cabin, holding on to its roof for balance, and found Jack arrayed on a blanket on the bow, wearing swim trunks and with his arms folded behind his head. He seemed so comfortable and relaxed in this posture that she almost didn’t want to disturb him, and stood watching while the current lifted and lowered the boat under her feet. Another vessel floated slightly farther into the bay, holding two men also clad in black suits incongruous to their surroundings. They were here to protect Jack, and she wondered what they would do to her if they knew what she really was.
“What are you gawking at?” he asked without opening his eyes, and she realized that he must have felt her shadow crossing his torso. Well, at you, she wanted to say, but even this felt too poignant to say out loud. She shouldn’t be there; she almost wished he would get tired of her already; she wanted to be brave enough to tell him how poisonous she was, with what duplicity she had started their affair, the betrayals already committed. The best she could hope for was that he would end it quickly—for Alexei would make himself known again, soon enough, and she would have to reveal things she didn’t want to, or else risk being put away permanently. This was borrowed time. “Well?” he prompted.
“I was just wondering if your goons are going to follow us all night.”
He sat up, propped his elbows on his knees. The curve of his back was so tanned it appeared almost black in that light, except where the sun’s reflection made it white. His hair, too, was a summer color, except at the base of his skull, where it was recently trimmed and dark brown. “I wish I could stay all night.”
“Oh. I’m sorry, I didn’t expect …” She hadn’t expected to spend the night with him, but hearing that she wouldn’t put a knot in her stomach. “Of course.”
“Aw, don’t be like that. We only have a few hours before I have to get back, and I want to enjoy them.”
“Tell me.” She gazed out, above the heads of the Secret Service men, at the wide, gentle surface of Biscayne Bay. Everything appeared perfectly tranquil, but she no longer believed in appearances. “Tell me how we’re going to spend them.”
“Was there anybody in that restaurant up there?”
“They must’ve cleared it for you.”
“Good. We’re going to go sit there like two ordinary people and drink some beer while the sun goes down, if that suits you. I’d like to take you to a fancy place, or a big gala, but that’s impossible, and besides I’m rather tired of them.”
“Oh, I like the first story fine.”
“Good. But first I have to get this damned coconut oil off me.” He swung his head around to look at her, removing his dark sunglasses with sudden energy. “Fuck me, are you a happy sight.”
With an awkward, wincing motion he was on his feet. After that he moved quickly, pulling her behind him along the side of the cabin, up onto the pier. The men in the motorboat out in the bay shifted position, as she followed Jack past idle boats and the occasional fisherman to the end of the dock where a wooden structure, grayed by the elements, housed a showerhead.
“Take that dress off,” he said when they were inside and he’d latched the door.
She turned away, showing him how she pulled at the zipper. Holding on to the straps, she stepped out of the dress, carefully so as not to dirty the hem in the drain, and hung it over the high wall. He grunted faintly at the revelation of her lack of underwear, and came up behind her, while turning on the shower, reaching around and grabbing her by the belly. The water broke over them from the side, the same temperature as the warm air, and as her hair got heavy and damp he put his face into her neck and she smelled the suntan oil he’d been wearing. She’d thought he was joking, but in fact he was fragrant with the stuff. The skin of his chest was slick against her back, pushing her into the wall, his hands sliding over her waist, one hand taking hold of a breast, the other gliding down her abdomen. Her own hands went up against the worn wood for ballast, and she pressed onto her tiptoes. They exhaled sharply, as one, when he nudged closer, and they hovered there for an exquisite, oxygen-deprived second before he slid the rest of the way in. Overhead, the sky was pure blue, and the mountainous, dramatically shaded clouds migrated south.
They were both quiet—they were very much in the world, but at the same time apart, and could hear the lap of waves, the snap of fishing line, the occasional shouting of one sailor to another on the other side of the shower wall while they went on silently moving into each other, against the rickety wooden structure, trying not to shake it too much. Light was refracted through the drops of water spilling over them, and she could sense how close they were to everything. When her mouth gaped she felt those droplets on her tongue, and shut her eyes to what waited outside.
Neither spoke for a while afterward. They turned to each other, and let the water wash over them, before drying off with the same towel. She put her dress back on, and he his swim trunks and a blue dress shirt and the black sunglasses, and they held hands and went barefoot into the place called Earl’s at the head of the docks. Without being asked, the man in the black suit brought them two beers and then retreated to the doorway. They sat at the edge and looked out over the water. From behind, she thought, they probably appeared, in his blue shirt and her pink dress, like any wealthy couple who had left the children with their grandmother and gone in search of the slums of their youth.
“Did you know you can sail all the way down, to the tip of the state, without having to go onto the open ocean?” he mused. “All the way to the Keys. All the way back up north, too.”
“Uh-uh.”
“Ever driven down that away, through the Keys?”
She shook her head.
“Papa Hemingway has a house there. Or had, rather.” He sighed, let his fingertips drum against her knee to the Judy Garland tune playing faintly on the radio. “I suppose we’ll never go looking for Hem at the Floridita now.”
“I guess not.”
“I still can’t believe it.”
“That he’s dead?”
“That a man who could write like that would want his head blown off. I suppose I mean I don’t want to believe it.”
“Well, maybe he didn’t mean to. Maybe he was just trying to scare himself and went too far. Maybe he was thinking about death, and wanted to see death’s face, you know? Just out of curiosity, kinda. About what he had coming. But then death called his bluff.”
Jack glanced at her as he pulled on his beer can. “What’s all this mystical mumbo-jumbo? Please don’t tell me you know of what you speak.”
She shrugged, and squinted at a sailboat out in the distance. “I didn’t grow up like you, you know, surrounded by people who care what happens in your life. When nobody but you cares whether you live or die, you spend a lot of time thinking about death. But I wouldn’t be here now if I hadn’t chosen living.”
“You said you had an analyst.” He shook his head. “I usually don’t go in for crazy broads.”
She laughed. “Sure you do.”
“I like good-looking broads; is it my fault so many of them
are off their rocker?”
“Well, Mr. President, it just might be your fault, at least in a few dozen cases in the New York and Washington areas. I bet you’ve messed with their pretty heads plenty.”
“Oh, come now. There haven’t been that many—”
“We were born under the same sign, did you know that? Gemini,” she told him. “So I understand. There’s a half of you that you show the world, and another half that’s yours alone. One part of you just wants to be loved, and the other part wants to know everything. But those impulses don’t go together very well, do they?”
He put his arm around her neck, spreading his hand over her breastplate, his teeth cold from the beer against her warm ear. “More mumbo-jumbo,” he muttered.
“All I meant is that sometimes the nicest things are the ones that can’t last.”
“I don’t like the sound of that very much.”
They had wandered dangerously close to her actual feelings, and her heart was as light and unmoored as a balloon loose in the atmosphere, and she changed the subject in the first way she thought of. “It’s that way, isn’t it?” She pointed south, across the water. “The little island that’s caused all the trouble.”
“Less than a hundred miles.” He drew away from her to reach for his beer. “It’s too bad. In a funny way I rather like him.”
“Like who?”
“Castro. Not his policies, of course, but he’s got wonderful flair. Under different circumstances, I think he and I might stay up all night arguing history. And his people actually matter to him; he’s not like Khrushchev. Khrushchev can talk about detonating a hydrogen bomb—about the possibility of a million fatalities, say—as though it’s totally acceptable to him. I don’t think he’d bat an eye. I used to think all people could be reasoned with, if you only figured out how to talk to them, but I don’t think that anymore. There have been times this year, I swear to you, where I just want to get out.”
“Get out of where?”
“This planet.”
“Well, couldn’t you just talk to him?” She glanced down, into the amber bottom of her beer can. She ought not to have asked. It was better for her not to know. But the rest of her life—the nightmares, the wired, paranoid days, the specter of Alexei, her face more etched with wrinkles every morning—none of that seemed real. The only thing that seemed real to her was this moment, this place, sitting with Jack, discussing the fate of the world. She liked talking to him like this—not probing him but actually curious—and couldn’t help lifting her gaze to him, and going on, “Castro, I mean.”
“No, no, too late for peace and love.” He waved off the suggestion, his troubled eyes focused out on the water. After a few moments of silence, he went on contemplatively: “I don’t want a war, nobody does. But we can’t look weak. We have to keep reminding them we’re stronger—that’s the only way another horror doesn’t happen. Anyway, Castro’s with the Russians now. It’s one thing to let them put up a wall—it’s not very nice, but that wall across Berlin is better than World War Three. It’s another thing entirely to let Khrushchev have his own satellite a hundred miles off the coast of Florida.”
“Don’t!” she gasped. Once he said Khrushchev, it was impossible for her to go on in this manner, as though her curiosity were innocent. “You said if we took out their top man, they could take out ours—so if that’s the case please don’t tell me about it, it’ll only make me worry!”
“We have to …” His gaze was fixed out on the water, and he seemed not to have registered her plea to change the subject. “The old man says he made us look like fools. Like little boys. He’s right, too. And we are trying it. Every night, out of places like this, in boats smaller than mine. To get intelligence, lay the groundwork. There’ll be another coup, there always is. Has to be.” He spoke with worried excitement, and it was in that spirit that he drained his beer and put it down, hard and dismissive, on the ledge. She was relieved that he seemed to be through with the topic. “Anyway, enough about all that. I love this song, don’t you? There’s only a little time left, and I’d rather spend it dancing than talking about things that keep me up at night.”
“I do worry about you …,” she murmured as he took her by the hand and into a slow sway. The radio was playing Sammy Davis Jr.’s rendition of “September Song,” a sorrowful saxophone accompanying the mellow vibration of his voice.
She thought Jack might brush off her worry. Tell her how the men in the black suits were highly trained, that this was his job, that the American people were who he worried about, or any number of courageous, campaign-trail pronouncements. But instead he surprised her by singing along, in a clear, accentless voice, to those melancholy show tune words about a year falling away, days becoming short, and realizing who he wanted to spend them with. His voice was low so that the bartender and the Secret Service man wouldn’t hear, and his cheek pressed against hers. They were very close, barely moving, and the salt-eroded floorboards creaked under their shuffling feet. As he repeated the refrain, the surface of her eyes got moist with the pure joy of being held like this, and sung to.
THIRTY-TWO
Miami, November 1961
MARILYN walked back along the beach holding her sandals by the straps, and let the waves wash over her toes. The big hotels towered to her left, some with rounded, white edges and their names proclaimed in neon cursive, others with glass fronts that reflected the changes of the seascape. The places on her body where Jack had touched her tingled, and she thought she would be happy forever so long as she could conjure the memory of sitting with him at the edge of that ramshackle place over the bay, talking about life and death. This uncharacteristically serene mood lasted all the way to the crescent moon spaceship of her own hotel, and she was smiling as she crossed the boardwalk onto the property—illuminated at that hour by torches—and didn’t think to disguise herself in any way.
A man’s voice called to her—“N.J.!”—and put a swift end to her bliss.
She turned, trying to locate the source of a nickname that now filled her with dread. He was behind her, and she felt his hand on her arm before she saw him. When she glanced up, Alexei’s lips curled. She pulled away, jerking her arm out of his grip and almost colliding with an older couple strolling toward the beach.
“Sorry,” she muttered, as they hurried on.
“Come.” Alexei took her arm again, and though his posture was casual his fingernails dug into her skin.
She’d known this moment would come, had never successfully put it out of her mind long. But she had not imagined how completely the sight of him—even dressed, in panama hat and brightly printed shirt, to blend in with vacationers—would flood her with the vile hopelessness of being locked up in the psychiatric hospital. The loss of Clark, too, cracked open again, and she couldn’t help but see Alexei’s features, however currently benign, as those of a murderer. Her breath was short, her stomach full of ice, as he pulled her along the hotel’s garden pathways.
“Have you eaten?” The old silken manner of address was gone—just a clipped request for information.
“No.” It was the only word she wanted to say to him.
“Where are you coming from?”
“Just a walk.”
“So you had the front desk tell the young man traveling with you,” he said, and did not have to add that he knew she was lying.
Her gaze flashed over the lawns of the Fontainebleau, its manicured trees, the fat, polished people eating alfresco, the pool illuminated at dusk, up along the curving wall of hotel rooms, some with their lights on and some abandoned already, trying to guess which one was hers. But she didn’t have to guess. It was the room next to the deck where the young man Alexei had just mentioned was standing, watching them through a pair of binoculars he was now pretending to look out to the sea with. My god, she thought, they can get to anybody, even a hunky California boy, even the stepson of a studio boss.
Alexei must have sensed her tension, because he softened
his tone. “Let’s have a drink, a little something to eat. You’ll tell me what you’ve been up to.”
“Was Arthur in on all this? He introduced me to Dr. Kurtz—did he know who she really is?” She spoke with her true hostility, but followed his lead, walking easily arm in arm like any two people enjoying the night air. If Alan Jacobs’s protégé was in Alexei’s camp, then any of those darkened balconies might be the place she went to die, and she knew she had better think quick and make no sudden moves.
“No, no. Of course we knew some things about you, and were able to steer you in the right direction, because of his sympathies. But he did not know of Dr. Kurtz’s other role, about me, that you were of any interest whatsoever. He was just a useful idiot.”
She’d never heard anybody call Arthur an idiot before, and was a little embarrassed to find that it relaxed her some, even at this moment of panic, when it seemed quite likely that every person she had ever been close to was in on a conspiracy against her. “How can I trust you?” she said instead. Go along, she told herself, but don’t seem too easily won over, or he won’t believe you. “That you won’t lock me up again.”
He did not answer, and she wondered, as they approached the maître d’s lectern at the outdoor restaurant, if his silence was an answer. If he was about to veer unexpectedly, then a bag over her head, her body shoved in the trunk of a car.
“Good evening, monsieur, madame. A table for two?”
“Yeah, thanks,” Marilyn answered.
“But of course, madame.” The maître d’s voice had changed, and she knew he had recognized her, which was a small comfort, to know that if she disappeared there would be someone to report her final sighting.