The Blonde by Anna Godbersen

moment of contented contemplation didn’t last long. With a bat of her eyelashes, she extended her hand for him to take. “Come on in, darling, I want to show you off.”
    He might have informed her that he was not an accessory, or a dancing bear, or even—in a kinder, more patient tone—the little boy she’d once dressed in sailor suits. But he only said yes, rather affirmatively, and offered her his arm. Anyway, he was wearing the charcoal drainpipe trousers and pink collared shirt that she had laid out for him, so he supposed that in every meaningful way he had already lost the battle.
    The best he could do was to perform a small, interior rebellion by reviewing for himself the activities of the day, all in the service of a career choice that Mosey had always disapproved of, and now discovered a fresh reason to dislike: Walls was not only disinclined to discuss what he did professionally but not permitted to by law. In truth, what activity he’d done with regards to his new assignment, he had done grudgingly. This had consisted mainly of reading back issues of Photoplay and Variety , scanning for the name Marilyn Monroe;skimming through hefty transcripts of late-night telephone calls between Miss Monroe and her sundry confidantes (chief conclusion: She was an inveterate fabulist); and finally, when she went out, bugging her hotel room.
    Inside, a record of Nat King Cole singing in Spanish was playing, muffled slightly by the sounds of collective drinking, and he did not have time to be surprised that the object of his day’s labors was approaching from the opposite direction on the arm of Clark Gable. She was just there, quite suddenly and naturally, and white as the moon. Her mouth was a flexed, pink bow, and her drowsy eyes were acknowledging the other guests in as gently swinging a manner as Cole’s orchestra. Not only her skin but her clothes were white, and it was obvious that she wasn’t wearing anything underneath her filmy shirt. They were casual clothes, in contrast to the gowns the other women had worn to his mother’s “evening.” But she did not seem to mind, and in fact her presence made the other female garments in the room seem a little hostile, their underpinnings pushing and shoving to create artificially smoothed and excessively fortified peaks and narrows. By contrast Marilyn was so amply feminine that Walls felt overwhelmed, almost nauseous, and had to glance away.
    “They’re drunk,” his mother observed, reminding him of her presence. Of course they were—as soon as Mother said it, he saw that she was right. Clark and Marilyn weren’t stumbling, they were just lit up, sailing slightly higher than everyone else, their gestures loose and hungry.
    Those others—who had managed to come more or less on time, and were now scattered across several stepped levels of brightly modern décor—were not nobodies. Far from it; and yet they were all staring at the man and woman who had just arrived. Of course his mother had delighted in detailing the density of power in her house—among the assembled were a girl who was up for an Academy Award, a Polish prince, Jimmy Stewart’s publicist, a popular science fiction novelist, and a senator who was rumored to be after the presidency, and who was in talks with Lou about turning hisbook into a picture. (This last one surprised Walls—not the bit about the book, but rather that Kennedy was considered a suitable nominee, as Walls had once observed him at a lawn party in McLean heading for the bushes with a girl who was almost certainly on the wrong side of seventeen.)
    Meanwhile, someone had changed the record.
    A Negro’s voice intoned, “One … two … THREE!” followed by a simple, entrancing beat that was somehow a voodoo incantation and also at the same time a Viennese waltz. The blonde in white slacks and no brassiere who everyone was staring at laughed when she recognized the song, and went slinking away from the man she’d come in with, a