Stephen Leigh - Card Sharks

I began to cry, hugging her, holding her. "Yes."

She kissed me and we made love.

"There's one other thing, Nickie," she said once we were done. "I'll never be whole until I have a child. I hope you like children."

"I love children, Marilyn."

A few days later, she told me she thought she was pregnant.

"And it has to be yours, Nickie," Marilyn said. "I've counted, and Jack and Bobby always use condoms, and Pan's had a vasectomy."

That satyr had an appropriate name, at least. I asked about Jack Braun and Tom Quincey.

Marilyn shook her head. "I gave Jack a blowjob and he passed out. And Tommy's sweet, but we were through months ago. It has to be you."

It was then that I realized that with all the pills she'd been taking, none of them had been birth control. And I'd never used a condom.

She begged me to keep it a secret. With as many as I had, one more wasn't any trouble.

But, oh God, what a dilemma. If Marilyn had a child conceived out of wedlock, the controversy would wreck the movie. Possibly her career.

"It's my career, Nickie. I can wreck it if I like, she told me. "I can do anything I want."

But I'd heard Marilyn's nightmares and her whispered confidences. She'd had abortions before, and I knew one more would destroy her.

There's an old legend that will-o'-wisps are the souls of unbaptized children. In Marilyn s dream, they were the souls of her abortions. They haunted her night by night, saying, "We are the dead and we are secrets and you will never know who we are. That is our vengeance and that is how we will haunt you."

She loved me, she said, but she could never marry a man who couldn't tell her his secrets. One more secret and she would die.

I didn't tell her any of mine, let alone my nickname for my little ball lightning charges. But I held her in my arms all that night and told her that the ghosts would go away if she would just name them. And one by one Marilyn named them, all seven, until she fell asleep in my arms.

I didn't sleep well at all, knowing all that. But we all make sacrifices for our careers, and Marilyn's had been her children. I know that the law makes her a murderess, but I couldn't bring myself to hate her for that. Maybe it sounds crazy, but as she fell asleep against my chest, I think I loved her all the more.

The weeks flew by and March passed to April. Marilyn was Blythe as she had never been and I was alternately stand-in or spy, but my heart wasn't in either. It was with Marilyn. Welles had hired me to save his movie, but I knew the greatest threat to Blythe was our love, and I wouldn't kill our child or destroy the woman I loved to save a strip of cellulose. It was none of his business anyway.

Hedda wasn't even a consideration. She'd discover everything in due time through her other spies. I'd even give her a refund if she complained.

Otherwise, everything was perfect. The conspiracy of silence had broken down of its own accord and there was some grudging press and commentary, spiced with Hedda's venom and Louella Parson's treacle.

And then there was another party at the Lawfords's, grander than the rest since it had a theme: Walpurgis Night.

It was the brainchild of Rudo and Quincey, a dress rehearsal for the May Day celebration they planned to hold on May second, a day late, when both Bobby and Jack Kennedy would be in town. Marilyn planned to spend the night with them. I wasn't pleased, but I knew that if you tried to hold a butterfly, you'd crush it.

Marilyn said it was one last fling, and I had to take that on faith. I tried to be open-minded.

But April Thirtieth, Rudo explained, was a traditional time for the opening of the gateways of perception, and beyond that, a good excuse for a masked ball.

Nobody took it seriously aside from a few domino masks, with the exception of Tom Quincey. He'd got himself up in drag as Guenevere from Camelot and did an a cappella version of "The Lusty Month of May" as the Lawfords' grandfather clock struck midnight. Everyone thought it was amusing except Marilyn and myself.

Tommy danced around handing out Sandoz tablets like candy and Dr. Rudo had brewed up an Indian punch using peyote buttons. Marilyn wanted me to take some, but vomiting until you hallucinate wasn't my idea of fun, even if I weren't an ace.

She got me a Coke instead, and I nursed it along as everyone around me drank every variety of alcohol along with Rudo's mescaline punch. I hadn't gotten drunk since college. You don't know what it's like being a teetotaler in a fraternity.

The pool lights sparkled as they came on, and it was then that I noticed that I was glowing. My St. Elmo'S fire was out, a crackling blue aura around me, sparking and making the lights flicker as I fed on the power.

I tried to damp it. I really did, but then I saw everyone looking at me.

No one said anything for a long while, then finally Tom Quincey went, "Wow, man! Colors!"

I ran off down the beach, trying to get away. My whole world had suddenly fallen apart. I had suppressed the power for so long, it had finally struck back. The wild card had played its cruelest trick on me and I knew I was going to die, I was getting so dizzy, and I fell down on the shoreline.

Then all my nightmares were around me. Everything I'd always feared would happen. Iack Braun standing over me, glowing gold to my blue: "You bastard. You think you're so much better than me. I only hurt people because I was scared and stupid. You did it out of spite. nothing else. Traitor ace." Then Hedda Hopper: "I always knew you were a joker, Nicholas darling. But now that you know I know, I own you — unless you want everyone else to know." And I saw her smile. Then there was the Olympic committee taking away medals I'd never won, and J. Edgar Hoover with draft papers, a choice between prison or disappearing somewhere where I'd never see anyone I loved again.

And Marilyn: "Sony, Nickie. I could never love a sparking electrical freak, so you might as well go anyway."

Then she was slapping my face and shaking me. "Nickie! Nickie! What's wrong?"

"I'm an ace." I'd finally said it, admitted it to her, to myself, to everyone. "I was glowing. Everybody saw ."

She splashed some water over me and I came to a bit more. "Nickie, nobody saw anything except you screaming and running off down the beach. Pan said you needed to loosen up, so I slipped some of Tommy's pills in your drink. I'm sorry. I didn't think you would have a bad trip." She paused and a look passed through her eyes. I still don't know how to describe it. "What do mean about being an ace?"

I broke down then and I really did start to glow, and Marilyn did notice this time. Tears poured out of my eyes, glowing with foxfire, and I forced the charge out of myself and down the wet sand and into the ocean. For a moment, I think the sea glowed, though that may have just been my imagination.

Then I told it all to Marilyn. Everything I've just told you and more. All my nightmares and my tears.

I must have passed out at the end, since I didn't know where I was until I woke up on somebody's couch the next morning.

Marilyn was there. She said that after I'd passed out, I was still sparking, so she couldn't touch me. She'd run and got Jack Braun and he'd carried me up to his house, and his glow had probably covered mine, so she didn't think anyone else would know. Know that I was an ace.

Nobody but Marilyn and the greatest betrayer in the history of wild cards.

She was crying. I could never stand it when she did that. I think her tears were why I first fell in love with her. She said she was sorry she'd given me the pills, but she hadn't known I was an ace, and she said she never would tell. She said Jack promised not to either.

Marilyn called in sick to the studio for both of us. I was so raw with nerves I could hardly move, so she drove me back to her house.