The Queen of Tuesday

by Darin Strauss

  “No, you’re serious?” the character Fred Mertz is saying to the character Ricky Ricardo.

  “Those two stinkers over there?” Ricky’s saying. “That’s Lucy and Ethel.”

  Fred: “Nah. Not really?”

  The director is no longer calling the shots from a control room; he is perceptible here, in front of the soundstage, and now turns at Lucille.

  “You’re right, Rick ol’ pal!” Fred’s saying. “How do we get our revenge?”

  In fact, the director came to lurk among the actors and the crew, but he has gone still; Lucille feels caught in the focus of his flustered face. He keeps staring at her. There are looks that are slaps, they sort of ring in the air between.

  Meanwhile Ricky tells Fred his plan:

  “…turn the ol’ tables, Fred. Show ’em the same lovey-dovey interest they been showing us!”

  The director had seen Lucille lose the character. That’s why he’s come down. Now his face is reckless in its scheming. He is about to cut the momentum, the scene, the whole shoot and all that comes with it. He likely feels he has to.

  The actor playing Fred is oblivious to the problem.

  “Let’s go show ’em who’s boss,” Fred is saying.

  Lucille senses Vivian Vance giving her an Are you okay? look. Vivian has one of those rare mouths where (when the lens is off her) the hydraulics of the frown just keep going.

  Ricky and Fred approach their wives, and a camera follows. The director starts to lift his “cut the action” palm, a signal in prospect.

  Ricky: “Oh, girls…”

  There can be an inescapable road to disaster; there may instead come a moment when things cannot help but find rescue. Lucille smiles.

  Lucy: “Oh, ’ello, Mister Ricky!”

  The director stays his hand. Lucille has gotten Lucy back.

  Some physically comic effects: She comes after Ricky, her elbows up and bent, hunting, the arms making a circle. It’s funny. This improvised shtick describes pure sexual hunger.

  “I’m hopin’ to catch a little pony,” Lucy is saying. “Cowgirl style!”

  And the audience laughs. And Lucille’s TV career isn’t killed in its crib.

  “Aw.” Lucy is happy-pouting, realizing her prey is on to her. “Ricky! You knew!” The audience hasn’t really stopped laughing.

  It’s time for the plot to turn away from the world of freedom and risk—to end its flirtation with madness, its repudiation of normality. And so the TV husband hugs his TV bride. (The actual husband and wife, of course, must therefore hug, too.) Lucille and Desi, Lucy and Ricky. With this program, there’s a pleasant glaze of self-referential complexity that the audience doesn’t give special thought to. But they sense it. This feels kind of real, the husband-and-wife couple we’re watching? And now, a musical prompt. Even after the jokes shut down, the audience continues its laugh, and this goes straight into cheering. In fact, it’s avalanchine, a huge crush barreling down on them. The loudest Lucille’s ever won. And you think her brain, just for one second—while she stands in all this undreamed noise and while commanding that bright and flabbergasted theater—you actually think her brain has gone to thoughts of Hold-on? Why, that’s nothing but a scurrilous rumor! (Ah, Hold-on. The cute jut of his ears. His fingers callused and warm.)

  Desi has taken Lucille’s hand and curtsied her into this applause. Yes, yes, folks, we love you right back.

  At the edge of vision—in the plunge of their double bow—Lucille sees a dark, wet lock of Desi’s usually disciplined hair slip free of the pompadour.

  She drops her husband’s hand with purpose: Take that, you always-cheating shit.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, one more time: Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz!”

  She can feel Desi’s oblivious smile on her cheek but doesn’t turn.

  (All our forgiveness has a far margin of grace. Lucille’s is the door of her ranch. Last summer, a few weeks after Hold-on, she got home early from the wrap party for Ginger Rogers’s Storm Warning. And it was the old familiar bit: husband caught out, boxers down; wife gone pale at the doorframe; some young lady, her posterior in the air, diving into the pillow to hide her face. Lucille had been enraged, but first she’d felt frightened by him and so, when her rage did come, it came with real force. Why the hell’m I afraid of my husband in my own house? Humiliating images. Legs, sheets. The Cheshire smile of Desi’s belly skin where his undershirt didn’t quite reach his waistband. Worse was the rough, grabby argument that followed. The few thumb-size shadows that later ran along Lucille’s wrist and, when she peeled up her sleeve, along her forearm. That’s why she’d been afraid of her husband in her own house. Jesus Christ, I was pregnant, Lucille thinks now. Compare that to Isidore, who far as Lucille can tell is the guy at the end of the evening who pauses to befriend dogs and kids while other grown-ups find their coats. And Hold-on is waiting for me to call him. But the new child, but the career…)

  The theme song has finished. The ovation hasn’t. Lucille sees the director shrug and smile and shake his head. Up in that booth, the script girl stands to cheer. Lucille is thrilled. The name Lucille Ball in recent years has made—what? Well, it’s made nothing much. Just the gossip pages and their slapdash, smudgeable dishonesties. Or maybe they weren’t dishonesties.

  Desi is saying: “Sweetie, we did it.” The cheers are loud. Still, she doesn’t turn to him.

  Near the front row, Lucille watches as two women jump in the aisle and keep jumping: enthusiasm they can express only with their bodies.

  The director shouts at the crowd. “Watch it again, Tuesday, nine P.M., when the show airs! We love Lucy!” the director says. He’s hopped in front of the Arnazes. “We love Lucille!”

  Lucille closes her eyes. Her fantasy has quit humming ’round her head; it’s now loose into the world.

  “This is true!” Desi half-shouts to be heard. “We all love you!”

  She doesn’t turn.

  “That is truth, Lucille,” he says.

  She doesn’t turn.

  “Sweetie?” Desi asks.

  She does not turn.

  What she does is sigh. I wasn’t cheating if he cheated first, Lucille thinks. First and often.

  She feels her loneliness like a prop she’s dragged across the soundstages of her life. My loneliness belongs to Desi, she thinks. The guilt I refuse to lug around is his, too.

  The cameras continue shooting. Nobody thought to tell their operators to stop, anyhow this ovation feels film-worthy.

  “Thank you,” Lucille addresses everyone. Her throat looks puffed out with pride. “Thank you all.”

  The cameramen already see it: This isn’t the movies; this is not heroicizing cinema. TV is intimacy. Right there inside the home, free from the proscenium arch. But TV is also lamp-lighting and microphones and this artifice lends importance to it. TV is hybrid. Lucille Ball understands. On the small screen Desi boasts a Rushmore chin and princely hair; but Lucille’s got the smile of the girl you should’ve kissed.

  She turns to Desi, finally. Handsome Desi, his brows raised, smiling, we did it, baby, we beat ’em.

  Lucille says to him what she hoped he’d say to her: “Of course we beat ’em.” And to the crowd, “Oh, your appreciation means so much.”

  Desi reaches for Lucille; she lets him catch her palm. His big, strong hand. Ah, Desi. Lucille can’t help herself. He is her husband and the father of her child and she loves him.

  She sets a kiss on his cheek. Theatrical, but heartfelt. And Desi spins her and dips her, tango-wise. In the crowd, some woman laughs, and this warm, recorded guffaw will never really fade. Which is to say it will eternally clang and rattle through television’s first ever laugh track, a recording used on programs that don’t have I Love Lucy’s confidence for live filming.

  Desi keeps his nose in her hair. “You were amazin
g”—right into her ear.

  “It just came.” She closes her eyes. “It just came.”

  And now Lucille pulls from Desi. She gives a last gesture to tonight’s crowd. Wide-open eyes, pouted lips, a baffled finger thrust into her own cheek. This quirky confusion, Lucy’s newest professional gesture, soon to be one more Lucille trademark.

  Then: offstage. In the wings, an executive from Philip Morris: “Excellent! Have a smoke, kid!”

  Sure, why not a cigarette? It’s the start of her life.

  The first episode of I Love Lucy won’t air until Tuesday, October 15, 1951, at nine P.M.

  On that night, Lucille will be flying across the country and miss the broadcast and it won’t matter. By October 15, 1951, at 9:30 P.M., her professional faces and comic gestures and that lady’s recorded guffaw and everything else from tonight’s episode will take in all the diamonds spread across the land, that sparkling mesh out Lucille’s airplane window.

  But everybody knows that already.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  IN MY GRANDFATHER’S hospital room, I found two Styrofoam cups, two white sugars cubed on the tray, a coating of disease everywhere. “Was I asleep?” my grandfather said. “I’m glad you’re here. I think I can fit you in between my four-thirty and my five.”

  “Funny, but it’s after six,” I said.

  “Oh,” he said, “a time Nazi.” Yet there was a strain.

  A curtain separated his bed and someone else’s. My mother had said he had something for me; he—concave and depressed—looked in no position to hold something valuable. “I’m fine,” my grandfather said. “Talk to me. How’s work? Sorry I didn’t neaten up.”

  I had never known Poppa Izzy as anything like a young man, but even I was surprised by how ruined his handsome face was. “I’m very glad to see you, and I’m fine,” he said. “Don’t look at me that way.”

  To speak with anything like candor, he and I would have had to voice our undisclosed fears, life, death. “Talk to me,” he said. “I happen to be interested in you.” His hand fell thwap on the bed. The woman he now lived with—his very longtime girlfriend—didn’t like leaving him alone in the hospital, but she was old, too, and couldn’t always be there. I remembered what my mom had said, and so I had something to ask Poppa Izzy.

  “Yes, I do,” he answered my blurted question. “I do have something. Thanks for reminding me.” Now he was shy and smiling. “I do. For you. For you, I do.”

  GREAT NECK, NEW YORK, SPRING/SUMMER 1952

  FROM DR. PITSKER he hears the acting is marvelous. From Essie Newburgh he hears the writing is marvelous. From Norman, it’s the star—the star is marvelous. Marvelous in humor, in sex appeal; in everything. Isidore believes them all. He believes his dentist, secretary, his brother—but he won’t check. He won’t snap on the TV set. (His wife hasn’t mentioned Lucy, thank goodness.)

  Isidore is trying otherwise to busy himself.

  With Norman he’s been putting up homes in Brooklyn—the Housing Act of 1949 offered developers like him great incentives. He’s busy with his family, too. With dark-haired, confident, athletic Bernie, the firstborn who seems almost ready to take care of himself and never to cry. And with Arthur, who, a few years behind Bernie, is blond, more sensitive, and—to his father’s repressed disappointment—a tad duller, sitting as he often does with one elbow resting on the sofa cushion, looking off at nothing. And Isidore has occupied himself, too, with being a husband. That has been harder.

  Busy Isidore’s brain finds itself not busy enough. He’d done the terrible wonderful surprising inevitable thing he’d done with Lucille. An act that forged its own excuses. A moral man being immoral—is this even a possible path?

  About a year after the Havana-Madrid, the constant news about Lucille made the secret feel like an itch. One morning, Isidore burst into his brother’s office as their secretary handed Norman some mail.

  “What’s the rush, Iz?” Norman said. “Something up?”

  Isidore tried to sound blithe. That’s all for now, Miss Newburgh. Bye. Thank you. And Norman watched Miss Newburgh go. Specifically, the vertical line—distinct even through her skirt—that hemisected her departing behind.

  At length, Norman said, “Something about her you didn’t want to talk in front of?”

  “Well—”

  So many thoughts knocked against each other and made sparks in Isidore’s brain:

  When Lucille calls me, I’ll say no. Having to move out, to pay for two residences, leaving the kids…He also didn’t want to see himself as immoral, to admit failure, to have to tell his father.

  “Hey, listen.” Isidore spoke extra quietly. “I heard the television program you and Miss Newburgh were discussing. Norman, that was her.”

  Often, in his imagination, he approached Lucille Ball with declarative sentences. Straight, bold announcements of fact.

  “Iz”—Norman just blinking. “You lost me. Who was what now?”

  Isidore wasn’t ready to admit to having had sexual intercourse with Lucille Ball. But he missed her, and talking would bring the kind of frizzle he needed.

  “Remember I told you about Fred Trump’s party, Norm?” He’d practiced this line, and now chewed it off and spit it out bit by bit. “How I kissed a beautiful actress? In front of Dad?”

  “What?”

  “I did. I did that.”

  Norman sat considering Isidore with his fist over his mouth. Isidore wasn’t sure how he would feel about Norman’s inevitable smile and congratulations.

  (Look here, Lucille, I love you, you know—a perfectly good declarative sentence.)

  Norman said nothing. His eyebrows went up and looked like snapped sticks. All this reached Isidore as a mark of something like his brother’s respect.

  “Norm,” he whispered, knowing that sharing this was irrational behavior, but the frizzle wasn’t rational.

  “I kissed Lucille Ball,” he said. “That was who.”

  The frizzle didn’t want to go away; its goal was to shine as a bruised eye shines before the world with its message of This is a wound.

  Norman finally laughed. “You? Be serious. Come on.”

  So—not respect.

  “Give it up, Iz. I think”—snort—“I’d remember.”

  Isidore shrugged. Resentfulness squeezed out all other feeling and turned into the kind of jealousy that spears the chest and goes all the way in.

  * * *

  —

  AFTER TALKING TO Norman, he has kept his reminiscence private, visiting it with a kind of wonder, this secret that brings pride and feels problematic and that he refers to, in his head, as my concern. In the way that a father who’s raised an unexpectedly brilliant child—suspiciously handsomer and cleverer and stronger than the father had ever been—might say of his patrimony: “Well, that’s my concern.”

  Afterward, I’d hailed her a cab—so reckless, being on the street together—and watched her leave, he thinks. I’d given her my telephone number. And then I schlumped off to find Harriet and made my explanations. And she believed me. Harriet believed me. (I must love her, though the time together had been so short. Love Lucille, that is.)

  “But,” his wife had said with shy rapidity, “did you get hurt or something? You were so long back there in the theater.” And he’d realized Harriet was offering an excuse. Like a Rapunzel letting down her forgiveness to him, so that he might climb the golden offering.

  Harriet was the same attractive wife, with the same wide eyes, unchanged, though he half-expected her to have a bloody lip or a bruised eye or some other stain of his cruelty. He hadn’t wanted to cheat. (When she calls, I’ll just have to tell her no.) Honestly, he hadn’t meant to do more than come watch a show. That’s the horrible thing. Lust is a slave driver. Lust is the Mr. Hyde we all forget—until Hyde’s wretched rearrival. We all forget we have it in
us. And yet! Blissful slavery!

  I gave her my number—but didn’t ask for hers. Idiot! he thought. What if she doesn’t call?

  And after Norman, he thought he wouldn’t talk about it to anyone else. But he did—once.

  * * *