PLACE IN THE SUN
Vacation Starts Early for Some
Local Families
[photo feature; caption for photo on bottom left of page]
Traditional deck snack of bouillon and sandwiches is served to Mr. and Mrs. Isidore Strauss of Great Neck on their return trip from Latin America aboard the SS Homeric. After all, would you bother to watch your waistline on such a jaunt?
* * *
—
YES, ISIDORE AND Harriet have found their own way into the newspaper, and merely for going on a summer cruise—where they sprawl and bake themselves across chaise longues, spend three hours in Panama, and slice up the Atlantic without thinking much about being in water. Isidore had suggested, and taken, this trip in a state of unspoken apology. And supplication. “Yes, Harriet, I’m having a great time—you?” His kids are back on shore, at summer camp. His guilt seems always (like his wife) with him. For weeks Isidore—when he remembers to try and shake off his obsession—has been extra-attentive. Caress, shame, irritability, ambivalence, even jealousy take turns in a kind of offbeat rhythm. But right now he’s brooding in bed. With his chest to Harriet’s back, her wearied exhalation the only sound. “Hey,” she says, turning over, not asleep after all. Every once in a while, a panic crashes into her eyes. “You’re having fun, right?”
“Yes, I’m having a nice time—you?”
In the morning they pass a man and his wife, the guy touching his sweaty hairpiece under the sun. I’m just like him, Isidore thinks. We all are. Wigs, a girdle, some pancake makeup. A beard over a weak chin. The body and its faults, the body and its vain wishes: Being an adult means you have secrets you cover.
“Me?” he says. “Having fun, yes.”
She holds out her hand to his cheek. That seems to be her thing now—reaching for his face. Did she always do this? He can’t recall if it’s new.
Marriage once seemed easy. He used to tell single friends. He knows Harriet still believes in that feeling. She may sense it going, but she believes. It wasn’t even that he’d felt the marriage decline. No, the marriage had always been all right. Once, at a Madison Square Garden Knicks game, Isidore had been quite enjoying his seats until a friend who worked there sidled up and offered him a courtside ticket. That was kind of what it was like having sex with a famous redhead comedienne. Or maybe better to describe it as like a snowy field that didn’t know it was cold; but then the first rays of warmth came.
Maybe I’m crazy, he thinks. Maybe one is lucky just to have tickets to the game, wherever one sits.
“It is fun, isn’t it?” Harriet’s saying now, the reel and splash of a Wednesday evening. “On the boat.”
Figure out something nice to say, he tells himself. There’s a big band in the ship’s dining room. The menu is crown roast or creamed chipped beef on bread, with baked potatoes and green bean casserole, and a surprising reserve has seized Harriet and Isidore both. Well, she’s often shy. Maybe it’s that. Now he’s tilting a lighter to her cigarette. The intense red of her lipstick. They had talked for a while about “that little white hotel” in the Catskills they’d gone to just before Bernie was born, the really fancy molding the place had. But now that’s done. The music gets louder. And Isidore leans nearer and has to sort of shout. “You’re such a fun person, Har!” He hasn’t planned on this, but it feels important now that he stop behaving prosaically. “No, no, I mean it! It’s so lovely, really lovely, just to spend time alone! I—do love you!” He feels his mouth crimp with a yearning to say more. Something that will erase what is unerasable. And there is in Harriet’s eyes a look of luminous craving. She needs him to go on. “I mean!” he says. “Sometimes I—forget how funny you are! When it’s just you and me, I mean. You’re really a very humorous person!”
If his wife has been truly funny it hasn’t occurred to him before—and he’s never imagined he fell in love with her for her humor. But now he’s convinced that what he’s saying is true. She does joke around, sometimes. And all of a sudden, the pleasure of a secret disclosed has come over them both. Isidore thinks this is the first genuine thing he’s said in a long while. It has the thrill of a furtive but real intimacy. When it’s just the two of them, she can be funny. Yes! Now and then.
Harriet’s look intensifies and then restores itself. “Oh, right,” she says. “Like I was the one who had them laughing that time at Kutsher’s resort.” Maybe what he’s said has been off base. But she’s felt that intimate thrill, too. Hasn’t she? Finally, appreciativeness or fond disbelief lifts her eyebrows.
“Isn’t it hot in here?” she says. “It’s loud and stuffy, and I want another cigarette. You feel like going out for a smoke?”
He pats his jacket pocket. “Left my pack in the cabin.” And he doesn’t smoke her brand, anyway.
“Oh, well.” Her voice, her appealing voice, often so shy, takes on some added charm: She sounds a bit frisky. “Come watch me have a cig,” she says.
And it’s a nice moment, out on the deck. The sun, before setting, rolls through the white of the clouds. Isidore lights Harriet’s cigarette.
“Listen, I don’t want you to—you seem kind of…Wait.” She tilts her head. “It wasn’t the molding.”
“What?” he says. Then, smiling, “No, it wasn’t the molding.”
“The ceiling. It was the ceiling at that white hotel, how it was decorated.”
“Yes,” he says. “I think it was.”
She pauses a second, her pointy nose pointing up as she blows a vertical rush of smoke. “You didn’t correct me,” she says.
He flushes, too red, too much for the situation. “I just wanted, you know, the Golden Rule—no one likes to be corrected,” he says. “Wouldn’t be nice.”
She stubs out her cigarette on the railing. “Remind me to ask you not to be so nice, then.”
This is the silken, feisty side to her. Isidore’s trying to feel moved and also doesn’t want to feel moved.
“Ooh, I know one, Iz. What do you do if the boat gets sick?” Dramatically, she raises another cigarette to her lips, and he lights it.
“Take it to the doc,” she says. “Get it?”
He shades his face with a hand to look at her. “Good one,” he says.
Harriet tells jokes the rest of the evening. She tells a joke the next morning. One’s about a widemouthed frog, and she makes faces and everything. “One day, a, er, what is it? A widemouthed frog decides to take a walk.” And Isidore eases back in bed, surprised that she is actually telling it.
Another: “You know that little bump when the ship pulls into port?” She’s holding his arm as they walk the deck. “That’s pier pressure.”
Harriet’s jokes never go all the way up. She gets them onto the elevator, but whatever button she pushes, they rarely make it out of the basement. Bless her for trying.
Another: “Do you want to go Dutch?” Harriet says this at dinner because the meals are already paid for. Trying, trying.
“I don’t look good in pointy wood shoes,” he says, working at it—working to tunnel into the missing fineness of something, the skeleton of what he felt with Lucille: that unresurrectable shell.
“It’s not the clogs as much as the flat caps,” Harriet says, sounding cheery.
Would he smile back?
Isidore again looks up at the lowering rags and pinks of the sky. But it’s not like the solace of a sundown lasts. Or even is a solace that means anything, Isidore thinks. It’s just sun, it’s just cloud. It’s just God’s concealment that makes us fill these empty things with meaning. It’s just the same hand in yours for decades. It’s not glamour.
I Love Lucy is a time machine. Every week it takes him back: newspaper photos inadvertently flipped to, recounted jokes inadvertently overheard. Other passengers talk, as people do, of popular culture. “It’s the worst part of the cruise, missing that program
!” How can the mental scab form?
“Have you ever seen a funnier woman? And that husband, with his accent!”
Whatever expression hearing this has brought to Isidore’s face now must resemble a look of husbandly love. Harriet meets his eyes with appreciation. “Thank you for suggesting this cruise,” she says nuzzling closer.
He goes back to telling her: “It is fun here.” And: “Try the bouillon” or “Try the shuffleboard.”
Post-Lucille, when Isidore had first seen his wife naked again, he’d been surprised by his own oddly prudish reaction. He dropped his gaze. As if his innocence—so decimated by wrongdoing—had returned in a surge. Like an overreactive immune system. Attacking everything. He’s carried this quirk of priggery to this cruise. What’s funny is, after Lucille, he’d remembered Harriet’s recent passion as having been kind of pale; but now, out on the water, in the July heat, atop the starched white bedding, there is a feverish, sunstroked quality to her, as there had been in the newlywed years. “Come here,” he mumbles and gasps now. Emotion makes the words hard to get out. “Oh, oh,” says Harriet, as he kisses her cheeks, her eyes, her neck, he squeezes her arms, too hard, her shoulders, buttocks, hair, his hand to her mouth finally presses on her startled gasp to stifle the sound. Forgive me. Forgive me. I do love you, he thinks.
But that is only his body.
* * *
—
LIKE MANY PEOPLE whose bad behavior forces them into further bad behavior, Isidore has come to feel annoyance at the person he’s sinned against. This is gross, and he knows it, and that makes him feel even lower. Still, though—annoyance. At Harriet. She should, in bed, detect on his body the contours of someone else. The physiological effects would’ve been obvious to her, he thinks. If she loved me. The change in the taste of his sweat has escaped her, also the new way he comports himself under the sheets. “What,” she hasn’t asked, “is that new thing you’re doing?” As a wife, she’s remained oblivious. She can’t spot the cause of Isidore’s brief, unexpected incandescences. She can’t spot the cause of her own new and frequent downheartedness. She can’t spot that her requests that he do chores, and even the timbre of her “Hello, Strauss residence, who’s calling?” really annoy him now.
Not that she always takes his bad behavior.
* * *
—
“JUST SAY WHAT the hell it is that’s bothering you, Isidore.”
This is one of those infrequent occasions when, through the littlest of spaces, her anger has geysered right up.
“Nothing,” he says. “I’m sorry.”
The kids are just home from camp, and Harriet makes that sound she sometimes does, mnnh—that stifled noise that looks for escape.
August has kicked in gently for New York, humanely, without its usual roaring ambush. The family is visiting some empty farmland he will soon develop. They’re walking over grass now to find a spot for a picnic. That summer cruise, followed by this trip into the soft warm orbit of his family—maybe that’s the blessing Isidore’s been hoping for? The surgical cut that will slice away guilt and desire.
But he’d snapped at Harriet about how long it took the family to get on the road, or something, really just an excuse to snap. To release the pressure that’s always there.
Now Bernie cuts in, “Mommy and Daddy are fighting,” with odd jokiness—his little voice trying out the big challenge of derision. Actual parental arguments are so rare. The boy walks alongside now, tight socks, blue shorts, watching. It’s like a bullfight.
“No, no, no,” Harriet says. “We’re not.”
Isidore risks taking her free hand—the other holds Arthur’s—and that contact is what breaks the spell. It surprises, rare as it must be, the breath from her.
Harriet says: “Okay, well.” The anger wipes off her face.
“I’m sorry,” he says. Harriet can’t stay mad, no matter how hard she tries, and that’s a blessing, he thinks.
But why haven’t you called? Why, why, why, Lucille?
The grass reaches mid-shin and makes a very silky noise as they walk through it and everything Isidore says has the flavor of a lie. Even what may be true. “It’s overcast, but nice out.” He points to the clouds. “I mean, not too hot.” And then he decides to kiss Harriet. And Lucille Ball rests on everything.
She’d asked me for my phone number! So, why…?
Isidore ends up not kissing his wife, after all. Don’t be too nice to her. That’s how you avoid getting caught. Also, don’t hesitate when you talk—ever. Isidore stops walking: “Maybe here’s good enough, guys?” From Long Island, it would take fifty-five nonstop hours to drive to Los Angeles.
“These roast beef sandwiches are delicious,” he says. “Look, I was a first-class heel, sweetie. Sorry again.”
The trip back to Great Neck, through a fresh fall of rain, is unmemorable. Mind if I turn the radio down? I think we need gasoline. Hey, we made good time. Didn’t we, though.
CHAPTER SIX
IN MY GRANDFATHER’S hospital room, at his request, I found myself pawing through a briefcase that sat under a Burberry coat on a chair across from the bed.
“Found it?” he said. “I think this will be something you can use.”
I pulled out a manila folder filled with papers. “No one knows that exists,” Poppa Izzy said. “Did you ever hear I knew Lucille Ball?”
SOUNDSTAGE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA/GREAT NECK, NEW YORK/HOLLYWOOD GENERAL SERVICES STUDIO, MAY 8, 1952, LATE AFTERNOON
A MAN PAUSES, CHIN up, vigorous hands on vigorous hips, smiling. His biggest spur is an unchecked masculinity. And spread around him are his ambitions, a tangled majesty of cables and microphones and fawners—and all of it calls for his presence, while the generators hum. He isn’t supposed to be in California today. He isn’t supposed to be here, and this will end up an important fact.
Feet spread wide, dark eyes alert; he is happy in his anger. “You all know just enough to be stupid!” He says it with a smile.
“What’d we screw up, Desi?” This is Jess Szilárd, the producer, who sits opposite him. “I don’t see a problem.”
Were Desi Arnaz now to leave this set that serves as his television home, he might find his wife doing something in his real home—something that would make him angry enough to kill.
He says: “Jess, why do you think”—the last word pronounced as “thin” in the manner America loves already—“we have succeeded so far?”
Seven months after the first episode, Desi has taken to saying he is—and who’ll contradict him?—the best executive now in television. Maybe the best ever. It’s a fledgling industry, why not? All across America, cathode tubes have lost their minds over his wife and made her their idol. But that’s her genius. Desi goes about it differently. Across yellow pads he scratches mad diagrams, blueprints, administrative charts; with real flair, he makes compound lists of who’s failed at x, y, and who’s failed at z. He names businesses to develop or purchase, he draws buildings to erect, their flags tight squares in the wind. Preparation is the coin he hoards. He shows his jottings to big-shot friends and reports back. See that, Szilárd? Bill Holden thinks it’s genius. (Many of these big shots can more accurately be called Lucille’s friends.) Desi will chuckle, shake his head, and act out mock wonder: Just admit no one thought there’d even be a Cuban Louis B. Mayer. (He brings Cuba with him everywhere.) Treat me nice, gents; I’ll be a one-man industry. I’ll make extras stars and writers directors.
To his left, some gaffer now walks out of the stage-set kitchen; Desi knows the fake door will shut with a clang, then rattle, then creak as it swings back open—the way it always does. Desi’s never spoken to this gaffer and couldn’t guess his title; he doesn’t have the terms for his studio’s everywhere wires and monitors. At the moment about fifty strangers in his employ bustle around, yelling, jotting notes, rearranging the fake furni
shings, and drinking coffee from Dixie cups; he’s happy in his nameless kingdom where at every step some new unknown delivers his wants and needs.
Clang, rattle, creak.
“Well, I don’t know, there are lots of reasons we’ve succeeded, Dez,” Szilárd is saying. It’s afternoon, but it seems no particular time in this tall, windowless hangar—this somehow touching, flimsy, cut-up replica of a home. (“Your wife is why we succeed,” Szilárd knows not to say.)
Szilárd brings a hand over his own neck, as if that was where his pride were leaking from. This droop of the head isn’t a cowardly retreat from Desi’s high, steady egotism; it’s a nonviolent resistance. In the past, this worked. On most days some tiny redress would occur when, as on some unseeable incline, the littlest bit of force did trickle from Desi to him.
Not today.
“Correct, Jess,” Desi says. “You don’t know. You don’t fucking know.” What he is upbraiding Szilárd for, Desi couldn’t say.
“I can’t do everything,” Desi snorts, tapping his foot. Angry? He looks splendid, ecstatic.
This week had debuted the thirtieth episode, “Lucy Does a TV Commercial.” More people had watched it than they had anything in the history of the world, and that’s the truth.
A Western Union messenger just this morning pressed the parchmenty sheet from Nielsen into Desi’s hand. The news was very good. Very. Almost seventy percent of homes that contained a television—or, by another measure, almost nine of every ten viewers who’d actually been watching TV at that hour of that night—tuned in.
And none of this addresses the fact that if Desi left here now, he’d find Lucille in a compromising spot.
“Let us have,” he’s saying, “a peek-see at the script pages.”
But Desi’s actually looking up at the script girl in her booth. She is hazardously pretty. He says, “Slide me a copy, someone”—and keeps eyeing the girl.
The Queen of Tuesday Page 12