And none of this matters to Isidore, who is thinking, thinking.
“Funny, I don’t think Isidore’s actually ever watched, either,” Harriet says. “It still doesn’t start for a few min—”
Isidore—“Oh, let’s turn it on already”—skims across the floor to the set.
When Harriet had invited the Feinmans from Brooklyn to watch Lucy, Isidore had said, “Here? Lucille? You did?” And then a blast of heat, felt down in his socks, whooshed right up to his throat. I hope my armpits don’t stain this shirt, he thought.
But maybe he and the evening will be calm. His tongue has gone dry like a leaf in the oven.
“Yeah, yes,” Isidore says now. “I haven’t watched, ever.” It’s been almost two years since he saw his love.
To sit beside Harriet, as Lucille will be in that box with her singing husband? He’s been dreading and craving this. A thousand times he’s told himself that he’ll never, likely, meet her again. But maybe it’s all right. It may be an enjoyable proxy….
Gary’s on his feet—“No, Harriet, I got it. Sit, sit”—fixing himself a Pimm’s cup.
Strike one against Gary Feinman’s looks: his height, what little there is of it. Strike two: his suit. It’s obvious he can’t—as Isidore can—be fastidious over thread count, seam integrity, the value of negligible difference. Gary has had his jacket brushed and dry-cleaned within an inch of its life. It has a kind of poverty gleam. But above his collar, Gary is finely handsome. His dark eyes jump left, right, on the pulse of a thought. “Oh, is that what I think it is?” he says now as the screen goes dark following a station announcement. “This means the program’s about to start?”
It is; it does. First the string-and-brass theme—those marching, happy daa-daa-daaas. Next the counter melody, which consists of two jumping beans (ta-tum te-tum) hopping right into the ear. And the screen goes light. The title calligraphy curves like a woman’s delicious body. Isidore—to do something—analyzes his fingers. He can hardly wait. The black-and-white version of the unforgotten, never forgotten, ever present face. Let the first joke come. There’s a dot of grime under his left pinkie nail. With the first gag, he’ll be able, without causing suspicion, to look as if his tears are from laughter.
The camera shows us: Lucy flipping a pancake. She is beautiful, Isidore thinks; she is funny, she is charismatic, on Tuesdays she is the woman in America.
“Do you think Lucille’s that great?” Isidore asks everyone, no one, himself. He rubs his mouth where she had bitten him. “I mean, really? Do you think?”
“She’s wonderful,” Mona says. Lucille on the screen looks not leeched of color—more like expressed in pure silver. “I can already tell,” Mona says.
Pan in on Harriet; she’s smiling hard. “Isidore and I saw her, you know. On Broadway, not very long ago. Did I tell you? Quite beautiful.”
Gary nods and dreams: “That Latin fellow—very lucky.”
There have been few words spoken in Isidore’s adult life that feel as much like a vindication. Lucille/Lucy is talking to Ethel, the eternal friend….
Isidore stands. Very lucky. He can’t help having stood: all that energy.
[“I made Ricky a promise,” Lucille/Lucy is saying.]
Isidore’s walking, then stops behind Harriet’s chair. The Feinmans are too entranced to notice. But Harriet turns and looks. Iz, Iz, what are you doing?
It’s hard to tell with her sitting down, but Harriet is three inches shorter than Lucille.
Isidore bends and awkwardly embraces Harriet. She tilts her head and he kisses her and kisses her, forehead, eyelids, mouth.
[“Oh, brother,” says black-and-white Ethel.]
Harriet only begins to kiss Isidore back—but now she pushes him off; there is company here. Her eyes blink, then narrow, considering him.
The Feinmans are blushing for them.
Once upon a time, Isidore had imagined, without having quite known he was doing so, an alternate future for him and Harriet. A crazier life. As if some alp of emotion would one day appear, only to be scaled—new heights of bliss or maybe even giant, bracing fights. But neither happened.
Harriet, now embarrassed, thrilled, perplexed, says, trying to keep her composure: “What’s, uh, what’s gotten into you?”
Isidore answers with pointing and shrugging, no, don’t worry about me, don’t worry, just going to the kitchen. A silver satin pillow and swooping calligraphy is what’s gotten into me….
Joy, pain, horniness, misery, all of it. Why did I think I could withstand this? The cracked mug of his night: No matter how much humor I Love Lucy will pour into it, the joy’s leaked out.
Alone now, he leans back on that little kitchen counter next to his fridge. He’s breathing like one of those hamsters in a pet store cage—the scared little guys whose hearts you see ticking in their chests.
Televised laughter filters in now through the closed door. Isidore sighs. He shuts the kitchen lights; he’s not sure why.
Sometimes, thinking about Lucille spreads a feeling like warm butter over his insides. But she hasn’t phoned. There is no future with Lucille. No gooey warmth now.
Near his face, a mosquito bounces on its air trampoline. Isidore’s been too guilty or afraid to try figuring out how to reach Lucille himself. If that’s even possible.
The physical stuff hadn’t been exactly perfect, in fact it didn’t, uh—no, don’t think of that!—his memory jumps—he remembers it smelled a little chalky in there, remembers the photographs, Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart in black-and-white, remembers Lucille’s cold blue stare, and, okay, it hadn’t been exactly perfect, but it’d started out truly great (the snips of her teeth on my neck; the desktop’s edge biting into my palms; my erection that would outlast Stonehenge).
Out in the other room, I Love Lucy gives way to another show, It’s News to Me, and this passing feels like the fall of Athens….—okay, it didn’t stay truly great for long (Nervous about missing the moment I was too, was too…I tried to count backward, by sevens. I recited—Ralph Branca, Preacher Roe—baseball lineups. Ninety-three. Ninety-one. Er, eighty-something. Roy Campanella, Carl Erskine. I tried thinking of General Eisenhower, which didn’t help as much as you’d think; Stonehenge sank to grief). Ignorance is what kindles love with someone new.
There’s a kind of reverential not-knowing. So, how can an everyday intimate, with her blemishes and odor details, compete with a mystery? And how can a guy stay in love with the person whose every detail he knows? And how can a guy not?
Isidore groans, unzips his pants in his kitchen, and—is it wrong to hope for some peace?—spits into his hand.
* * *
—
AND A WEEK later, here’s Lucille, come back to the Hollywood General Services Studio, A Yank in Indo-China, that soundstage air torn by frog sounds.
It’s a sweaty temperature in here. She, almost without being aware of why, has come a second time, at the invitation of John Archer.
Perhaps the heat’s meant to mimic the Mekong. The director, Wallace Grissell, smiles at Lucille. “I do a lot of takes, which is just my approach.” He winks, genius to genius. “Perfectionism, you know.”
Lucille has to smile back. Her increased celebrity, seven months in, is an onerous splendidness. (She’d immediately left Archer’s dressing room last week, just after downing that washed-out balloon of an éclair, with nothing unchaste having happened, yet.)
A Yank in Indo-China is obviously—despite the boost that her presence brings—going to be crap. Archer must be aware. Why’d he invite her? Most performers are insecure, secretly. But some are not.
She’s stopped allowing herself to fret about infidelity in the almost two years since she and Hold-on had, had— She wouldn’t phone up a nonfamous man, that seems a risk, a transgression, a—
It is hard to think; the damn croaking
! There’s a Hollywood idea of a jungle mist to the air here, which honestly helps the gray in Lucille’s blue eyes. Small mercies.
Last week, right before she’d left Archer’s dressing room, Lucille had caught her own reflection—and Archer’s—in the makeup mirror. Two actors, framed by a TV screenish square. They’d both stood watching the glass, her lashes lashing; to herself, at least, she’d looked pathetically eager. No, I can’t do this, she’d thought.
And yet here she is, on set, to see John Archer.
Moreover, she understands the effect of her presence. Fame of her almost planetary magnitude is a kind of gravity. Grissell, wearing his thin-brimmed fedora, yells “Cut!” now and looks not at his actors or cameraman. He looks at her.
“Sorry, Miss Ball,” Grissell says. Sorry for what?
Every day thousands upon thousands write to her, send poems, photographs, some propose marriage, give flowers. A few have offered their children for adoption. It feels sometimes like a foot pressing against her windpipe. When people write about her, it is said that she is worshipped, but “worship” gives the wrong idea.
A clapper loader walks past Lucille holding a magazine of film, head down, his mouth pursed. Too nervous even to take a peek?
“I’m that bad?” she says.
She mimes smelling her underarm, har de har har, and the entire crew bursts into laughter. The director, the screenwriter, the star. They stop to laugh.
It’s not the kind of worship you see in a church. “Idolization” is a better term. A kind of civic kinship with a favored patron, maybe close to what the Greeks knew. Athena for Athens, Poseidon for Corinth, Lucille for America. Someone’s very existence felt as a sort of communal bond. Admiring her is close to a national duty. But she isn’t feared as a goddess. She may as well be the wife of the general public.
“Hey,” Archer says approaching Lucille. “Sorry, give me one minute, doll”—padding right past her, gone to chat with the screenwriter over some detail.
Oh, really? she thinks.
“People copy me,” Lucille had been saying just the night before. It’d been on the gray couch of her TV set; she’d sat feet-up on the gray table. (To meet the contrast demands of the camera, everything—players’ wardrobes, “books” in shelves around the apartment, flowers on the mantel, all of it—was stripped of color.) As she sat there last night, everyone had gone home, even her husband. The only person with Lucille had been Hal Brade, the makeup man.
“I could wear, I don’t know, a man’s suit,” she’d said, “with a shirtfront sticking out the zipper. I could dye my hair chartreuse. And still, a flock of housewives would look like hell in trying to be like me. I could chop it all off.”
“You suggesting I get my garden shears?” Hal said. His banter seemed forced, his voice pinched with nerves.
Lucille was always the last person here, and she often coerced Hal into being the second-to-last. When the cameras were off, the gray of this place could steal into your head. But she liked to go around returning scrap paper to the closet, collecting pencils. She was a pencil hoarder, a paper re-user. She told herself this had nothing to do with the snowcapped memories of Jamestown, where the locals in shaggy Depression suits hiked the streets all day because where else would they go; the locals who hunted squirrels and pigeons to eat or to sell, the locals who carried valises full of can openers or melting chocolate bars or yards of twine they’d found.
“On the other hand, isn’t that the very end?” Hal was saying. “People copying you?”
He’d become a trusted friend to Lucille. But for her, the truth was too complicated to answer yes honestly.
“Yes,” she said. “I suppose in a way.”
It was fun, and a thrill, and flattering—she loved her fans, but it was a bit disheartening; had the people souls of their own?—and somehow a little disappointing, as if to say, “This is what it feels like to attain your dreams?”
“You gonna meet John Archer tomorrow?” Hal said, his bantering tone dropped.
“How’d you hear about that?”
“Somewhere around the seventh time you mentioned it.”
“Listen,” she said. “I was going to see Ann Sothern, is how we met.”
“Great. What’s tomorrow’s excuse?”
He slid his hands to his kneecaps: the I’m going to level with you position. “Aren’t there public figures who—” He waited to be interrupted but wasn’t. She said nothing.
“Lucille, people with a public platform whose—position shouldn’t be—that is, maybe the risk isn’t…”
The back of Lucille’s head inched toward the wall behind her, as if Brade’s meaning hit her brain as a pushing thumb.
“I’m going there to lend encouragement to a new friend,” she said. After a second, she said, “Desi and I are fine.”
“Look, you and I are new friends,” he said. “The press. They would—”
She lowered her brow to glare her big eyes at him, a long, steady, unrelenting look, leave it, leave it alone.
“Desi has done well by you,” Hal said—and tardily added, “business-wise.”
“How dare you,” she wanted to say. I have to be the one to worry. I am unhappy, Desi carries on, and I have to be the one, she thought. Desi has done well by me? This impudent makeup man!
—Desi gets furious if I talk to another man, while look how he acts, showgirls, secretaries I’ll bet, whatever he wants and I never despite any of my suspicions ever did a damn thing wrong, but only just tried to make him jealous, a little, only just harmless games, pretending to have a crush on someone when I didn’t, or not answering the phone if I thought it was him calling, to make him a tiny bit—not even jealous, just involved. It was only just innocent games, at least at first, and then it turns out that the whole time I was playing these innocent little, er, this sort of little harmless scheming that normal wives do, while, in fact, he’s been actually whoring around! Well, I did burst in that time screaming my stupid head off about him still liking Betty Grable, when there was nothing between them—though looking at it now, who can say?—and I came in and yelled in front of his mother, and he said that should’ve tipped him off to not marry me, but I think he secretly liked that I wasn’t like his sainted Mama who took so much terrible humiliation from his father. But I take it myself, I take it and take it, Lucille thought.
Oh, you chump! She remembers the handwritten cards she left on his pillow when he’d first gone from her to do a show or two in Cleveland. Don’t worry darling—if you’re as conscientious as I am, we have nothing to fear. Yours always, LB. What a sap! she thought. Because after that show, he didn’t come home for three days.
“Look,” Hal Brade was saying, “I owe it to you to be telling you this.”
Do you know what it’s like to be out with your husband, or at that time fiancé, in Ciro’s or the Tailspin Club and the waiter delivers a note from another woman and you’re sitting right there? Lucille nearly asked this of Hal Brade. (“I don’t like to make you angry,” the makeup man was saying now.) Jesus! she thought. That story in Collier’s after our wedding. The interview procedure runs as follows: this reporter begins chatting with Miss Lucille Ball and then Mr. Desi Arnaz enters and Miss Ball leaves. It is not that she is so rude as to leave in person, merely in spirit….Miss Ball looks at Mr. Arnaz as if he were something that has floated down from above, on a cloud. But what happens when the person you love in that cloud strays and strays? Desi went out on a USO tour with Bob Hope and Mickey Rooney, and those people couldn’t even look at me after. My peers! she thought. In front of them he betrayed me! Not one could look me in the face!
Now Lucille started to build, with effort, a smile for Hal Brade. There’s a practice to saying exactly enough, or almost enough, to uphold your dignity.
“You have no idea,” she said. “You have no idea.”
Simp
ly one more woman swallowing down an injustice; if suppression were torque, Lucille could lift the Sierra Nevadas right over her head.
“Time to vamoose, Hal!” High-spirited despite herself. “They need to close the stage!”
—Even on becoming a father Desi cheated; even when the TV program began, the TV program I cast him in to keep him, he cheated. Internally, she chuckled now. Because, the thing is, if she were being honest, you had—sort of—to admire the brazen consistency. Charisma was a powerful intoxicant. And Desi got you to suppress yourself—for reasons you would never know. Self-doubt, cultural mores, love? She couldn’t leave him. She loved him and was famous for loving him.
“Okay, doll,” Hal Brade said. “You’ve convinced me. You’re innocent.”
Could a woman be called a cuckold?
A lot of time had passed since she’d talked to, seen, or thought about Hold-on. Not in any front-of-the-mind way, at least. He’d been shelved like the black-and-white books on the set’s black-and-white bookshelf. Lucille gave almost no suggestion to herself that Isidore touched her life at all. Still, a trip to John Archer’s shoot was in order.
“Thank you, Hal, for your permission,” she was saying. “Now let’s go.”
This discussion would add to tomorrow’s visit with Archer the expectancy and suspense of something right out of Hollywood.
* * *
—
FROM THE RICH soil of her closet, Lucille has harvested an outfit. Wing-collar shirt with Gibson Girl sleeves, a knife-pleat skirt she swirls before the mirror.
I’m impulsive, sue me, she thinks.
On this visit, John Archer seems nervous around her. It’s clear Lucille has come here specifically to see him. Yet Archer looks unsure. Hesitant.
He talks to the director, watches her. He tries to focus on the faux jungle, watches her. He shoots a take, watches her.
“You’re an Army pilot,” the director is instructing him. “Imagine the way a pilot handles his parachute….” (Lucille sits behind the camera, at what must be the outer edge of his vision.)
The Queen of Tuesday Page 14