“Enough about that old bandleader,” she says. “What about you?”
“Me?” He sounds kind of exhilarated at the question. “My mother told me I was going to be the Cuban Teddy Roosevelt.”
“All right, you,” she says. “I like funny, already. But say something for real.”
* * *
—
ISIDORE LIFTS HIMSELF on his elbows and braces for discussion of the inevitable Harriet.
“But what do you want me to say?” he asks.
“Tell me about, I don’t know. For instance, if you hear about someone who’s sick, tell me about yourself, how you see that. Are you one of those people who sympathizes with the sick woman?”
“That’s the thing on your mind?”
“Or do you think about the husband,” she says. “The guy who has to spend her time taking care of him.”
“Wait, which one’s sick, her or him?” he says. “Seriously, why are you asking me th—”
“ ‘In sickness and in health.’ What would you feel, I wonder, if the ‘sickness’ bill comes due.”
“I would, I would be there,” he promises. Stupidly, pointlessly. He’ll never be asked in earnest to make that vow to Lucille. Though he is here now. Harriet has been so present in the folds of his life that he’s seen her historically. Once upon a time, his wife had been the girl who answered the door to a favored suitor, leaning into the threshold Katharine Hepburn–style, jaunty and smiling a la The Philadelphia Story, saying, “Hello, you.” And young Isidore, having rushed from his father’s office, this being 1938 or early ’39, would perspire on the spot, breathing heavily. His collar scratchy and tight on his strong neck. He’d then cradle Harriet’s elbow for block after block to Brandt’s Flatbush theater, where they had to themselves the whole swooning balcony, and this meant they petted, even before the newsreels, and more than petted; Isidore threw open her fur-collared coat, unwrapped her scarf, which felt like unwrapping the package of her—der gantser shmir—and Harriet leaning back and sighing, and giving Isidore a sense of falling right into who she was, right into all that warmth. Who cared that his friends didn’t see this side of her? She was giving him this! And still, her legs closed closed closed to him, and one evening was the evening when she quit holding those legs closed: and he took this as a profound welcome, in 1938 or early ’39. She did have a personality then. Or he thought she did. And for a long time after that, she’d breathed sighs into his ears, nipped her teeth into his shoulder, until she didn’t.
And now here he is in Los Angeles.
Still, the history. The countless little details, through which, in her noncelebrity way, Harriet has made him feel loved. Her surprisingly wild dance steps, her weekly or biweekly playing of the piano for him, the vacation mornings and the nighttime drives home, and more things, and of course still more, her having mothered his sons, for one; not to mention, well, the still pretty legs and the forceful, sexy, Ball-esque eyebrows of her own. And Isidore has to acknowledge that, no, he hadn’t ever been gravely unhappy in his married life, but in order to experience this hotel room moment, he must tell himself that it’s been less like a real joy than a blankness. It all does look a bit pathetic when seen from a bright hotel in Beverly Hills. But even now he can’t lie enough to convince himself that, in his cozy suits and breakfast smiles—at the front door in the morning when he kisses her cheek and grabs the paper and scoots off to the station—he’s been lumping around in his life without having ever been satisfied. He can’t say that. Isidore has been satisfied. But the light that shined from that word—“satisfied”—has now sputtered and gone out. Celebrity sin has convinced him that his marriage, as he thinks about it from this celebrity bed, is like tilling the same crop over and again on a field of lessening returns. Lucille and Desi never had to do chores.
“How you would handle a sick spouse would depend,” he’s answering now, “on the spouse, I guess. With kindness and understanding, if she deserves it.”
“Ding ding ding. Right response,” Lucille says. “It’s important. What kind of person you are. Caring, or the opposite.”
His skiing finger is back; it takes the moguls of her ribs. Soft skin, warm. Sometimes regret is just the determination to begin acting more selfishly from now on. While guilt, on the other hand, asks you to practice self-denial. Each is a tyrant, he thinks. Each keeps working to overthrow the other—and the disputed kingdom is my brain. Oh, don’t be so pompous. He moves to suck on Lucille’s shoulder.
“So, your wife,” she says.
His open mouth is arrested halfway to the target. “My turn now?”
“I talked about the Cuban.”
“Certainly, you did.” Leaning on elbows once again.
Lucille looks discomfited, the swoops and cords of her neck, the skin freckled under the collarbone. “Tell,” she says.
It’s a surprise, this humorous jealousy of hers. Other than in a commercial on last night’s TV, Lucy Ricardo hasn’t been seen at all around here.
What should Isidore say?
“She’s, you know, a housewife, but…well, pretty. Harriet. Kind of a Jewish Joan Crawford, but more shy.” He doesn’t say that she has kind of a peaked nose and sexy lipstick. He doesn’t say that the first word his wife’s name brings to his mind is “circumspect” or that she is smart and even witty, in a low-wattage way, but that sometimes it seems her wit and her smarts have been interred deep in the ground.
“She’s clever,” is how he puts it, “but she doesn’t get much chance to show it.” And maybe that’s my fault.
This is a celebrity-grade brood. Pleasurable, in a way. As if cheater’s guilt is a decisive expression of the stylish adult. Except, don’t think about Bernie and Arthur. Get your sons out of your head.
“Pretty?” Lucille’s saying. The pause that follows comes across as comic, isn’t meant to be. “How pretty?”
He falls back by her side, gazes at her face. She looks vulnerable on the tousled bed.
“I have something for you,” he says.
* * *
—
IT’S AN ACT of bravery for her to read standing at the window, naked. She got up from bed, a minute ago, carrying a loose scribble of pages.
The curtains are mostly drawn. Even so. Through the rift of curtain, anyone outside still would see a sliver of Lucille. Famous shoulder, immortal hair, just a peek of the soft-limbed star. Standing there is a tiny, nude rebellion.
“It’s—” Not finishing the sentence. Serious, biting her hangnail, engrossed, she is reading.
People always offer me stories, she thinks. Well, people would if she came into company with more of the unfamous. But Hold-on had called himself a writer, and so: She can hardly be expected to lie down with him and not read this. But is it good? Does she feel used? Does she want it to be good?
Okay, well, hmm. Yes, all right, see, right there. A little glimmer. Here, too. She tells herself she’d caught a hunch right off—faint, to be sure; performance wasn’t Hold-on’s line—a foretaste of something, a hidden specialness. There had to be. Oh, wait now, more than a glimmer here, in this paragraph. Why else would I feel this for him? she asks herself. In a good movie treatment, there’s a tug, even in outline form, that goes into the cool white fibers of the story. (But what do I feel for him? she wonders.)
In 1863, Meriday Edgefield, an educated, freed black man, joins the 10th South Carolina Infantry, African Descent, a regiment of black soldiers, largely ex-slaves, who fought deep into Confederate territory…
“He’s a Negro,” she says, turning.
“Light-skinned,” he says, then: “Yes.”
“All right,” she says, “but.” Smiling, shrugging in disparagement of his naïveté.
Lucille speaks—“True, it is a good story”—her voice slow and stained with regret. It’s November. Not long before, a black man named
Oliver Brown sued the Board of Education that had required his daughter to schlep her classwork a daily hour when a better school stood five blocks from her house. This past December, the Tuskegee Institute declared that year the first in seventy not to see any lynchings. In January, someplace called the Highlander Folk School held a course in civil disobedience promising a new and better future to its students, including one young woman named Rosa Parks. At the window, Lucille reads now.
“How could we cast it?”
Correll and Gosden were great as Amos ’n’ Andy on the radio. But when they tried to move out into a blackface film, audiences didn’t like following the curve to a surprising awareness: The actors were white. And that was twenty years ago.
“But they have a program on this year, isn’t that so?” he says—meaning Amos ’n’ Andy on television. And those characters are now played by black actors.
Yes, fine, but that’s a comedy….
But even as she said it, she was thinking of a possibility. Could be another Gone with the Wind, but a corrective, too—brave, unlikely hero, American soldiers, a Civil War quest. It could be Cecil B. DeMille meets D. W. Griffith. Lucille goes back to reading that now feels like more than reading. Dials have been spun, lightning has struck the cathodes, what had been inanimate now rises off the gurney. I can see this Meriday person, she thinks. As ubiquitous as they are, television screens are small. What if I could make a film myself, direct a film, a serious film, she thinks.
* * *
—
“JEWISH,” LUCILLE SAYS. She’s back in bed a short ninety minutes later, next to Isidore. That after-sex feeling of closeness, of calm sharing. “Is that important to you?” Her head is on his shoulder.
“You mean”—patting her hair—“my being a Jew?” Her non-kinky hair.
“Well, you said your wife. When you described her, she was Jewish, you said.”
“But why”—How important could it be; I’m here, aren’t I? he thinks—“d’you ask now?”
“Your story, the movie, the black fellow is an underdog. Jews always fight City Hall. It’s a thing with you people.”
“Oh.”
Moving her head to look at him. “That’s your I think she’s bigoted response.”
“It’s, no—it’s my Trying to come up with a good answer response. I’m finding myself fond of Christians lately.”
“Jews think about being Jews, is all I mean. I never think about being Christian. Jeez-o-pete, I was just accused of communism. Now I want to do a movie about a black soldier?”
“And lie with your head on a Semitic shoulder.”
Lucille was born (Isidore’s read somewhere) a Baptist. And what about him? He has wanted, synagogue attendance or no, to fit his life around at least the general shape of godliness. He has felt the Almighty in his life and, surprising to the sinner he is, never more than he does right now.
“I don’t want you to think I’m giving Jews bad press,” she says.
“Oh, has the press been good?” he says. “To be a Jew after the Nazis is like being a St. Louis Browns fan.” Where is this coming from? he wonders for the tenth time. This quipping is not me. I would usually smile and think too long about what to say.
“The Browns,” she says. “Are they good?”
“Haven’t won the series even one time.”
Why this need to spread his wings, why this need even for wings? he wonders. What makes me think I’m so special?
Could he just go home, that familiar, obsolete place? After these two unthinkable days, how will he again pick up his small-scale concerns? After all this kissing slowly and without fear of interruption? Hold-on and Lucille. Each of them is to the other the first new person they’d had sex with, or seen naked, in a decade. At first, they’d felt their own bodies to be spotlighted and magnified—flaws swashing everywhere. But when Lucille noticed Isidore’s squirminess (he wasn’t an actor and lacked the actor’s ability to disguise nerves), she made a joke: “Extree, extree! Read all about it! Middle-aged man has middle-aged body!” And then she’d kissed his belly button.
“Let me get myself and my people some good press,” he’s saying now.
And he slips himself out from under her head; in a deft transposed movement, he is above her again.
They both laugh. But if you look you can see that they’re each a little afraid.
* * *
—
HE HAS TO phone Harriet and the boys. That’s the only bad part of today. But he has dawdled. In the dawdle there’s a temptation that grows with the wait. Isidore’s hand hovers above the phone. The temptation pulses in the lull: Don’t phone her. But…
“Har?” he says, after the rigmarole with the long-distance operator. “Hi!” He blushes with guilt—this is not luxuriant, glamorous melancholy, after all; this is the worst guilt. This is self-hate.
He’s still in bed, Lucille next to him. She can’t allow him privacy; when one is famous, slipping into the hallway and waiting outside a hotel room isn’t possible. And getting up to loiter in the bathroom is one pride-killing charade Lucille will not perform.
“Sweetie?” Isidore says to the phone. That word, love made villainous, really opens up in him. The next thing Isidore says—“Miss you, too”—doesn’t help.
Harriet is talking about home. She says something about baiting a mousetrap while Lucille curls to the nightstand for a cigarette, and Isidore’s helpless gaze floats along her stark torso, the skin, the vigor, the indefinable sorcery of Lucille Ball. Just concentrate on talking to Harriet, he tells himself. You can manage this. But the feeling (“Iz, the exterminator said to use peanut butter; rodents like that better than cheese”), the feeling eats away at the moment. Stretched out here naked under the sheets, he may himself as well be a floorboard infested with chewing rodents, and yet he keeps up the talk.
“I’m not sure the deal is going to happen here. Yeah, no, the, uh, land deal and all that. No. It’s, well, the zoning commission…” he says.
Lucille, without a word, squints at the match smoke, licks a squiggle of tobacco off her mouth.
He closes his eyes. Maybe he can fix how he feels. Maybe all the guilt-endurer has to do to murder his guilt is to quit doing whatever has caused him that guilt.
So, return home now, he thinks. His real life has pulled up outside the window and is honking its horn.
“Say hi to the boys,” he says. “Oh, I can’t talk to them now, no. Gotta go.”
When he hangs up the phone (“…bye, love you…”), he forgets that he’s got the power to commit that guilt-murder, that the gun is in his hand were he only strong enough to pull the trigger. But he experiences guilt as if it were one of the Almighty’s mysterious forays against us, like a disease, or a tree fallen on the head, something beyond not only control but comprehension. How could this have happened to me?
And Lucille too seems disgusted with him. That “sweetie” probably didn’t help.
Before, without lifting the thought to actual consciousness, he’d actually allowed himself a little righteous indignation. Harriet’s not exactly forcing me into it, but she’s making it very hard not to…and with a father who never respected me, how could I do anything but, etc., etc. But now, in the glaring awfulness of that phone call, he imagines something: Harriet sitting in a theater waiting for some movie to start even though the projectionist has locked up and the screen turned dark as every other patron has up and left.
But now the call is over.
Lucille leans at a kindly angle, lays her hand on his forearm. “I’m sorry,” she says. “That was hard.” The breasts she is seemingly unmindful of sting his eyes. His body is wild with them.
“Thanks,” he says, looking away. “Hard for you, too, listening.”
“Yes,” she says.
“Well, there you are,” he says.
S
he leans and stubs out the cigarette. He says, “Do you want to maybe call your daughter or something, say hi?”
“No,” she says.
Lucille tears the slit to open a new pack of Fatimas. She plucks out a cig, takes a look at it, and lays it on the bedside table without smoking it.
“No,” she says, turning back to kiss his chest, and it’s not Lucille’s bankable magic that relights the candles of fantasy. It’s what Isidore sees in her eyes: the defenseless, flagrant intensity of feeling. Harriet doesn’t look at him like that, not anymore. “I’m right here,” she says, her kisses moving downward.
Just like that, Isidore is in love. He is in lots of it.
* * *
—
IT WOULD BE reckless. There’s no way. It’s not feasible, she thinks. What, I just drive him to the airport?
“Front desk, please.” Isidore sits on the lip of the bed, tying his shoe, the receiver between his shoulder and face. Checking out after two and a half days. “Operator, yes, it’s room 317. I’d like to reserve a taxicab. I’m going to—”
“Hang up,” Lucille says, breathily. Yes, I will drive him.
Being decisive! It’s like realizing that you can speak in another voice. Or realizing that your own voice, it so happens, has another register. Desi has been the businessman. The pusher. This new register is her own.
Friends who’ve driven in Lucille’s white Sunliner remember the weirdly caressive sensation of the leather, the mellow clutch, the dashboard flowers thirsting in the sun—the floral scent. Each Monday, a deposit of new white carnations appears on her dash, courtesy of Jess Szilárd, or Szilárd’s assistant, who has a key.
The Queen of Tuesday Page 19