The Queen of Tuesday

by Darin Strauss

  He’d half-sat, his backside against the sink, and watched. The showerhead had come wetly to life. The bathroom gave the rococo vibes you get from any high-end place. Swan-necked faucets, lighted cheval glass, blazing white porcelain. Lucille had pretended he wasn’t there.

  She soaped her torso, hips, her thighs, she soaped her pinkening chest. Oh, oh, oh! In the attitude of a young boy at a brothel window, he watched. Lucille, water-spangled and stepping from the shower, flushed, glittery, daubed off all the little rhinestone shower drops—the slow, loving towel. She didn’t say a word; he didn’t, either. Lucille made a performance of delighting in the swerves of her own body. She was aware of his watching. Arching her free hand—it reminded Isidore of the arc of the faucets—she traced a finger up her leg. And then the towel again made its happy rounds. The expression Lucille showed the mirror was the same expression she’d worn for her filmed love scenes in Sorrowful Jones: Kiss me, you fool!

  Everything must end. After the bathroom’s chaste burlesque, Lucille walked to the sink. She leaned to the mirror for some lipstick ministrations. Silent, still, close by, Lucille powdered and tweezed. He watched this, too; it was a performance of deeper intimacy. Lucille had been letting him in on a secret. She’d driven her beauty hard, and because of that, it had taken her over farther mountains.

  * * *

  —

  “CAN YOU TELL us what you learned this week in school?” Harriet’s saying.

  “Aw, it’s Sunday,” Arthur says.

  Isidore’s family is at the table—children and parents. Apparently it’s evening, dinner already. He’s been dipping in and out of time, paying occasional attention to this, his non-Lucille life, his actual life. It hasn’t quite been unendurable. Just utterly beside the point. Right now is one of the times when everything’s dunked in the sticky milk of home life—chatter, schoolwork, chores, suppressed yawns. It’s less and less what he thinks of as true existence.

  “The Louisiana Purchase,” Arthur says finally; he’s now in the fourth grade. “We learned it in social studies.”

  “What is the Louisiana Purchase?” Harriet says.

  I will participate, Isidore thinks. “This is quite delicious, Mary,” he says to the maid, who is on her way from the kitchen for the night. “No one beats your sweet potatoes.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Strauss.”

  “You don’t know what the Louisiana Purchase is, Mommy?” Arthur says.

  “She knows,” Bernie says. “She wants to see if you know. Right, Mom?”

  “I’m not sure I know,” Isidore says, his mouth crammed with sweet potato, “and I’m in real estate.” After his sons laugh, he decides to keep smiling. But once a smile becomes a decision, it’s no longer a smile.

  When you suffer from guilt, and when your own actions make you pity someone, you either start really to dislike that person or feel a tender sad beholden fondness for her. Isidore is too decent to blame his wife for his dissatisfaction. That’s what he tells himself.

  I tried to get Lucille to work on a movie with me, he thinks. How stupid! Dummy! Maybe that’s why she hasn’t called.

  * * *

  —

  POST-L.A., HE BUYS Harriet stuff. A television, a diamond pendant, each a surprise. Flowers every week. Harriet must be bored. He knows that. Mary handles the cooking and the house cleaning—what does Harriet do with her days? He’s offered to pay for lessons if she wants to get more serious about the piano; he’s asked her if she’d like to get a job—though he’s told her that, of course, she should do so only if she wants to. No, thanks. I keep busy. He still takes pleasure in watching her with the children and in going out with her to see friends for cocktails, and soon, they’ll head to Miami for the deadest month in winter, living in a hotel, hiring a tutor for the boys. A new affectation. He has begun to spend lavishly, to take glitzy risks at work, and that’s all right. Harriet certainly hasn’t minded the spending. Over at his brother Norman’s house, out to the Copacabana, on a long drive anywhere, he’s felt pleased to have her company. Heading (for example) to a party for Sam LeFrak at the Hotel Astor, walking up Broadway, arm in arm, trying not to think about anything other than being here with his wife—Harriet asking if he’s all right—“Yes, of course, darling”—and when he turned, her unexpected smile raised a smile on his own face. His marriage was something to which he needn’t give himself fully. The edifice of his connection to Harriet was like one of those skyscrapers you see at night where only some of the lights are turned on.

  Oddly, he feels furthest from his family when he’s with them, on weekends. He can’t on those days hover around his office phone, waiting for Lucille to call. She said she would call, she asked that he not call, she promised she would call, and so he waits for her call. Why did I push that stupid movie idea? Well, I cared about it; I wanted to do something creative, Isidore thinks. He resolves never to try to be a creative person again.

  “Aah, I’m so wet,” Harriet had said recently in a growled and throaty voice. She was being passionate in bed. And her resultant facial expression surprised him—the serious intensity of it. This means something to her!

  The sex is rare but not completely absent. Mostly he claims to be tired, she has a headache, they’re pooped after having gone dancing, or there’s been an argument—but most likely, he’s just been distant. Ordinarily, having sex doesn’t come up. Mostly, he’s too busy hiding his sadness. But occasionally, a stray touch or look would lead to a kiss, and that kind of kiss would inevitably lead to the bedroom—the chaste, in-the-dark, missionary-style, non-dirty-talk bedroom. Except for this time. An early showing of How to Marry a Millionaire, Marilyn Monroe, the promise of cinematic romance, and then, when the lights went out, each reached for the other. It was tender in its way. It was like listening to a record playing through a small speaker. (Lucille, of course, was right there, blaring in the orchestra pit of his skull.)

  That sex had happened a week ago. And now she teaches their sons to make a hard-boiled egg; Arthur bounces a pot of water on his way to the stove and spills some on Harriet. “Aaaah, I’m so wet,” she cries, laughing. And there, right there, is the problem for him.

  Infidelity has revealed to Isidore that he is a prude in spirit.

  He once read that Jonathan Swift as a newlywed was angry to discover that his bride had to answer the gross calls of the body, belching, farting, the toilet. Isidore knows it’s equally ridiculous to deny his wife any carnality simply because she is the mother of his children. But knowing isn’t the same as feeling. He can’t help it. Harriet saying “I’m so wet” has made him recoil.

  He feels bottled-up all the time and has trouble sleeping. There is a kind of love with Harriet, he tells himself.

  * * *

  —

  HE’S DIFFERENT ON Tuesdays. Tuesdays, he watches. And that brings a sense of a world to come. The anger he feels at Lucille—why has she not called me?—goes.

  The monochromatic show misses the allure of her hair, the complexity of its tones. Isidore remembers one red curl flying at an angle over her forehead, where he made out a reedy black filament, a dark vital principle, like the head of the match burning inside the flame.

  “Are you coming with us?” his son Bernie asks. It is a quiet Saturday morning now. “Mommy said we can go get sneakers. Can we buy sneakers, Dad?”

  “Look, just—[sigh; lowering the newspaper]—what’d your mother say?”

  Isidore neither likes feeling angry at his son nor does he know, precisely, from where the anger really springs.

  “Coming with us, Dad?”

  He uncreases the New York Tribune and lifts it again. “No. No, Bernie”; he tries to read the sports page. He and Bernie are alone in the living room. DIMAGGIO BACK FROM HONEYMOON AFTER MARRYING STARLET. No escaping celebrity, even in sports! The telephone rings in the kitchen, and not even trying for tranquility he rushe
s to answer it. Would Lucille call me at home? Maybe I should’ve done more work on our movie idea.

  “Hello?”—(Oh please, oh please)—it’s a woman from Temple Beth Shalom, calling about a raffle. Isidore hangs up, shlumps into a chair.

  “Just come to buy shoes, Dad. Mom said we could.” The boy has followed Isidore into the kitchen.

  “I’m not going, okay?” Isidore’s voice comes out firing. The boy’s face appears stung. A bad father, too! No. Isidore runs a caressing hand up and down Bernie’s arm. Entering adolescence, the boy smells the slightest bit sweaty. “I’m sorry. I just can’t come now, Bernie. I have things to do at home. You know I would if—”

  “You’re reading the paper.”

  “Yes, well—”

  It’s impossible to keep his mind on what he’s saying.

  He smiles his goodbye to Bernie, yells his goodbye through the wall to Harriet and Arthur, and heads for the bathroom, where he can sit and think. How does the same word stretch over the dissimilar intensities he feels for his sons and for his wife and for his Lucille? He lights a cigarette. Love! He sits there without having lowered his pants. The varieties of the feeling seem like separate elements. Love and love. Someone knocks on the bathroom door. Yes—I’m in here. (It’s just Harriet saying goodbye.) Okay, see you all when you get back! Isidore drags on his cigarette and waits for five woebegone minutes. He is restless; his brain is twanging. Finally he opens the door. Finally the family has gone.

  He feels a chill. The idea had seemed so easy. It feels now like a risky caper, something almost cat-burglarian. He has a toolbox in his garage. That’s where he’s heading. Down the porch stairs, out to the front lawn (having barked his knee on the door), over to the garage (whose handle he fumbles with), he looks over his shoulder, preposterously, at each leg of this big little journey, who would be watching, and what’s wrong with a man going to his own garage? It is freezing out. Isidore’s not wearing a jacket. He thinks of his life. He decides (rubbing that damn knee) that he would have been okay with all of it, had he not met Lucille. Disappointment—and accommodation to disappointment—is a big share of marriage, of normal life itself, and most normal people accept it, and in spite of that, married happiness is genuine happiness, or at least a genuine protection from sorrow, as if the fortress that keeps you from the rain and snow and wind needs, in order just to stand upright, a bit of wood rot in its timbers. Or something. But then you see that not everyone is normal. And maybe it doesn’t have to be that way for some special people….

  Yes, here, the toolbox! On the table in the garage! Why wouldn’t it be? Some things that appear insignificant in fact matter. Isidore is breathing heavily. The fibs and mistakes; the lucky and unlucky coincidences matter. How thrilling to call her now, he thinks. She did give me the number, after all. The decision to go to Fred Trump’s beach party; the purchasing of a plane ticket to California; the having told your wife you were actually in Chicago—these turn out to have mattered, he thinks. Lucille saying don’t call was maybe a test. He brings his hand up to the toolbox’s latch; blinking, he looks off at nothing. She can’t be angry if I call. Can she? Why else give me the number? Isidore is not stupid, nor is he morally blind. He understands what having an affair means for people he cares about. It means he’s making a choice to be recklessly disrespectful.

  The box is filled with his stuff, why wouldn’t it be, the number’s here somewhere, I put it in the back, but, but, where is the slip of paper, it’s not here, where could it have gone? Oh God! Just like that, his heart is a barbell dropping through a stack of wet paper tissues. Oh, wait, here it is! She said don’t call but gave me the number, so that means call because she wanted to see if I cared enough to break her orders. Nope, this isn’t the number; it’s a ticket stub—chills, nausea, thundering palpitations, damn it—just a Broadway souvenir. He pulls the top drawer of the toolbox out as far as it can go without it falling, and then he pulls it farther, the paper is not here. Quaking hands. Crash. The paper is not here. The toolbox is on the floor. Spilled from it, there’s the face of a bandless watch. Some snapshots of his family. Keys to the lawn mower. Lucille’s phone number, the private number, the method by which someone like him can reach someone as famous as she is, is gone. She told me she’s harder to reach now. And Harriet knows, she must know, and that means there is nothing I can do. It is gone.

  ACT FOUR

  “Is there a less poetic word in the English language than ‘landlord’?”

  —Richard Brody, The New Yorker

  —SET PIECE—

  FLASH-FORWARD TO SEPTEMBER 2000. TWENTY-NINTH STREET, MANHATTAN

  IT WASN’T THE unrelenting hours in this shitty bed. Although that was bad. It wasn’t the humiliating visitors who saw you wrapped in tissue paper and nausea. Though that too was rough. (“All righty, chow time,” a nurse was saying.) It wasn’t even your mind’s always-present, never-voiced question. No, worst about the whole hospital mise-en-scène—with the ceiling-anchored television, the sham privacy of the curtain ring, with the embarrassment of being laid up, and that awful sickbay mix (disinfectant, plastic, the stink of shit) lingering on the back of your tongue—the very worst was the air of tragic tedium. The spinal ache. Your feet on hard, cold linoleum when and if you managed to make it to the bathroom. The scary phrases delivered in that all-lowercase voice of medical disinterest.

  A non-hospitalized person’s day is a mountain range. Peak and valley, event, rest. But now, for him—almost ninety and in a shared room off the ICU—waiting for his food tray, and wearing that scratchy frock, eyeing the mound his gut made, time was vast and flat, and gloomy with clouds of defeat.

  “Looks scrumptious,” the nurse was saying.

  Trying now to sit up for her. For Nurse Latavia. Wearing a maroon outfit, this woman—wide torso, powerful legs, sneakers that looked like white bumper cars—brought a meager offering. Tea in a paper cup. A clump of capsules. Some broth or other.

  “Uh-oh—one sec; hold on,” Nurse Latavia said, turning, and despite himself, he smiled. Hold-on.

  Pardon me, Mr. Isidore (Nurse Latavia was speaking in a too-sweet voice), I gotta check on your neighbor here….Isidore had been five days in this room and on his third roommate. The first two had been old and ugly and seemed not to want to live. Do I come off that way? he wondered. This current roommate (thin, mustached) looked young and fit but complained enough to get tons of care. “Oooh!” he cried. “Aoooo!” Men’s tears, like any rare and glittering commodity, get attention.

  “Back in a flash, Mr. Isidore.”

  The nurse moved more solidly than women did when he was young. (Yesterday, Latavia tried and failed to draw blood from his earlobe, and her chummy teasing about it so lacked sexual content that he’d felt unmanned.) When would Mona come? His sweet, brassy Mona. As if she were a woman two decades younger, Mona had pinched his backside yesterday when helping him do his doctor-mandated lap of the NYU Medical Center seventh floor. He was grouchy and responded with no more than a smile. Mona has been the great boon of the second half of his life. It’s good that she—who got to know all the nurses, who thought charm made the difference in everything, and who may not have been wrong about this—had yet to see Nurse Latavia lift Isidore and help him to the bathroom; Latavia could wear Isidore like a backpack and tote him around the halls, barely encumbered.

  Isidore used to believe about aging that you still felt young in mind while the body changed. Not now. He hadn’t slept well here, had nightmares when he did, felt heavily tired, in the middle of the unstructured days. When he lay there not sleeping, he obsessed over a word he wouldn’t allow himself to utter or form as a thought.

  “Here I come, Mr. Isidore.” The tide of professional duty had finally returned Nurse Latavia to his bedside.

  “Okay,” he said. “I just, ah.” He forgot what he’d wanted to tell her.

  Now the mind creaks. “Than
k you, Nurse,” he said. The mind suffers, no doubt, a similar malady to the knee. But I get around, even if it’s with a cane sometimes, he thinks. I tremble a bit, but just a bit. So this is not the place where I’m going t— He couldn’t finish.

  Or, he had gotten around with a cane; he had only trembled a bit. Having checked in here for a stomach complaint, he’d suffered a heart attack under the hospital’s “care.”

  The nurse, having returned, rested the little tabletop on his gut. Water, broth, a chicken breast whose dry surface showed white lines: scars on the face of a desert. Wisssht went the curtain closing around his bed now. Vast and flat time is what he hates here, almost as much as the word he won’t even think. Thank goodness for the bulky little TV over his bed.

  “You welcome,” the nurse said. “Where’s your lady friend?”

  “That’s what I want to know. Mona, she’s called.”

  “She’ll come.” Latavia had a solemn face and shrewd, half-lowered eyes. “She’s not gonna forget you.”

  The finality of that struck him. Mmnuh was the noise he heard himself groan. Death. Death. That was the word. Will it come? The never-voiced question.

  “You good, Mr. Isidore?”

  She smiled at him. Hospital people knew you’d been separated from your dignity, the whole of your dignity. And they were cheerful! And more or less demanded you be cheerful, too.

  Isidore felt himself being shoved, manhandled by cheerfulness.

  “Well, you can see, Nurse,” he said, trying for good-natured sarcasm, ending up at plain sarcasm. “Best day of my goddamn life.”