Would he feel, when he got out of here, older still? Would he need more than a cane? Would the fog—the fog in his head, the fog of his aches—thicken over and on and in him? It’s ridiculous to—
“No no, none of this self-mockery,” the nurse was saying. “You good, Mr. Isidore. I can see that.”
She looked thirty, though he found it hard to tell. Being his age meant he almost never encountered someone his own age. Society made you embarrassed to be old, he thought. It didn’t used to be like that.
Bernie and Arthur thought it vanity that he used a cane instead of a full walker. Easy for them to say! he thought. Ah, but he loved being alive, even this moment is life, even just lying in bed, even an eternity of this he’d take, this vast, flat option. Resisting the use of a walker wasn’t vanity. It was heroic refusal to acknowledge the coming defeat. That’s what no one under eighty can understand.
I’ve been lucky, he thought.
He asked Latavia: “Can you please”—never knowing the exact time in here, somehow he sensed now was the moment—“turn up the television?”
The satin heart, the string-addled theme song, the elegant cursive, the feeling this all brought him. Or feelings. I Love Lucy reruns, 3:30 P.M. weekdays.
I was making illicit love to her one day or so ago in Beverly Hills, and now I’m here. That’s the speed of aging, the dirty trick of it. It’s a wonder people my age don’t all look like roller-coaster riders, hair blown back, eyes goggled in wide terror.
There she was. His Lucille, her regularly scheduled hospital visit. So there were events to his day, there was a peak.
“Oooh!” the man in the other bed cried. “Aaaooo!”
“Is that okay, Mr. Isidore? This station? I’ve got to check on Hector.”
“Yes, thank you. A little louder, please?” Move, you cow! Zip it, Hector!
The episode where Ricky has a gun pulled on him and Lucille (she was never Lucy to Isidore) is sweet to her husband until she wants to sing about the incident in the club. Funny, though Lucille defined the medium, TV never captured her—not her sexiness, her fierce beauty, not her carnality. Not the hair of caught flame, tall on her head.
Hold-on. Of course he’d never been called that again, outside of his cranium. It had been hell to lose her, especially the way he’d lost her. Anyway, now he loved Mona, he did, of course; the great boon and all that. I will love Lucille for as long as my brain works. Not loved, love. Lucille—that passion bomb—was the perpetual blast going off in him. That didn’t happen with Mona; it hadn’t happened with Harriet. He always knew he’d be a little more contented (if he could beat back the sadness) during those half hours he saw Lucille on the TV. Maybe Christians are right and we can be born again. A second, a new self began, when I met her.
“Waa!” Lucy was saying to Ethel.
“Oooh! Aaaooo!” Hector was saying.
Lucille had been dead for more than ten years. Inside him, their communication had and has remained uninterrupted.
I’ve been lucky, he thought. Blessed.
“You know, I knew her,” he said now.
But the nurse had gone. And a curtain isolated him from the man beside him. Ah, who cared. Lucille had been apart from him, and not. She was every watched episode, every image he ever saw of L.A., she was whenever somebody mentioned love at first sight. The years had shuddered by. And the pulse in the wound quieted.
Time is the key to everything. Give a protozoa a billion years and it could make Paris.
You can be in love with two women at once. If one love is conducted entirely in your head, you feel like you’re betraying neither woman, neither love. Mona was Mona. Lucille was different. Time and circumstance gave Isidore a Lucille-love that had no expectation or superfluity; he managed (mostly) to avoid feeling sullen about having lost her, about how he lost her.
Blessed. Part of saying the word was the thought that if God heard Isidore, He would reward the gratitude. So, trying to bullshit the Almighty. But also: Isidore was thankful. In the cooling, settled depths of who he was, Isidore felt gratitude. He’d been given a second life, one woman who loved him every day in their smallish midtown apartment; and a different woman who wore a black-and-white polka-dot dress and took him to the Oscars every year, who held his hand and in a practiced trot led him from the thronging flashbulbs and into a café that the gossip reporters didn’t dare enter. One woman gave him daily comfort, steady companionship. With the other he drank champagne and kissed the skin between her breasts (just as he had in reality!). He’d been going through the last portion of his life feeling secretly schizophrenic half the time and in that way found contentment with the woman he hadn’t actually seen in decades.
“What are we going to do about this?” Mona had said. And when she’d said it, it had been twenty-nine years before—could it really be that long?—when Isidore had first wooed her and left Harriet. She’d had her head on the hammocky part of his chest, that dip before the rise of the shoulder. The new couple had been having their first sleepover at his new, rented apartment in Manhattan. “We love each other. We do,” Mona had said.
A wedding would’ve suited Mona; her husband had died years before. But Isidore couldn’t have married her. “I’m sorry,” he’d told her. “Maybe sometime. You know Harriet, Mo.” Harriet had been her good friend.
This was in 1971, when rules were being reconsidered before they vanished.
He wanted to be happy, on this first night with Mona. No, he had not expected this sadness in his chest at all.
Don’t do this to me, Lucille, he thought. Don’t make me sad again now.
Back then, Isidore still often directed silent harangues at the Lucille he kept trapped in his head. Oh, Lucille—shouldn’t I move on? This kind of private broadcast went on all the time.
Besides, he’d thought he was doing the right thing by not marrying Mona. The moral thing. A divorce would’ve just about killed Harriet, who had by now started drinking. Okay, his not having to divorce would probably save him a lot of money, though that was a train of thought he didn’t want to board. Harriet had said to him: Whatever you do, please don’t divorce me. And when he finally did leave—I can’t, I can’t, I can’t anymore, Harriet, the drinking, the yelling, I’m sorry, I feel like I have no choice—he promised to take care of her financially for the rest of her life; she would receive whatever she needed. He honored his financial promise and at the same time he took up with her best friend. And yet he and Harriet didn’t get a legal divorce, and wouldn’t. She could still call herself his wife, and would.
“It’s okay,” said Mona, who was not sentimental. She was shorter than Lucille and thicker than his skinny wife—or ex-wife, or whatever she was—and there was a relaxed sensuality to her body. “No one has to know.”
“I’m sorry, Mona.”
“No,” she said, up off the mattress—a glass of water, she said, be right back—and on her return she said:
“No one has to be sorry. Promise me, here.” She handed him the glass for a sip. “This’ll be the service, Iz. No one has to know. I have to ask. I’m sorry. Don’t be sorry.”
“This will be the service?” He leaned nightstandward to set down the glass. “We don’t rub anybody’s nose in it?”
“Why won’t you even say her name?”
Whose, he joked grimly to himself. Which name?
The clock ticked twice, a taxi honked outside, and Isidore said, “Harriet. I can say it. Harriet.” He kissed Mona’s forehead. Harriet had made it impossible to live in their house once she’d started drinking. Such big nastiness from such a small woman.
“Okay, Mo,” he said. “Let this be the ceremony.”
“Our dirty-little-secret secret,” she said, not angry, not happy.
They kissed and without heat took each other’s clothes off—he nearing sixty, she at forty-six—and when
that was over they came to define and grow comfortable with their decision. They didn’t have to tell anybody. A real marriage wouldn’t be necessary or possible—and Harriet was the reason. And maybe five percent of it, or two percent, was a separate woman-based reason Mona didn’t need to know about. Regardless, he and Mona would live as if they were husband and wife. That was how he’d rolled up that old-world parchment, The Marriage of Isidore and Harriet. But he never shared with her the secret by which, in part, he defined himself, to himself. He was a bigamist of the head.
* * *
—
ON THE TV screen now, thirty years later, on the seventh floor of the NYU Medical Center:
Ethel, reading from a textbook: “Here, Lucy! How to win back your husband. If he hunts, take up hunting. If he fishes, take up fishing. If he golfs—”
Lucy: “Mine plays poker. I’ll take up poking.”
Lucille had accused Isidore of having been with her because—well, because her fame made the risk of their affair unreal to him somehow. Not true! But he wondered. As for her? Maybe it had been his normality. Maybe his normality had been the cure for fame exhaustion.
“Huh?” he said now, in the hospital. “What is this?”
Someone grabbed, was grabbing, his shoulder—hard. The pain grew, digging its nails into his arm; and it clawed through his chest.
All down his body it went now and felt very cold. He knew. But this couldn’t be the end; he was in a hospital. His own breathing sounded as if it came from within his body and outside his body. Thinking I’m in a hospital, he yelled for help. He yelled what he thought was happening. He screamed, or thought he did, but from his mouth no noise emerged. The unimaginable. That was now really happening. It was sinking onto him from above his bed. His scream of Nurse! had come out as “—!” A puff of breath, a voiceless cry. Up on the TV, the woman he loved was talking to her husband. Isidore knew he could reach a button, on the bed, by which he might call the nurse. Where, though? The curtain was closed. Oh, Ricky, let me come to the club tonight, I’ll be good. Isidore couldn’t see the call button. I knew it, he thought. His arm wouldn’t move. I just knew it. Through a rift in the curtain: The nurse who recently had been at his bedside was goofing with another nurse, swinging her arms, stomping her chunky sneakers. And she was laughing. Laughing and laughing. Nurse! Nurse! (“—! —!”) But the unimaginable, inch by inch, took him, numbing this limb, that muscle, closing the throat; now it infused his face with the oddest sensation, melting the external world. The nurse was laughing, he was dying.
Blessed be the name of the Lord…This is what his life had led to. The sadness, the great sadness of it. Trying to believe, to answer the lifelong doubts. Blessed be the name…
He would lose Lucille for good; even if the afterlife turned out to offer every outlandish, hopeful promise—even if he accepted this, and he didn’t, he didn’t, it turned out he didn’t—what claim would he have on that eternity? He and she, impossible anywhere outside his mind, impossible even in heaven. She’d had one husband and another husband and none of them were him. And yet the time he spent haunted by her gave his life, in his eyes, a heroic dimension. Harriet! he thought for the first time in months. Harriet, with her endearingly tough nose. I was selfish with her, he admitted, shivering.
He lay immobile in the bed, and his mind like a man trapped in a dark basement now ran around, looking for a door, frantic. But there was no door, there was no way free. His eyes were burning.
He was dying, he was dying. The bed had a plastic barricade on each side. Surprising to think about Harriet. Amazing to have been so intimately joined, to have your life so close to another that the roots get all tangled, then so wholly to break. Where is she now?
Time had slowed and accelerated in equal measure, it was disorienting. He began to cry for himself. There was fear, but not the fear you’d think.
A trifle, an incident he hadn’t thought about in decades, glowed in memory. Isidore’s then-young father taking off his hat to say, in his Russian accent: When you die, Izzy, your soul must find someplace to go, and that’s why you make friends, have children, build a home that you love, or plant a tree; that’s why you leave behind at least one thing you’re truly proud of, something to say that you were here. When you die, that’s where your soul goes. Judaism says that you live on in those places. Where and when you were proudest. Then I’ll live on nowhere, Isidore thought now. My soul will go to a love that died forty years ago and get buried there.
His brain’s grasp loosened, and details, starting with color—all around him—the pigment just went. No one ever got to see me at my happiest, he thought. Whole other things went too: bed, television, the moans nearby. No one ever saw me at my best. I was most myself in that hotel and no one I know ever got to see me. Only she did.
Really? Cheating in your head? You, Isidore?
Why were you not more like Zusya? Why were you not more like Isidore?
Out Los Angeles airport’s giant picture window, his plane flew away once more; and once more the shadows of clouds slid over 1950s California sand toward the Pacific. Dunes as smooth as Lucille’s breast. And then those images dissipated.
CHAPTER TEN
I WAS BORN INTO a parade that extended all the way back pretty much to the source of history, and yet the view didn’t extend behind my grandparents’ shoulders. Many American Jews had no more family knowledge than I did. The facts and even the names got lost in the erasive Atlantic. For a lot of us, that’s how it is. My great-great-grandparents were a void; my great-grandfather I never met and couldn’t cite his birthplace or even his last name before the mugs on Ellis Island changed it to Strauss; and my beloved grandfather (I was about to learn) was dead.
In the very slow-moving elevator, leaving the William Morris Agency, I got a call from my father. “I just heard from Uncle Arthur. Poppa Izzy…” he said.
Sadness—deep, instant sadness.
The elevator kept descending, and each floor-number lit up and went out, each stood bright and proud for its one meaningless second, like a bad idea in a line of bad ideas, going down.
NEW YORK, NOVEMBER 16, 1960
ALREADY—JUST THE SECOND date—their talk has gone into soft whispers. Words conveying more in the way they’re spoken than with their common meaning.
It may already be a romance; it’s definitely already a something.
“Okay, I told you about my ex-wife. And everyone knows about your ex—”
“Not yet,” Lucille says, pensive, and she blows shielding smoke. “He’s not quite my ex yet.” And she looks down at the cigarette she’s taking a long time to stub.
They’re eating in Danny’s Hideaway, the massive four-floor chophouse on Manhattan’s steak row. The man had begun the date by joking, “Wait, I’m out on a date with The Big Lady? Check, please!”
Okay, not hilarious. But from the first, she’d liked his gravelly voice, his easy-to-decipher voice. She likes that he teases her. (“I’m a nightclub performer, ma’am. What’s your line?”) She likes that Gary’s a creative person without being famous. It reminds her of someone. Gary’s ego (she decided) won’t be huge, nor will he be a drinker. He seems to listen when she talks. She also likes that Gary’s Jewish. It reminds her of the same someone.
Which is why it’s so coincidental when gravelly-voiced Gary says: “But tell me the truth—we’re sharing confidences all of a sudden. How do I know you’re over your husband? Is there—ever—I mean—did you love anyone besides him ever?”
To this tangled question, Lucille in 1960 does not have a straight answer.
* * *
—
IT IS A question that has vexed her before. Just about seven years earlier.
It’d been 1953. The Isidore visit had left her feeling plague-hit—knee aching from bursitis and swollen, a bulbous sty, five pounds added in a few weeks—and drenched
in gray emotions. And worry. And she’d been pregnant.
She’d said publicly that anxiety from the communism nonsense had caused her bursitis. Regarding Lucille, the conservative press hadn’t followed the rest of America round the curve from red traitor to red-headed patriot—not until Eisenhower intervened. An official White House visit. Lucille’s hasty heels crunching on the gravel. Some praise in an echoing room from that most potato-headish president. “So you’re the gal who keeps elbowing me off the front pages!” Ike rubbing the bristly white hairs on the back of his sunburned neck, then goodbye, good luck, an unspoken Don’t bother the nation with something like this again.
But really Lucille suspected that fate had punished her. What’re plagues for if not to chastise the wanton?
* * *
—
STILL TO HER amazement she wasn’t done climbing in 1953. The next year, “Lucy Goes to the Hospital” pulled the show’s (and the televisual medium’s) highest ratings ever. For much of that season, she’d been pregnant with her second child. The child whose provenance she worried over.
Was Isidore the father?
The very day Lucille delivered her baby in real life, CBS ran “Lucy Goes to the…” in which Lucy Ricardo also gives birth to her son. The real child was named Desi Jr., his TV analogue was Little Ricky. And a full third of the country’s millions watched. Because Eisenhower had been correct. It wasn’t just that Lucille, or Lucy, consistently out-Nielsenned the president; she knocked all other news out of America’s consciousness. TV WAS RIGHT: A BOY FOR LUCILLE (New York Daily News); AMERICA SAYS: LUCY’S HAVING OUR BABY (Los Angeles Examiner); LUCY STICKS TO THE PLOT! A BOY IT IS! (New York Daily Mirror); and WHAT THE SCRIPT ORDERED (Chicago Sun-Times). Newsweek and Time and Life gave their covers to the episode, too; the first-ever issue of TV Guide had on its cover a newborn Desi Arnaz Jr. captioned as “Lucy’s $50,000,000 Baby.” The dollar figure—by the twenty-first century inflated almost to ten times that number—was by some measures too small. No one was allowed to use the word pregnant on TV, but Lucille did. And the country celebrated the birth as a capitalist society celebrates any holiday: People bought shit. That was the $50 million: board games, Little Ricky dolls, books (Meet the Lucy Baby!), nursery sets, maternity wear, smoking jackets, bedroom furniture, even a hit single on the pop charts, “There’s a Brand New Baby in Our House.”
The Queen of Tuesday Page 23