The Queen of Tuesday Read online

  The Queen of Tuesday is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2020 by Darin Strauss

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Strauss, Darin, author.

  Title: The queen of Tuesday : a novel / Darin Strauss.

  Description: New York, NY : Random House, [2020]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020012804 (print) | LCCN 2020012805 (ebook) | ISBN 9780812992762 (hardcover : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780679643852 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Ball, Lucille, 1911–1989—Fiction. | GSAFD: Biographical fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3569.T692245 Q44 2020 (print) | LCC PS3569.T692245 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2020012804

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2020012805

  Ebook ISBN 9780679643852

  randomhousebooks.com

  Illustrations by Taufik Ramadhan/iStock

  Cover design: Evan Gaffney

  Cover photograph: Karen Radkai/Condé Nast Collection/Getty Images

  ep_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Act Two

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Act Three

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Act Four

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Epilogue

  Instead of an Afterword

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  By Darin Strauss

  About the Author

  Oh, the movie never ends. It goes on and on and on and on.

  —JOURNEY, “DON’T STOP BELIEVIN’ ”

  NIGHTFALL, THE BEACH AT CONEY ISLAND

  A CLOUD LIFTS, AND look—here’s Manhattan, tiara-bright and brash, American initiative written in glitter. It’s 1949. Hundreds of cars are driving from the city to the sea. Cadillacs and Packards and wood-bodied Fords. Snaking along Stillwell Ave, they stretch a tail for miles under a Warner Bros. sky.

  People are coming in the tangerine twilight to view a collapse.

  Hey, that’s your favorite celebrity over there. On the boardwalk, her white shoes scuffed black with sand. (If she’s not famous now, just wait.) She’s striding—confidenting—right into this party. And into the elation of this party. Banners promise or warn A NIGHT YOU’LL REMEMBER. Walking beside the actress, her husband raises his fist. She isn’t really sure he’s joking.

  Earlier, she’d been angry enough to throw a glass; he’d smashed her compact. Your typical knock-down-drag-out. Her husband’s not quite famous yet, either.

  And the actress certainly will remember this night. There’s a boy in suede gloves who’s botching it, failing to reach her. The gloves are lemon-colored: it’s a bright-colored time. Tonight, the actress will drop into trouble and watch the sparks in their upward flight. And her husband’s fists will be used in earnest.

  For now, the husband mopes. “It’s no good you keep insulting me,” he says, his accent having its way with the words. “I have to know this ‘torch’ expression. Can you explain ‘carry a torch’?”

  She says, “Just a habit men have of walking around on fire.” You recognize her—a woman who’s learned the score. “Burning yourself, getting singed, like that.”

  Another banner: A PARTY FOR THE AGES—Elizabeth Trump & Son.

  The actress feels chilly. That’s Coney Island in April for you. She’s also frustratingly unseen. The actress has bumped through life knowing what it is to be ignored, even by quote loved ones. At tonight’s party, she wants to be noticed by the husband she loves. But also, especially, by men she doesn’t.

  First she has to push her way to the boldface names at the water. It surprises her, a little, how the confident can darken a big, open beach.

  Partygoers have thronged to the tide line and the first pleats of brown sand. It’s like a religious ceremony where the theologics have been erased. These people are here to worship themselves. That’s only natural. Americans in this little breather from history stand pretty much alone on a cindered map. Every house needs a Westinghouse. The ad style is peppy, with pep and sincerity intertwined. Relax in casual slax. Make a date with Rocket 8. Across the country: fresh purchases and attitudes, fresh beliefs. Plus, it’s been sunny all year and the perfect song is always playing, at just the right volume.

  The actress and her husband start down the sand.

  In this moment, there is no city but New York City. The long Atlantic keeps pulse at the shore here. It’s glamorous. The air’s strung with laughs and the rattle of sequins, popping flashbulbs. But the actress has a problem now. Her last-chance break is simply not happening.

  She doesn’t consider taking her husband’s hand. Nor has he offered it. “On important nights, you louse things up,” he says. “Many times I just do not get you.”

  “Hey, that’s my line. You always make me come get you.”

  She—or the woman she has trained herself to be—is a bit excessive when not the center of attention. The high, provoking brows; bright hair pinned and lifted off the neck.

  “Don’t snap your cap, sweetie,” the actress continues. “When I accuse you for real, you’ll know.”

  The kid wearing lemon-suede gloves has to run over and tell the actress about the destruction that’s coming. It’s his actual job tonight. But will the kid reach her? His path across the boardwalk is choked by tuxedoed waiters and linen tabletops. The actress even from this distance is a woman of sedan curves, fantastic. Legs he’d want to die between. The kid’s driven by intensities he had no idea were in him.

  “Good luck,” the actress tells her husband. “So remember, the plan is— Hey, wait a second.”

  The husband piles ahead; he pretends not to hear. All around, partygoing women contemplate the beach, shoes in hand. And the actress is alone.

  This is a party with a political purpose. As is the custom at such parties—the shifts of bigwigs and schemes—the biggest and most important have together made their own scrum. The actress watches her husband jostle toward these fancy people, and she—

  She feels somebody’s stare. On her mouth, neckline, her throat. She moves a protective hand over the dimple in her collarbone. And keeps it there. Fingers on two hard dots.

  It’s the kid with the lemon-suede gloves: “Miss Puente!” He comes straight up. “Martha Puente, right?”

  She stops walking.

  “You know, the world’s never seen a destruction party before, miss.” The kid gleams with the importance of any teen given a duty. He recites his statement: “Ready, Martha—may I call you Martha?—er, ready to destroy the world?”

>   The kid, and with good reason, keeps calling her Martha Puente. Martha Puente is not her name.

  She knows what’s what tonight. The man hosting this party wants to get something obliterated. The actress is here to get something made.

  She isn’t Martha Puente, any more than she’s Diane Belmont or Montana Hearn. With those names, she’d been trying to catch something she’d almost found.

  The kid’s saying, “I mean, destroy metaphorically. It’s gonna be a hoot. Because…”

  What a time to be left alone here. She’s just schlepped back from Hollywood. Nightmarish trip! Los Angeles: a shuffle of faces and studio commands. Instructions about eyebrows, diction, about posture. Also about not falling for nice ethnics. She had been run through a showbiz machine that existed, far as she could tell, to conventionalize the neck length of swans for better sale to a nation of ducklings. (She’d sat through studio reprimands with parted lips and just listened.) But MGM terminated her contract last month. She’d failed as a movie star.

  “Miss Puente?” The kid’s scratching at a puberty cluster on his cheek.

  The actress gives her smile of special elegance anyway. (Her beauty can still draw a gasp when she smiles, when she pouts.) But after twenty bit-part years, although still kind of young, she’s also probably washed up.

  Another bad break: It looks as if her husband is holding back to chat with Nanette Fabray, of all people. Goddamn him. Nanette Fa-bare-ass?! Now?

  But hang on a sec.

  Instead of quitting and slinking back upstate—where the cold Chautauqua always springs tears from her face—after silently admitting, It’s over, I’ll never achieve, and also my husband’s talking to a harlot not ten yards from me, instead she surprises herself.

  “A hoot?” she says. She often surprises herself. “Kid, parties are for single women and cheating men. When you die, you’ll regret the things you did when you could’ve been home relaxing. Nice gloves. The name’s not Martha Puente.”

  And her brazen right eyebrow rises just a little.

  “The name,” she says on this April night two years, six months, and four days before her triumph, “is Lucille Ball.”

  * * *

  —

  MAYBE IT’S JUST an innocent little chat there across the beach with Lucille’s husband and Nanette Fabray?

  Looking over, she doesn’t notice that the kid with the gloves’s face has gone red. She’d done a few wartime “Martha Puente” spreads for Yank magazine, the Army publication. (The G.I.s had had fun with the centerfold, with the word Yank itself, General Ike’s hairy-palms-and-blindness campaign.) The kid’s standing here smitten, having kept that photo under his mattress all through junior high.

  He doesn’t know what to do. Say something to her.

  “It was only that…” He hunts around his brain for a suave line. “It was I could see right off you’re uh…” (Being an adolescent means running this kind of vain scavenger hunt every day.) “I guess I don’t know what you mean. You’re not Martha Puente?”

  Lucille brings her hand to his shoulder.

  “Kid, I’m in show business.” She smiles right at him. “I don’t mean a thing.”

  And he swallows, closing his eyes. He’s trying to make the moment a keepsake, like a photo, for later use.

  But Lucille barely registers the kid now as he gives her a foggy little—

  That’s no innocent little chat with Desi and Nanette Fabray. Male interest has made Fabray’s face beautiful. The eyes, the color on her cheeks. That is not just a chat.

  —as the kid gives her a foggy little smile.

  Maybe the world wants Lucille to fight. Or maybe it’s just the torch of her hair. The blunt call to arms of redheads. She appears to steady herself against a lifeguard’s chair. No one so glamorous will ever die, the kid thinks. (A woman of charisma makes you content with being ignored, so long as you stand near her.)

  “Well,” she says. “Off to rescue my husband.”

  “Okay, oh,” the kid says.

  But like so many people, he finds himself inclining toward Lucille Ball. “Now, of course, Miss…” Already he is touching up the photo in his memory, taking her hand from his shoulder and placing it on his cheek, emending general kindness into personal affection.

  Anyway, she is gone. “Let me get you a brick!” he calls after her. Too late.

  A jazz orchestra is meanwhile corrupting the sandy night a little. The lyrics—You may see a stranger—are very nearly articulated by the swooning horns.

  * * *

  —

  NANETTE FABRAY’S BIG eyes look to steal from each moment whatever it holds. This is why men have made her a star.

  Lucille’s crossing the beach toward her, high heels stabbing tiny sand holes. Nanette cries, “The darling Mrs. Arnaz!”—too late by a second. In her Juilliard voice: “Come over, Luce, don’t high-hat us!”

  Lucille huffs right to her husband and her nemesis (one of her nemeses). She has always had to carry the conjugal water, and that has made her strong.

  Nanette, she thinks: Stupid bitch.

  Desi does not wear a hat; even minor celebrities can sail above fashion. His scalp blazes at the part of his hair. (Lucille a half minute ago had caught the easy smile that Desi flashed Nanette.)

  “Hi de ho,” Lucille says, sounding distinctly unmiffed. Maybe easy smiles don’t mean anything.

  Nanette says, “Desi and I are talking about your TV plan, Lucille, which sounds to me like the absolute darb.”

  Easy smiles are not the rhythm of years. Easy smiles are nothing compared to the abiding beat of a shared life. (Lucille had missed it, but Desi, just before flashing Nanette his smile, had stroked Nanette’s hand with his thumb.)

  And the TV plan is a thing he is supposed to have kept secret.

  “Truth is,” Nanette’s saying, “I’ve been so gone lately about my Tony nomination. There’s been nothing else.”

  “Lucille,” Desi says, reaching for his wife, “come here, darling.” And it’s this warmth of possession that makes her finally despise him.

  “Ah,” Lucille says. “The big Tony nom. I thought they gave that award for theater?” Smiling, smiling. The tip of the blade is in the intonation.

  “Oh, you dizzy Dora.” Nanette laughs, an uncomplicated woman. “Why, it is theater! The Tony? Why, that’s the award I’ve always…” She stops herself.

  Lucille’s smile could kill daisies.

  “Lucille and I, uh”—Desi jumps in—“we are only in New York for the weekend. Isn’t that right, Lucille?”

  “How loveable you are when you consult me, Dez.” She’s fists on hips now. “You should do it more.”

  Is Lucille being mean? Hard for Nanette to say. There is that optimistic color to Lucille’s hair, her mouth, to her ten lighter-flame fingernails.

  “Was that a slight, Lucille?” A dying hopeful note in Nanette’s voice. “A crack about my Tony nomination?”

  “Slight? Not at all.” Lucille smiles. “I meant it to be substantial.”

  Nanette blinks and blinks like an offended Tinker Bell. And Desi rubs his forehead. “Now, Lucille.”

  Sqwauuhweee!—a surprising noise. Some beach birds are flying whoosh over the sand. Sqwauuhweee, wheeling around. The birds with their faces of beaked apathy kite on the wind. Gliding over this era as any other. But one of them hesitates in the sea breeze; it idles overhead like a pause in Lucille’s conversation.

  Nanette slaps Lucille in the face. Smack! Rudeness is being the first person to succumb to what you really want to do. And the birds circle overhead in a shape that expands and contracts, like a breathing constellation. A second blow comes. Smack!

  Desi does not budge.

  Lucille watches him watch Nanette move off, galumphing across the sand in her heels. (Only men would have planned a formal
gala on a beach.)

  Desi asks: “Why, Lucille?”

  I can’t dance, Lucille thinks, her hand to the fizz of her reddening cheek. I can’t dance and I can’t sing. I can talk. That’s why.

  Desi’s saying: “Jesus.”

  “Don’t bring religion into it, sweetheart,” she says. “Gets you close to some famous commandments.”

  But she will always love her husband, and hate him, and right now she thinks, Give me back what you took from me. Give me all that you took from me.

  * * *

  —

  TEN YEARS BEFORE, the press had named Lucille “Queen of B Movies.” They had seized Fay Wray’s crown of invisible plastic and set it on Lucille’s almost-famous hair. She can name the coronation date: January 23, 1939. It took Daily Variety two Page 7 sentences to end Wray’s brief epoch. Ball, the contract player on Phil Baker’s Gulf Headliner, also helmed nine low-budget program melodramas last year, including RKO’s Five Came Back. Let’s call her the new Queen of…Lucille had not wanted the throne—it was shoddy, its legs were shit—yet recently, the world’s unseen topplers had come to topple her. She had somehow believed they would never come to favor another woman. The new queen was Marie Windsor (I Love My Wife But!). So what comes after B royalty, after a B coup? Nothing, usually; or radio.

  At the time, she’d still had a program called My Madcap Bride, CBS 880 on your AM dial. Lucille played a character named Montana Hearn. The show had bumped along all season, but they canceled that, too. And now, despite her cheek that still feels hot; despite Marie Windsor, Nanette Fabray, and the gloved kid who did not know Lucille’s real name; despite her pride, her sore feet, her old wounds and many trials; despite the hundred-to-one of her mission here and even her husband’s many infidelities—despite her fisted hands—Lucille’s spirit rises a little on some sweet, get-started smell in the Coney wind.