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  Lucille’s next to Desi—Pinta in her lap now—and she hasn’t released his grip. With the other hand, she squeezes her chair. The dream keeps playing out. As for Desi, tense leg muscles press contours in his trousers. He’s quiet but far from uncommunicative—there can be a ferocity in silence.

  Lucille has a different approach. Okay, she thinks. Letting go of the chair, lighting a cigarette. Showtime.

  “I didn’t know a thing about politics in 1936. I registered as a commie only to please Grandpa, who was, yes, I admit, a socialist in those days. Maybe I play ditzy well because I was ditzy.”

  “No one knew this stuff then,” Desi says and gives her hand a further squeeze. She squeezes his back.

  “Thank you, darling.” On the show, this would’ve been a wry punch line. Something about thanks for nothing. She hates telling the reporters she had been ditzy. But she has always known how to spend her talent, and on what.

  “Take it up with FDR. We called Stalin ‘Uncle Joe’ and loved him for a time, right?” Desi’s saying. “I am crazy for my wife, and there’s a reason America is, too.”

  “Thank you, darling,” she says.

  Oh, the impulse to accept Desi—Desi in full—with his boorishness, his cruelty, womanizing, temper, with his shining black hair, the surprise of his business panache, his softening gut, warm hand, and perfect memory. His good looks. His grubby, snarling, jagged self, and all the invisible phantom stuff that, once accrued, comprises the body of any marriage. Perhaps she could agree not to mind any of it. He is here for her now.

  “Lucille’s pop-pop was a wonderful guy, loveable guy—the kind of guy, he wanted everybody in the world to be happy, you know? To be happy and have more money. In 1936, it was a, a kind of a light thing.” (Pronounced: “thin,” Desi playing up the accent, as if it’s Tuesday at nine P.M.) Now, a tonal shift: “If Pop-Pop was alive today, we might have to lock him in a back room.”

  “Thank you, darling,” she says, with a strained laugh. Then, an encore: “I want to thank my husband for everything. He loves America, as I do.”

  LOS ANGELES TIMES

  NOVEMBER 12, 1953, PAGE 1, NON-BYLINE

  LUCILLE BALL EXPLAINS 1936 COMMUNIST LINK

  Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz faced the press near the swimming pool of their Chatsworth ranch home.

  They were glad the truth was out about Lucy’s fleeting affair with Communist politics 17 years ago, they said.

  The nation’s top television star and her costarring husband were interviewed at home as the House Un-American Activities Committee revealed that she had been called in to a California field office to answer for her Communist Party membership….

  * * *

  —

  LUCILLE ASKS IF the reporters have any questions, and the hands creep up, and some hesitant voices too; there’s none of the anarchic feel of a White House press event. “One at a time, please.” Her nervous dog has jumped off her lap.

  “Okay, sir—you there.”

  Eric Salat of Reuters is the first lemming into the water. The question is the obvious one. That doesn’t make it easy to answer.

  “Well,” she begins. And takes a moment to blow, from the side of her mouth, a frank refractory jet of smoke. She’s giving herself time to shape and voice the answer.

  “Will it hurt me, you ask?” she says.

  LOS ANGELES TIMES

  NOVEMBER 12, 1953, PAGE 3 (CONT’D)

  …Miss Ball, the red-haired star of TV’s “I Love Lucy,” said, “Will it hurt me, you ask? No, I have more faith in the American people than to think this will hurt me. I think any time you give the American people the truth, they’re with you.”

  Lucille insisted she knew nothing of politics in 1936 and registered as a Communist only to please her grandfather, Fred Hunt, who was a zealous Socialist.

  On it goes. Lucille finishes her fifth answer, her sixth. Yet there’re still more inquisitional follies.

  The Los Angeles Examiner’s Ronald Barnett’s blurted question concerns the risk of Mao in China and the possible comfort this knowledge would be to those who would…

  Wearing a grim, newsroom scowl, Mr. Barnett stands here young, assertive, and stupid. Desi ignores him. He recites a point he’d already vetted with Herb Hubbard, of CBS’s legal team. “We’re lucky this happened to us in America, where newspapermen ask the questions. In commie countries, they shoot first and ask the questions later.”

  Lucille bends in her chair, picks up a random twig. The next day, in a sidebar that will run after that page-one story, the November 12 Los Angeles Times will report:

  The story of a loving, close-knit family that humored the wishes of a doting grandfather continues to emerge from the Actress Lucille Ball’s Communist Party imbroglio.

  Lucille Ball’s mother, Mrs. Desiree E. Ball, also registered to vote Communist in 1936, as the actress did to please “Grandpa”…

  Two days after that:

  LOS ANGELES TIMES

  NOVEMBER 14, 1953, PAGE 2:

  [photo caption]

  Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, comforted by stacks of telegrams from well-wishers, luxuriated in the privacy of their Chatsworth home yesterday, glad that the storm was over.

  [second photo caption]

  Desi said they felt no resentment over their questioning by hordes of newspaper reporters since Lucille’s 1936 registration as a Communist was made public.

  There is almost nothing to say about the rest of the press conference. But it is worth lingering over, for one reason.

  “I was kicked out of Cuba because commies wanted to take power and failed, as they fail always,” Desi’s saying. “Lucille Ball is one hundred percent American.”

  Lucille crunches the twig in her hand. I should be happy, she thinks. The press conference is going well. Desi has them where we want them.

  “…I mean my wife, my favorite redhead; in fact, that’s the only thing red about her and even that’s not legitimate!”

  Laughter, brusque, male laughter. It seems to Lucille she’s lived through all this, exactly this, before. The childhood sadness has crept back. Hearing herself talked about as if she’s not here. Her throat goes thick. Is she a good girl? Is she worth keeping around? She realizes Desi has dropped her hand. It’s as though her success has been the dream and she’s awakened back to those terrible days just outside Jamestown. To the vicious catastrophe of her true life. Her father’s death, marked by a bird flapping through an open window and breaking things. Desi still defends her: “Why, you fellows know it. She’s as American as Barney Baruch and Ike Eisenhower.” She waits for it all to finish. One way or the other. Fame, beauty, money, everything goes.

  The press conference is worth lingering over because it’s the first time Lucille realizes this.

  And I have—what? she asks herself. My husband, my daughter. Family. (Where is Lucie now, at this discordant hour? With Clara, the maid.) I love Desi, she thinks. And there’s a man coming to visit me? Now? Oh my God, there is! What was I thinking?

  Desi is reaching out for her hand again. “You see, do communists love each other wholesomely like this?”

  He punctuates the words: one of his booming, famous laughs. His sexy laugh. No one thrills her to the core like Desi does—that is, she is thrilled by him in those rare moments he remembers he has a wife. She is forever his, then. Wrapping a hand around Desi, taking in a fist the still surprising bigness of him, in her mouth, feeling him grow like that. Or even when she glides her hand over his chest and reverses the dark tide of his hair. (She pushes out of mind a different emerging memory: that fight in 1942 or ’43 when he’d vanished for days and she didn’t know if he was ever coming home, until the third morning found him crying in the front yard, blotto, declaring love for her, petting the dog.) Or, or…when she lays against him, her head on the packed rise of his biceps.


  Now the sun is coming through the clouds, as if the outcome of the press conference were happily settled. I should get happy, too, she thinks; my career will be over if I don’t make the marriage work.

  * * *

  —

  A MONTH OR so back, at the final bend of summer, in Brooklyn, Sig Mekheles’s brother Abraham married off his youngest daughter.

  On the way to the wedding in Brownsville, Isidore had driven through the old community with the window open. Line after line of laundry in the sun. Men in dress pants, undershirts. He passed the schmutz and relics of his old life. Women whose hair looked strong-armed back off their foreheads. He passed (in reverse) the route of his (why not say it?) escape. Stickball and churches, shadows and smells, hubcaps flashing in the sun.

  Inside the wedding hall, voices overheard: “…and her grandfather used to wear two skullcaps, one in front and one in back.” Another: “Before you know it, we’ll all be lying side by side in the dirt.” And people danced, fast and slow: husbands and wives, parents and children, laughs and debates, a Jewish gathering. Harriet’s hand lay on Isidore’s shoulder. Up, back, step-step-step, she was a prize-winning hoofer.

  “Glad I got you on the dance floor,” she said. “You love this song.”

  “Perry Como,” he said, trying to pick up the spirit. “I think it’s you who loves it.”

  “I knew it was one of us,” she said, then half-hummed, half-sang, “You may see a stranger…”

  Meanwhile, nearby on the dance floor a lovers’ quarrel caught fire, a woman with carefully dyed red hair and a man whose few hairs stretched over his tan scalp. No, you be quiet, you can’t talk to me like that. Oh, you can be a harridan sometimes, maybe I was wrong to marry you….The woman in the argument happened to turn; Isidore felt caught in the spotlight of her seething face.

  “What is it?” said Harriet, who evidently hadn’t heard the fight. “What are you thinking about?”

  “Oh,” Isidore muttered, stepping back and looking down. “Uh, nothing, just my clumsy Strauss feet.”

  The fight, this return to Brooklyn, all of it spun the turnstiles of who Isidore was.

  Now Harriet was talking about where they would spend the coming winter. “I really did have trouble with that hotel in Miami, because, you know—”

  It was not fun to think he might cause her suffering.

  “The Biltmore Hotel is nice for us,” he said. “We have a nice time there. Why not go back?”

  “Iz,” Harriet said. “The room service at the Biltmore is—”

  The current of the dance swung them around. Isidore saw the couple who had been fighting. Looking into the man’s face, Isidore felt linked to him.

  “Iz?” Harriet said.

  “No, I’m all right.” He found himself watching his wife’s ankles swim and glisten on the screen of a tear. “Just—”

  Sorry, excuse me, Isidore told Harriet, he needed the bathroom, excuse me….I’m not a good man, he thought. Excuse me, please. Maybe if he thought it with enough vehemence, he’d start to feel bad about it. Last week he read a quote whose aptness hurt him: “There in his past, as in every man’s, he found things he recognized as bad, and it was for this that his conscience should have tormented him; but it wasn’t the recollection of these evil actions that caused him so much suffering. Not at all. It was the trivial but humiliating reminiscence of a love gone wrong.” Fine! he thought now. Tolstoy figured me out. But I have a right to live!—the thought so lame even he heard the lameness in it.

  Before you know it, we’ll all be lying side by side in the dirt. Of course he knew that. (Men’s room sink, tap water, splashing his cheeks.) But something was different in hearing it said aloud.

  In the bathroom mirror his under eyes showed bloat, his face looked tired. He rubbed his jaw, as if it might assure him he was fine, everything looked fine. Maybe it wasn’t his age. Just be honest with yourself, he thought.

  Isidore found Harriet waiting for him with dance-flushed cheeks. She stood in a bright angle of party light.

  “Another good song,” she said.

  He rubbed more at the bristle skin of his jaw. Everything was fine. “Gene Kellystein reporting for duty,” he said. But the charm belonged to someone else.

  “What was that, Iz?” Harriet asked. “You okay? Your voice is—”

  Love has many faces and many voices. It can speak in a soft, calming way until you fall asleep. It can put a hand behind your head and yell in your ear, Don’t forget me! Call me!

  “Do you want to leave?” Harriet was saying. “Should we get out of here?”

  “There’s something I want to do,” he said. “Don’t think I’m crazy.”

  “Fourteen years, you’re worried I think you’re crazy?” Then, seeing he was serious: “Okay…”

  “This is, I know, a little odd.” Isidore felt outside himself and heavy, like some cartoon villain to whom you hand an anvil. Then you see him crashing down through floor after floor. “Bear with me,” he said.

  Isidore leaned in and, between his thumb and forefinger, took Harriet’s chin. “Don’t feel self-conscious,” he said.

  Say it, he thought. Say “I cheated.” And stop doing this.

  Harriet’s face with its simple frown broke his heart. “Iz, what are you—?” But he didn’t let go.

  Oh, please, let there be some magnetism between me and Harriet. Let something stop me from going anywhere.

  “Can I just…” he said, after having already lifted her face. “Can I see you in this light?”

  “Um, this is very”—speaking the best she could with tipped head and chin gripped.

  Isidore scrutinized her, his mouth a bit open, a jeweler entranced by a gemstone of yet-to-be-determined quality. The pointy nose, the very red mouth.

  “Okay,” he was saying. “Can I do one more thing?”

  Harriet’s eyes slid from the ceiling to show him her sidelong confusion. He moved her head side to side, gently.

  “This is silly now,” she said. “This is silly.”

  But he was spreading two fingers to the width of something in his memory. He brought those fingers, pliant as whiskers, to her collarbone, gently touching the two hard dots.

  “Iz?” Harriet said. Her mouth tightened.

  But already he’d let his gaze slide from her, as if his eyes had changed a channel.

  “Iz?”

  * * *

  —

  LATER THAT NIGHT, driving home in the dark, Isidore felt like an ant colony: so many little black questions in him, wishes and doubts, crawling every which way.

  For most of the drive, Harriet was quiet. What she said had a kind of discomfited formality to it. (“You were acting so strange. Not to say it wasn’t nice to be admired, and thank you for saying I looked pretty. But…”)

  And then it happened. A surprise even to him: He began an argument. “I’m sorry I did that weird, you know, weird thing back there. But, I don’t know, you’ve been acting weird lately yourself. And, and I wanted just to see. Did you have—something you don’t want to tell me?”

  “Why would you say that?”

  He felt bad, and wanted to feel worse, is why.

  “Do you remember when we saw The Third Man?” he said. “And I said how could Joseph Cotten not see Harry Lime was evil?”

  “I’m confused. What’s the—”

  “And then you said if I ever wondered why it was so important to me that I think of myself as a good person. How come I—your words—‘gave such a damn.’ ”

  “No, I don’t know,” she said. “What are you talking about? Yeah, I said I treat the people I love well—beyond that, who would worry about the idea of being a good person?”

  “Yes!” he said. He still couldn’t look at her. It’s not her fault. Some people don’t have a big personality. “Y
es, I’m talking about why being a good person is meaningless to you. That’s what I’m talking about.”

  “Don’t be like that. I just mean, outside the family, I—”

  “Maybe inside the family is where you should be concerning yourself.”

  He realized now he had taken Harriet on a cruise not to appease her or to throw her off the scent. Or he hadn’t done it merely to appease her and just to throw her off the scent. “If we could just get away together,” he’d thought then, having called the travel agent. It was clear now. He’d gone away to throw himself off the scent.

  It’s now about a month after that car ride. He has escaped from the light of family and to L.A., at least for a time. He has flown the crooked path and has come here, to the Beverly Hills Hotel, dripping with darkness.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  SUZANNE GLUCK OF the William Morris Agency represented novelists. She did not represent moviemakers. In my stupidity I hadn’t known.

  “What you brought me sounds like a film treatment, for one,” she said. “And it’s not about Lucille Ball, am I right? You’re saying it’s by her. And your grandfather. And who is he?”

  “They came up with a really good story together.”

  She looked unsurprised, neither by my presentation nor by me. “What is it you want?” The kindness of her tone was where the thorn hid.

  “I want someone, I guess, to represent it, or—me.”

  Her eyes basically said whatever decision she made now would be irrevocable. “Represent you for what?”

  For all my literary ambition. I was more or less a kid who’d never before written anything. Suzanne Gluck sat waiting for me to tell her this. And, in this expanse of moments, I felt like that notorious animated coyote who’d overshot his prey. Held by the empty air beyond the canyon’s edge, hanging in space, inert for the preposterous helium instant.