The Queen of Tuesday Read online

  “I’m not sure,” I said.

  Maybe that’s what it meant to be a man in his early twenties. Not to know exactly what you wanted, but to want it very badly.

  “I’d like to do something for my grandfather,” I said. “To get his movie out there.”

  CHATSWORTH, CALIFORNIA, NOVEMBER 1953

  LAST NIGHT, SHE’D dawdled in the corridor by room 317, on the point of bringing knuckles to wood, also on the point of not. But nothing ever came of nothing. She knocked, once, and the door opened immediately.

  In her head, where the light was better, Lucille had seen Hold-on as taller. Three years had touched him as a vertical crease between the eyes. Oh, good to see you. Yes, you too, you too.

  That was yesterday.

  And it has been good to see him—if strange. For months after that dressing-room night, she’d designated some thoughts as trip-wiry—land mines that would (were her brain to drive over them) blow the hell out of everything. These thoughts had involved Hold-on.

  And here he stood.

  Hold-on began talking right away about her TV program, how proud he was, about how he knew the pride was misplaced, but…

  “No, I mean it.” He put his hand on Lucille’s shoulder to stop her headshaking protest. “You’re wonderful.”

  “Oh?” she said—inexplicably angry. Or explicably.

  “Of course,” he was saying. “I see you every week, and…”

  He stopped mid-sentence, pursed his lips, looked unsure, helped her off with her coat. She sighed. That televisual rendering of her, the “person” she fabricates for the public—that forgery, Lucy Ricardo—had evidently fooled him too. What a complicated disloyalty from Hold-on.

  “Let me get a look at you,” Hold-on was saying. He leaned back a little, hands on her shoulders.

  “So,” she said, feeling surprising nervousness, “do I look different?”

  A gaze can feel like a sunlamp. “It’s you,” he said. “You’ve really come.”

  “Not as far as you have.”

  “On TV, you’re beautiful, but the camera doesn’t capture the whole of it.” Ahh.

  She smiled, lowered her face, she looked up at him through her lashes. Sweet guy.

  * * *

  —

  I WANT TO take her outside and buy her suntan lotion, thinks Isidore. Suntan lotion? How about a diamond pendant?

  A day has passed, deliciously. He’s forgotten to be shy. Shades are down.

  How decadent to find oneself, during working hours, in a snarled bed that isn’t yours. This is joy. He’s just waked from a nap. There’s a glow on the curtains. And the almost occult warmth of someone else’s body under blankets. The assorted naughty scents. Unbearable joy. Lucille makes a lip-popping I’m waking too noise.

  Her skin, its intense paleness. She has a scar right at her meaty above-elbow crease. Lucille is the rainbow and its cache of gold. Few of the Lucille-besotted millions will ever know about that scar.

  “Mmm,” she says, after a catlike stretch of the spine.

  “Keep snoozing, you want to snooze.”

  But beginning at her shoulder, he telemarks two fingers down the white trail of her arm.

  “It’s too nice to,” she murmurs.

  “Good.”

  Feeling bold, feeling unlike himself, he tugs at the sheet and he kisses her clavicle, next a rib, lips still heading south—to the soft aromatic skin above her nether hair: he gives a lick. “The most prime real estate in the world,” he says into her belly. The sound of her leg moving: that hiss of sheet against sheet.

  “Oh, come now.” She takes between her fingers some of his wavy hair. “Maybe just in California.”

  “In any case”—little bombs of atomic happiness go boom all through the archipelago in his chest—“never sell.”

  The air is gloriously stale in here. After last night, what a morning and noon it’s been. All that time and in-bed commotion. Oh, there had been a few breaks, a few lulls. There’d been shared laughs, secrets, there’d been quiet schmaltzy periods of eye-to-eye staring. Lucille went at his chest hair with inquiring fingers whenever she asked a personal question. The coziness of that. But mostly Lucille had climbed up his body and they’d gone.

  He shimmies now beside her, lays his head in the declension that slopes down to her breast. Something unexpected happens. Lucille tips the two of them right through this easy moment and into a very different one. Frowning a little, and taking some of the magnificence out of her voice, she says:

  “Do you know why rich and famous people get divorced so often?”

  “They’re immature?”

  “The press would agree. Ha.” In her quiet smile, amusement isn’t the only thing written.

  Wait, he thinks, how did we get here?

  “The truth is,” she says, “it’s because they don’t get to know each other, the two people. They think they can buy away problems. They’re very busy; they pay people to handle responsibilities. They never know if the other is able to clean a dish. Every life has its problems, and they’re not prepared,” she says.

  “Let me tell you a theory,” he says, and he knows he’s not the Isidore from the day before yesterday.

  “I think immortals would have a one hundred percent divorce rate,” he says.

  “Oh?” She lifts her eyebrow in the way the incalculable citizens of TV land have seen before.

  “Eventually you get to the end of people,” he says. “Love means it takes longer.”

  His little nod says But eventually it happens. Does he believe this, or does he just want to sound cavalier? He doesn’t know.

  “You charmer,” she says.

  Now she reaches for a cigarette and her breasts nibble across his chest and, oh, he’s ready to go again. “Saying all the sweet things,” Lucille says. “Do you think you’d come to the end of me?” Playing it cool, but there is a sadness in the question. “Maybe I wouldn’t get to the end of you.”

  “How else would you learn, for example, if I can wash a dish?” he says. “Sure, that’s good. Everything on the table, that’s my motto.”

  She leans back, her red, red hair is down and looks sexier than on TV, less bright. In person it’s the color of rosé enjoyed in the early evening, lighted with the sunset; but its color also holds the shadows that live in the wineglass.

  “Do all Christians have a motto?” he asks. “Jews are curious.”

  Her pff laugh is softer than Lucy Ricardo’s, flappier.

  “Yes,” she says. “We do”—reaching her hand between his legs. “Do unto others.”

  She leans to give his shoulder an unexpected bite. “You’re funny; I forgot that,” she says. “Do you do accents? Don’t answer. Hey, speaking of immortals. ‘Give a protozoa a billion years and it could make Paris.’ Jess Szilárd is always telling me that. Time is the key to everything,” she says.

  Jess Szilárd? Isidore pushes his face into her hair and breathes in. She’s obviously a woman used to having her associates’ names known. I don’t care who Jess Szilárd is as long as he’s not in bed with us, he thinks. And funny? I’m not funny; it’s being with her, in this place.

  Now they go into a series of improvisations on a theme, and the theme is: How can we say we want today to mean something without saying it?

  “What would this episode be titled?” he asks.

  No hesitation. “ ‘The Highlight of the Season,’ ” she says.

  He is about to answer: “ ‘You’ve Got Some ’Splainin’ to Do,’ ” then decides it best, even as a joke, not to bring up Ricky, er, Desi. What he says is, “ ‘Lucy Decides She Doesn’t Want to Go to the Club Tonight After All.’ ”

  “ ‘Lucy Is Not What You Thought.’ ”

  “ ‘Lucy Is Better Than You Thought.’ ”

 
“ ‘You’ve Got Some ’Splainin’ to Do,’ ” she says, and they both laugh. This is joy.

  She says, “ ‘Middle-Aged Star Has the Time of Her Life.’ ”

  “You’re not middle-aged.”

  “Tell it to the sponsors.”

  “You look very young,” he says. “Come now. You must know this.”

  “You got me here already, what else do you want?”

  It’s obviously just a joke, and yet—what else does he want?—he doesn’t answer.

  “Having the time of your life,” he says. “That’s nice. ‘Dropping Everything.’ Maybe that’s what we call it.”

  “Or ‘Sweeps Week.’ ”

  He doesn’t dare hope for much. She’s only holding the reins of her life and her television show because she’s holding them with her husband. Putting them down means putting down all.

  Her lowered face says that something new is coming. “You know why I never called, after the last time, Hold-on?”

  With shyness, with warmth, she tells him. It just comes out. The pregnancy that she’d learned about immediately after they’d slept together; the miscarriage in which it terminated. With despondency, she’s looking at Isidore. What she leaves unsaid, but implies, is that after the miscarriage she realized she wanted to have another child, with Desi. And that she has now had that other child. What is mysterious to him: Why is she here now? It can’t just be that we are so natural together, Isidore thinks; with charisma like hers, she must be natural with so many men. So why? He has never known, from the first up till this very moment, why him for her.

  “I’m glad you called, though,” she says.

  * * *

  —

  HIS HAND HAD lingered above his office phone. And lingered. This had been ten days back. He’d placed by his phone a business card, on which, in masculine handwriting, Lucille had penciled Desilu Productions’ number, Los Angeles, CIrcle-7-2099. That was crossed out. Under that was another number, in his own hand.

  Isidore double-checked that his office door was shut. He gulped. He found himself telling the Desilu receptionist, “Just say it’s from Hold-on.” He repeated that, and then did so again, to a second person. And as he leaned all the way back—the gravity-flouting design of a 1950s office chair—he thought calling was a mistake, possibly a mistake, a definite mistake (zooming his chair back to upright), maybe not a mistake; a waste of time and money (having called five New York private eyes before finding one who had Los Angeles contacts; then paying that California P.I. to get the number where he could actually reach her, instead of the switchboard that had put him off). And when Lucille Ball answered, the thrill of her voice, his fantasy captured in a plastic earpiece, Isidore’s laugh sounded like a bark. He felt a great release of pressure—the stone in his throat dissolving in a puff of air.

  For Lucille, the past week and a half had been different. Even after having talked to him, she’d been certain, at first, that she would avoid seeing Isidore.

  She had cured herself of the red scandal before it metastasized. (A review of the subject’s file reflects no activity that would warrant her inclusion on the Security Index—FBI memorandum: SAC Los Angeles to Hoover, Subject: Ball, Lucille.) The HUAC had had a good case, if it’d wanted to make one. In 1936, sponsoring the Communist Party’s candidate in her local California Assembly election, Lucille had signed a certificate: I am registered as affiliated with the Communist Party; the same year, she got appointed to the State Central Committee of the Communist Party of California. And so on. She’d picked up the hammer and sickle, halfheartedly, ignorantly, merely to placate her grandfather, but still. The HUAC had blacklisted many for less. This had been her boffo year, however. Lucille had made the sort of success from which you can’t really get dislodged.

  Lucille had gotten the call from Hold-on right before the HUAC mess and during a stretch of relative calm in her marriage. Little Lucie was around two. After a firstborn joins a house, the home-front action is filled with husbandly solicitude, husbandly kindness. Even if just for a short while.

  Desi was a strict, loving dad. His charisma got expressed as a light and sometimes even frisky fatherhood. Laughs, games, tickling. And with Lucille, too. The birth of their daughter brought one of Lucille and Desi’s dented reconciliations. She might have wished for a husband who went out less at night, who didn’t have at the very least an eye for other women, whom she trusted more, or a little. But even in all this, Desi seemed to be getting better. He’d quit, or paused, making coarse and disrespectful scenes. He took her out dancing just after little Lucie’s first birthday, and, as the photographers’ cameras flashed, and as Desi smiled at her, and as the dance floor cleared for them, she said to herself, Really, why shouldn’t I be happy with him?

  And then, one knotty morning, she took Hold-on’s surprise call. Oh. Yes, sure, I suppose, come out to Los Angeles. Well, the Russian and French Revolutions also broke out only as the yoke had been lifted, a bit, off those poor serfs.

  I do everything late in life. Having a baby now, in my forties, for instance. Having your first affair in middle age is late, also, she thought.

  An affair! And yet, after Hold-on reached out, Lucille’s scruples—or professional qualms, anyhow—placed in her path one last hurdle. The HUAC investigation told her she couldn’t risk it. But even the fear of being labeled un-American only put her off until after the press conference, and after the worry of the press conference. Well, I did tell the guy to come to L.A.; I can’t just not show up. Sometimes doing the right thing, the prudent thing, was hard; she decided, therefore, to see him. She thought, I am deciding, at last, to cheat. After all the pain my husband caused me, I am entitled.

  She more or less ignored the fact that, with Hold-on, she had already, once before, cheated.

  Lucille bid Hold-on to wait in the hotel for a day or two until Desi would go out somewhere to give her an afternoon free. And if Desi didn’t make plans to go out, she’d either think of something or just give up on seeing Hold-on. But she didn’t worry too much about that; her husband was like the tides.

  Sure enough, Desi told her he needed, during this filming hiatus—bless him, damn him—to take a trip with Gordon MacRae and Hoagy Carmichael to Las Vegas for “golf and to look into a possible business opportunity.” Great, great—take your time, darling. You’re not steamed, Red? No, no. Have your little fun with Hoagy. She wondered what she should tell Clara and the alternating nannies Rae and Ronny before slipping out herself. And then she realized: I don’t have to tell them anything at all.

  She’d found it difficult to keep news of Hold-on’s visit to herself. She considered telling Vivian Vance, who with the fixity characteristic of homely actors had become a true friend—her most trusted friend, in fact. (Viv had an awful husband herself.) But Viv knew Desi and saw Desi often and depended on Desi for a paycheck. So, not her. What about Hal Brade? But Brade had acted so oddly about John Archer. And wouldn’t Hollywood Confidential pay a year of his salary to blab something like this? Okay, there was no one she could trust. Didn’t matter—she was already on her way to the Beverly Hills Hotel.

  And here she is now, and has been for a day and a half.

  * * *

  —

  “WHAT DO YOU call it if it feels like you’re dreaming while you’re awake,” Isidore asks.

  Pause.

  “Hollywood.”

  * * *

  —

  “HE WAS HAPPY, of course, that I convinced the press I’m not a, you know, a commie,” she tells him. “But he can’t—he truly can’t handle it when he’s being treated, as he would say it, unequally, in relation to, you know, me. Even after the press conference, which went great for us, you know, really well, he was upset ’cause he thought reporters condescended. I don’t remember that happening, but they always do, I guess, and for someone like him, here’s a man who had four houses i
n Cuba, disguised himself as a penniless rebel, and fought to make his way here—after his whole childhood, where his mother was convincing him he’s going to be the Cuban Teddy Roosevelt or something—and even before he met me, women like Betty Grable were all over him, and, oh, everything’s a reaction to that. He’s spoiled. Pride. Vanity. You know. And here he is, finally a star for real.” She drags on her cigarette, then an exhalation of smoke that takes the hotel room sunlight. “But, it’s on my program, his fame—he’s second banana to the quote ditzy wife. And these reporters really do treat him like Carmen Miranda in chinos. It’s not fair. This always happens. There was one afternoon, he’s screaming at me, really screaming, you know, terrifying. Screaming. And I remind him it’s not my fault that some fly-by-night treated him like a busboy, what can I do, and he laughs and comes back, after spending that whole evening out, he comes back with an idea for a program. The idea was Make Room for Daddy. He’s smart, you know. He’s underestimated. The accent. But maybe if he got more respect, we wouldn’t produce such good television, so it’s actually a blessing. Do you think I’m awful to think like that?”

  “He screamed at you.”

  “He didn’t scream at me.” Shame and loyalty tug at her answer like opposing hooks. “He—raised his voice.”

  “He raises his voice with you.”

  “Well.”

  With the cheating and outbursts and recently with his drinking, Desi—his solicitous phase notwithstanding—takes Lucille’s love for granted. His actions dared her to do this, to come here. Still, she’d failed to appreciate how even a seemingly innocent Desi story might come off as a denunciation. It’s a surprise to have it pointed out. And to find herself defensive on his behalf.

  Right, she thinks, that was no way for Dez to’ve talked to me, and ogling at Mary What’s-Her-Name, last week, the script girl, right in front of my face, in front of everybody, but I have to admit also that I do like something about that, that Dez Arnaz goes and takes what he wants, boy, and I can’t help how that makes me feel. Though Hold-on has spunk enough of his own and is kind, she thinks. I think he may be actually kind. And who needs that much spunk. Plus, here the guy is, smiling at me like he invented fucking.