The Queen of Tuesday Page 20

  It’s less conspicuous to have the man at the wheel. She has her hand over his, atop the gearshift. Likewise now, she makes sure her cuddling hand is down low, out of sight. She’s wearing the scarf, the hat and sunglasses, the camouflage that will fool nobody. She never drives with the convertible’s top up; today she is.

  “Thank you,” Isidore’s saying. For letting him drive, the time, the encouraging words about his film idea. Yes. If we make my movie, I will…I will what? he thinks.

  They attempt to keep the talk cheerful and relaxed. The car’s qualities. The weather. The duration of a cross-country flight.

  But then: “I shouldn’t be doing this,” she says.

  His mind’s reaction: Huh?

  “Driving me to the airport, you mean?” He tries not to take his eyes from the road, its dispassionate particulars. “Or—?”

  She extracts her hand from his, she turns away movieishly. Out the window, North Camden Drive is deserted, just hedges, palm trees, and the gawking, buttinsky sun.

  “If you want to sell this movie, if you want to do something great with yourself at this late date”—her voice is strident—“why do you strangle yourself to death in the sticks?”

  This he hasn’t expected, the quick drama, the trapdooring tone.

  From the start in the Beverly Hills Hotel, Lucille had smiled, had asked him things. As if he’d been the interesting one, as if his modest-lawned, two-story life had news appeal. And now, the interest is shown to have been scorn.

  So, is your partnership with your brother successful? Yeah, he’d told her, yeah it is, especially lately—not mentioning that a part of the drive to make a success, even in real estate, had been her. He also didn’t mention that he believed he’d likely be more successful without Norman; Samuel LeFrak—a seething little genius—had offered him a stake in a huge project. A giant tract of land in Queens, thousands of working-class units, ungodly government subsidies, etc. LeFrak City would be more than a moneymaker; it would be a life changer. But the deal was contingent on Isidore’s shutting out Norman. And he couldn’t very well abandon—

  “Okay, but are your wives friends? Yours and Norman’s. Do they get together?”

  “Wouldn’t call them friends, necessarily. Tillie, that’s Norman’s wife, is—I would say they are respectful of each other.”

  And then an apology from Isidore: wishing he could lead her to more promising ground. Lucille had kissed him on the hair of his chest. The wives she could picture, their farce of mandatory closeness. She’d absorbed enough. And the brothers—she’d known there was some usable feeling there, some new poignant note of comedy she could sing out in black-and-white, if ever she wanted to change the tenor of the show.

  He said, “My life isn’t worth plowing through like yours is.”

  “Ah, except you. You’re worth plowing through.”

  “Well.” He laughed. “Here I’m firing on all cylinders. In Long Island, a few of my cylinders conk out. Or, not conk out. They don’t exist. Here, I grow new ones.”

  “I could make a crude joke.”

  “Another one? I want you to,” he said.

  “But it’s beneath you, all that. It’s beneath you.”

  “Marriage and a family?”

  “That marriage, that existence.”

  He cleared his throat. “ ‘In the middle of the path of our life, I went astray from the straight road and found myself in a wilderness where the right course was lost.’ ”

  She hadn’t known—a confused smile bent her mouth—what he’d been talking about.

  “Dante,” he’d said. “The Inferno. It’s the opening.”

  She’d said that the line—which he’d heard as a howled reproach—had been beautiful. And soon after that, he’d given her his movie pages. And the rest of the time had passed smoothly. No anger had been presaged; the troubled ending he’d worried over had never materialized—until this ride to the airport.

  “Well, okay, Lucille,” he says now, squeezing the steering wheel. “I guess not many find success in work and at home.”

  “And you have it in neither.” Temper has made her voice flute up.

  “Okay, that is not true.”

  It’s not that he worries that her mood will last or that she believes what she’s saying. “This anger…” he says.

  What does worry Isidore: Her last-minute behavior may pollute the memory. For him and for her. Maybe it’s a way for her to make it easy on herself to forget him?

  She’s half-yelling now. “You have to live your life in a way that—”

  “That what?”

  Lucille pretends to be absorbed in her cigarette. No answer. She cradles her elbow in an upturned palm. The Fatima she holds between two fingers, with her hand bent down like the head of a swan.

  “Lucille,” Isidore softly says, choosing not to be angry, but flattered. “If this is how you ask me to stay…”

  She turns from the window to show Hold-on that her eyes have teared.

  “I promised myself no scenes, but”—dramatic gulp—“I’m going to miss you.” And then to cover the seriousness: “Hold-on, you better promise to stop firing on all cylinders. Keep the charm for me.”

  As if he could do it all the time!

  “Ah, that extra cylinder you found,” he says, moved by her tears, “is retired.”

  They’re at a stoplight; he’s looking at her and doesn’t see the light’s now green.

  “I can never be alone, is the problem,” she says.

  Like many teary confessions, none of this costs her much. She’s merely repeating something about herself she’s often heard and dismissed. She knows it’s partially true; she gets lonely. It also feels less than true.

  A Lincoln behind them is impatient, beep beep, green light, pal.

  My hatred of and familiarity with being alone is probably the cause of everything about me people love, she thinks. All that solitary time at her step-grandparents’ is the windstorm at the center of who she is.

  Isidore chugs ahead. As they pass under the traffic light, he turns—“What are you doing?” Lucille says—off the route. Onto a little street called Lomitas, and another called North Bedford. “One second,” he says.

  In front of a driveway he would’ve built out wider, Isidore has shifted the car into park, shifted his glasses from eyes to forehead; he shifts in his seat. A brown Cadillac rolls by. The driver, like all of America, is a Lucy fan.

  Isidore embraces her. And the passing motorist has no idea that he’s driven past his secret love.

  Isidore says, “You’re the wilderness I find myself in,” right into the nape of her neck, those smoky little hairs. Trying a little too hard to make a memory. “That’s that Dante line,” he adds, unnecessarily.

  “This is more sad than I want it to be,” she says.

  Pulling back from her. “Don’t feel guilty, Lucille.”

  “All right,” she says. But her expression can’t hide its message: I don’t feel guilty. Why would I?

  She tries again:

  “If Scarlett O’Hara had married Rhett and then been run over by a bus, think about it,” she says. “She would’ve thought they were meant to be.”

  “People would’ve also wondered about how there was a bus.”

  She waves him off. No jokes; you don’t need to impress me now, Hold-on. “That movie is about—Scarlett was meant to be with Ashley Wilkes, not Rhett.”

  Isidore sighs, not with unhappiness; with informed resignation. “And look at you. You feel guilty,” she accuses.

  He can’t lie. “I mean, it’s not Harriet’s fault I met you. She doesn’t mistreat me the way your husband mis—”

  “No, oh, that’s right.” A light in Lucille flares on. “Because I’m the one who takes too much guff from her husband, right? I’m the one who takes
it and takes it and is too cowardly to walk away.”

  “You’re Lucille Ball,” he says.

  “I see.” She is angry. “I’m so famous. This isn’t real to you,” she says. “You aren’t the one who has to feel guilty. Because this never happened, you’re saying.”

  “You can’t think I think that. And I thought you didn’t feel guilty.”

  Lucille has about her the attitude of a woman set upon by a million antagonists, more than a million, a hostile audience that doesn’t understand her.

  “This is the only real thing,” he says. He means it.

  But what does real mean if he can’t, at this moment, recognize himself? When faced with a dramatic moment, his actual personality usually shies up its collar and ducks into the alley.

  She turns her eyes full on him. “That’s what I feel, too,” she says—though it’s not what she feels, not quite.

  “I meant, you’re Lucille Ball,” he says. “You’re fearless.”

  She is emotional. But Lucille’s life always feels real to her. This is different.

  Everything with Hold-on has been somehow easy and bright, sincere—she’s had the feeling there’s something crucial she hadn’t considered, something now offering itself up to her. It isn’t too late. He wouldn’t understand that his normality is what excites and frightens her. He’s quiet, calm, different. (And sometimes this also repels her.) There’s so much he doesn’t understand. That being famous is like going to another country, and you only know how lonesome it is in that foreign place once you arrive. That if everyone always concerns themselves with your well-being they’re sort of asking you to remain a toddler. That fame is something you rent; that nobody can occupy that state forever. And that when your lease on celebrity is up—when the public turns against you—it’s painful, humbling, inexplicable, and the smirk of the indifferent is lonely in the way of being abandoned by a lover. And they always do turn against you, she thinks. This is America. Do Americans really want idols? Does anyone more than an American hate someone who thinks he’s better than they are? The turn can be giddy and savage. What does that mean for someone like her, and for someone like Hold-on? But even the witty lines Isidore said in the hotel—one was “Every minute you stay here, Frank Capra loses the plot for another movie”—had the bait and the hook of real kindness. Or maybe Lucille has just wanted very much to be caught.

  He’s saying, “I know it’s real. Otherwise I would’ve awakened by now.”

  “It’s real,” she says.

  They promise, they promise and promise; calls, letters, visits. He has no immediate plans to return, how can he, but she’ll be back in New York, maybe even by New Year’s. Always some reason to visit the Apple, the sponsors, the network….Isidore realizes he understands nothing about the multiple-location, theoretical municipality where she actually resides. California, Madison Avenue, the airwaves. She’ll be on television, in Los Angeles, and he’ll go back to his family, his business, to the watchful eye of his father. Oh, maybe now and again his hopes will catch fire, but life will come along and pour on them its cold water.

  He decides not to mention his movie idea if she doesn’t.

  “We didn’t think this through, Lucille.” He’s starting up the car and driving again. “You can’t take me to the airport. They’ll see you—everybody,” he says. “I’ll get out here at a cabstand or something.”

  “Oh, to hell with everybody.” The way she says this doesn’t hide her acknowledgment. He’s right.

  They both picture the impossible TWA scene. Last call announced, travelers wheeling past, bags and goodbyes, and he and Lucille embracing, kissing, until the cinematographer pans in on the plane flying away out the giant window.

  “I’ll call you,” she says. Desilu was moving offices—a multi-studio space, and her number would soon change. “Anyway, you can’t call me, it’s too—it’s too hard. Everyone watches everything I do.”

  “All right, Lucille.” Gripping the wheel.

  “I will call you, I promise,” she says. “I will.”

  In their silence, the tire sounds, the engine, the car humming. At the stoplight, the silence grows louder.

  Okay, pull over at North Canon; it’s an easy walk back to the hotel, not as trafficked as Rodeo or Sunset, and you can get a cab from there. I’m sorry….

  But something happens as Isidore gets out. He has a thought. This is the end of a romantic scene; why aren’t these palm trees cheering? And Lucille leans across the seat to look up at Isidore through the rolled-down window. She says: “This is all?” Her smile is an incursion against tears. “Where’s the applause for a great finale?”

  Then she and the car begin to motor out of his life. I guess my movie idea was silly. Not that he wanted her to think he was using her.

  Before he’s picked up his Samsonite, he sees her brakelights flash, a hopeful red bloom. Lucille has stopped the car. She reverses, slowly, toward him, tires over gravel, that little coughy pop, and he actually feels it in his heart, the almost humid chest warmth, the fullness that’s total. Oh, I am happy, happy, happy—and yet this will turn to sadness when I leave, when I have to leave all glamorous this.

  His adulthood before now seems like nursery school, like a coloring book. “I almost forgot,” Lucille says through the open window. Her eyes are teary. “The movie. Your movie. There’s something there. I really think so.”

  And she gives him her card; on the back, in her handwriting, with its frills and melismas, she’d written her invented endearment, that ridiculous nickname, and, below that, the phone number of Desilu Productions’ new offices in Los Angeles: MU 5-9975—my number, after all. And, added in a corner: But let me call you first, okay?

  “When you go out to dinner,” she says, “and it’s a group of builders? I’m guessing the thought never crosses your mind, ‘Am I the most successful one here?’ Unless you’re a jerk. It’s a jerk’s idea to think like that. When you’re famous, that idea is pushed on you all the time. It turns you into a jerk.”

  How can he answer this? “You? Never.”

  He wants to add something memorable and true. That thought actually does cross his mind whenever he’s out with builders. But what he says is an attempt at something more. “You’re the juiciest part of the fruit”—and her face is a tangle of the saddest happiness.

  Just before she leaves, Lucille blows him a kiss, and the palm trees still don’t applaud. What is Lucille without an audience?

  CHAPTER NINE

  ALL THE TCHOTCHKES inside Suzanne Gluck’s cushy William Morris office were of a piece, the plants and framed faces and silver hanging stuff, their display, their alert tones. She frowned reading my grandfather’s pages. “You know something?” she said. “Certain publishing houses’ tastes aside, there’s a difference between a book and a movie.”

  “I know there would be interest,” I bluffed. “Maybe like a coffee-table thing, with, like—isn’t there anyone here who could represent it for a movie?”

  She lay the pages facedown on her desk. The unspoken engine here was professionalism.

  “There’s a man in this office, Wright Torrence is his name, who deals with book-to-film and the rare vice versa,” Suzanne said.

  Despite her ambivalence to me, despite my knowing she was putting me off, I sort of felt thrilled. Because New York had done its New York thing. My thrill was wrongheaded. But I was a young man and had come to the city for this. Which is to say, New York seemed to be granting what I asked (what everyone asks)—the excitement, discovery, the career and reinvention wishes—but, of course, after the forewarnings that everybody hears but forgets, the city so often shows itself to be one of those genies whose broad-chested magic is more trial than reward; who grants and twists the wishes we whisper and who hides in the shadow of our eagerness, waiting to subsist on our bones.

  LOS ANGELES, JANUARY 26, 1954
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  “OH GOD,” CRIES the man with the subordinate’s face. “I’ll never remember!”—the forceful agitation that plays as comedy to all but him.

  It’s Wednesday, the man hates Wednesdays. He’s obliged every Wednesday to begin remembering.

  “Oh, again?” says a second man whose wet hair bears a comb’s inscription. The two men sit waiting for the others.

  “It’s hard every time, yeah,” the first man says, the inadvertently funny man. This man is lucratively bald.

  They are not here to eat, but they will eat. The table is laid, as happens every Wednesday.

  “Maybe it’s the jokes are bad,” the second man, Bob Kargman, says. “Maybe that’s why it’s hard to remember them.”

  “Yeah, the jokes. Maybe.” This first man, the bald man, has rolled his napkin into a floppy little cone. “The jokes.” Brooding now, he unfurls his small project. The man needs someone to write his lines for him. Someone like Bob Kargman. “Yeah,” he says. “It’s those fuckers.”

  They start in on the requisite cigarettes. The bald man sparks flame from his Zippo, and this makes him grimace: the burst of glare, his hangover. William Frawley is his name. He plays a supporting role on the most popular entertainment thus far in American history.

  “You probably like being here, Bob,” Frawley says, rubbing his eyes, that timeless gesture of I’d rather be home relaxing. “You have a family.” A professional beat. “To run away from.”

  “Bill, I’m not gonna argue with you there, buddy,” Kargman says. “Children are, I don’t know, it’s not easy to say if we are doing right by them.”

  “Uh-huh,” says Frawley. Desi Arnaz told him he had only one more strike before losing this job, but—his headache! His lagging heart!

  He rerolls the napkin wearily.

  Kargman says, “Just trying to find a decent school for the boy, you know? Anyway, this week won’t be so hard to memorize for you, Bill. There are easy lines for—”

  “That’s what wrecks children,” says Frawley, his chin down into his chest. “Mothers.”