The Queen of Tuesday Page 24

  But whose baby was he?

  New children are a leading indicator for the stock market of your life. You see what’s rising, what’s declining. What new children are not is a miracle. Their arrival won’t turn stones to bread. Desi had viewed a baby optimistically, at least in prospect. He saw babies almost as you would a fancy car. People admire your having a nice one, and it may take you and your wife where you want to go.

  “We’ll be happy from now on,” Desi said in her ear, in the hospital right after she’d given birth to Desi Jr. Her husband bent to kiss her forehead, and she realized he hadn’t said what he would do to ensure that.

  Please let him look like Desi, Lucille thought. A nurse in pink held the tiny slick crying pruned seraph up for her to see before taking him from the room. Please let him be Desi’s. And added to her normal delivery spirits, the love and pain and anxiety and the intense fatigue and exultation and somehow sorrow, the tears that were of joy and also of something else, some changeable emotion that felt kind of like a nothingness, she was afraid to gaze at her baby.

  She thought about Hold-on. About his elusive good looks, his wide shoulders, his air of having spent decades helping ladies cross the street. Later, when they brought Lucille her cleaned-up child—his skin, his eyebrows, his nose—she knew he was not Hold-on’s. Desi Jr. was Desi’s son. And so what now?

  Well, for a while, Desi’s fatherly solicitude came back. There were quiet nights as a family. There were staged kisses for photographers. There were promises made, and, when Desi placed a new ring on Lucille’s finger and sent the staff home early, Lucille felt deliriously wifely. And then, the next headline, the next deposit in the bank where scandal collected interest:

  LOWDOWN: DOES DESI REALLY LOVE LUCY? SOURCES SAY ‘NO.’

  In the months following Desi Jr.’s birth, the family company, Desilu, had grabbed hold of the Nielsen ratings and tickled them at will. And all across the week. It wasn’t just the Lucy show. It was Jack Benny specials. Our Miss Brooks. Make Room for Daddy. It was Private Secretary—not to mention commercials they started filming. And they actually purchased and took over the Motion Picture Center on Cahuenga. And so this pair of onetime studio rejects made, owned, and commanded, at last, their own studio. It should’ve been their time.

  More programs came quickly: December Bride, Those Whiting Girls, Willy, The Jimmy Durante Show, Not in My House, Love Is Grand. And yet, all this business success was a fault-line rumble underfoot, a readied fist, a curtain yanked back on a deserted stage. And Lucille still would now and then wonder about Hold-on whenever reality became too crowded with argument.

  “I hate you,” she’d said right after the worst embarrassment came—the scandal. “Doing this to me. And with a six-month-old at home.”

  “Is it even cheating if people are with people they don’t enjoy doing it with?”

  “That’s your apology? People?”

  As it turned out, just before this exchange—before the embarrassment—Desi had hired old studio hand Mose Bock to run their expanded day-to-day: the implementing, firing and hiring, scheduling, the below-dreaming stuff needed to keep a dream together. “Ah, here’s the man now.”

  “Dez!” Mose said, marching in on Day One, tall, hands in pockets, a baggy suit. “Let’s get to work, eh?”

  Mose started in on what he saw as “the problem areas.”

  The very first: Lucille and Desi’s marriage. Mose, a fierce-looking old man who had actually cut Desi from the MGM roster years before, was not shy. “There’s just a little something I need you two to peruse.” Mose’s face looked worse when he smiled.

  Mose had summoned Lucille and Desi to his office. His smile inflamed his wrinkles. “Here.”

  Los Angeles burbled under Mose’s window. Lucille had a sense of what was coming and turned from Mose. The window looked over some murky hedges and onto Cahuenga, its shops and its lonely palms and—

  “Take a gander.” Mose slid across the desk to them a reading glass, a contract, two paranoid pens. I am this person’s boss, Lucille thought. She’d been back at work for three months.

  The contract was called a buy-sell agreement: Either spouse could buy the other out. In the event of a divorce. (It was “a way to protect the company.”)

  There were office girls about now, pretty, slightly less pretty, young, old, colleagues with whom Lucille would never be familiar. She heard two of them whisper their real worry over something—one’s boyfriend had insulted her in front of her office manager—and Lucille realized something about fame. I’ll never care about that kind of thing again, she thought. Not only that money meant she’d never worry about being fired. But socially, I’m secure. No one will talk badly about me, to me. Fame is the real social security. But must we hire all these girls, the expense, the benefits, the office supplies alone! And—it had to be admitted, only to be pushed quickly from the brain—why add the temptation for Desi! There weren’t many slightly less pretty office girls, nor many old, come to think on it. Lucille put on shades and looked out again at shimmering Los Angeles. She’d had the baby scare with Hold-on, and—despite herself—felt bad about having almost deceived Desi so thoroughly. She took the pen and (pretending the contract wasn’t a big deal, listening with a nod and even a smile) signed where it said “endorser.” Desi had to get up and take a turn around the room; but he didn’t speak, signed. (He’d started drinking more.)

  Mose with an intentionally bland look on his cheeks reached for the contract. “Moving on…” he said.

  Desi’s eyes held an expression, a glint of reprieve. As if he’d been acquitted from wrongdoing by the mere acknowledgment of having done wrong. He wiped from his lips, with a single finger, a skim of sweat.

  Lucille knew the kindly words to say, the wifely words; these kindly, wifely words just sat on her mind. I certainly can’t call Hold-on now, she thought. Not for a while, anyway.

  Desi cleared his throat. This contract is about my cheating, his face said. And I’m not sorry. No one got up, and the silence echoed in Lucille’s head like a migraine.

  Well, it wasn’t a secret. Their marriage must have smelled—as a “source close to the couple” would say in that week’s Confidential—like “hell.”

  Subhead: AMERICA’S #1 HUSBAND IS ANYTHING BUT?

  The article came out the Wednesday after they’d signed. It used the word prostitutes. It used the words Desi makes habitual use of. The article used the sentence America’s #1 husband isn’t what you think. It used, derogatorily, the word Latin.

  This news reached Lucille as soon as she’d gotten to her office—alone; as ever, she’d driven the Sunliner in by herself, after Desi, who had tended to arrive late—but she heard about it without having actually seen the article.

  “Can you buy a copy and bring it to me?” Lucille asked Bob Kargman with attempted equanimity. “I can’t be seen buying one.” Bob’s eyes dimmed. Sure, Lucille, uh, of course. Let me get my hat.

  The article came to her as shattering as feared. Mr. Arnaz has been known to hire two or more at once and…

  The magazine’s cover, luckily, wasn’t taken up with their story; rather, MARILYN MONROE, THE MAKING OF A SUPERSTAR. And yet everyone at Desilu, stagehands, cameramen, secretaries, writers, fellow cast members, and Lucille herself, stole peeks at it, hid it under newspapers, in scripts, behind notebooks. Like elementary students with a Playboy. (“Arnaz’s dirty habit is said to threaten America’s most cherished…” And why wasn’t it the cover story? Was Marilyn a bigger star, all of a sudden?)

  Where was Desi? Would he show today?

  He would; he did.

  * * *

  —

  DESI MATERIALIZED AT noon, swept in by shame, borne up into the office like Enoch to heaven. (If there was any consolation, it was that she, years older, now looked younger than ragged, drunken, thirty-eight-year-old he.)

/>   The magazine Desi held high—a track-and-field baton in Los Angeles’s most distasteful relay. And he said, in a practiced voice, loud for all to hear: “Can you believe what these SOBs are saying about me now?”

  “Believe?” Lucille said. “Of course we do.”

  Lucille had never before seen him this drunk on a workday. She got up, slumped to her office, closed the door; she had a long and wordless sit behind her desk; a private glass full of scotch; and she had a wrap over her shoulders. Emotion drifted up the flue of the throat—hiccupped grief; gasped anger—and she began, finally, gently, to cry.

  * * *

  —

  THEIR MARRIAGE COULDN’T fail. They were American Marriage. Six months back, when Desi Jr. was born, the Associated Press had wired hourly bulletins of Lucille’s progress to seventeen hundred newspapers. AMERICA’S GOT A NEWBORN! And now this, she thought. Yes, I cheated, but only after Desi did, and mine meant something. And, damn it, the baby was Desi’s.

  Agreement, schma-greement; how could she divorce Desi when hundreds of employees counted on her?

  How could she divorce him and toss out the show and her career?

  How much humiliation would this scandal cause, and for how long? (The hurt it caused was, of course, a given.)

  Desi now put into practice a kind of wounded pose—slouchy look; sloe-eyed face—as if he had some nebulous back pain. As if he had gotten conked in the head by a shovel. It wasn’t just acting, Lucille thought. It was bad acting.

  Worse, maddeningly worse: The implication was this had hurt him, that he was the casualty here. Jesus, the gall of men.

  That’s when she decided she would phone Hold-on. No additional scandal for the Arnazes was possible; no ammunition for Desi to fire back at her now. She needed her anger to be unblemished. So she thought about praying for Hold-on to call her. Honestly—an appeal to the good Lord. But she knew not to push her luck; so many of her prayers had already been answered.

  The first night of the scandal, Desi made sure not to be alone with Lucille; the Arnazes and Mose Bock had an appearance at the Beverly Hills Hotel’s Hollywood Foreign Press fundraiser. The Beverly Hills Hotel! Desi’s infidelities would infect even her memories of this place!

  They were seated at a banquet table with Danny Kaye and Kseniya Resnick, the Russian-American light-opera star. Desi drank a scotch slowly and then another quickly. Lucille worried the cheeky Kaye would feel free to make a remark about the odor that had wafted in with Desi from all the earlier scotches.

  “What is it we’re supposed to do at this event?” Lucille asked. “Anyone know?”

  “Not I. Oh, Dez?” Kaye said, turning toward Desi with mock admiration. “You made it to the pages of Confidential!”

  “What is Confidential?” Resnick asked in her delicate curlicue voice.

  There was a uniqueness to Resnick that you could see imprinted on her very name. The U.S.-suburb sound of “Resnick,” the Hitchcock villain Soviet-ness of that lovely “Kseniya.”

  “My dear Comrade Resnick, you must get to know Confidential,” Kaye told her with a smile. “It is a magazine about fucking.”

  Desi leaned forward, jolting the table’s edge. Lucille knew this move, this tautness in Desi’s body: her drunk husband, readying for a fight. “Desi,” she said. And she touched him, a wifely hand to his forearm, a tender gesture, not here, not now—tenderness, the very last sentiment she wanted to put out into this air. (On the way over this afternoon: “I hate you.” “Is it even cheating if people…” “People?”)

  No talk in the limo ride home. No talk later as Desi skulked off, following some wordless agreement, to sleep in the guest room.

  The darkened house. It was very windy around the Desilu Ranch; you could hear it blow at the walls. A desert night.

  Seconds after Lucille laid her face to her already teary pillow, Desi opened the door—a small shadow in the lighted threshold, reticent, stuck in uncharacteristic shyness. Not good enough, she thought. He had some ’splainin’ to do. Even at this sad hour, she made a grim joke. But it had gone out for the first time—the beam of his splendid confidence had gone out.

  “Lucille,” he croaked. “Ah, Red.”

  With his back to the doorjamb, he slid all the way down. Then, on hands and knees, he crawled. He crawled to Lucille. Is he kidding? She wouldn’t have allowed him to come in with her, under the covers. But he didn’t even try to enter the bed. He just knelt beside the mattress, smoothing her hair.

  I’ll let him do this, she thought. And in the dark, Desi took her hand, bringing it to his cheek, and he gentled her forehead with his knuckles. He could still be a comfort. He could still be a husband. On his knees, in a room pounded by wind, which reached her ears like the approval of a distant crowd.

  But it was over, she knew it was over.

  * * *

  —

  WHAT COULD BRING her comfort now? Family? Her children could sometimes seem imposed on her, even she would admit that. She would say, “Come give Mommy a kiss.” And Clara, or somebody—one of the bucket-brigade of foreigners and African Americans she’d contracted to tote the children to the end of the week—somebody would catwalk Lucie and Desi Jr. over to Lucille for a nightly show of affection. “Good night, dears. Mmmm, yes. Kiss.” The girl’s dry lips on her cheek. And then she would shoo them, subtly. Not with her hands or anything. Her eyes slid doorward and that was that.

  Every so often she would feel something more tender, would feel love—the mood would present as a wondrous limpid palm that carried and held her and the children both. It was suitably dramatic. The baby lying on her chest, wearing only a diaper, and Lucille stroking his face and head, kissing an ear at its tiny, pale fuzz. Her daughter’s hand in hers as they walked toward the ice cream counter at Woolworth’s. That feeling was rare. And the cameramen and crowds at Woolworth’s made it hard to focus on the kids. Her heart opened for Lucie and Desi Jr. most when she saw the least of them. Lucie nicknamed Lucille “Fat Chicken”; that’s the sort of thing one is obliged to find cute, but I don’t, Lucille thought, and the center of her heart would cool, and close a little more.

  Certainly, and even here, she was a consummate actress. As with the woman in the Lawrence story, everybody else said of her: “She is such a good mother. She adores her children.” Only she herself, and her children themselves, had a sense that this might not be so. Her tapping foot and those doorward glances were indexes of the truth.

  Her feelings weren’t much different toward her own mother. DeDe lived now on the skirts of Beverly Hills in a house Lucille had bought. They talked nearly every week. DeDe seemed grateful for the home, the car, the allowance, for the life—things Lucille granted her. Everyone thinks they know about fame, but everyone forgets to mention one thing. Becoming a celebrity transforms you; that’s what they say. But, more, fame changes people around you. Celebrities often end relationships with people they’ve known forever. That’s because it’s the loved ones, the friends, who are bent and shifted by groveling. No matter how jam-packed the room or loud the conversation, whenever Lucille opened her mouth, the world as easily as a pool table would tip, and all the attention clacked and rolled her way. Waiters halted mid-stride. Diners quit salting their food, and you could hear the match burn all the way down. I treat everyone the same as I always have, she thought, but no one treats me the same. And the fact that DeDe had abandoned her as a girl was there, an always pain. Another valve, another chamber that wouldn’t open. Father died, Mother left me, and how dare they have? And now Mother’s back and kisses my behind!

  DeDe liked to say she too had been a woman of ambition and beauty, as if it were a curse that spiraled through the cells of who they were. DeDe didn’t get it. For someone like her daughter, “ambition” meant neither talent nor a common want; Lucille Ball’s ambition was something like a spiritual power, an added dimension to her character.
“Well, I never trusted the Cuban,” DeDe liked to say, now.

  Oh, Hold-on! is what Lucille thought. It felt like the right time to call Hold-on. Saying “Mother, please,” is what she did instead, and the voice scraped her throat. “Desi is the father of your grandchildren.”

  “How much is he drinking now?”

  “Goodbye, Mother. The man is coming today to install the air conditioner.”

  “So, Lucille, Miss Hotshot TV Star, is there anyone you ever loved besides your husband?” the gravelly-voiced man says now, again, at Danny’s Hideaway.

  Yes, I did love a man besides my husband once. I suppose. But I didn’t know him well.

  * * *

  —

  ISIDORE PLODDED ON through 1953, confused, dead-hearted, in a private exile. He’d been driving his kids to birthdays, cleaning the gutters; he’d bought an air conditioner. “Wait, let me take the boys!” or “No, no, I’ll get it!” Errands, duties, meals; he’d managed to square the shoulders of a lot of husbandly stuff. But from it all, he felt cast out. In the kitchen the TV glared steadily over the coffee maker. There was no glamour here.

  “So, isn’t this stew really good stew, boys? Say ‘Thank you’ to your mother.”

  In effect, Isidore was the one who cast himself out. Harriet must have known everything. She’d tossed the scribbled number. Or maybe, possibly, nah, but could he maybe have misplaced it? The sort of conundrum that drives you mad. He yawned now.