The Queen of Tuesday Read online

  The fierce bright thrilled look in his smile. Desi was trying to make her act cruel too; he was trying to make it so they were both wrong, to ease his guilt.

  “That’s no surprise, Dez,” she said, trying to steady her hand as she lighted a new cigarette. “You’d take anyone in a skirt.”

  The composure was a giveaway. It was too blatant. Her heart was Sugar Ray Robinson, jabbing whomp whomp whomp into the ribs.

  “Not everyone.” Desi gestured at her. “I draw the line somewhere.”

  “Well, somebody has to. Maybe it should be me.” But her gaze faltered.

  Desi leaned both hands against the table. “I draw the line too.” He knew he was being a shit and this made him more cruel, more angry, more thrilled. “I draw the line at aging nags,” he said.

  She stared at Desi and his face looked perplexingly new to her. Maybe that’s just what happens to something familiar that you think you’re going to leave forever.

  “In a way, it’s my fault. I wasn’t strong enough,” she said. “I am now.”

  I asked for so little. That’s the shock, Lucille thought. I asked him to keep his cheating quiet. From me and from everyone else. That’s it.

  * * *

  —

  LUCILLE’S HOME, SCARCELY calm before, stood nervously waiting for the resolution, the big finish. But there wasn’t a big finish.

  Even with its wounds the marriage had staggered and wobbled ahead. The late-period Arnazes even starred together in a non-Lucy movie, and in another, but no one wanted to see Lucy and Ricky as bigger than life. Or Lucy and Ricky with different names. Friends like the Ricardos you would rather get together with informally, in the lax comfort of your home. But they weren’t visiting as often now.

  The weekly I Love Lucy became a few specials a year, each named The Lucy–Desi Comedy Hour. By the penultimate episode (aka The Ricardos Go to Japan), Lucille and Desi were hardly speaking except on camera. Each show did well, and each was less good than the last. She had performed red-eyed after yet another crying screaming embarrassing belittling demoralizing argument. That struck her as a sign.

  Lucille would now find a new home; she would file the sad paperwork.

  “Will we see you more now?” Desi Jr. said, his eyes blinking fast. The now almost six-year-old boy was fighting tears, was about to cry; now he had a wet face. “Will you work less if you’re divorced?”

  And Lucille thought merely, This couch. The kissing, the sex that she and Desi had enjoyed on this very couch, the kids and Clara having gone upstairs to bed. It is possible, it turns out, to be relieved and bereft at once.

  Desi had held himself above her there, his arms flexed. “Mommy has to work to give us all this, sweetie,” she said.

  Sometimes the natural light in her next home, the Beverly Hills house that she would soon come to live in, was very bright, and this would infuse it with a Chatsworth-like warmth that ushered in some nostalgia.

  In memory she’d only had three days with Desi, and each one lasted years: a day of sex, a day of fighting, a day of work. These had (she felt) run in succession. No commonplace days in between, or days otherwise good or bad.

  “Do you like your new house?”

  I do, thanks, she wrote in response to this question posed by her fan club. I picked it out. It’s hard to be here without a husband.

  In the animation studio behind her eyes, she would draw various scenes of reconciliation or triumphantly bitter reunion. A fateful rendezvous on Fifty-second Street and Broadway. Oh, is that you, Desi? So wrinkled and out of shape! Sometimes her memories or fantasies would mix, it was Desi and Hold-on merging, the men, the beds, the hotel and the home.

  Ah, beautiful Desi. Now that was over.

  And yet Desi had one more humiliation for her, one last awful surprise.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN THE MARRIAGE ended—when the glass of the façade of perfection broke—the American people worried for her. Or the people nestled worry for themselves in worry for her. If you learn that the ideal of perfection is fake, the disappointment can feel like a national hex. But Lucille didn’t worry. To be a famous woman after a divorce took an odd mix of skills that she had a talent for. Guile, camouflage, and poise. (She had less aptitude for happiness.)

  And, of course, it hadn’t helped to get Desi’s weaponized letter. “One last fuck you on the way out,” she told Vivian.

  This was 1960. The TV show had gone. Her winning streak too. On stage, starring in a Broadway production of Wildcat—something to keep her busy—she realized that her new life had begun. A life that now looked like a question mark. “Oh, this is my life now!” she thought, standing amid the applause. Cheering, another cloud of faces, another curtsy, but this curtsy performed alone. Lucille was still “a looker, a knockout, a doll” (The New York Times), though the thickening in her face and hips was emphasized by cameras. And there was a sadness too. Or maybe it was the lines around the mouth. Age, the reverse sculptor, slowly marring, slowly unchiseling.

  “What’s your idea of fun and happiness offstage?” asked the New York Daily Mirror’s theater critic after her first Wildcat performance. The answer was there was no answer. “Well, you know,” she said. The critic seemed rudely young. He smiled and stared, stared and smiled. Lucille felt her jowls thicken and her wrinkles deepen and that made her blush. She could have answered, My kids are my idea of happiness, but Lucie and Desi Jr. were back in Los Angeles, so that might not’ve come off well. She could’ve answered, When other people aren’t exactly all that real to you, there’s a limit to how much something like this can hurt. Though Lucille hadn’t believed she had that particular flaw. That line had just been something mean someone told her about herself once. She could’ve answered, You know what’s not much fun? When everything in your life is shown to be made of shit. Get out of my dressing room, you little turd. Sometimes, not always, or even often, but sometimes she thought fun and happiness had been Desi, and her relationship with Desi, her show with Desi, the studio she ran with Desi, the house and plans she’d shared with Desi. Not counting that momentary escape with Hold-on, Desi had been life to me. Hadn’t he? Maybe that was more dramatic bullshit. Why else did I need Hold-on?

  Hold-on. Isidore Strauss. Why can’t I just call Isidore now? she thought. I’m in New York. I’m not married. What am I afraid of? I’ll find him and call him. Why not?

  But she knew why. Recently, life had given her a reason.

  * * *

  —

  THE DIVORCE HAD been handled by a mediator—to avoid the press; to make the awfulness end quickly; and because neither party had any material wants. And so the for-the-last-time Arnazes appeared before Thurman I. Shepherd (Retired Judge and Certified Family Law Specialist), of Palm Springs Mediation Services, Palm Springs, California. Cozy little chambers, a sofa, no black robe—the exes sitting across from each other. And just before Shepherd uncorked the proceedings, Desi walked over (the heels of his shoes went tsk-tsk) pulling a letter from a hesitant briefcase. He stopped, thought better of it, then pulled it out again. To my wife, while she still is, the envelope read. And for Lucille a tidal push of quiet washed away all sound.

  Typed up, on Desilu stationery, his difficulties with the language making him seem less brilliant than he, in fact, truly was:

  You act all hi and mighty. Making me feel bad.

  I hired a private “eye.” And he tells me that you were up to no good yourself. I have been aware for awhile. It’s the man from New York. I know about the one time but may be there were others. I may be was right about Archer too.

  The point is, I am not going to let you make me sub-conscious about my own actions. You don’t care because no one is real to you but yourself.

  And as she read, Lucille felt a hot sickly feeling in her chest. She crumpled the letter. Closing her eyes, she rubbed the lid
s. For a while. At last she turned at Desi and saw he throbbed with satisfaction.

  No one is real to you but yourself. He could be a shrewd character; she would cite the accusation often, in the cozy little chambers of her head. It’s a lonely life when you don’t really trust in the reality of anyone but yourself.

  That was Day One of the mediation. On the third and final day, when lunch break was announced, Desi asked if he could talk to Lucille for a secon’, jus’ me and you. (Don’t mock the voice of the father of your children, especially not in a bigoted fashion, she admonished herself.) Can we, Red, just the two of us, get away from these moochers for a second? “Lucille,” said her lawyer, Lew Gotkin, snapping shut his briefcase, “as your counsel, I can’t in good faith advise this.”

  “Lew, as your client,” she said, “I can in good faith mention who’s paying who.”

  There were no reporters in front of Palm Springs Mediation Services, just desert trees, the asphalt parking lot, six boatish cars, endless sky.

  “Okay, Dez,” said Lucille; her face added, What now?

  She didn’t want to be talking alone with Desi and yet was in some way glad, for the first time in weeks, to return to the comfortable pang of him. She hadn’t told Gotkin about Desi’s note, and she wondered if his own lawyers knew. Likely not; they would’ve cleaned up the spelling.

  “What are we doing here, huh?” he said. “I mean, really.” Anger and longing were behind them both, and over them; anger and longing and even forgiveness.

  “It’s pretty plain.” She said it as if it were an endearment, soft, with a breath of friendliness. “We’re set to right a twenty-year wrong, is why I am here. You’re here, I’d say, because you bedded too many whores. Though you didn’t always use a bed, did you?”

  “You wouldn’t talk like that if I was still young. Twenty-one years it was, actually, we were together.”

  He was a little unsteady on his feet. With a backward step he leaned his big tobacco-stained hand on the wall: sweat-ruined underarms on his white shirt.

  “Jesus, you think this is that you’re not young anymore, Dez? You’re younger than I am and—no.” She waved him off. “Don’t come near me. You’re just talking to talk.”

  “Ah, Christ, Red.” The words came out kind of fuzzy and wet. “What are we doing?”

  Palm Springs Mediation Services had a big front window, and Lucille saw both parties’ lawyers standing there, peeping out through the uncurtained glass.

  Desi hadn’t always looked like this. Someone may as well have plugged a tire pump into the back of his skull and inflated his head. “Let’s call it off,” he said, then stared off at nothing. He was drunk. Worse, he was thirsting, hard, for another drink.

  “Don’t look at me like that, Red.” He said, “Let’s call it off.” And he looked right at her and asked her again.

  “Oh, come now.” She turned away, surprised at all she was feeling. “Desi.”

  He was a lush and halfway to fat and still Lucille thought of him as hers. He still calls me “Red.” That was the pull of him, the feeling of marriage in each part of her—the feeling in the nose that smelled his familiar smell and in the eyes that took in that known face and in the fingertips that itched to go to his. It was a whole-body inclination. The pushpins jabbing behind her nose were a cry, a good long cry that wouldn’t come out. Oh, she wanted to say yes, yes, let’s call it off. You say tomato, I say tomahto.

  Desi took a drag on his cigarette so deeply that the orange end flared bright. How can anyone walk away from twenty years with a man like him? How could anyone stay twenty years with a man like him?

  “No, Desi, no.”—that’s how you walk away. “No,” she said. “No.”

  But what about Isidore? The Desi letter, which made it clear she couldn’t call Isidore, immediately exalted Isidore. Why hadn’t she called him? Worse, why hadn’t Isidore disregarded her request and called her?

  Desi raised his thick eyebrows a little; he didn’t even frown or shake his head. “Do you want to go inside?” he asked politely. He stood taller, almost stately in his lamenting. She managed a tender look as she headed back to Gotkin.

  Desi put a hand on her arm to check her forward progress. He held a second, looking up, as if hoping the sky would swallow him in its wide blue mouth. And then, “I do have one demand,” he said.

  * * *

  —

  A THREAT! AFTER all the nameless women Desi had been with!

  More of that unfairness at which 1950s men did fairly excel.

  “If it’s that Jewish guy, that New York guy,” Desi told her in the Palm Springs Mediation Services parking lot, “I take it to your public.”

  “Why? Why do you care who—”

  “Not him,” Desi said. “Just not him.” His one demand.

  She drove the next day to the studio early in the morning, the sunshine brightening the lot. Earlier than she’d ever arrived, hoping to be there alone. He thinks he can tell me what to do? She felt the sunshine kind of emblaze the warm light of her ambition.

  The phone on her desk at Desilu was chunky and black, with thick rubbery wires. Lucille never accepted ultimatums. Especially not from Desi. And inside the vast desk, hidden in a drawer, lay a slip of paper with Isidore’s number on it. Even as she picked up the receiver and fingered its curlicue wire she felt—even before she called—she felt as you feel when landing at the airport and nobody’s there to greet you.

  The truth is, she had never been going to call Isidore. Or probably hadn’t ever been. She couldn’t have said why. Lord knows she wanted to. It felt like a matter of propriety. If the marriage failed, then maybe Isidore seemed bound up with that failure. In a way, the decision not to call amounted to Lucille’s punishing herself. Or maybe she didn’t want the normal life she thought she wanted.

  No. Now she realized why. I Love Lucy fans had made her marriage into the Washington Monument of wedlock, and she’d always felt something sacred in that, something true, something like the most genuine and deep relationship she’d had—the one between her and the public. They stood with her when she’d been an avowed member of the Commie Party. And they stood with her when I Love Lucy slipped. And if she got committedly romantic with someone whom she’d had sex with before the divorce, even if the romance’s timeline wouldn’t go public, something about that would feel, to her, like a violation of the trust the entire country had put in her. And, of course, it would possibly go public; Desi would tell.

  Lucille’s anxiety for Isidore had loitered for years like a ball in her chest, but now it rolled out from her and vanished. How could she admire a man who would listen to an injunction (no matter if she’d made it herself) not to call her? She sighed. What was wrong with that guy? If you’re worshipped by millions it’s sad not to have someone you can worship back. It’s not a fate known by mortals. And Zeus and his famed siblings had eventually to quit Olympus and live among us.

  That was that.

  * * *

  —

  “YES, THERE WAS someone I loved besides my husband,” she says in Danny’s Hideaway, on steak row, at the end of 1960, in the beginning of her date with Gary Morton, the second man she would marry, and the last.

  “Tell me,” says Morton.

  Lucille forks a slice of rib eye around her plate, into a lake of brown sauce.

  “Maybe next time I’ll tell,” she says. “Let’s talk about you.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  NEVER IN HIS later life of windfall and loss did my grandfather divorce my grandmother. Who can say why? When he died, I didn’t feel sad, as I said, for Mona, the woman he loved and lived with and who acted as my surrogate grandmother for almost thirty years. No, I felt sad for the woman who hadn’t lived with him since before I’d been born.

  Grandma Harriet was a mean, isolated drunk for most of the time I’d known her. Around my gran
dmother I didn’t feel comfortable as a kid. She was unpleasant to spend time with and wasn’t traditionally grandmotherly toward me. It didn’t matter. Compassion is a clear, open stream. It flows where it will.

  Maybe it was that my grandfather wanted to avoid the three icy winds of a trial—claims, judgment, expense. Not that he skimped on what he thought was his duty. The Great Neck home; the housekeeper; a monthly allowance for the wife he’d abandoned. He’d kept all this up well past when he could afford it. But he managed to skip receiving someone else’s verdict on his life. “No,” he often said with perhaps a little martyrdom, “I’m going to do what’s best for Harriet.” She hadn’t wanted a court’s finality, either. She wanted still—forever—to call herself his wife. And, again, even as he lost all his money, he paid generously. But leaving room for hope where there is no hope is not generous. Because she would have returned to him, no matter what. She spent the last forty years of her life a recluse.

  CLOSING NUMBER

  1977, 1932, 2000

  THE PATH SQUIRTS between the Sheraton’s pool and some palms and leads to the foot-torture of hot sand. But how hot on the tootsies; how humid is it today? These questions now mark the only stress this generally stressed-out woman feels. In front of her, the glistening Atlantic. Jacketed waiters, drinks on their trays, scoot across the beach. The cool sea air, like a reassuring memory, blows in. Isidore would kiss me. And I would let him do more. And that was how we started, Harriet thinks.

  At bedtime, if it’s breezy out her window, the palm fronds rake their fingers over the night sky, poking holes in the black. Stars, trees, the sound of the ocean. And people say I can’t be happy, she thinks. Here I can be happy, still. At least here.

  Now it’s morning. A man and woman cross Harriet’s line of sight, young marrieds probably, mid-twenties, the man’s ankle cuffs rolled. The woman’s fingers possessive on her husband’s neck. Harriet watches her. The woman yelps. The ocean must be cold. “Ahh!”—the woman starts laughingly to flee the waterline; the man laughingly reaches back to the woman’s elbow, they fall into each other; and Harriet has to look away. The air is warm.