The Queen of Tuesday

by Darin Strauss

  “This?” he said. (Hold-on! Sigh.) And he touched the achy skin.

  Harriet wasn’t turning out to be unfamiliar, of course. That wifely concern in her face; she was great. The mother of my children and even kind of a beauty and I love her and she loves me. Spouses now and then just find themselves in very different mental situations. That’s all.

  “It’s nothing,” he said.

  Hold-on. Last night, on that beach, he’d stepped for a moment out of the cool serene drowning waters of his marriage.

  He managed to say, “I banged myself” right as Harriet said, “You got a little bruise, looks like.”

  Her face, so exposed smiling its compassion, made him sad.

  “Oh, Har,” he said. “Your mother shouldn’t make you so angry.” And he looked meaningfully at the boys. The good family man.

  “Daddy’s eye is a black eye,” said Arthur.

  Isidore thought—as he was saying, “fine, I’m fine”; as he tapped the ache high on his cheek and added, “thanks for breakfast”—he thought about something he’d read in Proust.

  “Is it a black eye, Daddy?”

  And the look on Harriet’s face with its pointy nose asked, “Is there something you’re not telling me, Isidore?”

  The prospect of infidelity is the key to marriage, Proust wrote. Is it so surprising a builder from Long Island read Proust? That’s me, he often said. That’s who I am. He’d once wanted, against his father’s wishes, to become a writer. (Every first-generation Jewish family had one such. Isidore’s penniless cousin Harold worked spearing up trash in the street while quoting Spinoza.) Proust wrote that the possibility of the spouse cheating is a necessary spark. An awareness that betrayal is possible. The thing that keeps couples together. Nonsense. The ignorant marriage presumptions of an unmarried man. It would lock anger in and make for a lasting doubt, a barrier to closeness; cheating would bring down a life, Isidore thought. I’m a moral person, besides. And so I can’t do this. Obviously I can’t.

  “I tripped, actually,” he said. “I, well, I took a tumble on a slick pavement and banged my cheek.” Isidore closed the collar of his robe. “That’s why the bruise.”

  “Huh,” Harriet said, adding an empathetic “ouch.” Her characteristic smile made him frown. With time even your spouse’s virtues can come to be seen as vices.

  Would cheating bring down a life, though?

  The younger boy, Arthur, meanwhile, was asking if everyone thought Bugs Bunny was funnier than Mickey Mouse. Bernie said of course. Mary said neither was good for a boy’s mental life. And Harriet said—

  That’s it? Isidore thought. Though his mind knew it was unreasonable, Isidore’s gut wanted Harriet to have leaped between him and this threat to their family, protecting him. Or protecting them. From him.

  Why won’t you tell me you love me, Harriet? he yelled inside his head.

  In the first blush of marriage, Isidore had been surprised by what he could only call—and he still got embarrassed thinking of it—his wife’s sexual ravenousness.

  “Time,” she was saying now, “for my shower.” She winked at him. “Sorry about your eye. Love you. Stop acting so strangely.” He reached for Harriet as she walked away. Don’t leave me with my memories, he thought. Or my wants.

  Isidore knew he had been kidding himself. Harriet was never going to be unfamiliar to him. (Her hand slid from his.) His typical self-control went; he was now the stranger to himself.

  What had I been thinking, trying to kiss a starlet—a beautiful, glamorous, fun, wonderful redheaded starlet who was someplace in the world right now, living her own life, having her own morning. What would she be saying this instant?

  “Daddy?” Arthur was holding up a fork-spear of breakfast, pointing it. “Why are you laughing?”

  Listen here, Dezdee [or whatever her husband’s name is], certainly I did not enjoy the kiss from that handsome man last night.

  “What is so funny, Daddy?”

  No, señora, the husband says. You cannot hide love, Lucille.

  What could Isidore now tell his son? That he had fallen back into one life and was grabbing at the other as it passed overhead?

  He saw—projected in his memory, but with her décolletage flushed via the reshoots of desire—Lucille’s flirty smile, the lips pulling to the side. Of course it’s something we can do again, Hold-on. Don’t deny it was glamorous.

  I would never deny that, madam.

  His sons did not know a strange woman was thundering through their father’s mind, whooshing with abandon through the doors Isidore tried to shut. Bernie looked at his father with a dimple that said I am living the best day ever. He said, “Do you know what today is, Daddy? Parade!”

  * * *

  —

  ISIDORE WAS SERIOUS about being a Jew, if—like many Jews in Long Island—he wasn’t too observant. Or too specific about faith. Or even certain about much Judaica, including the language used to express it. He considered himself a Jew. And that was that.

  With his father years before, Isidore visited an Orthodox synagogue in deepest Brooklyn, though the old man hadn’t been Orthodox. (Isidore’s father’s father had been, however, back there on the steppes of history.) Isidore felt claustrophobic in that sweat-smelling Williamsburg chapel, his nose, his worldly nostrils, aching for the air of the rational world, the world of modernity and science, of assimilation and leniency. He was generous to his own mind. He called himself an intellectual. He’d received (he told himself) the wisdom of the great books. And yet it’d been hard to follow these old irrelevant Orthodox men arguing about the oldest book, whether original sin didn’t exist because God created the inclination to evil, and that this inclination lives within everybody, right next to our inclination to goodness, which means that free will is just an obedience test. The logic was exacting. The men bobbed to God as they argued. That was when Isidore decided he’d read the Bible, on his own terms. He’d compose his own prayers. But now, all this time later (holding his son Bernie’s hand out on Great Neck’s Northern Boulevard amid the paraders juddering up the traffic-free street), he remembered having thought spitefully that these had been old men who would never be tested by temptation. It had been a young man’s thought. He was not that young man anymore.

  He had considered himself a moral person; he’d maybe—secretly—thought himself better than his colleagues. The particulars of this betterness were not specific or spoken, even to himself. (How many builders had read Melville and Emerson and Dante and got the lessons therein?)

  But how could he know exactly what was moral and good and still have done—?

  And still want to!

  Isidore tried to right the frown on his face. Not that he’d ever been perfect. Even before this, he’d stand next to a beautiful woman on the elevator, imagine having sex with her, and then guiltily call his wife to profess his love.

  This was different. 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.

  The famous words came back, but to what end?

  * * *

  —

  IN SOME WAYS, Great Neck was like old Brooklyn’s antonym. It was built to be an equation: candidly rural Americana + elegance + young secular Jewish families, minus ethnic markings or any unsightliness. Isidore watched his neighbors who had come to cheer the parade. That was how it went every week. A haughty advance of local podunk athletes each Sunday. And the Property Value Fairy would show up, too, looking for any hatted or gray heads; with her magic fairy wand, she’d poof into oblivion the buttoned-up, the pale, the otherwise unvivacious. The old, for example; the visibly immigrant. And in their place, she’d produce these carefreely sundaying Long Islanders.

  In Great Neck, you didn’t see Hasids, with their fur halos for hats, their wigs, their curlicue children.
Here, you saw dogs on leashes. You saw chipmunks. (Chipmunks who stood and rubbed their claws like Dickens’s famous miser Fagin, but still.) This was the story line Property Men were trying to shape and push. Property Men like Isidore. Or those less ambivalent about it than Isidore. Here, Jewish women shone with (department store) haute couture, a darker-complected copy of Manhattan WASPs.

  All around now, wives smiled at their husbands—why, it was smiles everywhere—children smiled with lifted faces like wondrous dentifrice advertisements. Brusha, brusha brusha. But do none of these happy children, wives, or husbands struggle with the grave problem of the penis and the vagina, or a heart that sinks and leaps and pulls the brain with it? Isidore couldn’t restrain his crazy thoughts now.

  A Property Man! Having lacked chutzpah to tell his father, No, I’m not going into the family business. I’m a writer. That was Isidore. With his middle brother, Norman, he had some of Great Neck, had some of Baldwin, some of Syosset; some of Long Island City he had, too.

  “Look, Daddy!” Bernie yipped and tugged Isidore’s hand. “Charlie Conerly, leading the parade!” An eight-year-old, sweating with enthusiasm.

  “Fantastic,” Isidore said.

  He imagined a smiling ideal of attentive fatherhood, of amused concentration, and he impersonated that. (In fact, Charlie Conerly, the New York Football Giants’ quarterback, was not here, marching down Northern Boulevard in Great Neck’s weekly parade of high school players.) “I think it’s maybe someone just has the same number on his jersey, Bernard.”

  “Do you know Mommy says for a snack I can eat fudge?” The boy’s cheeks above his smile glowed. “Do-o you want a fudge snack, too, Dad?”

  “Grown men don’t generally have fudge snacks. Grown men don’t generally have snacks.” He surprised himself by what he said next. Also by the surprisingly bitter laugh that he fired from his nostrils.

  “Grown men”—pfff—“aren’t generally allowed to enjoy many things.”

  Those in-house despots, the penis and the vagina…

  Ah, who had I been to feel bewildered disappointment in Harriet for having had bedroom wants like mine, only a little more intense? he thought. “How do you like them apples?” is what she’d said, so many years back, after having surprised him with their first kiss. (Over the years Harriet’s passion faded, and his did too. And here they were.)

  “Nine is pretty grown, for a kid,” Bernie said now. The parade had tapered to its last few marchers in the sun.

  To have a love affair, to live the beautiful cliché, the stuff of movies and books! To any sophisticated person, to a woman like Lucille, the kiss would be nothing. But then—he felt his cheeks go hot—let me be unsophisticated!

  Even after the band had started that final time into “Some Enchanted Evening,” Isidore’s hope had stood on wobbly legs. But, after a moment, those wobbly legs were on a dance floor with a beautiful starlet. What a night. The soft nude arms of women. All those men whose hair shined and didn’t budge. The dancers like clocktower figurines in synched courses, swayed, spun, swayed more. Rehearsed competence. Whispering, flushed skin, skirts that fanned out with every swish. There were shadows everywhere, too; one shadow even reached out courageously to stroke Lucille’s face. Do something bold, Isidore had thought.

  But the husband showed. Desi stomped over from the beach. Fists up and ready. Isidore kept on. Lucille was lifting her chin slowly—what Isidore said to make her laugh will remain between them—and he was in a mood to blow up his life, to sway in place, to feel the ashes of who he’d been rain down. If I stop, I will regret it always. Time mercifully licked its thumb and waited before turning the page. And Isidore took Lucille’s shoulders—gripped them—and kissed her. This is when Isidore saw his father, Jacob Strauss, who in his draconian black tie looked at his son in condemnation, quit it, quit it, you have a family. What? Lucille was saying after the kiss. What? Wait. She had been married for almost ten years and this was the first time she had cheated. It’s not cheating, Isidore had answered, it’s living.

  Then Desi had been upon him.

  “…And I’m almost nine,” Bernie was saying now. “And that’s grown, Dad. Dad?”

  Isidore smiled, looked. But Bernie didn’t smile—the boy stared at his father, his head at an angle, his lip hung in puzzlement.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ONCE, AN ADVANCED Comp professor at Tufts had spotted a very green talent pulsing around one of my memoir pieces. Every few weeks, I’d exhume that paper—my eyes inching across the corpse of it, like a pair of slugs. Why had that piece stood out? (My eyes, for all their slurping over the pages, could never determine.) A later effort—“The Twins”; second runner-up, Undergraduate Writing Prize—the department called “an energetic third-place fiction” but “in the final analysis, too in love with concepts.” (It would take a decade to admit that this hadn’t been disguised approval.) I hadn’t done much, and what little I had done wasn’t good. But I doubted those two bits of evidence. This was the positive doubt that comes with ambition: the reach for the small fluttering thing suspended between solid certainties.

  My ambition came to me from my grandfather. A very particular ambition, for literary achievement.

  HAVANA-MADRID THEATER, NEW YORK CITY, JUNE 1950

  NEVER IN MY life did I imagine I would become a heartbreaker, he tells himself.

  “There is a place, actually, come to think of it,” Lucille says. An intense blush of desire colors her throat. “My dressing room,” she says, huskily. “My dressing room. That’s where we can go, Hold-on.”

  It’s late and warm on Fifty-first and Broadway. And Lucille Ball isn’t looking around to see, at this moment of her star-rise, if anyone recognizes her.

  This whole thing is such a shock that Isidore won’t allow himself to ask why. (No one does recognize her.)

  No, I’m not cut out to be a heartbreaker, Isidore thinks.

  A heart mender, possibly. He’d known who he was. A heart tape-and-gluer. The sort of man women look to when they need to be made whole. But now—with his wife waiting for him a half block away—Isidore feels Lucille take the first step toward where Harriet stands under the marquee, hazardously downtown. He spins the actress by the shoulders (“Perhaps we should, ah, find another route?”), and he catches her hand, and they’re walking, phew, away from his wife.

  Harriet! Harriet who is going to—who surely has to—turn around and see them soon.

  A fire engine passes, the second in the last minute; a red giant rejoicing with its blushing and jubilant light all a-spin.

  “Let’s go, Lucille.” Walking has never felt so much like running.

  Through the theater’s side entrance, backstage now. A red-lit passageway, otherwise dark post-show, and quiet. Columns everywhere. They’re on an illicit footpath leading from Juliet’s yonder window; or, they’re Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy out hurrying together at Longbourn….

  Lucille speeding ahead has a performer’s meticulous grace. In the past few minutes, some burden has released its grip on her. The show’s crew has finished up and skedaddled, and, already, forty-five minutes after curtain, it’s serene. Even Isidore, who’s never set foot backstage, can sense it’s not usually this peaceful. He bumps against something—hard. Doesn’t care. Bruisable hip, table in shadows, this passageway a maze of darkened spike corners, and he is happy.

  Her dressing room at last, and here on the door is MISS LUCILLE BALL, script inside a sparkly cardboard star. (“Miss”: The sign, too, has forgotten her marriage.)

  Isidore notices a backstage worker loitering under a red bulb, and then Lucille sees him too; she releases Isidore’s hand. Her husband could be anyplace, everyplace.

  Lucille is breathing in a way that may or may not be nerves. That backstage worker has gone, at least.

  Isidore swallows. This is the moment.

  It’s not just that
he’s worried about his wife and her husband; it’s that Lucille might back out. Or—

  Or:

  That the plump woman Isidore saw a few minutes ago—an employee of Lucille’s?—might nudge her head in, through the doorway, peeking around for her boss.

  Which actually does happen.

  A real face now under the framed black-and-white faces of performers on the wall. This is Clara, the Arnazes’ maid. Looking in to see why Lucille’s taken such an age.

  Lucille pulls Isidore—Hide!—behind one of those columns. Her perfume lights up his nose: Chanel No. 5, that unnatural composition of jasmine and soused flowers. Standing so close, her delicate breathing, the exquisite pulse ticking in her throat.

  They wait—petrified, trying not to laugh.

  The moment stretches, and Isidore, giggling despite himself, is reminded of old times with Harriet, years ago, when they were courting: all those contented balcony nights in Brandt’s Flatbush movie palace. How do you like them apples?

  Now Lucille leans away from him and says in a whisper: “This is not something I do.” Whatever it is they’re doing. “Really, I don’t.”

  And yet. Her smile may be subdued, but it is still there.

  Her very large, eloquent eyes add a footnote: I’ve spent a long time being in love with a man who does this kind of thing. And then her head lowers, and her crinkled forehead adds something like: So that is why I’m doing this. Although I do feel surprised to be enjoying it.

  “Well,” Isidore whispers. “Who does do this kind of thing?”

  He laughs softly and checks to see that Clara has gone. “Rogues, that’s who. Scoundrels.”

  Lucille’s head goes back in surprise, but she catches the spirit. “Vamps,” she says.

  Laughing. “Scamps.”

  “Tramps.”

  “Not lamps, though?”

  “Villains.”

  “Ne’er-do-wells.”