She’s recovered her performance voice, that cigarette sound, those rasping lifts. “Floozies,” she says.
“Lovers,” he says, taken by glamour.
And there’s something else Lucille has recovered: her rapturous expression. “Lovers,” she says.
CUT TO: Five days before.
Isidore had his brother and next-door neighbor Norman’s family in his living room, everyone frittering away the morning, newspapers and coloring books and coffee, four children, two wives, the lady of the house at the piano, the adults’ easeful cigarette smoke up to the ceiling, the children quiet after having been chastised—you know not to run in the living room while Harriet’s playing—as Isidore sat contemplating his wife and, in the black sprinkle of piano notes, told himself that she was the mother of his children, talented, kind, and pretty even with her pointed nose, and he should be all right with all that. I doubt I’ll ever have the chance to see her again, anyway, Isidore thought. And then he came across a paid notice, a surprising agony column, in The New York Sun:
Lucille Ball. Two Nights. The Havana-Madrid Theater. Showcasing Her Husb—
And the duality of his feelings returned. He hadn’t seen or talked to her. And when you pull an illicit trigger, there’s a kickback; it changes the forensics of who you are.
“Iz?” Harriet said.
He just looked, blinking. Can’t deny Harriet’s been a good wife. And when our moods are matched, she’s wonderful to talk with, gossip and secrets, not big secrets, he told himself. Not the big secret. “Uh, don’t stop playing, Har,” he said.
“Okay,” she said. She was shy even in front of her brother-in-law’s family.
“You sounded wonderful,” he said.
Pull an illicit trigger? Idiot! Boaster! His burning cheeks mocked him: How did I pull any trigger? Who’s to say the woman even remembers? Jesus, to suffer so, for nothing but a kiss!
He closed his eyes. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, the assembly lines of sin roll out ever more heartbreak into the world. How angry he was now!
Norman was asking, “What’s shakin’, Iz? Did they run something bad, the newspaper?” He was sitting on the couch opposite his brother. “Again with Auschwitz pictures? Is it corpses?”
Before waiting for an answer, Norman said to the room (his favorite conversation partner being an abstract congregation of ears): “They should leave off showing those, it’s been long enough.”
Norman’s wife agreed. “Do we need gruesomeness on a Sunday?”
Isidore would’ve needed to hail from Krypton to flip the newspaper pages fast as he wanted. “Mmm,” he said.
His mind was a drawer of sharp and perilous things. He had worked hard to control himself, to keep the drawer closed; don’t let the blades and soft lips and regrets come spilling out.
Say something now. “I don’t think we need gruesomeness,” Isidore said, lifting his chin.
And he had managed it! He’d gotten pretty happy again, he thought—even these past fourteen months, after the kiss-emotions had settled—with wife and family. He’d been happy. Pretty happy.
What was so wrong with Harriet? Long ago, she’d improvised bawdy variations to “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” on the piano they’d bought that afternoon. (“Izzy was a famous cranny-prodder from out Brooklyn way/He had a child-gettin’ style that no one else could play….”) Sometimes it bothered him that his friends and even his brothers didn’t know shy Harriet had this silken, feisty side to her. They likely caught in the thin face, the black hair, and stately brows only a touching sort of home ec allure.
Lucille Ball. The advertisement read. Two Nights. The Havana-Madrid Theater.
This miracle made him furious.
It made everything seem as if he’d dreamed it and kept dreaming it. And there is no morality in a dream. No morality and no free will. You just do what the dream tells you to.
Showcasing Her Husband and—
Harriet was smiling at him, and he smiled back. Her flat mouth always had to make up for a lot with its intense red lipstick. And Isidore’s friends and even his brothers were not privy to the gleam in her wide dark eyes, the sometime look of friskiness and appetite.
Not that he’d seen that appetite look much lately himself.
Isidore had been taught to believe—by popular music, movies, books, even many of the serious books he read; by the most sophisticated people he knew; in fact, by society itself—that love was its own reward. That a perfect love equaled a higher morality. Forbidden love most definitely included. (Not that people talked like this; it was simply and generally understood by cultured people.) Fools give you reasons / wise men never try / some enchanted evening / when you find your true love. Et cetera. Was it Victor Laszlo or were there others in between? Or aren’t you the kind that tells? Yes, even Norman (who was not just Isidore’s brother but business partner) cheated. Maybe, by remembering that, Isidore could sustain his sense of a principled self. He must have loved Lucille.
Harriet, meanwhile, seemed no longer to care if they ever had sex again.
Lucille Ball. Two Nights—a touch of defeat in the words. As in a great book, when you read some familiar insight and feel that you already knew it and might’ve written it yourself had you only articulated it. That very feeling, times a hundred.
“We should go and do something fun this week, Har,” Isidore said.
It was a beautiful morning. Isidore was turned to his wife with the blatant eyes of the guilty. Sunshine lay across the floor, a golden light.
“Iz,” Harriet said, “you’re so pale. Everything okay?”
“Am I?” he asked. In the realm of morality, should can fall short of did. “I’m fine,” he said.
“Okay,” Harriet said.
The moment Harriet saw Isidore noticing her worried look, she blanked her own face. Isidore didn’t care now. He was, as he sat here, moving away.
“These papers, they suppose it’s their job to educate you,” Norman was saying, “even on a Sunday. But on Sunday—”
“I meant,” Isidore butted in, “let’s you and me go into the city later this week, Har.”
Bernie ran past Isidore’s ankles, chasing Arthur, who wore a movie Indian’s feathered headdress. This was not a disastrous family.
Harriet cocked her head and thought a second. “You mean besides the thing on the first of the month?”
Swallowing, Isidore was still moving away. He could see all that had been with him on the other shore, but could he make the jump and get back to what he’d had?
“Yes,” he said. Did he want to get back to what he’d had?
Inside the newspaper, in the black-and-white allusions that went beyond his family, beyond Great Neck, Long Island, a different life was crooking a come-hither finger at him. And he went toward it.
“In fact, there’s a theater thing I think we should go to,” he said.
“Well, I’m jealous,” said Matilda, Norman’s wife, who sat near Isidore.
* * *
—
“BUT HARRIET WOULD never forgive,” Norman whispered a little later in Isidore’s driveway.
“Tell me,” Norman added. “Dad saw?”
“It was nothing,” Isidore said. “All right, she’d half-murder me, Harriet. But I can’t forgive myself, is the thing.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I mean it.”
Isidore craning his neck to look up Norfolk Road saw his father hadn’t arrived yet. Harriet and the children were still in the house. He and Norman were going to pick up bagels for their father’s weekend visit. Harriet would not forgive. But Isidore also knew she might act as if she had. And he couldn’t abide living with that guilt.
“If Dad saw, we’re talking about Dad,” Norman said. “All the standard rules shouldn’t reply.” He was the middle brother who acted like the oldest an
d almost smug about his dullness of mind.
But Norman was right. Their father wasn’t the type to avoid saying something. Yet after the kiss, the old man had stayed quiet.
“A position you put him in, Iz.” Norman was scratching at the perfect, tan yarmulke of baldness on the back of his head. “A father, to have to see that.”
“Oh, please,” said Isidore, opening the door to his Packard. “Coming from you.”
“What about Phil,” Norman said. He eased into the passenger seat. “Philly saw?”
When Isidore had kissed Lucille, he’d felt surprised at how close to relief it had felt. But somewhere in there, he’d definitely been ashamed, hadn’t he, maybe he had, he definitely had been, right?
“You’ve done worse in your marriage, Norm,” said Isidore coolly.
Together, Isidore and Norman had recently founded a business—NORMIDOR REALTY CORP.—that built almost the entire four-street development in which they both suddenly lived. (NORMIDOR’s matter-of-fact slogan: “Building middle-class housing.”)
“Your wife isn’t my wife,” Norman said, winding his wristwatch. “You’re not me.”
“Ah. Thank you, Edward R. Murrow.”
Norman gave a nasty chuckle. “This I believe.”
In NORMIDOR’s skyrise office near the Brooklyn promenade; at the horse track in Belmont or with foremen on muddy construction sites; at the Boro Park Deli and in Temple Beth El, where twice a year everybody burned candles and opened scarcely understood prayer books for their dead—everywhere it was agreed that Isidore and Norman Strauss had each inherited half the qualities of their shrewd, moralizing father. These guys are like those twins Eng and Kang, people said. Norman has the stomach for business, they said. Isidore? Carries himself like a poet, wants to build affordable housing for working people, but does he care about profit? Now, if you could mix Iz and his brains with Norman and his appetites! I mean, that Norman is nothing but stomach. Ah, you don’t know what you’re talking about, Izzy’s all right, let’s go eat….
“Anyway, she’ll never find out,” Isidore begged.
Maybe he could change the way he did business to be someone worthy of Lucille, someone who shined. Maybe he was looking at being a builder all wrong.
“If this is what in Long Island they call a bagel, it’s for sure not Brooklyn,” their father complained later that day as he sat in Isidore’s kitchen.
Will Dad say something about Lucille to me? Isidore had wondered. I’ll never see her again, he thought. How will I live with that?
* * *
—
AFTER A CURSORY dinner in Manhattan, he and Harriet went to the theater. The Havana-Madrid on Fifty-first Street. He’d thought all week that maybe it would merely be an enjoyable night at a show. Or that being there with his wife would break the spell. “There” was the Lucille-Desi revue, a two-hour production, skits about marriage and music, which had now just about reached its rollicking finale. Drum-accompanied hip shaking, a hole in the stage narrowly avoided: a vaudeville show.
“It’s funny, right?” he whispered to his wife next to him in the dark. He would like to hear her tell him Lucille was dazzling. Even a second-rate recompense fills your pockets with something. (A merely joyful husband-and-wife night out seemed impossible now. That husband, transmogrified, had gone.)
“Right?” he asked. “Right?” The show approached its big finish.
* * *
—
THE TRAVELING LUCILLE-DESI revue’s big finish stood on three pillars of funniness:
1) The physicality of it had to look impossible; 2) the leads could reveal no effort in doing the impossible; 3) Lucille, in the midst of the impossible, needed to throw in some of her own uncanny, comic quirks. That was the conceptual basis of it, anyway.
Now, if you removed just one pillar, it’d be whump, instant stage death. It was time to test the concept.
Lucille’s previous gag (“That’s what I said: Dizzy Arnazzy. But anyhow, I want a job with your orchestra…”) flopped and went, a very protracted two seconds ago.
The audience sat here, balanced between laughs. There was a quiet—even a nervous—attention. It was hot and still, and Desi and Lucille lingered for the longest short while.
Lucille saw Desi, at the back of his collar, sweat; she felt herself sweat from her armpits. This was worrisome. Cuban Pete, Sally Sweet: their crucial, improvised bit of circling each other and tumbling. No recusing oneself. But in Columbus it hadn’t gone right, nor in Hudson. Nor in Duluth; in Mt. Lakota, he’d tripped, or she had.
A stoplight kind of a moment, everybody waiting for the signal that’ll set the evening rolling again.
“Can you do this—you’re panting so?” Desi asked in a whisper. (Not that she had another choice.)
“Shh,” she said.
They’d finished the bit with the xylophone; she’d just chucked her fedora behind the wagon wheel and her tear-away baggy pants getup the Rube Goldberg cello had already yielded, from its hidden compartment, the footrest, the flowers, the toilet plunger. But Lucille’s breathing was—well, she was huffing. A lot. And they had another joke to tell. And there was only quiet from the audience.
At last, she took Desi’s hand in her sweaty own. She began her stage yell: “I’m”—huff huff—“Sally Sweet!” (More like Sally Flop Sweat.)
The audience basically just realized that, somehow, she’d managed to switch her buffoon-wear for this sequined gown, this feathered hat; that she was beautiful; that Cuban Pete was suavely dancing Sally Sweet right toward a giant hole set up at center stage; and, worse, that Pete was gazing too distractedly at Sally—and Sally was too engrossed by reading the book in her free hand—to notice that they were heading straight for the imminent fall that’d surely kill them both.
“I’m Cuban Pete, and”—Desi’s singing voice ran syrup-thick, although it did thin, a bit, when he had to stretch a high note over a consonant—“I hurry like Arthur Murray. I come from Havana and there’s always mañana…”
Lucille’s turn now. But…huff huff. What was the story with her breathing?
“I’m Queen of Delancey Street!” Lucille almost coughed.
Still, she was, even while she read the book and huffed, singing loudly. “When I start to dance”—she began to move—“everything goes chick-chicky boom!” The drum-timed pendulant of her hips. “Chick-chicky boom!”
* * *
—
ISIDORE SAT POTTED out there in Row 2, Seat 5. Those sexual hip explosions were for him a delicious anguish. Each boom after the chick-chickys made pain.
Up on that stage, Cuban Pete (“I place my hand on your hip and…”) was twirling Sally Sweet right at the perilous hole—in fact, already, they were smack-dab in danger.
Her foot arced out above the drop, and she tootled out her own comic “Eeugh!”—an idiosyncratic Lucille noise, a gag, a soon-to-be trademark, a signal to the audience, a signal to Desi, telling everyone that she’d been whirled into danger. But she kept dancing. Sally Sweet evidently remained (except for that dramatically inexplicable and inexplicably hilarious Eeugh!) unaware of the threat.
Earlier today, right up till curtain time, Lucille had been distant, pale, cross with her husband. It had annoyed Desi. “Enough!” he had said.
“Can’t a girl get the jitters?” she had answered. “You know, New York, the big one, the night we’ve been—”
“Sure, ’course you can.” He waved her off. “Just not to your stage partner and husband. Forget this. I’m off to get the papers.”
But once Desi left her dressing room, he didn’t visit the newsstand. He kept to his own wing of backstage, napping, playing the radio, where he heard something that floored him. (Was that the right word in this impossible language? Floored? Why not walled or ceilinged him? Este país es comemierda.) What the radio brought was news, but not
just. Personal news. He greeted the hard surprise of it with some favorite behaviors: smoking, pacing, and—when the maid, Clara, arrived—giving a woman a good razzing. He started in on the way Clara dressed—the maid outfit. ¿Soy yo quien te hace mirar de esta manera? ¿No serías feo si no fueras nuestra doncella?
“Oh, Mr. Arnaz,” Clara said.
“Another cigarette, please,” he said. “That a new hairstyle you got on?”
Clara was twenty-six, nearly and plumply genderless, and she didn’t know how to answer a man like Desi, so she just smiled. There was something unreachable in him, and not just for Clara: some special Arnaz languor you’d never mistake for boredom. Like most gifted entertainers, he gave the sense of looking at you with all he had, but with Dez, you felt, too, that there was a mirror at your back or in your eyes—and this mirror was the reason he’d aimed his powerful notice in your direction in the first place. To see how he looked reflected in it.
“I actually need a hair appointment, Mr. Arnaz,” Clara said. “And as we’re in New York, maybe Miss Ball could give me a name.”
“Now why would you do that?” he said, absently, his mind on the bad news he’d gotten from the radio. “You don’t need to change anything.”
Desi was personable. He had learned, chapter and verse, all the social manners and strategies; still, he would remind you of a mechanic who was pretty okay up front with the customers but who wanted to slip out back and tinker with the dream car he was always fixing up. The dream car was himself. Anybody could sense this. The question was whether you were intrigued by this unreachability or resented it.
After he heard the radio item, at showtime, he went to fetch Lucille. Maybe I should break the story to her. She deserves to know.
But as he’d knocked on her dressing room, he’d decided against telling. Why risk bothering the show? And maybe it’s the kind of news best shared alone….
Now, onstage, another “Chick-chicky boom!” But with the added danger over the hole.
The actual jump had come.
The Queen of Tuesday Page 6
