There was no alternative now. Desi and Lucille knew—though for some reason, she huffed like an old lady—there was no more delaying.
The act of leaping in the nick of time. Some of it came out of those years of shared intimate bodily knowledge, but mostly, it was the result of plain old stage practice. Chick-ch—the spark of rehearsed movement. It can light over differences; it can buzz the world into one shared current. Lucille and Desi were now—icky boo—at the hole; their toes wiggled into the deep nothing below. Up to this point, the show hadn’t gone great. Not terribly, but not great.
(The crowd—“Ooh!”—began to react; Izzy closed his eyes. Then couldn’t not open them.)
Together, Lucille and Desi leaped—up they went over the hole, they were singing even, such grace and harmony, as synched as a deer and its reflection over a pond, she in mid-leap able to glance at the audience; goodness, would you just look at all those stone-idol faces, row after row, it’s a bit drafty up over this thing, wait a second, who’s that there, up near the front, is, is that…? And I’m Sall—she and Desi cleared the open hatch, but Lucille was off course now, and her heel came down mid-rotation onto some unexpected thing. A fleck of wood off the Rube Goldberg cello. A banana peel. Who knows what. She didn’t gasp; she winced. She even twisted a little. Desi followed, or, he didn’t exactly follow. He just sort of predicted the activity, greeting the move with a corresponding twist. A responsiveness close to ESP. They were onto the next turn in this singing dance. And the audience kept laughing. Safety. But there was still something missing from the act.
And why was she breathing like this?
All the same, the revue tonight had debuted its new name. The Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball Revue was now I Love Lucy.
* * *
—
“SO, I ENJOYED IT,” Harriet said. “Their marriage is like our marriage, except for the trapdoors in the carpet; or maybe we’ve got them, too. Just kidding.”
She walked holding her pocketbook to her chest so firmly it gave her shoulder a tilt, a posture of self-repression. It was as if her public shyness were creeping in to their private dealings.
“You liked it,” she sort of asked.
Isidore was determined not to sacrifice the pleasure he felt. Lucille, her vital flash; don’t tell me that was just the spotlight.
“I did, I did enjoy it,” he told her. “I did. Did you? You did, right?”
He hadn’t thought of the hole thing to be a metaphor until Harriet brought it up. Who cares? Wasn’t Lucille a radiant humdinger? Wonderful, superb. And yet somehow it all made him feel an atom or two of disappointment as well.
“The woman does have something, sure,” Harriet said, squeezing his hand.
If I’d never met her, Harriet’s familiarity and niceness would’ve been enough. I want Harriet to be happy, he thought. I do!
Even the great books have it wrong. It’s not that you marry a Karenin and then you meet a Vronsky. Marriage transforms every spouse, makes us all both. You fall for a Vronsky and end, Isidore thought, with a Karenin. (This kind of insight made up for missing the point of the trapdoor thing, right?)
Isidore looked and looked at the proscenium curtain. On that stage, in the spotlight, the applause she’d gotten—Lucille would never make that marital journey in his head from shiny to dull. She wouldn’t have the chance. How unfair to Harriet.
But how sad to leave now. Lucille had vanished into some backstage El Dorado of glamour, of hiddenness, while he was pretty much exactly where he’d been, down here by the cheap seats; he’d joined the collective bovine schlep toward the exits.
“I’m not in a go-home mood, I don’t think,” he said.
“What? Really?” Harriet held her handbag in one hand and let go of him to fish out her umbrella (just in case) with the other.
She’d had a tough time when they moved to Long Island. She’d had to pick up the big shaggy plant of her Brooklyn life and hump it all the way out to Great Neck.
“A drink somewhere?” he said. Drinks were her soft spot. The first weekend of every month—or, as they referred to it officially, The Thing on the First of the Month—Isidore and Harriet had been coming to Manhattan for drinks and/or dinner. It’d seemed a nice recent change. And it had never seemed pathetic to him before.
He was now as nervous as he’d ever been, and as giddy; he knew what he had to do.
* * *
—
AN ACTRESS IS a kind of Baskin-Robbins franchise of smiles.
Every movie actress in 1950 needed the soggy-eyed, mournful smile. And the shut-lipped smile, the make-love-to-me—another requisite, right behind being “leggy.” Some varieties were particular to certain women. Lucille’s smile came in six flavors.
Bette Davis smiled in eight flavors, damn her. (And Bette wasn’t even a smiler.) Kate Hepburn could pull twelve.
After tiny to big parts in more than seventy movies, Lucille had found her trademark: the I-know-something-you-don’t comical smile. Teeth showing. Eyeballs up and looking to the side. (This was a Harpo Marx deal. But nobody realized this, and wouldn’t for five years, when she’d graciously invite that mop-headed genius and has-been to appear on TV.) More than her unequally thick lips, Lucille’s giant moon eyes decided all her smile flavors.
At this moment, she was working the simple-gratitude smile. “Roses?” she said to her fans. “How sweet. Thank you.”
She laid the flowers aside immediately for her maid, Clara, who would get them later. But it was true: Lucille loved roses, she loved the autographs and the post-show jostle, and her fans she loved most of all.
A knot of admirers stood before her in the corridor.
“No, Miss Ball, thank you,” a female fan said now. People Lucille talked to often felt their cheeks go hot. “For, well, for, um—?” she asked. “You two aren’t really married?”
Desi laughed.
When celebrity is in attendance, a gathering of normals sucks in its gut.
“I am lucky,” Desi said into the undifferentiated white faces of these undifferentiated white people. “Because she married me.” This worked. The fans’ chuckles arrived gratefully.
Desi was able to cast a sentence out there like a twist of wire and feathers and know the fish would come swimming toward it. That winning skill of born celebrities. Even with his unwieldy voice, his limited wit. Didn’t matter. He’d lure in the human fish.
“Certainly, I’ll sign that,” said Lucille, reaching for some straw-hatted biddy’s autograph book.
“Make it out to M-A-R-T-H…”
For the rest of Martha’s life, she would say, “Lucille Ball? Met her. She’s just like one of us.” Not so, however.
Lucille held Martha’s pen gently, redly. Nails red enough to look cheerful about something. She wasn’t one of them. She wasn’t a stand-in. She had an extra vividness.
Or she could have. Now she was still breathing hard. It had Lucille a tad worried. She was able to feel her own face, tired and wheezy, amid all these covetous mouths and covetous faces.
After signing two more autographs, she rubbed her arms.
“Tired, Dez. I’m tired.”
She spoke as if her fans weren’t there, which was confirmation. “What say we make a clean squeak and go to the hotel?”
Desi knew it was just about time to reveal the news. “Sure, honey,” he said.
* * *
—
HARRIET WATCHED ISIDORE fail to leave the theater. His hands behind his back, he dawdled.
“Something in your shoe, Iz?”
“Huh?” he said. “Oh. Ha.”
She and Isidore took two steps before having to stop. Momentarily held up in a cloud of audience chatter. “Are you tired, dear?” he asked, loudly, over the din.
“Tired?”
Harriet worked to hide any ha
rdness from Isidore; she didn’t often give herself the right. Her voice, even when she felt grumpish, might sound borrowed from the polite lady down the street who offered relationship advice. Maybe because Harriet didn’t like this about herself, she also worked to hide any softness. “If you want to get a drink, we can,” she said now.
Isidore brightened.
He said, “Where do you want to wait for me?”
“What?”
“Sorry. The john. Have to use the john.” He was already moving. “Stomach upset.” Even pushing a chair out of the way. “Meet you out under the marquee? Ten minutes,” he said. “Fifteen.”
* * *
—
ISIDORE SHOULDERED PAST the concession booth, past the ladies’ room, the men’s, looking, looking for a backstage door, still looking. “Please,” he said into the departing crowd, the sourness of exhaled smoke, the mothball musk of wool coats, of furs. “May I get through?”
How many little suicides had he committed since Thanksgiving? “Please.” How many times had he killed who he had become that night on Coney Island? “Please let me pass.”
A mustachioed concierge, sharply dressed, tartly compassionate, told him the stage door was that way. But the truth, boss, is, I don’t suppose you’ll be able to get in.
“Okay, then, I’ll just, er,” Isidore said. But he would make sure he got in.
Hey, bub, take a powder—(this from a separate concierge)—no backstage visitors, got it?
Meanwhile, just out of Isidore’s eyeshot: Lucille.
She was just now getting to her feet in the backstage hallway, with a fur stole draped around her.
“Sure, Red, you are tired,” said Desi, smoothing the fur. “You will feel better” is all the news he told her.
Lucille looked back with the sacrificial glance of the condemned. “In all my years, Dez, have you ever known me to be tired after a standing ovation?”
“I have a hunch why,” said Desi, “take my arm”—who, secret be told, didn’t care for his wife’s playing Joan of Arc at the stake of an autograph line. Or playing Bette Davis playing Joan of Arc.
Her reaction to the news might be complicated. She was childless at thirty-nine, and for all her ambition, it hasn’t been easy. Maybe he should tell her only after they hit the air of West Fifty-first.
“I’m sure Clara will come in a minute; Robert’ll find her,” Desi was saying. “But it’s going to be a good evening, I promise you.”
“What are you on about now, you crazy Cuban? Oh, you never listen to me, I swear. I’m tired.”
“Ha, yes, I know. You’ll see.”
Desi tried to look jolly. He believed he knew Lucille enough to predict her actions—though he wasn’t one to bother trying, really, to know somebody else, let alone a somebody as full of multitudes as was his wife—but he was surprised anyway at his own helplessness to forecast the sort of thing she would say upon learning that Walter Winchell had broadcast to the world a crucial and secret detail about their lives, a secret that her doctor had kept even from her. She was pregnant. The hospital leaked it to Winchell before they told me and you, he’d say. But, anyway, darling—we’re going to have a baby! He wouldn’t linger on the fact that the listeners of ABC Radio knew before she did.
“Where the devil is Clara?” Lucille said.
“Fine,” Desi said and went to fetch the maid himself.
A glowing red exit sign watched Lucille stand there; it anatomized her head into elements of pink, red-pink, and shadow. And she gave a stylishly imperious nod to the few autograph seekers there. Thank you, her face told them, but no. Don’t.
The sort of background people whose jobs Lucille never would get a handle on—spotlighters, riggers, etc.—came and went, inquiring about her comfort. Desi returned, lugging things the maid normally would. Lucille’s purse, flowers. And it was Desi who opened the exit to the street—“I’ll go try again to find Clara, okay?”—but it was Lucille who first saw what was out there in the alley just off Fifty-first Street.
She seemed at first not to know him. Lucille blinked at the man with her lusterless blue stare until memory showed in her eyes: a school of bright fish darting straight for the surface.
Good God.
It was the man from the Coney Island party, taking off his hat. “Lucille,” Hold-on/Isidore said.
He looked calmly unsurprised and suddenly very close and in front of her. Hello.
Lucille found herself in a brief fantasy, and in this fantasy, Desi storms off and divorces her, and she doesn’t necessarily accept Isidore/Hold-on’s courtship, not fully or at first, but she does, in spite of herself, begin to allow the man to take her out on the town, and, yes, she’s unmarried and disgraced publicly, but somehow she holds up all right, and the guy’s a good snuggler. All this in a millisecond.
She said, “Hold-on, is it?”
“I’m hoping it still is.”
Meanwhile, Desi was ten yards off, fifteen now, and failing, for the moment, to notice Isidore; Desi’s attention in that bustling place was taken by somebody else walking up to his side—Robert. Robert was their occasional New York chauffeur and even more occasional New York houseboy. And Desi would see Isidore if he’d just turn.
A long while ago, going back to Desi’s birth and right up till he turned sixteen—which was when President Batista snatched up all Arnaz property and on balance just kind of poked the family in the eye—Desi’s father had been the mayor of Santiago de Cuba, which is a way of saying that Desi, or Desiderio Alberto Arnaz y de Acha III, had been accustomed for many years not only to wealth (having been heir to a San Simeon–sized home, three ranches, and a vacation address on a private island in Santiago Bay) but accustomed to poverty also, because his Miami refugee days had plunked him down in a boardinghouse and shuffled his mornings from odd job (busboy) to odd job (doorman). And so here was the final result of those two lived pasts, the prosperity and the austerity: a sort of relaxation of the spirit. That’s all. A relaxation among the working-class people of his life. In handing his care over to Robert and Clara, Desi felt comfortable. Most old-money rich Americans wouldn’t, probably; neither would the nouveau, the egalitarian of heart. But Desi acted neither rudely to “the help,” nor overly polite (over-politeness being another kind of disrespect, a more delicate form of rudeness), and this made his hired caretakers more fond of him than they were of Lucille—or of anyone else they were paid to serve.
Desi had stopped, and Robert had come right beside him. The chauffeur didn’t look at his boss, but down the block at Isidore—fearfully.
“Mr. Arnaz, I can’t find Clara.”
But even as he talked, Robert’s eyes stayed on the strange man who stood there next to Lucille holding a fedora to his chest. Robert submitted to curiosity and imagination. Well, I’d like to take a nice long dip in her blue eyes myself, Robert thought.
Lucille’s face—now looking at Isidore—was unreadable. Isidore stood wondering at its mysteries, and Desi showed up at his side.
“It’s you, huh?” Desi said.
Desi’s expression was wild. Pleasurable anger. Gratifying, meaty anger. I should’ve dragged this maricón back where he came from, library or pawnbroker’s, down in Brooklyn, off to Palestine.
“Yes, me,” Isidore said. “I think I owe you one.”
Desi faced Isidore; Isidore faced Desi.
Isidore didn’t want too much. Just a little enjoyable time with a glamorous woman. A slippery tail of time, just once, grabbed and held.
“If you’re trying to upset me, friend,” Desi said.
He had a flared look; Isidore tried to match it. What if I come back to Harriet with a black eye again?
Desi said, “This time I take a swing, I won’t miss.”
“You didn’t miss last time,” Isidore said. He could feel his heart twist on its cords and vines
.
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.
* * *
—
WHERE IS MY husband, Harriet thought.
Out under the marquee, just around the corner from that husband, with walkers flowing by—and she getting bumped and jostled like a marble in a funnel—Harriet couldn’t quit looking at her diamond-salted watch. There was a chilly breeze, and she kept tensing her shoulders. What in the world could be taking so long? Maybe a long line. These words a way to disavow, to convince herself that this was her only question.
Isidore found himself skulking alone back to where he guessed his wife might be.
He was tensing his own shoulders against the wind. Jesus; so damn cold. Lucille was gone. And he’d never be a heartbreaker, he thought. Yet he found himself falling for her.
This idea was interrupted: that panicked fire engine, its repeating yowl.
A minute or so ago, Lucille had said, “Just wait a second, Desi.” Or something like that. “Don’t do anything rash.” And then she and her husband were gone.
Isidore tried to piece it together, on this street where taxis and hansom cabs kept rolling past.
Lucille’s husband’s expression, its raw fury—that, and then everything had gone chaotic. I’d been in front of the husband; Lucille had said, “Just wait,” and then—? Okay, some woman who seemed to work for them had rushed over. Clacking heels. This woman had been in a state. “There you are!” She’d worked to catch the husband’s eye, to convey some message. “What is it?” Lucille had said. The husband had answered in Spanish. “Tengo que decirte algo.” Isidore didn’t understand; maybe Lucille did. The husband unclenched himself. And then the entire Lucille-Desi crowd up and left—and Isidore ended up being the guy looking at fire engines and cabs and wondering what happened.
“Falling for”—what can that even mean? All this should be said with enough caveats to overflow his pockets. Anyway, she was gone.
The Queen of Tuesday Page 7
