The Queen of Tuesday

by Darin Strauss

  Desi, even to himself, universalizes his particular offenses. People enjoy skinny pale blond script girls with big breasts, girls who work for them. Which is to say, he isn’t confusingly weak-willed and amoral; people are. People feel their mouths foam when looking at a young Southern belle who works on their TV show; is it a crime for people to do that? He smiles at his philosophy of human nature. But how come this belle is not coming down here now? It’s not just Szilárd; the writers also take Desi in with half-lowered faces, loving him, hating him. The warmth of his smile roars its confidence at you. (What’s the point of warmth if it doesn’t scare up a little envy?)

  One thing about those Lucy-viewing homes. Nielsen measures them in the tens of millions, and this doesn’t even count all the TV-less Americans who descend on neighbors’ living rooms to watch.

  “This episode’s story has to be sharper,” Desi says. He lights a cigarette, blows a perfect smoke ring. The Johnny Hartman single “Wheel of Fortune” plays on some radio, bright horn blasts, syrupy violins, low volume.

  “Jess, you ever see an episode of anything that starts by not showing you who’s talking?”

  “Only show I ever saw do it is Young Mr. Bobbin.”

  “Correct,” Desi says.

  “And The Gallery of Madame Liu-Tsong.”

  “Correct.”

  “And where are those programs now, you mean?”

  “Correct.”

  Szilárd is the first to open and start reading the dialogue-heavy script, whose voices now harmonize in his brain with Hartman’s violins and horns.

  “No, see,” Desi says, frowning into the pages.

  The shadow of his hand stops across the very first joke. “See, no, unacceptable.” As he speaks, his eyes darken; in his face’s intensifying color, the pupils go deeply black. He shakes his head: I am a boss more sinned against than sinning.

  Desi likes this particular staff, or the idea of this particular staff—or at least having a staff. Now with staff around, he ad-libs; the conversation drifts on whatever smoke-ring of thought rises from his lips. CBS are a bunch of ankle-biters. They demanded I learn about amortization, well I never heard of it, he tells the staff. And so now, it’s all gravy for me—by two episodes in, all the costs were paid for. I’m going to sell fucking I Love Lucy pajamas and dinner sets, you watch. Desi looks overhead again; what is that script girl doing up there? Desi has gotten very rich very fast, and there are things he desires and people to take revenge on. Fuckin’ I Love Lucy pajamas—at a huge profit! Desi knows Szilárd and the writers have heard at least some of this before. The success, though! Huge! An example: New York City’s municipal reservoir-pumping station reports visible pressure drops at Lucy’s commercial breaks. The city’s water commissioner, his incredulous fingernail tapping the gauge, sees Lucille Ball steer the largest city in the world to the toilet. (Where is Lucille now, anyway?)

  “Okay, this first scene”—Desi thumbing through the script pages on the table—“how long is it?”

  Brooklyn-born Szilárd wears what looks like a wardrobe-closet cravat. His outlandish mid-Atlantic accent gives his voice a poignantly fancy elocution; that’s the voice he uses to tell Desi: “This is a rough draft. The script is not due till tomorrow, Dez.”

  This is the response Desi has been looking for.

  “Lazy attitude!” he says. I know these people, he thinks, even if I don’t actually know each of them very well.

  He takes out a pen and with swooping bravado lines out, willy-nilly, an entire page. “Lazy!” I know what work they are capable of and what work they are capable of avoiding.

  Carol Pugh—of the four writers on Lucy, the only woman—gasps. And silence falls like dust—coats the table with its grainy foreboding. Szilárd likes to say his work schedule gives him everything but the pleasure of spending time in the heart of his life.

  Desi lays down the script. “I am Desi Arnaz.” His eyes light up with absolute joy. “I am nobody’s fool, least of all yours.”

  This is a lift of a quote that he knows, that everyone knows—it’s from All About Eve. Desi, the king bee, is also their meal ticket and their second lead, and his favorite gesture these past few weeks is to give them the honey of his wisdom. He lifts his chin now and approximates the look of some passionately eternal bust of George Washington—the intensity, force, the quality of being seen. Success drives his staff to love him, or at least to gobble up whatever honey he puts on offer. Nobody minds that he’d stolen the All About Eve line. He’s a slightly talented young aristocrat-turned-refugee. A Miami busboy who overcame unfair history and racism to win at life and can you say for certain you’d behave better than he? (Can you really?)

  Compassion is another unit of power. He tells himself to be lenient with everyone, tomorrow. So he reminds them that their contract requires that they hand in—do any of you deny it?—the script by today if asked to.

  “I want you to make this week’s program even bigger, even better, is that so bad?” he says in his purl of an accent.

  On his way out, he slaps one of the three cameras as if they’re his loyal pets, which in a way they are. And without guilt, he smiles and winks up at the girl in the booth, in case she happens to be looking down. All the women he doesn’t deny himself. He never, ever feels guilt, though he’d swear to himself he does. What he sometimes actually does feel is regret—specifically, the hangdog remorse of getting caught at something, if he gets caught. He hates getting caught. In getting caught, he feels wronged—wronged by the world and (here’s what tastes enough like penitence for the moral distinction to slip past him) wronged by himself. Why do people do the kinds of things that make them get caught? he wonders with philosophical sadness—the same way he would wonder why it feels worse to walk in accidentally on someone using the toilet than it does to be the person whose shit is disturbed?

  Starting this week, a sign in the window at Marshall Field’s, Chicago’s most famous department store: WE LOVE LUCY, TOO, WHICH IS WHY WE’RE CLOSING TUESDAY NIGHTS. So who fucking cares about guilt?

  Desi bounces on his toes and walks as if he were trying to bump his forehead on the clouds. Crossing the parking lot, he feels transported to some other land of wealth, imagines a prairie wind and himself wearing a bolo tie. Oil field gushers he pictures at his back, jetting up their Texas tea. A different mogul in appearance, and, he thinks, maybe that guy would spend his afternoon imagining life as me!

  And still Desi has no idea about the sticky surprise that awaits him.

  * * *

  —

  “DO IT OR don’t, Iz, but quit moaning,” is pretty much the last thing said on the phone call. This is the second or third time they’ve discussed this.

  “But.”

  “You want to call her, there must be ways to find the number,” Norman says. “You don’t want to call, then stop complaining to me about it.”

  But Isidore, seated at his kitchen table, fiddling with the lazy Susan, wants to keep on. “Isn’t it strange, though, that—”

  But now Harriet enters the kitchen. Isidore had thought she was out food shopping.

  Oh, Christ.

  “All right, goodbye.” Isidore’s already moving the receiver from his face. “Thanks.”

  Before he hangs up, Isidore hears Norman say: “Welcome to the crooked path, big brother.”

  A quick slam down of the receiver. A quick, markedly pleasant smile at Harriet. Markedly pleasant has become everyday mode with her, no matter what. But she doesn’t smile back at him now. Who was that on the line? Oh, just, you know, work call with Norman. And next it’s the typical busted-husband reaction—falling into the claws of panic.

  “Why,” she says, “did you ring off so fast?”

  “Getting bored talking business. You came in. I didn’t want to be rude to you. My ear was getting sweaty.”

  “Business
? You were asking something about your father.”

  Isidore hopes Norman won’t be dumb enough to call back and ask why’d you hang up on me? Okay, Isidore, let’s see what kind of fiction writer you would’ve been, he thinks. Maybe don’t come up with three separate excuses this time.

  “Dad sold his Plainview property at a nice profit.”

  Harriet’s gone to open the fridge and now bends into it. The top of her has disappeared into the appliance. A nice profit was a good line, Isidore thinks.

  “Really?” she says, standing straight. “You seem”—and emerges carrying an uncooked pot roast to the counter—“not to be telling the truth.”

  “Why?” he asks this wife he’d been sharing a life with for years. “How long were you listening?”

  “You tell me why. You got off so quickly, Iz. I don’t know. You sound nervous.”

  His heart jolts and tugs, but his panic isn’t manifested in a tied tongue. “I can’t imagine,” he says smoothly. The panic manifests as an urge to giggle.

  With one hand, she opens the oven, and—as Isidore asks, “Do you need help with that?”—she puts in the pot roast. Find me out! he thinks. The tickling impulse to ruin it all was whispering in his ear. You end it for me! Make everything easy!

  Harriet brings her hands to her waist, and, in thinking it over, she appears to be holding back from something.

  “Well,” she says. “Why is it your father always does seem to make you nervous? Didn’t I say not to bring him out of retirement and involve him in Long Island?”

  “You’re right!” The giggle emerges. “I shouldn’t have involved him!” Relief!

  But then, the laugh goes. The years once made Isidore and Harriet nearly indivisible. Had the situation changed before Lucille or because of her? And could it be that Harriet didn’t feel it?

  He’s hit by a real fondness for his wife, for her obliviousness, for his luck. Harriet has joined a full and diverse cast of millions. It’s the age-old drama of a woman wronged by her husband and yet faithful in her ignorance. “You’re right! I shouldn’t have!” he repeats.

  * * *

  —

  THE SCENE IS tropical now. Frogs fill the air with an angry noise; the sound one hundred frogs make together is weird and strident, like page after page being torn from an old hardcover. A hundred frogs at least. Of course, there might be no frogs in here at all. Not actual frogs. That’s this crazy business we’re in, Lucille tells herself. The reality of anything can unravel….

  She hadn’t met the handsome John Archer until after Lucy had been airing for four months.

  Her friend Ann Sothern had been filming a pilot (Private Secretary) at the old Hollywood General Services Studio; Lucille arrived to offer a pep talk—see, TV’s just like the movies, Ann; a set is a set is a set! The world will be yours, kid!

  Ann had been filming on Stage 2. On Stage 1, director Wallace Grissell, B-movie regular John Archer, and the Esskay Pictures Corporation (this was before the federal tax lien) were slapping together A Yank in Indo-China—in which a tiny budget, a Pacific Theater WWII set, and some Technicolor once more grinned the lipsticked grin and hiked up the skirt at the indifferent public. (It’s somebody else’s battle, read the breathless poster, but it’s a Yank’s gal they’re shooting at…and he’s shooting back! It didn’t mention the frogs.)

  In the General Services commissary, at the lunch break, Archer swaggered up to Lucille. She didn’t know him. He bobbed his head, a kind of synopsis of a bow. “Ah, the woman who gives men like me hope!”

  Lucille tilted her face at this. “Not sure that’s a compliment.”

  And with a relaxed, sort of cozy movement, he sat down across from her. “Give me time,” he said.

  She smiled. He smiled.

  Right off they spotted each other as champions of resolve, maybe lucky, maybe unlucky, mostly intent that luck not have a say. Like the soldier he was playing, Archer was tall, lean, a confident man in uniform.

  After one coffee, Ann Sothern excused herself and returned to the set—time for the afternoon “Martini Shots,” what they call a day’s last bit of shooting. Before Lucille could join her, Archer said, “Lucy, I’ll get you an éclair.”

  Lucille squirmed, and bells went off in her mind.

  “No,” she said. “You got this thing wrong. Lucy lives in a one-bedroom apartment in New York and scrubs dishes.” She raised her nose a little higher. “My name is Lucille, and I have a beautiful California ranch. With my husband.”

  Archer just sat elbows on the table, rapt, pinching his lips between his hands. Looking at her. His hair was thick and wavy; his careful part looked ax-chopped in the grain of his curls. Some men have a birthmark, a beard, a memorably loud voice. John Archer had that part, hewn right into the cowlicks.

  “The cream filling’s delicious. Try one,” he said. “E-clare. Fun to say too. Say it.”

  And Lucille’s brain just kind of stopped.

  When they got to his dressing room, she wished she hadn’t come alone. He stared at her too long with his light and crinkly eyes, and with that detachment and near impudence you see when a guy thinks he’s cut out for Hollywood. What was she doing? Maybe part of it was just how much she hated being by herself. She held—wrapped in a cloth napkin—a runny, boring, deflated éclair. E-clare.

  Maybe Archer sensed her doubt. “Thank you for coming. As I said, if you’re willing, I’d ask your career advice here.” The dressing room was quite small. “Hey, apologies for the ‘Lucy’ slipup before.”

  Archer’s wrists were sinuous and elegant; his shirt cuffs were perfect tight hoops, as if the suit had been darned around them.

  “You don’t want my advice, and you know it,” Lucille said, serious-browed until she smiled.

  Lucille was right. He wasn’t, in fact, asking for assistance; the manful tone made that clear. (Me, need help from a woman? said his 1950s smirk.) The one professional gene that all born actors share—along with clever facial muscles—is a lunatic’s optimism. He didn’t need anyone; success would come with this film, finally, for sure.

  “And don’t bother about the ‘Lucy’ thing,” she said. “I’ve been getting that.”

  “Hey, it’s a problem to have, first of all.”

  He looked at her out of those crinkly, dangerous, domineering eyes. Then Archer aimed a finger pistol at her, because he had no second of all. Bang. It’d been better when he had only been looking.

  * * *

  —

  ISIDORE FOLLOWS AS his wife leads two guests into their house, right into the den, the circle of general comfort. These friends haven’t seen the home before. They rubberneck, take in the cherrywood, the mirror and its cold iron frame, the unequivocal leather. Everything is dustless. Everything is spanky new. This place talks (Isidore knows) in a clear silent voice, and what it says is: fancy. Maybe even a little celebrity shine right here in Great Neck?

  The couch once faced a glossy black piano. Now it faces the television screen.

  “This house!” says the woman. Her name is Mona Feinman. She is Harriet’s good friend.

  Isidore, taking his seat, watches Harriet’s face go scrunched with pleasure. “How much time do we have?” says the other guest, Gary Feinman. He’s Mona’s husband and Isidore’s good friend.

  “Oh, it won’t be long now.”

  Both Feinmans still stand, their shoulders pulled straight, as if on the threshold of something illicit.

  A hint of small talk and yet everyone has to wait until the exact appointed time. I’m good, Gary; you? Oh Harriet, the drinks are perfect. I’m glad, Mo, and you know that’s a fantastic dress….

  Just stalling. The Feinmans came over tonight for only one reason.

  There is a pleasing completeness to Mona. She is what she is, confidently. A smile on a handsome face, pert, just a little fleshy. But Isid
ore isn’t attracted to her. Mona he sees as the housewife among Harriet’s friends—the woman most housewifely in spirit. She is now leaning to the bowl of almonds. Mona has full-looking smooth skin under her jaw, and maybe this is why Isidore thinks he receives signals of sexual compliance off her full frame. Harriet, too, is a housewife, but not only. She can play Gershwin on the piano. Harriet holds opinions about what she reads, is politically aware, has lately been trying to tell jokes and be funny. As for Mona? She’s bending her stout figure at the moment. Her bosom swells from beneath her blouse, and Isidore has no trouble receiving the signals. But she appears not to have interests, or much of a mental life. Or maybe that’s unfair.

  “We going to watch, or sit letting me bore each of you?” Gary says, the ice in his Tom Collins rattling pleasantly.

  “It doesn’t start for a bit.”

  Mona and Gary don’t have a television of their own. “I can’t wait,” Mona says.

  “I can’t believe you’ve never seen it.”

  “She’s wonderful, I hear.”

  And Isidore has to look down, biting his mouth and causing enough pain to kill his sad, wild grin—

  “How’s the Hicksville project?” asks Gary. Isidore lifts his face, a smile that says, Oh, you know, it’s business. Going okay.

  Gary is a garmento, selling bridal. Gary has struggled. Isidore tries on his humblest look. “Units are moving, Gary,” he says. “I guess they’re moving.”

  “This guy,” says Gary, shaking his head.

  It could be that, tonight, Isidore’s humble look hasn’t conveyed much humility. It could be that his humblest look—when Lucille is already sort of here in this room, her expansive vitality, that warmth and humor—is no longer humble. Could it be Isidore has become a celebrity of the mind? (Hold-on.)

  “How’s about you? Business good?” Harriet says. This is the wrong question to ask Gary, and Harriet seems to realize it immediately.

  “Ah, bridal’s bridle. Dress the gal up,” Gary says, “before she walks to the gallows.”