The Queen of Tuesday

by Darin Strauss

  “Um. Yes. Maybe with some, but,” says Kargman, shaking his uxorious head no. “I mean, with us it’s—”

  “Why don’t you give the boy household chores?”

  “Oh, sure. We—”

  “Wait a second.” Frawley lifts his head in surprised anger, like a brontosaurus who’d stubbed its toe minutes earlier, back at the edge of memory. “You think I have trouble remembering lines if they’re not ‘easy’?”

  “Bill, it was you who’d said—”

  The door opens, and before anyone enters, a voice calls out:

  “Hide your liquor—it’s a raid!” And Desi Arnaz steps in.

  “Here we go!” Frawley says. He’s all brightness now.

  Behind Desi is Jess Szilárd, with the familiar cravat, the familiar—“Hello, all”—mid-Atlantic voice.

  “I’d tell you how long we’ve been waiting, Dez,” says Frawley, “but you wouldn’t hear me—your ears are stuffed with money.”

  Desi sits opposite Bill; rough and friendly joking. Then Desi stops. “Oh, no.” He frowns, having smelled the alcohol. “Again, Bill? If I can wait…”

  Frawley, comically dramatic, drops his face to his hands. “Come on, Desi,” he says.

  Szilárd says, “Well, William.”

  Frawley, from between the hands he’s buried his face in: “Now don’t you start, Jess.”

  Szilárd has been lugging a clutch of papers. These he drops on the middle of the table.

  Frawley starts talking about “the girls” being late to this meeting, when a man with a lean, loveless face backs through the door holding a tray. Mealtime! Banana supreme, peach and pear salad, open club sirloin sandwiches. And then a separate little guy, someone unnaturally genteel, pushes in with plates.

  No one acknowledges these waiters, let alone eats.

  “Where are the girls? Seen Lucille, Dez?” asks Kargman. Even the waiters shoot him a look. Wrong question.

  Desi is a lot of things, but he is not a convincing dramatic actor. The A/C is rattling from a vent somewhere. Kargman sniffs in a breath and it sounds as if he’s got a clogged nose. Desi mumbles, “Oh, her? She’s on her way, just, she had to…” and doesn’t finish. (Evidently not a great dialogue writer, either.)

  “Can we start work?” Frawley says, muffled by the hands over his mouth.

  “Sorry!” says Lucille, breezing in, a fashionable scarf, a pillbox hat, a dress that whispers after the strong motion of her legs.

  “You know us,” says Vivian Vance, just a step behind. “Late to the ball.”

  Frawley groans and collapses onto the table like an old wino paid a dollar to perform Hamlet’s death scene.

  “Now, now,” says Desi. He’s sitting with his feet up: a show of confidence and Italianly chic shoes.

  Everyone (other than Frawley) grabs a script. This is Lucy’s weekly read-through. Desi’s confidence is fake. He and Lucille have been fighting; everyone knows it.

  “Okay,” says Szilárd. “Let’s see what we got.”

  “This is the Wayne episode? Or that’s next week?” Vivian says, pulling out her cat-eye reading glasses.

  “You can see that it is,” says Frawley, the famous crotchety boom of his baritone. “I think that’s why it’s called ‘Lucy and John Wayne.’ ”

  “Another charming season under way,” Vivian says with fractured bravado; the fracture is there, too, in her expression, her bothered face.

  “You know something, Bill?” says Lucille. “Why don’t you just—”

  Szilárd and Kargman—the horn-rimmed duo—jump over themselves to interrupt.

  “Okay! We start—” says Kargman. Kargman with his camel-hair coat and his library complexion resembles a history prof who’s chased after the grander lectern of mic and camera.

  “The episode opens in the place Lucy and Ricky are renting for their trip to Hollywood,” says Szilárd.

  “Um, this actually isn’t ‘Lucy and John Wayne,’ ” says Kargman, with his odd intonation. His parents escaped Moscow with him when he was a baby; he projects American English through the red filter of his native Russian. “This one, Lucy steals famous footprints from Grauman’s Theatre.”

  “We’re doing a two-parter,” says Vivian primly. “Wayne’s in the follow-up next week.”

  “Okeydokey, let me take a look.” The now-friendly Frawley peruses the script—then looks up, realizing something. “Hey, where’s the word girl?”

  “Sick,” says Kargman.

  They’re referring to Carol Pugh—the “word girl” being the show’s co–head writer.

  “Has a dose of the flu.”

  “My nose is clogged, so I may have some as well. Be warned.”

  Frawley starts grimacing at the pages. “Ah, hell.”

  “What is it now?”—he is asked this, all at once, by everyone. Frawley is paid a fortune to look for all America like the friend you love because you feel a little superior to him.

  “This line, uh, here, this dialogue where I open the show?” Frawley’s scratching his head. “So I say, ‘I still can’t think why we’re having this party for Rick.’ ”

  “Right,” Lucille says, “and I explain it to Fred. ‘It’s just something you do in Hollywood, Fred. When a person finishes a picture, you give a party.’ Simple. Then you say, ‘Oh.’ And then it’s, And Fred returns to hammering up the sign. What’s wrong with that?”

  “Is Fred a damn idiot all of a sudden?” The growl of his voice.

  “It’s exposition,” says Kargman.

  “Yes, Bill, it’s called exposition,” Lucille says. (Vivian mutters softly, “All of a sudden. Right.”)

  “I know it’s called that,” says Desi, “but it’s not called ‘good writing.’ I have to agree with Bill.”

  Kargman and Szilárd exchange looks: Uh-oh. And Frawley is aiming his wink-like chuckle at Desi.

  Lucille is thumbing through the pages. “I see there’s a Lana Turner joke in here,” she says.

  “No one’s eating?”—Frawley, reaching for a plate.

  Desi says, “Oh, Lana Turner too now, Lucille?” His feet come down; he sits curled powerfully over the table. “Her, too?”

  “Is there a—problem with Lana Turner?” Kargman says.

  “So I’m the writer all of a sudden?” Desi snaps at Lucille. “I choose the jokes? The people in the jokes?”

  “Ask Loverboy if there’s a problem with Lana, Bob,” Lucille says. “He’s the one who dated her. Is there a Grable joke in here, too?”

  “Well, uh,” Kargman says, “as a matter of fact—”

  “Okay, Lucille, that’s enough,” Desi says.

  “Maybe it’s not the writers’ fault, dear.” Lucille has her nose in the air. “If they want to pick an actress you haven’t romanced, Dez, they’re limited to dinner theater in Cleveland.”

  “No, no.” Desi smiles, a hint of the pirate captain in the upcurved lips. “I played a show there too, once.”

  Kargman raises his hands; Szilárd jumps to his feet. “All right, all right. Quick break, everyone.”

  CUT TO: Just a little while ago

  “This kind of secret I tell only you, God, and my cleaning lady.”

  Lucille had said this to Vivian Vance five minutes before the read-through, this conversation being the reason for their lateness.

  The ladies’ powder room was a fancy one: flowers, a sofa, candlelight.

  “Got it,” Vivian said. “Tell.”

  Vivian’s stooping shadow climbed the back wall as she bent to splash her cheeks.

  Lucille said: “I’m afraid I’m going to come off as ridiculous, Viv.”

  “You?”

  On the show, this would be a laugh-line. In real life, Lucille Ball was far from ridiculous. She was adept at smoothing over the wrinkled parts of
life.

  Now she blocked the door with her back, eyed the empty room, and talked—and talked—about Hold-on.

  Finally Vivian Vance said, “Again?”—then in a whisper, “Again? The guy from New York?”

  “I don’t know,” Lucille said. “Madness, right?”

  It’d been eight or nine weeks since she’d seen Hold-on; this talk released him from the privacy of her thoughts and she heard his voice now. Every minute you stay here, Frank Capra loses the plot for another movie. It wasn’t just that she remembered what he’d said with clarity. You’re the juiciest part of the fruit. She could also feel what those words had done to her, and this made him burningly present.

  She was the first woman with power in television. She was the first person who made televisual power worth having. She would soon come to run an entire studio—the first woman to do so. Power moves through history and presses it into its own image; Lucille would invent the idea of reruns—doubling a network’s profits. You want to air something when I’m pregnant? Just air old episodes. And so she was a pioneer who was only now beginning to think of herself as one. Yet here she was, with man trouble.

  “I feel that I can tell you this, Viv, because you—”

  Vivian was on her third unhappy marriage. She would often joke about herself. “My father made me so ashamed of my body that half the time I tried to hide it under men.” And because Lucille was both friend and boss to her, Lucille could get away with saying, or almost saying, insulting things.

  “Not,” said Lucille, with uncharacteristic uncertainty, “that I’m some kind of helpless damsel.”

  His hands. That was the physical detail she remembered and to her surprise cherished. Desi was a rutting, wild plow in bed. That had its charms. But the touch of Desi’s hand had meant nothing to her—it always had been the way station to what they both wanted. But Hold-on’s careful, gentle, aware fingertips! Yes, that touch was what she relished.

  “Why hasn’t he called me?”

  “Why,” Vivian said, “haven’t you called him?”

  Lucille could be brusque when she wanted. “We should go; they must be waiting,” she said.

  “Sure, Lucille.” Vivian turned to the mirror, her compact open, the powder puff—whish—pressed into quick service. “But when has it bothered you to make Bill Frawley wait?” she said.

  “I know Desi is my life,” Lucille said.

  But what this statement brought her now was sadness. Sadness because she had lived her life not knowing that the life might’ve gone differently. Sadness because she had a husband whose touch was hurried, rough, and perfunctory. Sadness because she thought of a man, often, whom she hadn’t phoned after she last saw him.

  “I understand that,” Vivian was saying. “Desi is your life, that’s right.” She turned to give Lucille her full face.

  “But you also know him,” Lucille said. “You know how Desi is. And, well—”

  Lucille stopped herself. Hold-on wasn’t some puppy-love infatuation. She didn’t come off as ridiculous, as she’d feared. This was life casting her in the role of a married woman who loved a married man—or who wanted to be able to determine whether she might love him—and she brought to light everything in this role that was gorgeous and grand.

  What if she flew Hold-on to L.A.? Her bankrolling the trip would make it more worth it, somehow. She said, “Is it crazy to—”

  “You’re not cr—”

  “—to meet someone and feel maybe as much for them right away as the man you’ve been with forever?” Lucille would not be interrupted now. “Did you ever fall for someone, and it wasn’t that he was beautiful or famous or rich or any reason you can think of?”

  “Of course,” Vivian said. “Well, I’m not sure.”

  “When I was with him, the world got smaller.” Lucille couldn’t describe it in a way that wasn’t embarrassing. Couldn’t describe the quality of the memory. “I don’t know,” she said.

  The memory that promised to wrap itself around her life, to cover her whole.

  “Okay, look.” Vivian addressed her without the discomfiture or ass-kissing that afflicted most everybody else in conversation with Lucille:

  “Maybe the question is, ‘What’s in your life that you need to find the opposite of?’ ”

  “Try not to make it about Desi, all right?”

  “But listen to yourself, sweetie.”

  “Sex,” Lucille whispered; she hadn’t whispered till now. “Don’t you think it can be so…?” What was the word. “So everything?”

  “Lucille.”

  She could say what moved her really was the talk, the jokes, the having found someone who understood her. His normalness. And okay—her odd affinity with him, the honesty of their conversation, it was all of a piece. But really, it was the fucking.

  Want, again, edged its electric way under her skin, entered her bones.

  Vivian didn’t dare look at Lucille. “Maybe people who have these magical kind of unrealistic dreams just don’t know how an actual relationship is,” she said.

  Anyone else saying this would’ve set off Lucille’s famous temper. But Lucille knew she felt what she felt. Knowledge, wordless and complete anyway.

  “You’re wrong,” she said. “It’s like a—curtain parting.”

  “All right, sweetie.” Vivian dropped her compact without fuss into her handbag. “All right.”

  “A curtain parts sometimes,” Lucille said, failing to explain. It should’ve been weird when Hold-on watched her take off her robe to go to the shower, just silently watched her, but it wasn’t. It was worshipful in every way. They’d both felt it, and that was powerful.

  “So,” Vivian was saying, “what are you going to do?”

  “Who knows if he’d still want to hear from me?”

  That skeptical twist Vivian could give to her face was famous for a reason.

  “I want him to call me.”

  “But you’re going to call him.”

  “No, no,” Lucille said. She finger-swatted the idea, and this made the candlelight wobble.

  The man was supposed to call the woman, no matter what. But the reason was more pressing now—for a reason she wasn’t telling Vivian, or anyone.

  “You’re going to be the one who suffers, all I’m going to say,” Vivian told her, heading to the door. “You are the woman, and you are famous.”

  Something in Lucille grew heavy with that. King Midas got his wish, and everyone he loved died when a touch turned them to gold. And it’s not as if she doesn’t still love Desi, too. Still.

  “No, you’re right,” she said. “I think maybe I will call him.” Then a laugh: “Maybe.”

  And with that, she went to the read-through for the first episode of a two-parter, Grauman’s and yet more marital hijinks, the husband and wife never really knowing what the other was doing or thinking. And she never told Vivian Vance that she had just learned she was pregnant, and didn’t know whose baby it would be.

  * * *

  —

  IF A MAN could pass through Paradise in a dream, & have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his Soul had really been there, & if he found that flower in his hand when he awoke—yes, what then?

  Books are of only intermittent help. They sting the wound. (The above line comes from Coleridge, that famous salt-pourer.) The worst was recognizing himself among literature’s spurned pathetics:

  While an abstract insight wakes

  Among the glaciers and the rocks

  The hermit’s carnal ecstasy —W. H. Auden

  This isn’t to say books never provide consolation.

  There is none righteous, not even one…

  For there is not a single just man upon earth, who doeth good, and sinneth not….

  “Reading the Bible again, Iz?” Harriet says. �
�It’s a weekend. Don’t withdraw from the family, please.”

  She’s come this morning across her husband reading scripture in the living room and smiling to himself. Not even one. “Mmm,” he answers without lifting his head.

  They are all gone aside, they are all together become filthy: there is none that doeth good, no, not one.

  Yes. Yes! There is something holy about his feelings for Lucille. And we’re all sinners. His lascivious, his infidelitous, his righteous feelings. It sounds awful to call infidelity holy on this Sabbath morning, but there it is; how can you argue with the Bible? The Beverly Hills Hotel to him revealed the Almighty in the everyday by showing the furthest possibilities for human joy.

  And yet, more and more now, guilt comes. It tastes like regret.

  His thoughts go back, every so often, to young Harriet leaning into the 1930s threshold, to “Hello, you,” to the Brandt’s Flatbush swooning balcony, to the fur-collared coat thrown open. They had known glamour then. But it had been in 1938 or early ’39. That woman, and that young man, no longer exist.

  “I can put down the book, sure,” he says. “It’s the Bible. You can’t argue with the Bible.”

  He’s unfulfilled, is that Harriet’s fault? Guilt has a way of making him considerate of her. She’d seen very little of the world before him; why would she know how to make and keep—over years and years—another person happy?

  Two very long months ago, when he and Lucille had been preparing to leave that lascivious, infidelitous, righteous room, he’d looked at her as she’d slinked out of her hotel robe; looked as she pulled the screaking curtain aside and stepped without a word into the shower; and he reached to check her hand from closing the curtain. “May I watch?” he’d said.

  There are some moments in a life that seem more real than others. Examples—cards shuffled randomly from the memory deck: High-school graduation. Or when, with chin held high and in the echo of his own reverent words, he’d gotten bar mitzvahed. Having lost, in his virile twenties, his virginity to Felice Zuckerbrod. And standing poolside at Kutsher’s Catskills resort, post-race, the gray umbrellas and cabanas seeming in their restrained presentation to defer to victorious teenaged him. (Not the day of his marriage or the birth of his children, each of which, as they happened, felt dreamlike and bizarre and decidedly unreal.) And then, too, watching her shower. The moment had felt most inarguable. He in Beverly Hills.