The Queen of Tuesday

by Darin Strauss

  There was something between them. And maybe, had they met in a later, more patient generation, they would have grown really to love each other before they’d gotten married. Or realized it wasn’t going to happen. Or maybe they had, in fact, grown to love each other.

  * * *

  —

  AROUND THE TIME of Harriet’s wedding, Isidore and his brother Norman were straightening their ties, shooting their cuffs, and trying on their careers. She knew he also hoped—or, it was more pipe dream, almost never discussed—to become a writer. His father wouldn’t have it. The Strausses were a real estate family. But exciting things were happening; he and Norman were leaving their father to open an office on Court Street.

  She hoped that when he got home from the office, she’d be able to share his optimism, his energy. She’d opened a bottle of wine. And, waiting for him, she had had some before he’d arrived. This felt a tad decadent. It was the end of his first week, and it had been her idea to celebrate. But now he came home tired. She swallowed the sentence she was going to ask (Why are you so late?). “Tell me about your day,” she said, putting his dinner on the table. “You’re a little late,” she apologized for him.

  Her shrug posed a question. Do you hold a grudge if you stub your own toe? Isidore was she; Harriet was he—wasn’t that out-and-out unification what marriage was?

  Sometimes before bed she surprised him, and herself, by wanting to be intimate more than he did, and, when it happened, enjoying it more. And sometimes—though she didn’t have the words for it—if an encounter didn’t end as satisfyingly as she had wanted, she would lie staring up in the dark toward the ceiling.

  Some days, she’d sit alone at the kitchen table while he was at work, pondering unanswerable questions. The differences between men and women—or husbands and wives, more precisely—and about the fairness of marriage compared to the fairness of love. And she wondered about the distance between a real estate contract and a novel. She had a hard, flashing thought: Isidore’s being married to me is keeping him back.

  It’s that wine, she told herself. It makes depressing thoughts. He would’ve been a good writer, she thought, without having read a word. Or having asked to.

  The bottle was already opened. May as well have a glass so it won’t go to waste, she thought. Another glass.

  Isidore when he came home smiled at her, and took her hand. “Sorry. Just tired. What do you want to know?”

  And she smiled and caressed the hand that had taken hers.

  * * *

  —

  ONE NIGHT, ISIDORE didn’t follow Harriet to the bedroom. When she in her usual, gently leading way yawned and told him she was tired, he proffered up a good-night but stayed downstairs to watch the late rebroadcast of a show he’d once said he didn’t like but now seemed captivated by. “Okay,” she said, hoping to have been kissed good night or touched by him. “Night.”

  The wordless theme song filtered through her bedroom wall—not loud enough to keep her up, but she did, for some reason, find herself staying awake, listening.

  I’m being silly, she thought. It was that TV music, its upbeat and somehow longing melody, that floated her into sleep. She knew why the I Love Lucy theme felt like longing to her, and she didn’t begrudge her husband his time alone with that popular TV show; it must have been a kind of lamenting way for Isidore to remain connected to his lost dream of writing something that would entertain people.

  * * *

  —

  AND THEN CAME the party where things changed. It was the 1950s, almost twenty-five years after Harriet first met Isidore, and a time when a hostess greeted you by the open door wearing her knee-length dress.

  The Kramers in their 3,700-square-foot, three-story Dutch colonial were hosting a party for eighth-graders and their families. Autumn in the suburbs, one big nap of get-togethers, cocktails, jazz on the phonograph.

  “Ah, the Strausses are here!” said Mrs. Kramer in the entrance hall with its overflow of coats. “Minus one, I guess.”

  The living room was a snooper’s chance to see people you hadn’t for a while—children and adults, talking, laughing, tipsy. Isidore wasn’t here. He was out of town working for a few sudden days—he said some project in Chicago or somewhere—and now, as Arthur went off to orbit the prettier of his classmates, Harriet was left alone.

  These are not my friends. They’re just people I know, Harriet thought, as she always did, with a few rays of self-pity. She didn’t like the country club people of University Gardens, the chintz dynamism.

  Two strides into that packed room, and she decided first to veer to the kitchen for a glass of water.

  “Oh,” she said, “no, sorry,” upon seeing youngish Ron Naraniss kiss his wife by the kitchen door. Harriet saw the mouths open, saw the eyes close. Harriet said, “Excuse me—”

  Ron Naraniss’s kitchen-door kiss she could almost feel—still. As if he had kissed her, were kissing her. Why does it affect me so? I’m not a newlywed, she thought.

  Over Harold Kramer’s shoulder, in a corner: the neighborhood’s averting, blushing adolescents. By the bar—living rooms in University Gardens had bars—by the wrists, adults grabbed one another, or leaned too close, talking low and huskily.

  Harriet found herself listening to Renata Corman, Arthur’s best friend’s mother. “Isidore isn’t here,” Renata asked, no question in the sentence.

  “Building something out of town,” Harriet said.

  “Ah.”

  Harriet chewed on her mouth to rid it of the ghostly kiss she felt. She had no special attraction toward that Naraniss guy, in fact, she barely knew him. Why did she—this was the question scalding up her throat; she wanted to say it aloud—why did she imagine sucking the oyster of Naraniss’s tongue in the shell of his mouth?

  It had been a while. But Harriet still expected gently to disturb the atoms of a room. At least some man at a party would note her entrance. (She knew how to make her lipstick do a lot of work for her.) But she hadn’t realized until now how much she’d relied on that silent approval. Was that past? She was just about middle-aged.

  “On business, you say?” Renata Corman asked. That forthright tone of interest.

  Some people take whatever script life hands them and make it a fancy production. Harriet’s brother-in-law and neighbor Norman now arrived at the party. He came in like Sinatra tramping through the Sands. With his short dumpy imbecilic wife, his receding hairline, even with his shirt untucked in the back—and a big stride that conveyed appealing recklessness—Norman busted into the midday murk of Jewish suburbia, lit by imminent adventure. “Harriet,” he said, and on seeing her the light went out. “Oh, uh, hey, doll,” he said. Norman was the type who always grabbed your arm excitedly. But now he made an effort to keep his eyes from scudding down.

  Harriet said hi. Norman lowered his chin. “Um, okay, Har!” And he was off. He shouldn’t have done that. Harriet spanned the living room to the bar. No, a brother-in-law really shouldn’t do that. She poured herself a very tall scotch. A brother-in-law shouldn’t look away like that, with his chin at that guilty angle, having set her heart galloping, confirming something she didn’t know she feared. She poured herself another. She thought: Isidore had said he’d been on the phone with Norman that time, but I knew he wasn’t, or almost knew, or didn’t let myself know. It’s because I’m shy around other people, and Iz hates when I’m awkward, she thought—and so I overcompensate and am afraid to seem awkward about anything. Another realization in the Kramers’ living room.

  Then she was outside. After saying her goodbyes, and, in a dying blaze of late sun, with the boys walking two feet in front of her—down this street of lawns where she and her husband sometimes took strolls—Harriet thought, Being a mother is the last and only real job I will ever have. And how much of that work is left?

  She’d made her family her world. Whic
h is something you notice only when you think your husband is unfaithful and your boys are growing up and you ask what there would be of you if they all left. She had no real friends in Great Neck. And no career. Or the skills to start one.

  Harriet thought of Naraniss’s kiss, and the image stirred her in the lower half of her body. She might have liked the feeling, the possibility—even if merely in fantasy—of kissing someone else herself. But it just frightened her.

  * * *

  —

  THE STANDARD METAPHORS about marriage were not right. She felt like someone on a calm and flat river who realizes the uselessness of what she’d been told to do when the weather got rough—to row to a safe harbor; to scoop water from the boat. No, that stuff doesn’t work. The oars didn’t catch, she had no control, there was only air underneath. There never had been a river.

  After Isidore got back from his trip to who-knew-where, Harriet greeted him with her mouth clinched shut, as if her suspicion was a little bird behind her teeth that she couldn’t let escape. Looking, she found a phone number in a woman’s hand. After many raids on many parts of the house. A card from Desilu Productions. A card that read Lucille Ball. Incredible. Impossible.

  That night in bed, she rolled away from Isidore.

  He took this for the indicator that it was and said, “Is everything okay?” He poked his finger onto the page he was reading, as if to pin down attention that was otherwise likely to wriggle away. “I’ve been away a lot,” he said. “I only—”

  Harriet spun back toward him. He looked at her with a broad smile. He might say something vaguely apologetic. He might say she’d been right to worry, but he was going to stay home from now on.

  “I only wish I knew why you were so irritable about this,” Isidore said. He opened his book wider and stared into it, and as he read his lips stiffened into a long glum derisive line.

  They’d once promised not to be like other couples. They wouldn’t mark every error. They wouldn’t like gem appraisers lift every last detail to the bright lamp of faultfinding. They wouldn’t look to devalue. They hadn’t realized this basically meant promising to avoid frank and candid talk.

  Harriet decided to give it a last try, to be even more attentive to Isidore. She had to lean on forgetfulness, smiles, and on acquiescence. A wife’s three pillars.

  * * *

  —

  HARRIET STRAUSS, NÉE Joseph, was my grandmother.

  Look at her. Memories glimpsed through cigarette smoke. What’s there to see? Potential, and love, and the failure of love. Maybe you just see an alcoholic old housewife.

  I’d wanted this book to chronicle my grandfather’s secret love affair with Lucille Ball, and end with my efforts to get the movie they conceived of together made. But my grandmother kept pulling the story to her. And stories have multiple strands.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CODA

  1987, 1989, 2000

  WHEN I WALKED up to the guy at his favorite restaurant, he was scratching a finger along his dark beard, through its sprinkling of salt. “You’re asking for something that is generally,” the guy said, “not done.” Scratch, scratch. “Even if everyone knows I do have a thing for Lucille.”

  He was tall even sitting and dressed in the T-shirt/blazer uniform of the generation of douchey men just older than mine (Bad Brains; Brooks Brothers). His date was very feminine, thin-mouthed, and she—flashing the tip of her tongue as she reached for her wine—ignored me. I was interrupting an after-hours date, an eleven P.M. meal amid the coq au vin, leather banquettes, and grand opera vibrations of the Dahlberg Café, a restaurant downtown I’d heard about via Suzanne Gluck at the William Morris Agency. The year, if I haven’t said so before, was 2000. There were candles all around.

  “We haven’t been introduced, I don’t think?” I said with a smile to the douchey guy.

  “Haven’t been introduced. Okay,” the douchey guy said. He had a funhouse-mirror skill, picking up and reflecting back your words, slightly altering their tone—distorting them into caricature.

  “What’s your name?”

  I said, “Darin?”

  “As long as you’re sure,” he said. “Ask me anyhow, I guess. Quick.”

  Saying my unsteady thanks I stepped closer. First surprise: His handshake was slack and damp, your pillow on a sweaty night.

  I was unused to the cockeyed sprockets of a showbiz conversation—that is, I was unused to having to play the dual role of myself and Greek chorus for myself.

  “Kid, speak up. No one respects a mumbler.” His voice had the confidence of money.

  The guy’s name was P. N. Defoe. Wright Torrence’s assistant said he’d be here. (“This guy Defoe’s a Lucille Ball nut….You didn’t hear it from me, but he has a late dinner almost every night at the Dahlberg.”) Torrence was the guy Suzanne Gluck had told me to contact.

  P. N. Defoe was a producer. I almost hadn’t made it here. First, a traffic jam and its cramped taxicab frustrations, and then—when I’d had enough of that—the lurid sigh of a listless subway. And the whole trip, slanting forty or so blocks southeast, I ruminated about how Ms. Gluck had told me no one would care about my grandfather’s movie, or my trying to make it.

  I gave Defoe my spiel; he watched me along his nose. Then he said, “Talk a little more about the love affair. Between your grandfather and Lucille Ball?”

  My mouth opened in throttled complaint. “There wasn’t a love affair,” I said. “I don’t think there was anything like that. Let me tell you a little more about the story of Meriday, the slave who, well, okay. First, it’s based on Xenophon…”

  I lost Defoe—and his date, too. Their looks dropped.

  “Uh, kid,” Defoe said. “You want to make a movie about, you know, black men of color?”

  Then he looked up to give me a dry little frowning nod. “Tell me about your grandfather’s affair.”

  Defoe filled the lengthening silence by looking at me in protest as if to say: “You want to come in here and bother my meal and then hold out on me, well then it’s your loss.”

  I had the strong sensation that I’d seen him (aloof, tenuous, his fat lower lip a bit menacing) somewhere before. I knew this person. I often had this hunch, but this time, I felt positive.

  But then his demeanor changed. “No one’s going to let you make a movie about, uh, African Americans,” Defoe said. “There’s something you could write, though. We’re talking about Lucille Ball.”

  * * *

  —

  APRIL 1989. LUCILLE had lain in her bed in Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, sighing under the cautionary luck of a close medical call. Twenty-four hours earlier, she’d had gray skin and turbulent hair and been near death. A grab in the chest, ambulance; lying flat on a gurney; the bumping rush to the ER.

  But it was not her time, not the end yet at seventy-seven. The head nurse—Jolene? She must try to memorize it—asked Lucille, Did she see the Hard Rock Cafe out the window?

  Beside Jolene, Lucille shuffled across the cardiac wing; she wore a hospital “gown”—a real gown was Oscar de la Renta, blue crushed velvet, simple lines that turned heads on the red carpet. No, this was a sheaf of crepe paper, yawning at the back and chilly. Gary wasn’t here; it was 5:30 A.M. She felt alone in this white hospital world.

  Nice man, Gary, but a putz, Lucille thought.

  Jolene was very fat, you could hear the fabric shuff shuff on her brushing thighs, even at this pace.

  Lucille had just had surgery, eight hours of it, to heal a dissecting aortic aneurysm; but she’d survived, the Ball luck again coming through. There was a twenty-seven-year-old’s aorta in her chest; her old heart was spitting blood to her organs through a greased, young tube. But I’m not lucky, Lucille thought. Jolene would likely tell people for the rest of her life about this walk around the hall. Fame like that�
�s not luck, Lucille thought; I worked my whole life for it. She would never think to ask the donor’s name, or gender, or cause of death (Eric, male, motorcycle accident).

  Lung cancer had taken Desi two years before. She hadn’t spoken to him in four.

  “The Hard Rock Cafe?” Lucille said. “My taste.” A rasp. “Runs more to.” Eyes closing, and determinedly opening. “Frank Sinatra.”

  Jolene said, “They have you on their awning, though. See?”

  I shouldn’t call Gary a putz, Lucille thought. He’s a good man. At least. To me. It seemed to her even her thoughts were panting.

  “THE HARD ROCK LOVES LUCY.” Jolene’s eyes shone with the romance of it. “Right out there.”

  On her biceps Lucille felt Jolene’s hand shift for a moment into a near-caress.

  “It’s hard for the mind to conceive,” Jolene said. “Being like so famous.”

  “You want to be. Famous so that in the future. Someone you don’t know will say. ‘Did you hear Jolene so-and-so died?’—and then immediately get on. With their life.”

  She’d meant it as a joke—or, kinder than a joke; as a blessing on this woman’s not-special existence. But her words came out sounding snappy and distancing. I’m out of practice talking to normal people, she thought. Vivian Vance was always good at that. Oh, well. Think of something else. Screw it, she felt lighter, better, having insulted Jolene. (Vivian Vance, ten years dead.)

  Jolene’s hair was cut short in the front, like a boy’s; but in the back, a little Niagara of ringlets ran to her shoulders.

  “That’s it, Lucille,” Jolene said. “Walking good now.” But Lucille was back in the yard at Chatsworth with Desi.