“Thanks, kid,” Lucille says, acknowledging the brick at last.
Yesterday her manager had warned: Don’t fool yourself, no chance in hell the networks play ball, better not to bother. And now, here she is, slapped, feeling marked, holding a brick for some reason.
But no one became great listening to her manager’s warnings.
Right before Lucille decides to go to Desi, he strides off again. He’s rejoining Nanette Fabray, who’s standing alone; maybe this was a planned rendezvous.
“Would you get a load of that,” Lucille says.
The kid is nervous, but he focuses on Lucille to make up for it. She is nervous. Her cigarette is out but still clenched between her fingers, its gray pine cone of dead tobacco. (The kid’s name, not that she asked, is Philip.) He works to depatsy his presentation. Throwing back his shoulders, he sees a rescue coming.
He asks: “Want to meet my brother?” He does not add: “Because if I’m too young to make it with you, I’d like to know someone who does.”
Lucille looks at him. No. She wants that not even a little.
“Well, kid,” she says. “What kind of gloves does he have?” And her peripheral vision itches, right as the brother comes up. “Oh,” she says.
It’s not that Lucille is anti-Semitic. (1949 is not long after those Auschwitz photos; copping to anti-Semitism is about as big a setback as having a Jewish surname.) Even so, Lucille has told herself she is not attracted to Jews. Or hasn’t been since Pandro Berman and Mack Gray—big men in the way she likes those who happen to be Jewish. But now she has seen the brother. And her mouth peeps open—a red gum–like pop from her lipstick.
“Oh,” she says again.
The kid’s brother Isidore—Izzy to his crowd, now eating a deviled egg—approaches with a blip in his stride. This gives his large body a haphazard charm.
“Well, look at this, Phil,” the brother says, wiping his hands on his lapels. “You made a friend.”
Maybe he’s a studio executive I don’t know about, Lucille hopes, fearful that he’ll see the red in her cheek.
“I’ve seen you before,” Isidore says. “But not in real life, I’m guessing.” Lucille transfers the brick from one palm to another, feels the grainy weight. She shakes Isidore’s hand the way a man would.
“What’s real life?” she says.
“Whatever this isn’t.”
He seems preoccupied, as if he’s also listening to a radio in a room down the hall. As she talks, Isidore looks not at her eyes but at her mouth. (The kid Phil has been thrown from the saddle of this conversation. He is as far away now as someone can be while standing here.)
She turns to hide the slapwarm cheek. “So, besides hard labor on ladies’ ankles, what is this party?” She has to tilt her head back to meet his eyes.
“I’ll show you a secret,” Isidore says.
He’s got Johnny Weissmuller shoulders, a Cary Grant chin. Wearing his hat pulled low, he’s good to look at—imperfectly good. He has known stress; it’s fanned in arrows across his brow. (Most of the men she knows look wrinkled only when you see their newspaper spreads crushed and tossed in the trash.)
“Oh, you’ve got a secret, have you?” she says.
Is she flirting? She doesn’t know. This man will not be pushed over. Suddenly, Isidore is leading her to the pavilion, Coney Island’s giant steel-and-glass centerpiece. Philip has been abandoned, left to his gloves and idolatry. “Come,” Isidore tells her. Meanwhile, her fingers nibble at his sleeve—the only way for her to keep pace. He’s going fast, and she’s following.
“Come.”
* * *
—
“STOP!”—LUCILLE WILL SAY. “Not tonight, Dez!”
Here is what will happen in about twenty minutes. Lucille will step between her husband and Isidore. “Stop!” she will cry. It will be easy to see big public scenes in Desi’s attitude, to see fisticuffs; his eyes open insanely—the whites visible above and below. Fighting words will come.
“I’ll chin you right now!” Desi will say.
But before this, the entire party knows that something else is about to happen.
* * *
—
SOMETHING IS ABOUT to happen. The shimmery Pavilion of Fun, with its thousand moon-holding windows, looks huge and dignified, even on pegs. People crunch by. Guests, waiters and captains, the crowd hustling closer, climbing stairs from the beach. It’s almost time. The pavilion, like a royal at the guillotine, awaits the blade.
This is why the press has come, and politicians, celebrities, the supermen of city real estate and industry. To witness a New York relic meet its theatrical end.
And they’ve come also to assert their place, to shine their status. “See that, Lucille?” Isidore says.
When Fred Trump bought this entire area in one swoop, he knew everyone would tsk-tsk. He planned the eradication of a landmark. He also knew he could undercut the scandal by sweeping people up in a fantasy. No one knew they wanted to demolish a building until the doing it revealed the desire. (Watch City Hall get torched? Nah. Light the fuse yourself? Let’s make an evening of it!) People love to get swept up. Like all myth-makers, Fred Trump takes the thing at hand and spins a fairy tale. And so: all these bricks. And a crystal palace that smacks of bygones.
Isidore and Lucille are standing at a bar set up on the sand. There’s a liquor skyline on the counter: whiskey bottles, gin and scotch, champagne, amber, green, the works.
Isidore hands Lucille a glass of champagne, then gestures at her brick. “To me, my guess is, you’re a seasoned clay-tosser.”
“First time I’ve heard that one,” she says smiling, nodding, frisky eyes. “No, I came to take care of something kind of difficult.”
The moment is sweet. Except there is the sense that his gaze is trying to hoard all that is between them. But that man thing of not wanting to be seen doing it brings the sweetness back.
“Nothing too serious, I hope,” he’s saying. “I don’t mean to pry.”
Hmm. This human quality, the unasked question of You okay?, is the thing her husband hasn’t shown tonight. She feels compelled to share her plan. Ever since her CBS Radio show was canceled, she and her husband—because the executives at CBS were so stubborn—have decided…
No. He’s a stranger. Not going to share things yet. “Got a gasper?” she says.
Putting down his brick, Isidore scrabbles through his pocket. “Here’s my deck”—holding out his pack of Chesterfields.