A cig is passed; looks are, too. Eyes brightened by match flame.
“Thanks, kid,” she says. “You know—”
Isidore jumps in. “You’re married?”
(Later, she’ll remember his smile here. The wolfish curve of it.)
She asks, well, is he not married? And he shrugs, yeah, yes, almost ten years. The exchange is quick. So, where is she, in that case. My wife? Well, who else—do tell; where’s the little woman? After just the shortest hesitation, Isidore says, “Couldn’t make it.” (He doesn’t mention that he proposed to his wife at Coney Island.)
“Ah.” Lucille inhales, exhales, and there’s glamorous smoke.
She resolves not to call this man Isidore, doesn’t like the Ellis Island stamp on it.
Her brand of cigarette is Fatima—a Madcap Bride sponsor—but now as he bends to pick up his brick, she tastes Isidore’s Chesterfield.
“So, what do you like to do?” she says. “Have any talents?”
He decides to be serious. Thinks about saying, I dream I’d written The Naked and the Dead.
“I like to scribble, to be honest,” he says.
She was looking at her cigarette, ignoring his answer. “Hey? Tell me what to name you,” she says.
He is, for the first time, confused by her.
“You know,” she says. “A nickname. A nom de beach. Something.”
His mind goes empty; he stalls: “Hold on…”
“Yes!” She laughs, charmingly, lifting a hand to soften the teasing. “Hold on.” Her eyes seem washed in naughtiness. “Interesting name. If I ‘hold on,’ what will I find in my hand?”
Isidore can feel this all the way down. But then his face goes thoughtful. “Tonight, you’ll get whatever difficult thing it was you came for, I bet,” he says, then smiles again. “Though you never told me your plan to get it.”
When Lucille was a kid upstate, her crush Ted Sward dropped the cloth napkin he’d used to wipe catsup off his mouth; Lucille had skedaddled across the cafeteria, snatched up the gory rag, and kept it in her bedroom—the gusto and scrapbooking of the lovestruck. Feeling stirred by a napkin. Love at first sight is a dopey promise. Lucille’s legs are now shaky. What is it? You’ll get whatever difficult thing it was you came for, I bet. The wideness of the shoulders when a man stands close and takes hold of your gaze. Also he said that perfect thing.
“It’s just a scheme to land a television program,” she says. “Well, but a person does have to stand up for herself. It’s true! No one else does. They just run to some other schmo who’s learned to stand up straight. I hope the CBS executives—”
“They’d be idiots,” he says with such joy it’s impossible not to fall for him, at least a little, “not to want you.”
“Well,” she says. Don’t kid yourself, Lucille; no chance in hell the networks play ball. “Everyone says they’re likely to play ball,” she tells him.
“Of course.”
Torch flames take bows up and down the boardwalk. Isidore cannot stop looking at her.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Lucille says to him.
But I don’t know what I’m thinking, he thinks. Thoughts I shouldn’t be.
She says, “You’re thinking my husband is right over there.”
Oh. Isidore has forgotten to be aware of the husband. Isidore is aware of her elbow in his hand.
“But it’s all right,” she’s saying. “Once in his life, Hold-on, every man is entitled to fall madly in love with a gorgeous redhead.”
Jeez-o-pete, she thinks. She loves Desi, and isn’t a cheater. (Where is Dez?) She and Hold-on look each other in the eye. But she wouldn’t. Maybe Hold-on has missed the connotations. Married women flirt—but behind a guardrail. You can throw bread to them, you can buy popcorn while you watch, and then stroll to the next exhibit.
They have staggered closer to the Pavilion of Fun; Lucille nods at it.
“Get a load of that glass,” she says. “Take away the glass, what would you have?”
Now here’s a test, she thinks. If he says something wrong, or maybe just anything at all, the moment’s frail perfection will go to pieces.
He lets his hand fall from her elbow. (Could Hold-on have missed the connotations?)
The orchestra has moved; it’s seated here, sweating out jazz. The beseeching puffs of brass, the drum’s confident, sexual tuh-t-tomp! The horns beg you to fall in love; the beat demonstrates how to express it.
She is an actress and can wear the mask that improves the scene. The mask might become double-sided; an actress can look, even to herself, like whatever person the scene needs her to be.
The music and wind rip at Isidore’s words—“…Wait, did you say CBS is…?”—but Lucille can get enough of what she needs from the happy look on his chin and the laugh he barely keeps in check. So the perfection of the moment holds.
Hold-on squeezes her arm again.
Men do business, fine, she thinks. Let Desi handle it….
An actor she recognizes passes. The man’s tuxedo tie is undone. This party seems to be unraveling. The sound of sand tramped under formal shoes. People moving fast now, mostly in pairs. And this, she and Isidore, is her pairing.
For once, Lucille has gone silent and smiley.
Over her shoulder, Lucille sees Desi through layers of shoulders and faces. Desi is on the beach, crossing a dance floor that hasn’t been used yet—what a ham he is, she thinks fondly, and wonders if he’ll do a little shuffle. He is looking around for her, in his thick-necked way. The ocean smashes at the sand.
Desi is alone, Nanette Fabray nowhere in sight. Hold-on still, lovelily, has her arm.
“Well,” Isidore’s saying, “you can throw or not throw the brick”—looking toward the pavilion—“but that thing’s coming down.”
It has started to drizzle. Isidore fails to see Desi making his way to them. Isidore’s attention is pulled to someone else moving through the crowd: “Let him pass!” “Mr. Trump!” The orchestra quits playing. The alto player takes the opportunity to wrist at some sweat on his forehead. Voices repeat other voices, which is how a crowd begins to realize it’s a crowd: “Let him pass!” “The host, the host.” And finally, at the entrance to the Pavilion of Fun, there emerges Fred Trump, balding and mustachioed. Hurrying, hurrying. He is quite thin. This moment—all of it, Lucille Ball, the pavilion, the jazz orchestra, Desi, this whole corner of sand and ocean—is his.