Niagara Falls All Over Again

by Elizabeth McCracken

  I felt, simultaneously, like a river being dragged for a body; like the body beneath the surface of the river, insensible but wanting to be found; like the searching heroes bobbing on the river’s surface in their boat. There you are, I heard Sukey say, the heroes looking for the body, the drowning man pulled into the boat by his rescuers. It felt exactly that personal: a matter of life and death between strangers.

  For the next few months, it would suddenly occur to me that I could have sunk to the bottom of the pool and been retrieved too late. If they’d been a little drunker. If I’d been a little drunker . . . The lesson I took from this was that I shouldn’t dance with Rocky near the pool. I wasn’t angry at him, exactly, more bewildered by the possibility. I would have been on the front pages of all the movie magazines, my name and the word TRAGEDY. I could still feel the scouring chlorine in my nose, could see the angling shadow arms of the Ferris wheel turning above me. You’re not beyond learning, Rocky told me, but I decided that I was. A better man would have signed up for swimming lessons the next day.

  Sukey, meanwhile, was doing her best to befuddle me. Her best was pretty damn good. We had an agreement, by which I mean she had demands and I met them. She did not want to be my girlfriend. She did not want to be my date. She did not want my name linked to hers in any way, by anyone. This, of course, included Rocky and Penny. In return, we’d sleep together every now and then.

  Such a puzzle, Sukey, calm and expert. I never met anyone who could make her fingers so separate: a caress from her meant one finger edging along an ear, her thumb at the corner of your mouth, a third finger at your waist, a fourth . . . Sleeping with Sukey made me feel pleasantly, sexily infested. She’d call me up in the middle of the night and invite me over—after that first night, she never came to my place—and afterward she made me again pledge my silence.

  “Should I be insulted?” I asked. “You think I’d hurt your career?”

  “I don’t want people to know about me,” she’d answer. Indeed, she never told me a single story about her past. I began to miss the Sukey I’d known before I fell into the pool, who was more likely to make a joke at her own expense than this intermittently ardent woman who met me at the door fresh from the shower. Still, I thought I might be in love with her. I hadn’t had this steady a date since Miriam. Then again, a woman hadn’t treated me with this much indifference since Miriam. I didn’t see the connection then. I wondered how to tell, as though love was a house that needed to be viewed in the right kind of light, the right kind of weather, by which I mean of course her loving me back.

  Carmen of Beverly Hills

  “Come meet someone, Mosey!” Rocky called to me one afternoon on the set of Gobs Away! He displayed with a flourish a terrible-looking little gent.

  I shook the man’s hand, which took some doing, because his hands were already shaking. The guy was mostly a pair of giant blue eyes; the rest of his face seemed to have eroded like a cliff. His thin lips were sparkling wet, and his black suit looked slept in. Somebody—maybe Rocky—had already stuck a round white sailor’s hat on his head at an angle that might have appeared jaunty if the guy’s neck didn’t look in danger of bending under its weight.

  “Nice to meet you,” I said.

  “Skipper Moran!” said Rocky. I looked confused, and he repeated the name.

  “Iss goo,” said the old guy. I couldn’t tell whether drink or a foreign accent had robbed him of his consonants.

  Then I remembered Rocky talking about Skipper Moran, years before, when we regularly had arguments about who was funny and who wasn’t. I said Harry Langdon, Buster Keaton, Mabel Normand. He said Fatty Arbuckle, Charley Chase, Billy Blevan, Mack Swain, and Skipper Moran, a particularly obscure Mack Sennett second banana. Moran’s specialty was getting caught in things: trash cans, fences, fat women’s décolletés. Despite the Irish name, he was a German immigrant, and once sound came in, disappeared.

  Maybe the rag-bin clothes were left over from his movies, but the smell of whiskey couldn’t have been. “Funny boy,” Skipper Moran said to me warmly.

  “Thanks,” I said, but maybe he was just giving me his job description.

  “I’m talking to Neddy,” Rock said. Neddy was always hired to write special material for us. “We gotta get a part for this guy.” Years later, when Rock had his own problems, I wished some young comic would do the same for him.

  Poor Skipper. Neddy worked up a bit of mime for him—we couldn’t let a guy with a German accent speak in such times—in a scene at some big do in this picture, a good-bye bash for sailors shipping out. Rocky and I were pulling KP duty in the kitchen and complaining, and Skipper played a geriatric gob who peeled potatoes. On the first take, he sliced open his thumb. On the second his hands trembled so they blurred.

  “This is a disaster,” I said to Rocky.

  “No,” he said. “Betcha a hundred bucks it won’t be.”

  I just nodded.

  Rocky took him off set, and when they returned five minutes later, Skipper Moran sat down at his pail of spuds with a ludicrous bandage on his thumb and was—I hate to admit it—suddenly funny. He threw the potatoes in the air and caught them on the end of his knife, he hugged the pail close to him with his legs and picked up another potato with his feet. His upper limbs got into a fight with his lower limbs, spuds everywhere, and at the end, of course, he’d gotten caught in the bucket, folded up in half, someone’s limber grandpa with a sweet, befuddled expression on his face. He asked, without a trace of an accent, “Help?”

  In the next shot, I slipped a hundred bucks in Rocky’s pocket. He turned his face from the camera. “Thanks,” he said. His breath was whiskey-coated.

  Rocky’s breath. I could write pages on it. In my life, I breathed in more Rocky Air than Iowan. There the guy was, breathing. I mean, not that I blame him. All those years we stood nose to nose: onstage, and closer in movies, and closer even in publicity stills so both our heads would fit in the frame. Me the stern educator, he the truant student—for those shots, like the leading man I wished to be, I stood on a box to exaggerate the height difference. (The height difference didn’t exist.) “Move in closer, boys,” the photographer would say. Normally Rocky’s breath was like anyone’s, a caffeinated meadow, though if he’d been on a bender the meadow had flooded and gone to rot overnight. It changed, though, if he were on a diet or a health kick—for Rocky, never the same thing. Fatter was funnier, but sometimes, weary of being funny, he’d decide to slim; other times, weary of being bad, he’d resolve to be good. A health kick meant fruit and water and thick steaks for protein and hard-boiled eggs that found their way into his back pocket, where he sat on them. His breath was fierce then: I think his tongue went in mourning for the bourbon. A diet meant coffee, steaks, and gin: nothing else. Then his breath smelled of juniper, with a hint of an old metal cocktail shaker behind it.

  And you know, that’s one of the things I miss about him, the same way I missed Iowa thunderstorms in California, Iowa ice storms, mornings you woke up and the trees had turned to chandeliers and the roads to plate glass. It’s the bad weather you miss most.

  Penny, when she heard that her husband had hired Skipper Moran, threw a fit. If he could give a job to old-time foreign has-been comics, why couldn’t he find a part, just a little part, for his own darling, talented wife? “That’s different,” Rocky told her, and she replied, “I’ll say it is,” and announced that she was going to sleep on the Ferris wheel and skulked out the door. “Be reasonable, Penn,” he said, but she wouldn’t talk to him, and so he set her in motion. She rode for nearly an hour, sitting in silence. She threw her wedding ring in the direction of his head, then she threw up and he let her down.

  “The silence I can take,” he told me. “It’s the singing.”

  He’d come over to my place, which he did only when he wanted to get away from Penny. He hated giving up hosting privileges. So we sat in my living room, and Rocky smoked a cigar and tapped ashes on the white rug. I tried to keep myself
from thrusting an ashtray underneath.

  “You love her voice,” I said.

  “When she’s happy. When she’s mad it’s like being married to a bad musical. She gets furious, and then she sings. Like she’s seen so many movies, she thinks it’s real life—she’ll yell for about three seconds, get quiet, and break into song. And I swear she gets madder because I won’t sing back.”

  “Maybe you should try,” I suggested.

  “You ever try to reason with an angry woman?”

  “Once or twice.”

  “You felt like singing? If I’m going to fight with someone, I don’t want it to be like some goddamn quiz show.”

  “I was thinking more opera,” I said.

  “This marriage,” he said in a suddenly fierce voice, “is giving me a headache. She’s a nice girl, but who knows what she wants?”

  “Ask her,” I said.

  “Oh, she tells me. She wants a kid, do you believe that?”

  “Sure. Another drink?”

  He nodded, though of course with Rocky it was a rhetorical question. I pulled the martini cart closer to my chair.

  “Imagine it,” Rocky said. “If the baby cries, how’s she going to find it? She can’t make her way down a hallway in the dark as it is. Plus I think there’s something wrong with her memory. We’ve been in the house two years already, and she’s still surprised when she opens the door. ‘Oh, look!’ she says. ‘A bathroom!’ ”

  “Hire a nurse,” I said, rattling my shaker. I adored making martinis. It made me feel like a mad scientist.

  “Well, of course she wants a nurse too. Make me a Gibson this time, will you?”

  “No onions.”

  “Just my luck,” said Rocky, though it couldn’t have been my lack of onions that made him so gloomy. “She proposed to me, I ever tell you that? What was I supposed to say, no?”

  I strained the martini and handed it to him. “You married her because it would have been awkward not to marry her?”

  “She lied to me. She said it was election day, and when she hustled me into the booth, there was a JP waiting. The problem is, Professor, she’s not even my type.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know: I like big blondes.” He drew a big blonde in the air. “She’s so little.” He pinched his fingers together. “A sturdy woman, that’s more my type.”

  I stared at him. “What, your blood type?”

  “No, you know—”

  “What is wrong with you, Rocky?” I felt like snatching back the martini. No more gin until you behave yourself.

  “What’s wrong with you? Not everyone has your catholic tastes.”

  “You’re being ridiculous, that’s what’s wrong with me. Someone’s not your type, you leave her alone. She’s a lovely girl. You married her.”

  “You say that,” he said, “but I notice, looking around, that you appear to be a bachelor.”

  We examined my living room, empty of women.

  “You notice correctly. You know why? Because I don’t go around marrying people out of boredom.”

  “My partner the playboy,” Rocky said admiringly. He angled his empty glass toward me and I poured a little more from the shaker. “You’ll never get married. I’d like to think you would, but you won’t.”

  “Of course I will,” I said. “Eventually.”

  “Well, you might get married, but you’ll never be married. You’ll fuck around.”

  That bothered me. “Why would you even say something like that?”

  “What? That historically you’ve spent a goodly amount of time fucking around, and history repeats itself?”

  “I never did.”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “No. I mean, not the way I define the word.”

  “Which word would that be? Fuck?”

  “Actually, no. Around. I’ve never made a promise I didn’t keep. I’ve never been a sneak. I’ve never lied.”

  “Never.”

  “Never. I’ve been discreet, sure. Stop laughing. I mean it. When I get married, it’ll mean I’ve stopped.”

  “Fucking around.”

  “The around part, sure.”

  “Well, darling boy, when the time comes, remember who to ask for divorce advice.” He twirled his glass between his fingers morosely. “You know how to find them, but nobody knows better than me how to lose them.”

  Whose Julep?

  Tansy always said that money changed Rocky, and not for the better, but I think it was just the opposite: he stayed the same as he always was. That was the problem. He’d never been humble, he’d never been thrifty, he’d never had an ounce of noblesse oblige. A man with big dreams and a brash belief in himself and no money at all has a kind of charm. The guy’s got pride, God bless him. No telling how far a fellow like that can go.

  Same guy, same habits, but rich? Worst jerk you ever met.

  Rocky had always wanted a bar in his basement, a band playing by the swimming pool, the prettiest lady barber in town to cut his hair. Poor, he drank too much and ate too much and sometimes lost his temper with strangers and those he loved, and the only thing that changed was now he could hire people to do the things he’d previously left undone. He’d always believed that money needed to be spent as quickly as possible; it was just harder work now. He lived big, a lot bigger than I did, because he made more and because some of my father’s lessons had stuck with me and I believed in banks as places to increase my fortune, not merely as vaults to keep my cold hard cash, as Rocky said, warm.

  Not that I played the ant to Rocky’s grasshopper. A better man than me would have watched Rock’s spendthrift ways and shaken his head sadly: Don’t you know there’s a war on? I watched that grasshopping and thought it looked like fun. I frowned at the endless supply of gas ration coupons he’d got his hands on—he seemed to know a counterfeiter—but I happily bought myself a jukebox that, when plugged in, bubbled at the edges like a hysterical carpenter’s level. Rock installed an entire game room, including a roulette wheel. I bought a restaurant; Rock took over a nightclub on Sunset and called it the Rock Club. Rock bought himself a trailer to relax in between takes; I had his trailer towed into my driveway; he hired a guy to come around on the set to hit me with a pie; I hired a pretty girl in a low-cut dress to hit him with three pies; he bought a Rolls-Royce and hired a driver; I bought myself a diamond ring; he bought his wife a diamond necklace that made my ring look like dust; I slept with his wife, though not the necklace.

  Okay, so as pranks go, that last one goes too far. It wasn’t entirely my fault.

  Hear me out. Excuse number one: they were estranged, they’d both told me so. Rocky had taken an apartment and left Penny at the house while they sorted things out. “This time it’s for good,” said Rocky. “Born a bachelor, might as well die one.” “You’ll never,” I said, and he bet me two thousand dollars that he’d stay single. But he hadn’t divorced Penny yet, and now I know that this is exactly when you shouldn’t sleep with your best friend’s wife, because it means too much. Then, though, it seemed as though I might as well, the way that Rocky in restaurants would eat my leftovers when I was finished with my meal. That sounds awful. It probably is. All I mean is: the line between what was his and what was mine sometimes seemed pretty blurry.

  Excuse number two: Rocky was sleeping around then, so he said, and how could he complain?

  Excuse number three: it wasn’t my idea.

  Rocky loved his nightclub. He had an idea that he was meant to be an impresario, enamored as he was of liquor, company, smoke, music, and girl singers. “I’m only being patriotic,” he said. “Servicemen drink free.” Nearly everyone drank free. All you had to do was shake Rocky’s hand: instant cocktail. If you were sufficiently grateful, you got a line of credit. Anyhow, it was late. Penny and I were sitting in a banquette in the back; she and Rock had recently resolved to be buddies. Across the room, Rock stood behind the bar, talking to a young woman whose blond hair was more aluminum than plat
inum. Then Rocky cocked his elbow for her to take and they left together. I was glad Penny’s eyesight was so bad. We’d become buddies too: she was simultaneously the deepest and most shallow person I’d ever met. She had an abandoned child’s need to be the center of attention, and then she’d get suddenly wise.

  “They gone?” she said.

  “Who?”

  “Rock and the magician’s assistant.”

  “They’re gone. You can see that far?”

  “I got radar for girls like that,” said Penny. “I should get a part-time job on the vice squad.”

  “Penny!” I said, and clucked my tongue. “I thought there were no hard feelings between you and Rock.”

  “I’m drunk,” she explained, leaning back on the quilted banquette. “You know, I always liked you.”

  “I never thought otherwise. Drink?”

  “Nah. No: sure.” She sat thinking for a while, then closed one eye and looked at me, then swapped and looked again.

  “How many?” I asked.

  “One drink’s fine.”

  “No,” I said. “How many of everything are you seeing?”

  “Dozens. None of them clearly. You look like a whole orchestra, sitting there.”

  “What’ll you have to drink.”

  “A julep,” she said, which was what she now called all drinks. “A tall cold julep. Is it true that you slept with one?”

  “A julep? Does that mean something I don’t know about?”

  She giggled. “Should. No: an orchestra. That’s the rumor that I heard, is that you slept with an all-girl orchestra.”

  Ah. This was one of Rocky’s favorite myths: The week we played Syracuse, the Professor worked his way through the whole Cherry Red Orchestra, starting with the percussioness. I wished he hadn’t spread it to Penny.