Niagara Falls All Over Again

by Elizabeth McCracken

  “This kid—” said Rocky. But then he stopped. “He’s a good kid. Probably above average, but I don’t care if he’s a dope. I hope he is one.”

  “He’s not a dope,” I said.

  “I just hope he doesn’t remember too much, you know?”

  “No,” I said. “You mean whoever his actual mother was? Who remembers that far back?” Rocky junior turned over in the grass and began to graze. His father seemed unconcerned, but I went and flipped him back sunny-side up.

  “Me,” said Rocky. “I remember the crib, sure. My father once dropped a slice of meat loaf on my head. You know, that’s my problem. No, no, don’t say it, not the meat loaf: I just remember too much. Everything, every single embarrassing thing I ever did, every rotten name anyone ever called me, every rotten name I ever called someone else . . .”

  I sat back down. “Comes in handy, that memory.”

  “I’d trade it away in a minute if I could. That’s why I want the kid to be forgetful. Happy.”

  “He won’t have any bad memories to wish away,” I said, “his childhood will be milk and chocolate cake—”

  “He’ll find a way to fuck it up,” said Rocky. “It’s human nature. All’s that matters is how quick you get over it. If you’re lucky, you’ll forget what you need to and revise what you can’t.”

  “What a philosophy!” I said. I looked at our kids, both now dozing in the shade of a midget palm tree. Maybe he couldn’t tell, but I knew they were both geniuses, beloved, as lucky as a pair of loaded dice.

  Compared to Rocky junior, our own baby was not really a baby anymore: she was nearly two, though she was still as plump and milky as an infant. One day you look at your kid and see that she’s become a child, a little person, but it happens to every kid at a different time. Thinner arms and legs, a more muscular mouth, hair that needs cutting. The whole world of noninfant expressions: babies do not smirk, but toddlers can. Our baby had not outgrown her baby ways, though her older brothers had become actual little people by the time they were one year old. Betty—I love that name, the way it sounds like Hattie but luckier—did not talk much. She gestured. She waved like a starlet. And then there was her giggle, God how she giggled, slow at other things but at laughter a genius!

  “An audience,” said Jessica, dryly.

  So what if the baby was not in a hurry to be a kid, a toddler, a refuser of fatherly advice? Maybe she just enjoyed the condition of infancy. In my own childhood home we’d always known that there were good babies and bad babies. There wasn’t any pattern: good babies could grow up to be miserable people, and bad babies saints. My father always said that Fannie, the mildest and quietest of my sisters, had been such a squalling vomiting bundle that sometimes he threatened to take her to the store and put her in the case that held smaller accessories, white handkerchiefs for businessmen, bandanas for the railroad men. “I could have gotten a good price for her,” my father said, and Fannie smiled, and apologized for her earlier behavior.

  Just as I’d planned, Betty was my favorite and I was hers. The boys preferred their mother, and who could blame them? The baby stuck to me. She gave her mother what I called the House Detective Glare, a kind of polite suspicion. Jessica probably wasn’t stealing the towels, but she bore watching. I sat on the sofa, and the baby backed up between my knees and slung her arms across my thighs, watching her mother stretching on the floor.

  “Where did you come from, my little blondie?” I asked her. It seemed impossible that Jess and I could have produced such a creature.

  “She’ll darken,” said Jess. “I was blond as a child.”

  “What?” That seemed even more impossible.

  “Sure. My hair didn’t turn this dark till I was a teenager.”

  “A former blonde,” I said musingly. “No kidding. All the women I know are former brunettes.” Already I felt sad that Betty might become like the rest of us. I loved her this way, different, my changeling, my little bubblehead. Don’t darken, I thought, and of course later I could hear my sister Annie whispering in my ear, See? See? Things you wish for will be granted, in the worst possible way. Wishes are fatal.

  11

  Better than a Backdrop

  By 1948 Rocky and I had made a dozen and a half movies, so many that the oscillations on our careers happened very quickly. Still, we’d been on a downswing, box-office-wise, for a couple of years. We suffered—like most comedians—from the very thing that had made us. We reminded people of the war, and the war was over.

  Why not take some time off? I said. Give the audience a year to miss us. Give Neddy and the studio more time with the scripts. We were saturating the market all by ourselves. I wasn’t talking retirement—we had the radio show, there were some murmurs about getting into television, we could play Vegas or London. Just no more movies for a while, no more holding my mortarboard to my head as I turned corners one-legged or jumped down a manhole. On our last picture, Slaphappy Saps, I’d been chided by wardrobe, and then the studio: Jess, a champion of all sorts of exercise (a pioneer, I think now), had presented me with a set of dumbbells for my birthday, which she installed in the corner of her studio so I could watch myself in the mirror, and by developing a couple of muscles I’d done the unthinkable and monkeyed with the Professor’s chickenhearted scrawniness. “Leave off the weights, Adonis,” a studio exec warned me, and that seemed too much to bear.

  We met with Tansy to discuss the future. Tansy loved his office, where he could always be seated when people were ushered in, though to show off his prosperity he’d bought a desk that could have seated twenty for dinner, which made him look more than ever like a mouse peeping out of a hole to see if the coast was clear of cats. Even the pencil holder was enormous. Rocky paced the room; I settled into one of the huge leather armchairs for guests, which made me feel agreeably like a snagged pop fly.

  “It’s not like we need the money,” I told Rocky.

  “You don’t,” said Rocky. I didn’t point out that he still made sixty percent to my forty. “I need all the money I can get. We have our entire lives to slow down! Tansy,” Rocky pleaded. “Tell him: we have a contract with the studio, and—”

  Tansy smiled apologetically. “I don’t think the studio’ll mind, if you lay off a little. The last few pictures . . .”

  “That’s their fault,” Rocky said.

  “Maybe it’s time to move along on TV, that’s all I mean,” said Tansy. “You could rest a little more. Spend time with your kids.”

  “I’ll spend time with my kid when I’m retired.” Rocky frowned and tried to peek under Tansy’s blotter. “In twenty or thirty years. Meantime I’m going to make movies, with whoever wants to make them with me.”

  “Go ahead,” I told him. “I’m too old for this nonsense. I’m done.”

  Rocky slowly sat down on the edge of Tansy’s gargantuan desk. “You’re quitting?” he said.

  Was that what I’d meant? I only knew I was done with the dumb argument that we couldn’t stop making movies because we couldn’t stop making movies. But quitting? Out of the business? Surely not, and yet—what was that I felt? Elation? Why not retire, before we ended up like Skipper Moran, with his skid-row clothes and trembling fingers. We didn’t have our dignity—that we’d sold off at the start of our careers—but at least we had all our teeth, and I had plenty of money, and three kids who’d love to roll around on the carpet with their pop.

  “He’s not quitting,” said Tansy.

  Rocky stared down at him, then at me. That’s why he stood up, for the height advantage. “Are you quitting?” he asked.

  “I’m tired. I’m an old man.” I was thirty-seven. Rocky was forty-three.

  “Toughen up!” he barked at me. “Jesus Christ. What would your father think of you, too tired to work?”

  “I hate the movies we’re making,” I said. “So does the moviegoing public, apparently.”

  “The next one will be better. Look,” he said, kinder now, “I know you pretty well, huh? Today yo
u’re tired, tomorrow you’ll be fine. You’re like your old man: you don’t know how not to work. Right? Don’t give me a heart attack, Mosey. I got alimony and a kid and maybe more alimony in my future—no, I’m kidding, but who knows. I need to work, and I need you to work. I’m not ashamed to say it.” He had his hands together, fingers down, prayerlike but not too showy about it. He was taking this more seriously than I was. “Tell me you’re not quitting.”

  “Rocky—”

  “Tell me.”

  I’d never seen him so earnest. “I’m not quitting,” I said dubiously.

  “The kid’s not quitting,” said Tansy. “Sit down in a chair like a human being, would you?”

  But I’d spooked him pretty bad. Rocky claimed not to read his own press, but I did, and a couple of months and one above-average but still lousy movie later—What, Us Haunted?—I picked up a movie magazine with an interview with Rocky.

  Q. What have been the most important parts of your success?

  A. Burlesque, the navy, vaudeville. My lovely wife, of course, and our son.

  Q. And your partner?

  A. Mike’s a nice guy.

  Q. But where would you be without him?

  A. Oh, probably somewhere close to where I am, but it wouldn’t be as much fun.

  Maybe he was just trying to suggest to the general public that Carter was the essential ingredient of Carter and Sharp, and that, should Sharp devote himself to his family instead of show business, things could go on as they had without him. Chances are the world believed that already. But I had thought I could count on Rock as the one person who didn’t think so. Now I could practically hear him shrug me off. I was fun. Not for the audience, just for him.

  I went that night to the Rock Club, with the magazine in hand; there was a painting of Hedy Lamarr looking gorgeous on the cover, her head tipped back to show off her white neck. Rocky was sitting at his favorite banquette in the corner, where Penny had thrown her legs across my lap six years before. The club was half filled. Onstage, a trio of Spanish girl singers tragically harmonized on “Enjoy Yourself—It’s Later Than You Think.” They had red roses tucked behind their ears; the girl in the center held the neck of the mike stand like she couldn’t decide whether to kiss or strangle it.

  I shook the magazine at Rocky. “What’s this?”

  “Hedy Lamarr,” he said.

  “I’ve been reading your press,” I told him.

  “Yeah? How’d it come out? The reporter got me a little drunk.” He snuffed his cigar. As though it took someone to get Rocky a little drunk.

  “I’m a nice guy?” I said.

  He must not have read the article; he was authentically confused. “Are you trying to establish a reputation as a son of a bitch I don’t know about yet?”

  I read him the pertinent passage, then tossed the magazine down on the table, where it careened into the candle. Fine. Let the whole place burn.

  “They used that, huh,” said Rock, staring at Hedy Lamarr’s throat. “That’s not so bad.”

  “This success,” I said. “This is all your doing?”

  He thought for a second. I assumed he was mustering up an apology. Then he looked at me. “This success? This success you’re not so impressed with? Probably not. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have had a different, possibly more interesting success without you. Why do you think I get paid more?”

  “That’s a good question. That’s a very good question. Because we have a contract together. And the contract says it’s my turn to get more money. In fact, I’m long overdue. I figure, you owe me.”

  The singers finished their song. Rocky clapped, still looking at me. “You know, kid,” he said, “you were more interesting when you didn’t talk about yourself so much.”

  “What?”

  “When I first met you. You shut up all the time. You never said anything except to ask a question.”

  “And I was interesting then.”

  “You were fascinating.”

  “Watch me shut up,” I told him, and stalked out of the club.

  He could have at least lied and said he’d been misquoted. Maybe I’d quit after all! Rocky could find one of those dime-a-dozen straight men. Just lean over and pick one up off the sidewalk, if it was that easy.

  It might have been, I think now. Maybe I should have quit the team then, taken that early retirement. We could have been friends for the rest of our lives. I would have forgiven him. He was drunk. He was scared.

  But at the moment it felt like Rock had been beating me at an eighteen-year game of poker. If I quit now, I’d never get even. I still had the orginal contract, the one that said that Rocky would get sixty percent more for the first ten years, and then the terms would reverse. He owed me eight years in back wages, the way I figured it. I steamed the page out of my scrapbook and took it to Tansy, who doubted it was legal. He urged me to calm down. “I’ll talk to Rock,” he said. “How’s fifty-fifty? That’s fair, right?”

  “Barely,” I said.

  But Rocky wouldn’t budge, and then he stopped talking to me completely.

  We were shooting a racetrack picture—I played a tout, Rocky a jockey—and he only looked at me when the cameras were rolling. Then he was exuberant. The scene ended, and he walked away in disgust. It made me crazy. You do not exist, you do not exist. “Rocky, this is foolishness,” I told him. He didn’t care. Okay, then. If I didn’t exist, then he didn’t either.

  Our first major falling out. After a while, it was almost like we weren’t mad with each other, just shy. We declared nothing. We just stopped talking. For our radio show, we picked up our scripts; for the picture, we hit our marks and said our lines. I don’t think the audience noticed the difference. Everyone was on my side, but everyone humored Rock. Jessica told me I should apologize, if not for me, then for our kids, who missed him.

  “What am I apologizing for? Making less money? Being a sucker?”

  “We have all the money we need,” she said. “You know Rocky. He won’t apologize. Don’t drag your heels just to punish him.”

  “That sounds very wise,” I said, “but I’m not going to roll over. I do it for every single other thing.”

  She sighed. “He’s an unhappy man. If a little money makes him happier—”

  “It isn’t the money,” I insisted.

  “So you keep saying, dear, and then you explain how it is.”

  Those couple of months were our first silence: not the longest one, but the deepest. Once you’ve stopped speaking to someone, no matter how sincerely you then make up, there’s a new chance that you’ll stop speaking again. Every time, though, is different: sometimes you’re furious and sometimes merely peevish; sometimes you struggle not to call the other person up in the middle of the night to yell or apologize, and sometimes it’s just something that you do, like the morning crossword or calisthenics. After that first time it was easy: mad? Stop talking.

  But that time, of course, we made it up.

  Baby in Bright Water

  Where was I? At the studio. I figured it out later, I mean, I wrote down everywhere I’d gone that day, and at just what time, accounting for travel, for conversations in hallways, for visits to the canteen and the men’s room. I was sitting in one of those canvas-backed director’s chairs that civilians believe movie people spend all their time in, my name stenciled across the back. We were posing for stills. The most hackneyed shot in the world, both of us leaning back, one careful elbow hooked over the canvas so that we would not obscure our names or the little drawings—mortarboard on my chair, Rocky’s striped shirt (empty of Rocky) on his. In real life we hadn’t spoken to each other in a month, but in publicity photos we were the best of friends, smiling at the camera, our elbows nearly touching. It was supposed to look as though the photographer, strolling up behind us, had said, “Heya, boys!” and snapped the picture. That took two hours.

  Then I went to Musso’s with Neddy. We ate tongue sandwiches; that’s what I remember. (Tongue was one o
f the only things Rocky would not eat. “I only like human tongues in my mouth,” he said, “but past that I’m not particular.”)

  “He’ll cool down,” said Neddy. “He never stays mad for long.”

  “Maybe I won’t cool down. How come nobody ever worries about that?”

  Neddy got the look on his face that meant that if he were a laughing man, by now he’d be in hysterics. He gestured at my sandwich with his sandwich. “Bite your tongue. Because you’ve always cooled down. What do you think is the secret of Carter and Sharp? You’re the only son of a bitch who can take him. You’re the only one who’ll never walk out.”

  “That’s all?” I said. “Good God, Neddy, I’d like to think that’s not it. I’d like to think I had some talent. I’d like to think—”

  And then the waiter came to our table, and handed me the phone, and it was Jessica saying, “Come home.”

  “What is it?” I asked, and she said, “The Baby,” and hung up.

  She hung up because she could not bear me asking for specifics. The specifics were this: my beautiful family was in its beautiful home. They had everything they could want, including, behind the house, that heart-shaped swimming pool with the wrought-iron fence. Jessica was the only one who swam; I still didn’t know how. She complained about the shape. You could not travel one long line across the heart without bumping into a point or a curve. Every morning, nearly, she dove into the pool for a few irregular laps, and then she’d get out, and she’d shut the iron gates.

  Maybe sometimes she forgot to shut them.

  The baby had wandered out of the house. Look: a beautiful shimmering heart in the backyard, glittering romance to a baby girl. There were always little wavelets in our pool, the water holding coins of light between its fingers. The baby doesn’t know the difference between water and light, unless it’s on her skin: one is cold, and the other warm, but how can you tell if you don’t touch? So she tries to touch. She is a magpie; she steals all the shiny things in the house and hides them in her bed, butter knives and costume jewelry and the foil from packs of cigarettes. She walks to the edge of the pool. She doesn’t look around. She doesn’t know this is forbidden. She leans over the water, and now the flash is beyond her reach, so she leans farther, and she is so small there is no splash, and she is so round that she floats, and she is so surprised that she does nothing, nothing at all, and when her mother finds her—only minutes later, says the doctor—she is still floating, little jellyfish, greedy little jellyfish, her hands empty and her face, when they turn her over, disappointed.