Elizabeth McCracken - Niagara Falls All Over Again

There was something about seeing Miriam close-up onstage that unnerved me, too many layers of what-age-was-she and where-had-we-met. I could see the girders of brown makeup meant to bend her nose into something less Semitic; I could see a bruise on her neck, free of makeup because only someone standing right next to her could peer past her collar and see it. Good God, did I do that? The wide-open eyes and the simpering giggle seemed designed to drive me crazy, not to amuse the audience.

Mimi, who do you like better, your father or your mother?

Why, I don’t have anything against either one of ’em.

The shorn hair turned her from a cutie to a beauty. I’d never noticed that a hairstyle could make such a difference. There, revealed, her arching nose, her newly huge brown eyes. The neck so long it seemed impossible. Cheekbones. A profile. Her dark oiled hair showed comb marks like the grain of dark oiled wood, and entirely changed her complexion from slightly ruddy, under the blond wig, to roses-and-cream. Her eyebrows matched the rest of her, instead of looking like a proofreader’s fatheaded correction: insert eyebrows here.

I was eighteen: of course I loved her. She’d rescued and renovated me, and in return I kept proposing marriage. How else could I keep her around? She turned me down every time, which I took to mean she loved me but hated convention. Years after we’d broken up, I’d tell myself: you were a kid, you didn’t really love her. In the months afterward, though, I walked the streets of every new and old town, saying, you loved her, you loved her, you loved her, that was love. She always faced the audiences, and I faced her.

She was a nice Jewish girl, like me from somewhere unlikely: Louisville, Kentucky. She was a little confused when I brought her a Christmas stocking filled with candy and dime-store presents; she was totally flummoxed three months later when I presented her with an Easter basket. “I hate to break it to you,” she said, “but we’re Jewish. You know that, don’t you?”

“Some Jews celebrate Easter,” I said.

She stared at me.

I tried to explain that I’d always thought of Easter as a secular holiday: chicks, candy, bunnies, cards. My mother and then Annie bought us Easter baskets from the five-and-ten. I don’t know how old I was before I realized it all had something to do with the death of Jesus Christ, but I know exactly how old I was before I realized it was entirely connected to the death of Jesus Christ: eighteen, at the Monroe Hotel in Chicago. Thereafter, we sometimes went to Saturday-morning services, if we were in the right town and awake in time.

Miriam was the least serious person I’d ever known. She laughed constantly, at my jokes and my foibles: the time I tried to iron a pair of pants and left a cathedral-shaped burn on the seat without realizing, my first unpleasant encounter with a pickled egg. She seemed always to have just bitten me somewhere, about to run away from the scene of her mischief. She had teenage skin, by which I mean beautiful, and even then, when I ran a hand down her back, I realized I would never sleep with anyone that young again. She decided she’d educate me in everything. “Now, pay attention,” she said, leaning over me in bed. “I’m only going to show you this once.

“What a sweet, sweet boy you are.”

She was a beautiful girl. Sometimes she drank too much — always after the shows, never before — and then she did seem a little like onstage Mimi, because she cried and then laughed immediately afterward. Sometimes she even talked in her baby voice. I hated it.

“You’re a grown woman,” I said, even though this wasn’t exactly true, and she would pout, and come over and sit on my lap — she was quite a lapful — and say, “You’re supposed to help me forget .”

So: we weren’t married, but I assumed we somehow were. Miriam didn’t. She still flirted with an occasional boy wonder, praising him for his youth as though she herself was seventy-five. Then she said, one morning when we’d finished a week in Madison, “I think it’s time to break up the act.”

“Okay,” I said. “Well, that might be easier. The agent can get us work—”

“No, no,” said Miriam. We were surrounded by room-service trays again; she had a terrible weakness for bellboys. “Everything, I meant. No act. No romance.”

Oh.

Despite the wig and the cupid’s bow mouth, she never saw life onstage as separate from life off: to her, that would have been as ridiculous as claiming you were one person while taking a walk, and another while sitting in a restaurant, and then someone else again while bathing. But, see, I did feel that way. Even standing up from a chair I felt suddenly changed, now a standing man, a man who stood, and if I put my mind to it, I could be a man who walked, and a man who sang. This is why I always loved to dance: everyone wanted to know a man who danced.

Turned out my predecessor in the Ben Savant biz had decided to make a comeback, and they were going to try something new, a reverse drag double, where she’d play the male part and he the female. With the short hair — which I had cut for her every two weeks — she could go wigless.

“Finally I can get out of these petticoats. Good-bye,” she said to me, and walked away into the sunset — actually, we were in our hotel room and she didn’t move. Still, I see her in men’s pants held up by suspenders, her coat hooked over one shoulder on two curved fingers, a boater tucked under her arm. She tries to swagger away like a boy, but she’s still my girl, though smaller and smaller, till she disappears at the end of the road where the sidewalks clap together and there’s no room for anyone. She hasn’t bumped her nose on the backdrop, she’s just gone.

Aha, you might say to me: she left you, and so you hated her. I toyed with hate, and then chose something harder. I decided I wanted to be her pal. Other people who’d left me had managed by dying, and it seemed a shame to let a whole living woman go to waste. I wanted her to think well of me, which seemed a kind of revenge in itself. Look what a reasonable fellow you just left! Look how you can’t forget him! So I courted her — for the first time — I wrote her letters, which she returned with postcards, and once or twice, though I couldn’t afford it, I called her on the telephone (I tracked her new act’s progress with the week’s Variety ). She seemed fresh out of love, but I was sure that somewhere in her luggage, among the makeup and the worn-out shoes, was a tiny package of affection for me, which I kept petitioning for. It belonged to me. Hating her wouldn’t have been so awful, so constant, but that might require her to hate me, and that, I realized, I couldn’t bear.

We’d parted at the Madison Orpheum, after ten months on the road together. I refused to say good-bye; I had a horror of the word. I had not said good-bye to my sisters, I had not said good-bye to my father, I would not say good-bye to Miriam. That last night, I could hear her call my name backstage, but I’d gone to hide among the blades in a sword-swallower’s dressing room. “You’re safe here,” the sword swallower assured me, laughing because he believed I was the heartbreaker. Eventually, Miriam gave up, and went back to the hotel room to pack her things alone. Will I ever see you again? I’d asked, and she’d shrugged. But that’s the thing about the circuit: what you once lost — on purpose, by accident — is delivered to your doorstep sooner or later. And make no mistake: you are delivered, too, even to people who’d like to refuse you. Maybe especially.

The Genuine Article

So I was back to being a single, a comedian, I decided. I figured what most people figure: a comedy act is a business, the comic is the boss, the straight man’s just the hired help. Surely after my time on the road with Miriam, I deserved a promotion. I tried to write some patter songs. One — inspired by my eleventh-grade English class — went this way: