Elizabeth McCracken - Niagara Falls All Over Again

“Tastes terrible,” Rocky said, giving it a nibble. And then he began to dance by himself. We all pom-pommed in an Argentinean way. At first it was a joke, and then it wasn’t. Rocky held the air, and you knew exactly what his imagined partner weighed. Small, especially compared to him, and so he was deferential; he danced on his toes, his feet back, to give her room. You even knew that she tried to get away from him, and then she got more forgiving and passionate. He loved her; she had a temper, she was still making up her mind. Well, I thought, this was worth getting fired for.

He tilted her into a dip. I swear I could see her hand wrinkling the back of his shirt.

Later, he showed me how to cultivate that newspaper flower. I hadn’t noticed that the actual fashioning of it was part of the trick, like Charlie Chaplin making do with a shoe for dinner, two dinner rolls on forks for entertainment, a gag he’d stolen from Fatty Arbuckle anyhow. “Here,” Rocky said to me. He inclined his head toward the rose that emerged from the local editorial, petal by petal, his face undisturbed, curious, watching it bloom.

The All-Girl Cure

Middling success gets exhausting, take my word for it. Rocky ate more, drank more. Fatter was funnier, so he claimed, but really he was just hungry. He couldn’t get enough. He’d clean off his plate and then look at mine, hopeful. At first it was a request, but soon enough it might as well have been written into the contract: once he’d demolished his meal, he got to eat whatever was left of mine. Sometimes he ordered two meals at once, the only man for whom the fried-clam platter was a side dish. You passed an ice-cream shop with Rocky, and two doors down you suddenly realized you were walking alone. Go back, peer through the window, and there he was, instructing the help on how to lay on the whipped cream, the maraschino cherries, like a pharaoh overseeing a pyramid.

As for me, I became a ladies’ man. I’d discovered the secret, which was mostly just deciding to be one. Wasn’t Rocky right? I needed the practice for the act. The more girls I saw offstage, the more my timing improved: I learned the uses of the long look, the pause, the sudden twinkling smile. How could I think I knew anything about comedy, back when I knew nothing about sex? Waiter, another girl please, we’re booked in Chicago next week and I have a piece of business I need to polish. What the hell, I’ll take all the girls in the house. Girls like that never harmed anyone.

I spent my money on clothes, slick plaid jackets and light wool pants. In other words, I became a dandy, a religious affiliation I still cling to. I took up smoking, so I could carry a lighter and a case. I wore my hat at angles that my father would have considered a thumb in the eye of society: the way you wore your hat was not a joke. Nothing, thought my father, was more serious.

Now I was seeing lots of girls, chorines and dramatic actresses and tumblers and hoofers and soubrettes. Not all of them were as eager as the Indian Rubber Maid to come back to my room, but plenty were. Lots and lots of girls. This one smells like roses and that one smells like cake. This one knows the words to the Iowa fight song and will sing them; this one likes to drink; this shy one will surprise you by slipping the cigar from your hand and taking a puff. This one is just your size; this one is smaller; this one outweighs you in a pleasant, daunting way.

I had a lot of fun. What can I say? I made them laugh.

Rocky, though he’d seen it happen, could not understand. He loved women, but he was inept, so romantically amateurish he’d ask anyone for advice. Sometimes I watched him trying to talk to a girl. If he was sober, he came off too brisk and busy. Drunk, he bumbled, overaffectionate, a dog wanting nothing but to lay its head in your lap. He’d go to kiss a girl’s hand, and she’d end up damp to the elbow. He spent endearments like nickels, called everyone Baby and Sweetheart and Darling and Little Friend and Cutie. This worked until he called the bartender Doll Baby, and the girl he had his eye on suspected that Rock’s affection was for the world at large, not her in particular.

“There must be some tricks you’re not telling me,” Rocky would beg.

“What can I tell you?” I’d answer. “It’s love.”

Not that I didn’t have my methods. Ever since the start of the world, girls have been told by their mothers: a certain kind of man is only after one thing. A suspicious mother is almost always right. Some guys (Rocky, for instance) believed that this meant a guy on the make should act innocent, interested only vaguely in the girl’s company, and not at all in the One Thing. But girls didn’t care. All you had to do was convince a girl that it was Her One Thing that you were angling for, hers and hers alone, surrounded as it was by all her charms. Of course you wanted to sleep with her — how will you ever get there if you don’t make that clear? — it’s you, my darling brunette, my beloved redhead, my most glorious bottle blonde. You with the three brothers, or the father with the butcher shop, or a love of Bach. Let me kiss you, because your butcher father writes you letters that quote Tennyson. Come back to my room, because you love Bach.

So you find your girl and sit down next to her between shows, in a restaurant, or a sitting room, or best of all a park, on a bench. Courtesy and courage. You rest your right elbow on the back of the bench, near her shoulder, make a bow of your arms, hands clasped in front, your left elbow pointing at your left hip. Maybe a bow of your legs, too, your ankle crossed on your knee. Smile as though she has just told nine tenths of a long joke that promises to be the funniest thing you ever heard, you can taste the punch line. Don’t touch her, but keep close. Ask her questions. Look her in the eyes, sure, but look away, down to her lap, at her shoulder — you’re either a confident man made shy by her beauty, or an emboldened shrinking violet; either transformation’ll charm her. If you hold still enough, she will be the one to put her hand on your nearby knee, and then slide it closer to your hip, and then, on a good day, she will spread her overcoat across your laps. Better still, a newspaper, which will rattle but is disposable, and makes more sense as a prop. You are theatrical people, after all. Tabloids are too small: you need something respectable and full sized. You are only sitting with your girl, reading the paper together — is the right movie playing at the right theater — and you look at the paper, and then at your girl, your free hand holding your side of the daily news, and hers hers. The prim pigeons will fly away, but squirrels are worse perverts than old ladies, and will loiter. One set of her garters has come undone (Oh, you men who care nothing for fashion, let me tell you a story about the days before pantyhose!) and the pale stocking has fallen around her pale shoe on the dark grass like a ring around the moon. If you are a good actor, and a quiet careful polite boy brought up in a houseful of girls, only those local squirrels will wonder why you don’t run a finger along the newsprint, why the far left columns crumple in your grip, why she folds the horoscope nearly in half, her thumb threading it between her fingers, her tongue between her teeth. Why it takes so long for the two of you to fold the paper up, neatly, as though you are making the bed.

We were playing the Casino Theater at Coney Island when Rocky became enamored of a nearsighted chanteuse named Penny O’Hanian, a pretty girl with a great deal of nut-brown hair who specialized in love-gone-wrong songs. Maybe she was just a good singer, but despite a thin voice she sounded like she meant every stepped-on word. Her eyesight was so bad (she refused to wear glasses) that she had to sidle stage right and feel for the curtain with her fingers. Then she whipped it around herself like a cape — that was her exit — and whipped it back for her bow. Sometimes in the whirlwind of velvet, she nearly toppled over.