Elizabeth McCracken - Niagara Falls All Over Again

“Meet the little woman,” said Rocky, and Penny smiled dazzlingly in my general direction. Ah. There was a ring on that hand. I tried to sort this out: Penny was not in New York. Penny was on the train. Penny and Rocky appeared to be married.

How could he have kept that a secret from me?

“No kidding!” I said, and gave her a kiss. We had to bust it up to let a middle-aged couple get past us.

“You haven’t told me how I look,” said Penny.

“You’re beautiful, Pen,” I said. “You don’t look married at all.” That wasn’t true. She looked married and divorced and already facing a long future alone. “But when did this happen ?”

Rocky shrugged. Penny said, “The night before you left. We figured, California! Why not go together? We’d’ve told you, but. . surprised, right?” She laughed delightedly, as though your husband wanting to keep your marriage from his best friend was good news under certain circumstances. Rocky wouldn’t look at me.

Nevertheless, the newlyweds went to their compartment and I went to mine. The bed pulled down from the wall right in front of the window: it made me feel like a failed tank act, drowned, pressed up against the glass for the audience — people at the stations we pulled into, that is — to gawk at. I couldn’t get over this sudden marriage. Probably he’d been drunk, maybe they both had. I remembered how indifferent he’d seemed to Penny when we left her the first time, waving in Penn Station at our northbound train. Maybe he’d married her out of a different brand of boredom, and was ashamed.

I was a bachelor then. Now I’m sure it wasn’t shame or restlessness. Rocky knew how to talk about anything but happiness, and Penny, for all her chatter and nightclub flash, made the guy authentically happy. He couldn’t explain it, so he wouldn’t try. In those days Rock never said anything he couldn’t bluff his way out of.

Somehow I could not imagine that we were actually moving toward California: it seemed more likely that California was being pulled toward us, on giant chains run by the train engine, and that we stayed where we were while the cars rocked from the effort. Where I had picked up such a cinematic notion, I have no idea, but that’s what eventually happened in our movies. No matter where trouble found Carter and Sharp — Mexico, Mars, Italy, New Orleans — we ourselves were always on a Californian movie lot, and the mountains, the craters, the Mardi Gras parade, were pulled in by chains and prettied up with paint.

In the morning I went to meet them in the red-and-black dining car. Penny wasn’t up yet; Rock waited by himself in one of the orange leather booths.

“She’s a great girl,” I said as I sat down. “Now, tell me the truth. Are you divorced from your last wife?”

“Yes!” he said. “Penny made me, actually, and there went my last good reason for not getting married. I only hope your father is right about this come-to-love business.”

“You love her already, and you know it,” I said.

“Yeah, sure. I’ll tell you the truth, Professor. I’ve never seen a woman so quickly ruined by marriage.” He said this as though he was not the man who instigated the marriage, and therefore the ruin.

“She looks fine,” I said. I was a matrimonial amateur, but it struck me as unseemly to talk about your wife that way. Then I said it: “I know I’m an amateur—”

“That’s right,” said Rocky. “You’ll learn. You know”—he reached across the table and flicked at my lapel—“I’ve never seen you look so unpressed.”

“Unimpressed?”

“Wrinkled,” said Rocky.

Penny arrived then, yawning and smoking. She slid in next to Rocky and reached across him to grind out her cigarette in the ashtray.

“Mike’s a mess,” said Rocky.

“He looks swell,” said Penny, for whom wrinkles were a kind of sartorial braille.

Poor kid. She was wearing a great deal of makeup, which just made her look more exhausted. I don’t think Rocky really was to blame. Nightclub singers don’t age well — all that smoke and liquor and nightly pining. Besides, someone who liked to flirt as much as Penny did would be miserable married: she was like a dog chasing a rabbit for years only to discover that, upon cornering the thing, she didn’t much care for rabbits. I started really liking Penny, once she was married to Rock: as she put it (somewhat to my embarrassment), we shared a husband. That would get me into trouble later.

A marriage of convenience. What marriage isn’t? Penny and Rocky, getting hitched in New York. My father marrying my mother so the neighbors don’t talk. Love is inconvenient; marriage makes it less so. Years later, me and Jessica, my fancy dancer, as Rocky called her: I wanted to marry Jessie so that in the morning, when we woke up, there we’d be, married, convenient, sufficient. Rose on the highway with Quigley at the wheel, Rose leaving Iowa. Marry your driver, girls, and you’ll get where you’re going faster.

“What next?” Penny said now, which is what she always said. Once it meant she was looking forward to the next adventure; this time it sounded as though she was addressing a punishing God.

“What indeed?” said Rocky, not catching the tone. “What heights shall we soar to now?”

By 1939, when I arrived, Hollywood had already made plenty of pictures about Midwestern bumpkins such as myself who came to the land of sunshine and either triumphed or lost their minds. We were cheerful gawkers, one hand on our cardboard grips, one holding our hats to the crowns of our heads. I was set to strike that pose, but Rock’s first act in Los Angeles — we were standing on the platform of the station — was to light a cigar and suggest getting drunk.

“All right,” Penny said amiably. She’d tucked herself under Rock’s arm, so she wouldn’t get lost. “But where are the oranges?”

Rocky pulled her closer. “What oranges, my love?”

“Oranges,” she explained. “Whenever I pictured myself in California, I always had an orange in my hand.”

“You thought they doled them out at the border?”

“Maybe.”

“They only take away your old fruit,” said Rocky. “They don’t give you replacements.”

“We should have oranges,” said Penny. “And honey. And — what do they drink here? Is there such a thing as an orange julep?”

“I’ll invent them for you,” said Rocky. “Orange juleps, honey juleps, milk-and-honey juleps, grape juleps. Name your julep.”

“Honey,” she answered, shivering in her lilac Swiss-dotted frock, part of her California trousseau. She had a diaphanous shawl that she pulled around her shoulders, though it didn’t look like it could warm a wax dummy.

The studio had arranged a couple of neighboring bungalows for us on Melrose Avenue, and Rocky directed a taxi to take our luggage to them: Penny had packed so many trunks we couldn’t have ridden along even if we’d wanted to.

In any case, she insisted on sight-seeing before drinking, though with her vision that meant dropping to a squat in the front of Grauman’s Chinese so she could trace Norma Shearer’s tiny footprints with her fingers. The movie palaces themselves were red-and-gold smudges to her, and she could not see the letters on Mount Lee that in those days still read HOLLYWOODLAND.

“It’s like Stonehenge,” I said.

“It’s parochial,” Rock answered. “It’s advertising. There should be a giant sign next to it saying when and where the local Rotary club meets.” (He was right, of course. It had originally been an ad for a nearby housing development of the same name.)

“Aha!” I said. “Mystery of Stonehenge solved. Odd Fellows meet here third Thursday of every month. See it, Penn? Over there?”