Elizabeth McCracken - Niagara Falls All Over Again

I didn’t know that then. As I said, in my line of work, we did not discuss killing, only rescues.

Everyone Dances Underwater

There were days when I came home, and, having spent hours going Yipes! Duck in this alleyway; here comes the sarge! could not shake it. I went Yipes through the door, Yipes to the kitchen, Yipes into bed under the covers, my shoulders up around my ears and my arms fluttering like the flightless bird I was.

So to soothe my nerves, I bought things, including — at Rocky’s urging — a house. (On our radio show, we joked about the housing shortage. We just never suffered from it.) The lady agent showed me a five-year-old white stucco house in North Hollywood, with a flat-topped Spanish-style roof that seemed impractical; I told her so: what about snow? Would you have to shovel it off so it wouldn’t cave in your ceilings?

She looked at me. She looked at the sky. She looked at the palm trees that lined the street.

Yes, that’s right: California . I laughed and pulled out my checkbook. You could stroll across that roof like a park if you wanted. Safe. Anyone who wanted to hurt herself here would have to jump, I thought.

I hadn’t given much thought to the house itself, which God knows was more room than I needed, but I was like someone who’d starved as a kid: all I wanted was space. I’d grown up in a house crowded with people; I’d roomed in broom closets all my years on the road. Sometimes, in vaude houses, dazzled by the space and high ceilings, I’d daydream about moving onto the stage, or even into one of the boxes that overlooked it — maybe I’d install a Murphy bed to pull down from the wall, an invention I’d only seen in movies, where they behaved like dragons accustomed to a steady diet of sleepers. My new place — not quite a mansion, but pretty close — had six bedrooms, and five bathrooms, and a whole variety of rooms in which to live and dine and recreate and play games, and all for me. Dimly I thought, Well, kid, if you ever marry you can fill the place up; mostly I judged it a hell of a spot for assignations.

There had been nothing in my childhood home newer than the nineteenth century except some of the people: I wanted a place where everything was new and modish and luminous. That was how I decorated: mirrors everywhere, setting like suns and rising like moons; slim tables with blue glass tops. A martini cart trembling with glasses.

Rocky and Penny bought a bona-fide Beverly Hills mansion that had belonged to a suicided silent movie director. The place was as fountainous as Rome: in every corner on the grounds, there was something or someone cast in concrete and spitting. They had two swimming pools and a tennis court and a guesthouse and bathrooms for days and days. Their greatest regret was that because of the manpower shortage, they couldn’t build on more bathrooms. Happily, the place came with a movie theater already, and they added a popcorn machine and moved in a soda fountain by the main swimming pool. Rocky, fondly remembering that cellar in Milwaukee, put in a bar in the basement and hired, before any other household help, a bartender, a wonderful old Portuguese guy named Bobby who wore his hair in a dyed black pageboy and mixed weaker and weaker drinks as the night wore on. Penny wanted a Ferris wheel, though Rocky was putting that off. They threw parties downstairs, and invited everyone — crew guys from our movies, people who Penny had met in stores, soldiers on leave. Rocky vowed that he’d never forget what it was like to be a regular working stiff — though when was he ever? — which to his mind meant laying out as much cash as it took to get the working stiffs dead drunk. Sometimes the parties would start with dinner; mostly, they’d start with drinks and end with breakfast for whoever was left standing. The soda fountain had a giant grill, and we would emerge from the smoky basement and go out to the pool, the sky the color of a dress that Penny wanted. Rocky would scramble dozens and dozens of eggs.

Sometimes then, five in the morning, Penny would sing. She missed her New York nightclubs, and tried her best to re-create them in the silk jersey dawn. Band members still among the living would gamely try to play along with her. Lately, she had acquired a taste for blues numbers full of murder:

I love you like a razorblade

I love you like a knife

I love you like a Gatling gun

You love me like a wife.

Or:

Poppa, don’t push me.

I’ve killed men before.

You’ll be kissing the threshold

If you walk toward that door.

An unsavory song over scrambled eggs. It seemed just right.

Some nights I brought over a lady comic I’d met at the Hollywood Canteen named Sukey Decker. We were pals. Sukey was bucktoothed to that narrow margin of beauty between forgettable and unfortunate: with some effort she could make herself look comic straight on, but she couldn’t help her gorgeous profile. Lovely figure, too, the kind that comics trace in the air with the flats of their hands, saying zowie or hubba hubba . The movies didn’t know what to do with her; she would pal around with the leading lady and crack wise and only show her legs as a burlesque punch line. On radio, and later on TV, she did well. Her shtick was a kind of world-weary man-hunger. Her voice was like that, too, low and slightly soft around the edges: hearing it was like tasting expensive candy. Till then, you’d never realized how lousy most candy was.

The four of us often ended up at Rocky’s basement bar and smoked cigarettes and insulted each other and drank too much. “What time is it?” Penny would ask, unable to see the clock over the bar. “Tomorrow,” Rocky would answer: nine in the morning, or ten. “A little eye-opener never hurt anyone,” said Sukey, who could outdrink us or anyone.

I like Sukey a lot. As far as we knew, she’d never married. She didn’t even go with anyone, though on the radio she joked that she could do without silk and nylon and meat and gas and sugar, but the man shortage was about to kill her.

“She likes me,” said Rocky one drunken tomorrow morning, though that wasn’t true. She hated him; she only came to his parties because he had great taste in musicians. But Sukey fascinated Rocky. “What’s her story?” he asked me, though Sukey was sitting next to him. He hooked an arm around her neck.

“Who knows?” I said.

“Okay, sweetheart.” He pulled her in and kissed the top of her head. “You tell me your story.”

“What story?” she asked.

“Boyfriends,” he said, giving her a wobbly gesture that meant, Do you have any?

“I’m allergic,” she said.

Sukey was like a high elevation: when she was around you, you got drunker quicker. Penny was already drowsing like the dormouse on the edge of the bar. “You’re afraid,” Rock said, sloppy and sage.

“Of what?”

“Men,” said Rocky, in a pure imitation of how Sukey as a leading lady’s best friend would have said it, equal parts contempt and longing. That he managed this was a coincidence, the way sometimes the third verse of a long-forgotten song will come cresting into your brain on too much whiskey.

Sukey laughed. “You sadden me,” she said. “You amuse me. But you don’t frighten me.”

“Okay,” said Rocky, “sex. You’re afraid of.”

“Oh, sex. No, I’m not afraid of sex. I’m all for sex. Sex doesn’t give me a second’s pause. Sex?” she said. “Sex is swell.”

“Good,” said Rocky, puzzled.

“But romance, ” said Sukey, “ mortifies me.”

Sukey liked me fine as a friend, and I pretended that the feeling was mutual, that all I longed for was her company and clever wit and the occasional firm handshake. Really, I wanted to get her into bed. I mean, not just into bed, because I also loved her company and clever wit; it’s just that her firm handshake tortured me with its possibilities. I suspected that the Professor had monkey-wrenched my love life: she would have gone for me if I’d been a leading man. I decided I could wait her out. She wasn’t your usual girl; she required unusual tactics. But Sukey seemed quite immune to my charms. In retrospect I’d say she was immune to charm, period; she hated anything that smacked of pretense or practice. She was a devout cynic, which meant that only naïve sincerity could melt her heart. In other words, she adored Penny and her five-in-the-morning declarations of homicide. Sweetheart, I’ll stab you/Tangled up in my bedding./I want to cry at your funeral/Not at your wedding .