Elizabeth McCracken - Niagara Falls All Over Again

“She’s like a cartoon girl,” Sukey once told me, and I realized who Penny had always reminded me of: certain female impersonators who’d studied girlishness. “Betty Boop,” Sukey called Penny, who giggled and showed her garters. The four of us mostly palled around together at Rocky’s place, because Sukey did not want to be photographed next to me at a nightclub with a caption that only said the truth, but suggested much more: Funnyman Mike Sharp and Funnylady Sukey Decker, out on the town, insist they’re “Just Friends .”

Penny finally ordered a Ferris wheel when Rock and I were out on a bond drive, and one Sunday she invited Sukey and me over for its inaugural spin. We had cocktails by the pool, under its empty turning shadow. Penny kept trying to talk me onto it.

“Keep talking,” I told her.

She wore a green top with slim green pants and green shoes, and lay across Rock’s lap on a chaise longue. She looked like a piece of parsley on the blue plate special. “Suit yourself,” she said sleepily.

Then she rolled to her feet and put her hands out to Sukey, Will you dance, and Sukey took them in agreement. That was one of the loveliest things about Penny: she’d ask anyone to dance, old men and grandmas and five-year-olds and homely single women, though this might be because all of the above looked the same, to Penny; what she could see, from across the room, were shoulders shifting longingly in time to the rhythm.

“It Had to Be You” played on the portable record player. Penny was the stronger dancer, and so she tried to use her advantage to force Sukey into leading. This ploy failed, but they looked lovely dancing together, in time but out of step. Both of them wore giant Andrews Sisters rolled hairdos; Sukey had on a fascinating halter top and a pair of camel-colored bell-bottoms. Penny placed her hand on the knot that held up Sukey’s top.

Soon enough, Rocky stood up and offered his hands to me. We danced. Next to each other awhile, then arm-in-arm, both of us self-conscious but not embarrassed: we were men who’d danced together plenty onstage and in the movies. According to Rocky, heavy guys were always great dancers, because they flung themselves around to music at an early age to get a laugh and found out they liked it.

He started to sing: “When Mose Sharp was booooorn, ’mid Iowa coooooooorn. .” Then he swiveled me around and dipped me one way. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Penny threaten to untie Sukey’s halter top. Maybe that’s what threw me off balance when Rocky suddenly dipped me the other way. I fell through his arms and into the pool. On the other hand, he might have dropped me on purpose, for a laugh. I still don’t know.

Gravity must have treated me like any other heavy object — the seat of my pants must have gotten wet before the tips of my fingers as Rocky let go of them — but in my memory I’m a character in a comic strip: panel one, dancing on the deck with Rocky. Panel two, suddenly underwater — it wasn’t that I’d forgotten that I couldn’t swim; I’d forgotten that swimming was something you wanted to do, if you ended up in a pool. The water yanked at my necktie, the bottom of my jacket, as though it planned to make me presentable. Panel three: a half a dozen hands slip into my various pockets to lift me up. Panel four: I’m on the deck, lying on my back, surrounded by people who want to give me artificial respiration but are laughing too hard.

The sky beyond them looked as hard as the tile under me. I felt pinned down by my wet clothes, but full of life. If I’d been in a movie, I would have sat up, spit out a mouthful of water, and removed a goldfish from my pocket.

“Can’t you swim ?” Sukey asked.

“Not a stroke!” I said cheerfully. “I could have drowned!”

We were all giggling. Well, they giggled; I laughed and wept at the same time as they hauled me to my feet, trying to slap the water out of my clothes, out of my toupee, which had kept half a toehold on my head. Who cared? I wasn’t vain: I was alive!

“I could have drowned!” I told Sukey.

“You didn’t,” she said. She removed my wig and tucked it in her handbag, which set us all to laughing harder.

There wasn’t a stitch of clothing anywhere in any of the dozens of closets in that house that would have fit me. I was folded into Rock’s oversized toweling robe, and then folded into the passenger’s side of my Buick, a gift from the studio in late 1941, just before the manufacturers quit production on civilian vehicles.

“I could have drowned!” I kept saying. “I could have drowned!”

Rocky leaned into the car. “You would have figured out how to swim eventually.”

Sukey drove me to my house, as always relatively sober. “How will you get home?” I asked her, and she said that we’d figure that out later. Meaning: I drove her home the next morning, because she spent the night with me. At first I was still shocky and sodden from the pool, and then I was shocky and sodden from Sukey. She’d helped me into the house and into my bedroom, at which point I turned to her and said, “For God’s sake, Suke, don’t leave me alone.” “You’re all right,” she said, but I think she saw the look on my face that said I wasn’t. “I could have drowned,” I said, my hands reaching for her but lost in the sleeves of the robe, “I could have drowned,” and she told me to shut up, and then she shut me up.

I felt, simultaneously, like a river being dragged for a body; like the body beneath the surface of the river, insensible but wanting to be found; like the searching heroes bobbing on the river’s surface in their boat. There you are , I heard Sukey say, the heroes looking for the body, the drowning man pulled into the boat by his rescuers. It felt exactly that personal: a matter of life and death between strangers.

For the next few months, it would suddenly occur to me that I could have sunk to the bottom of the pool and been retrieved too late. If they’d been a little drunker. If I’d been a little drunker. . The lesson I took from this was that I shouldn’t dance with Rocky near the pool. I wasn’t angry at him, exactly, more bewildered by the possibility. I would have been on the front pages of all the movie magazines, my name and the word TRAGEDY. I could still feel the scouring chlorine in my nose, could see the angling shadow arms of the Ferris wheel turning above me. You’re not beyond learning, Rocky told me, but I decided that I was. A better man would have signed up for swimming lessons the next day.

Sukey, meanwhile, was doing her best to befuddle me. Her best was pretty damn good. We had an agreement, by which I mean she had demands and I met them. She did not want to be my girlfriend. She did not want to be my date. She did not want my name linked to hers in any way, by anyone. This, of course, included Rocky and Penny. In return, we’d sleep together every now and then.

Such a puzzle, Sukey, calm and expert. I never met anyone who could make her fingers so separate: a caress from her meant one finger edging along an ear, her thumb at the corner of your mouth, a third finger at your waist, a fourth. . Sleeping with Sukey made me feel pleasantly, sexily infested. She’d call me up in the middle of the night and invite me over — after that first night, she never came to my place — and afterward she made me again pledge my silence.

“Should I be insulted?” I asked. “You think I’d hurt your career?”

“I don’t want people to know about me,” she’d answer. Indeed, she never told me a single story about her past. I began to miss the Sukey I’d known before I fell into the pool, who was more likely to make a joke at her own expense than this intermittently ardent woman who met me at the door fresh from the shower. Still, I thought I might be in love with her. I hadn’t had this steady a date since Miriam. Then again, a woman hadn’t treated me with this much indifference since Miriam. I didn’t see the connection then. I wondered how to tell, as though love was a house that needed to be viewed in the right kind of light, the right kind of weather, by which I mean of course her loving me back.