Elizabeth McCracken - Niagara Falls All Over Again

“No,” I said. “They loved their instruments too much. When a girl gets to know a tuba real well, she’s pretty much spoiled for human company.”

“You know. .” Penny said confidentially. She reclined sideways and tossed her calves across my thighs, making a hash mark of my lap. “Where’s my julep, Julep?”

“Let me free, and I’ll get you one.”

“Any minute now.” Penny’s dress was a bright emerald green, gathered with rhinestone clips at either point of her collarbone. “You know,” she said again, “when I started hanging around with you boys, it wasn’t Rocky I liked.”

“No?”

“No.” She nodded.

“Okay,” I said. “So you grew to love him.”

“Yes!” she said. “He talked me into it. I figured the two of you had a conversation and decided he’d get me.”

I decided to be polite. “He always did get the lion’s share of everything.”

“Sixty-forty,” she said, and that was another thing I resented, Rocky telling her the terms of our agreement. “So, you want to collect?”

“What?” I said.

“Your forty percent.” One of her green shoes fell off her foot onto the banquette next to me. I picked it up, slipped my hand inside. I could feel the row of elliptical indentations like little stones where her toes had settled into the leather.

“Listen,” I said.

“You listen, Julep.” The other shoe fell off. “You’re going to have to carry me home. The all-julep orchestra. I mean, I always liked you. And I could tell you always liked me. I’m not really drunk, I mean, not much. Not more than you are, if that’s what you’re worried about—”

What had Rocky been telling her? That was what I always told him: Never sleep with anyone drunker than you are. True enough, I was drunk, and that would have been excuse number four except that I never did anything I regretted simply because I was drunk. Rocky liked to say, “Too bad, the way you always keep your wits about you.”

“—and besides,” Penny said, and she looked like she wished she had a third shoe to kick off, “you don’t want to hurt my feelings.”

Excuse number four: I didn’t want to hurt her feelings.

In the movies, I never so much as kissed a girl. These days they give even the fattest and least appealing comedians their own love interests, a pretty girl who has nothing to do with the business at hand. Our movies had the pretty girl plus her dull handsome gentleman friend. Now and then Rocky would be in love with a girl comedian, because Rocky was made even less than I for Romance, and therefore was a funnier Romeo. A kiss between them was a spoof, a giant zealous puckering sound like a zipper going, as though for Rocky even kissing was slapstick, slightly painful, unserious. In Ghost of a Chance I had a fiancée who was so much a foregone conclusion that we barely appeared on-screen together, though she did beg me not to go into a haunted house with only the Wee Willie Winkie candle on a plate I clutched in my hand. The joke was that girls frightened the Professor more than any old ghost.

In real life, I hadn’t been afraid of a girl in a long time, not even Sukey, but Penny spooked me. Drunk as we were, we didn’t get much sleep that night. Penny seemed always to have just brushed her teeth, her kisses all canines and peppermint. Why on earth was I doing this? She seemed amazed that I guessed that her dress unzipped on the side. Maybe she hoped that I’d give up if I didn’t know the secret. That part was easy; her underthings were complicated, a camisole over a long-line brassiere, a half slip over a girdle and garters, hooks and eyes everywhere. Despite this bracing assortment of garments, she seemed smaller undressed. One knee was childishly skinned, rough and hot. Everywhere I touched felt like a different temperature: her narrow shoulders, her slightly wider hips. She took her hair down, and suddenly looked even more naked.

What unnerved me was watching this woman I knew perfectly well, this woman I’d grown fond of, turn, by degrees, into a woman about to have sex. I hadn’t ever slept with someone I’d really known before, I mean, not for the first time. There was Mimi, but Mimi in bed was Mimi out of bed; I’d never known a woman who changed less in the act of love. As for Sukey: I’d never known a woman who changed more. Penny was somewhere in between. I hadn’t seen her make that expression before, but it was familiar. Her hand went fluttering under my chin.

I bit the insides of her thighs, and she almost squirmed away but moved my hands with her own to her waist to keep her steady. I thought I was betraying everyone, Rocky and Sukey and Penny herself, and maybe the only difference the drink made was that I couldn’t tell how much I cared. I had crossed over: I was no longer a man of discretion, I was a lousy goddamn sneak. She was his wife . She was living in his house .

Such a squirming girl. I am changing the subject.

“Do you think—” I began, but she shushed me with a shudder, sat up and kissed my shoulder and bit my collarbone. Where had her legs gone all of a sudden? Ah. They were around my waist, and I was sitting up on my heels, and Penny slid her lips across my chin and down my throat. My heart felt like a ball bearing in a child’s maze, moved around by her mouth.

We’d gone to Penny’s house, which is to say Rocky’s, which was why I missed the telegram from the former Valley Junction, now West Des Moines. I found it slid beneath my door when I went home at four in the morning, just after Penny and I swore not to tell anyone, especially Rocky.

March 3, 1943

Michael Sharp

1123 Belmont Drive

Sherman Oaks, Calif.

darling Papa died today come home if you can all love Annie.

Beautiful frugal Annie, who wouldn’t have said died but all the euphemisms cost more, and she’d already wasted forty cents on darling . I wondered who Michael Sharp was, and then realized she wanted to be both respectful of my stage name and formal. That was what I concentrated on, because my father’s death seemed made up. I hadn’t seen him in four years, not since Rocky had tricked me into going home. You’ve come home once , Annie said to me then. Now you can do it over and over . I’d agreed with her. But then the war came, and Carter and Sharp were a hit, and it was hard to travel in wartime, and we were a hit, and I’d meant to and meant to. . but I didn’t, because we were a hit. Busy. Come back . Those were his last words to me. He’d gotten too deaf to use the phones. All I knew of his life from the past four years I got from Annie. His appetite is good. He doesn’t mention the war. He’s grown fond of crossword puzzles. He adores his grandchildren. He thanks you for the necktie, he thanks you for the bottle of wine, he thanks you for the new radio. What a failure I was. Bad enough to run away from home once, but twice?

I wondered whether I could catch a plane so I could make the funeral, which was probably today and if not today, then tomorrow. Most of the spots on planes were saved for servicemen, but I sat down and wrote several telegrams — one to Rocky, one to Tansy, and one to Annie, explaining where I’d gone, where I’d be, and I drove to the airport and waited for a flight, and there I remembered Penny, and sent her a wire too.

As I walked up Eighth Street to the house in Vee Jay, I could see a young woman sitting on the front steps, despite the late winter nip. She stood up as I got closer, a young woman in a brown dress with black piping and very red lipstick. Some niece, or great-niece, or unaccounted in-law. She met me halfway across the lawn, and I realized two things: I was about to be hugged; the woman was Rose, grown up.