Elizabeth McCracken - Niagara Falls All Over Again

“I’m sorry,” I told him. “We’re newlyweds.”

He said, “Then I think you would have gotten here earlier.”

The next morning I took my place in the passenger’s seat. I couldn’t shut up. I told Jessica about my parents, my sisters, every detail I could remember. I told her about Rocky, and how much they’d love each other. “And California!” I said.

“California I know,” she answered. “I studied with Agnes de Mille and Ted Shawn there, when I was younger, before I moved to New York.”

“New York?”

“You’ll catch up.” She drove like a dancer, holding the wheel lovingly but lightly, as if to remind the car that it needed to do its own part. How had I talked her into this? I felt like I’d bribed the rabbi to sneak into Jessica’s bedroom and pronounce her my wife, as though he was tying her shoes together: not till she woke up would she notice the prank. As her passenger I had plenty of time to stare at her face, trying to see if she looked bamboozled or regretful, but every time she looked over and saw me, she smiled.

“You’ll miss Des Moines,” I said.

“We have family there. We’ll be back.”

Is that why I’d married her?

She hadn’t been lying about not having seen any of my movies. “How many?” she asked.

“Eleven.”

She whistled. (She could whistle!) “How old a man are you?”

“You know how old I am. What can I say? I’ve been keeping busy.”

“Which is the best?” she asked.

“The next one. The next one is always the best.”

“So I’ll see the next one.”

“If you’re really interested, Rocky has a theater in his house. I don’t know if he owns prints of our pictures, but he could get them.”

“A theater? You mean, a projector.”

“Well,” I said, “there’s a projector. It’s in the theater. Which is next to the bar. Near the soda fountain and the Ferris wheel.”

“A Ferris wheel. That’s handy. How many children?”

“None.”

“But he’s married?”

“Married,” I said. “Maybe.”

Just then, Utah crawling past our window, I remembered everything I was headed for: not only Rocky, but Penny and Sukey. It wasn’t that I’d forgotten about them, exactly; I’d forgotten that either one of them might care about me getting married. I’d made a hash of things, I saw that now, though I couldn’t imagine that I’d have done anything differently since leaving California. Rocky would have told them about the telegram announcing my engagement, but I hadn’t sent another one saying that we’d actually gotten married. (How could he complain? He’d set the precedent for secret weddings.) Before Jessica, I might have managed to get out of this mess, to get Penny alone and — well, not apologize, a gentleman never apologizes for sleeping with a young lady — I could have explained that despite my dearest wishes, we should simply be friends, that in a perfect world, etc., etc. Maybe it wasn’t too late to try something like it. Sukey I didn’t think would be so much of a problem. She’d shrug me off like she shrugged off everything.

What I needed was to keep my brain busy, in those moments Jessica and I fell into a companionable silence. I decided to write a song as a late wedding present. The title came first: “My Darling Lives in Des Moines.” I did better with the lyrics when I drove, which was almost never; my concentration was less focused when I merely rode. Jessica let me have the wheel through a large chunk of Arizona, and I noodled around with the verse.

In the middle of the city

In the middle of the state

In the middle of the country

I count my dreams and wait

In the middle of my bedroom

In the middle of the night

In the middle of my dream of love

I hold my darling tight

I had a melody in mind, even though I wasn’t so good at melodies and couldn’t have transcribed it. We passed a sign that said, “When You Ride Alone, You Ride with Hitler.”

“There’s something wrong with the car!” Jessica said, sitting up in the passenger’s seat.

I’d been tapping the gas with my foot.

The Store Was Fresh Out of Camels

“Earthquakes,” said Jessica, when she first saw my breakable living room.

“It’s not like we can’t afford to replace things,” I said.

She laughed. “Broken glass . That’s what I’m worried about. How long would it take to dig out glass from this carpet?”

I shrugged. She had a point, and still, all I could think of was how I didn’t know, exactly, what everything in this room had cost me. A glorious feeling: I could smash a martini glass every hour, and it wouldn’t make the slightest dent in my bank account. The difference between me and Rocky is that he might have thought the same thing, and then would have gone ahead and shattered the glasses.

I still live in this house, alone now, and somehow it’s darkened over the years. Dirt? My own failing eyesight? A slight change in the earth’s rotation? When the children were little, the house seemed full of light, and I don’t mean metaphorically: the mirrors seemed as deep as rooms themselves, the window blinds glowed. Eventually we bought rugs the children could spill anything on, we put away the crystal and covered the sofas and chairs in dark green paisley, but still it was brighter than it ever was when I lived alone. On the table, glossy chicken soup or pale warm cream of wheat. In every patch of sunshine was a child, or our calico cat, or my wife the dancer who viewed the floor as a piece of furniture except more practical. Maybe bodies stop sunlight in its tracks. Without them it stumbles through the house and out the back door.

Rocky arrived at 8:30 that evening. (I’d called him from the California border. He made hurt noises over not being invited to the wedding, but I made it sound as though the marriage had been an emergency: a nice girl, after all. She wouldn’t have come with me otherwise. I have no idea of whether this was true.) First he threw his arms around me, and then he went after Jessica. For a moment, I was afraid that he planned to scoop her up, but instead he took her hand. He said, “You’re a dancer.” She nodded. I didn’t think I’d told him that.

“You know,” he said, “I can’t even tell you what a pleasure it is to meet you, Jessica.” And then he whooped and scooped her up in his arms and kissed her. “Tour jeté!” he said.

Meanwhile, I realized he had stuck something in my breast pocket when he embraced me: a giant roll of money. I pulled it out. “Really, Rock,” I said. “A wedding present? Why didn’t you get me something I didn’t already have?”

“Oh, for your wedding I got you a llama,” he said breezily. He set Jessica down again, just as she said, “A what ?” She’d already seen the jukebox, which might have seemed as unlikely a piece of living-room furniture.

I said, “Joke!”

“A nice llama,” said Rocky. “Barely spits at all, for a llama. Someone for us to get drunk with. But: am I not an honest man? Didn’t we have a bet going?”

“Usually several,” I said, though I was hoping to introduce my wife to my bad habits one at a time. I already had the notion — and hope — that she might try to break me of them.

“We only had one two-thousand-dollar bet,” he said. “The matrimonial one.”

Penny’s gone, I hoped. To a beautiful foreign country where she’s carried on a litter like Cleopatra. Rocky’s remarried and has already forgotten Penny’s forwarding address, because she’s so gone she’s never coming back .

“Penny’s come back to me!” he said.