Elizabeth McCracken - Niagara Falls All Over Again

“A waterstain birthmark the shape of Spain on her left hip,” said Sukey, and — whoops! — I said, “Yes.” Rocky didn’t notice. He said, “You mean Italy.”

“Italy,” she said. “And cold feet.”

“Yes,” said Rocky.

“And she likes her waist to be held—”

“Okay,” Rocky and I said.

After she left, Rocky said, sadly, “Nobody remembers the shape of Spain.”

I wanted to show my midwestern sweetheart everything about California, but she’d already seen it all. She didn’t like Hollywood Boulevard, which still staggered me so you would have guessed I was a tourist, not a guy whose name appeared with almost mind-numbing regularity on the marquees of the movie palaces, whose footprints could be seen in the cement in front of Grauman’s Chinese. (I swear Rocky wore bigger shoes that day, so that his feet would dwarf mine in perpetuity.) “The ocean!” I said. “It’s nice,” said Jess. “The mountains!” I explained. “I’ve climbed them,” she told me. One day I dragged her out into the backyard. “Hummingbirds!” I instructed. “Look!”

She did. She was silent a long time, and then she said, “There are hummingbirds in Iowa.”

“Never,” I said, looking at the little mechanical genius that now backed out of one flower and hung in the air like a cartoon fairy, looking over what the other blooms offered.

“I’ll get you a bird book,” she said, “and you can look it up. But isn’t he beautiful?”

“Beautiful,” I said sadly. “Iowa?”

“Yes, Mr. Audubon. Iowa.”

Despite having climbed a mountain, she viewed Nature as mostly an inconsistently lit corridor that led from one building to another. She adored music: Tchaikovsky and Mendelssohn, and big bands, and jazz, anything you could dance to, anything you might — with the right people — reproduce in your living room. She could not sing at all, but she loved to, so she did — not like Hattie, who flaunted her pitchless vibrating alto voice, but softly, so you could hardly hear how wrong she was. She loved in general the works of man, painting and poetry and architecture.

And she loved me.

This was a fascinating prospect. She really did love me, my Jessica. I kept thinking that she’d notice she didn’t. Sometimes she could be almost dismissive of my behavior, if it displeased her — sniffing the air for a snuck cigarette, shaking her head as I tried to memorize lines to movies that she never would have gone to, had her husband not been one of the stars — and would give me a look that I well remembered from my days as a boarder under the gaze of a disappointed landlady: Mr. Sharp, is this how you act in your own home? But that was just Jessica: she loved me, but that didn’t mean she’d put up with all sorts of nonsense. Minutes later — she was not mad, she would not brood — she’d call me her boy (how did she know this is what I would want to be?) and outline my ear with her finger. Or she’d sit in a chair across from me, and ask me about my childhood. I told her different stories than I told Rocky: at least, the telling was different. With Rock the point was to be funny, to pump tragedy full of slapstick. You knew that there were awful things in this world — what people had to bear! — but God had rigged up one kind of consolation: you could get a good story out of it. “This,” said Rock, “is the lesson of the Bible.” Jessica did not love comedy, despite loving a comedian; she wanted to be moved by stories unadorned by wisecracks. The sadder the better, and so I told her the whole story of Hattie’s death, a story I had not told at all since I first met Rocky, and only an abridged version then.

“She died with me angry at her,” I said to Jessica.

“Do you think so? Sounds like you had forgiven her.”

No, I said, I hadn’t. Jessica shrugged. She’d never argue about that sort of thing. But her eyes darkened, which meant they were damp, and she laid a hand upon me — more people should have this knack — that was somehow less about comfort, which I couldn’t have stood, and more about just wanting to touch me. She did not pat, she did not hug, she did not there-there . She just set her hand on my arm. That’s what she always did, she’d touch my elbow or stomach or the back of my neck, as though she wondered what a sad man felt like, so we could be sad together.

And generally, when she did this, no matter what time it was, we’d go to bed.

On the other hand, we went to bed when we were happy, too. She was amused by my constant willingness, and I grateful for hers, which in those years was what I believed marriage was. Years of vaudeville meant I never gave a thought to when decent people embarked on carnal embraces: I’d worked nights, and besides, I didn’t know any decent people. Not that I told her this. I mentioned Mimi, but otherwise my past was my past. It was scattered across the middle of the country, and here we were at the edge. Maybe some days in Dayton, Dubuque, Duluth (dear Duluth!), part of my past would walk into a theater, and see me: So that’s what happened to that guy . I felt no need to go likewise looking.

I had Jessica. In the mornings she stood in the bathroom, naked, winding her hair on the back of her head and fixing it with a two-part contraption, a long skewer and a curved bar; the pieces worked together, like an arrow drawn in a bow, at her nape. The bathroom was so porcelain-white that even pale Jessica looked pink in it. In fact, if I came to the door without my glasses on, I saw an impressionist painting: white, with a smudge of slightly ruddier white; a curl of black; some silver-blue bursting in through the pebbled glass window. In some ways she was fastidious and in others filthy. She showered and powdered herself with talcum and then she’d put on an unwashed leotard covered in fuzzy fabric blemishes and would dance all day. By evening she would smell like something burning — a small something, a thing that shouldn’t be burned. Not consumed, just a spark at the heart of something densely packed.

What was marriage to me, a guy who had, historically, gotten around? Favors granted endlessly, cheerfully, complicatedly. A certain relaxation of good manners. Permission to stick my nose anywhere. My knuckles had already grazed every part of her body as we danced, as we stepped away from dancing. This was marriage: sticking my nose into every alcove of her body. A skinny ballerina. She had tiny biceps, though her legs were decidedly muscly. You could see her ribs above and below her small breasts. Her sweat smelled like rain-barrel water, sun-warmed and touched with rust.

“My feet are ugly,” she told me once, a single moment of self-deprecation. They weren’t. They were just covered with the evidence of her work, the bottoms thick and darker than the rest of her skin, a gray lampshade over a white light. The lines of her footprint were slightly darker than that. Her big toes cocked over, and her little toes were beveled: they had distinct edges where they tucked in against the rest of her foot. The grain of her toenails ran side to side, unlike her fingernails, but in this she was probably not unique. Only her arches resembled the rest of her, resembled the talc she doused herself with. I kissed them. Why was a foot curved except for kisses?

Her hands were well trained, maybe from years of describing things while dancing. Now, they described me. Was my back really my back, before Jessica swept one hand from the top of my head to the hinge of my knees? No, it had been a jumble of parts, the nape of my neck to keep my necktie up, a pair of chummy shoulders, a length of spine, a prat for pratfalls, legs for hightailing it out of there, all certainly previously kissed and bitten and even spanked, but not this: all me. I felt like I could think great thoughts with my skin. She curled her fists into my armpits, then ran her hands (opening) down the underside of my arms past my elbows, till we were chest to chest and her fingers were around my faulty wrists and I wished I could bend them, to take her hands, maybe if I just tried, and then she stretched her arms a little wider, and suddenly we were palm to palm, palm to palm. She had quite a wingspan, my wife. She nudged my nose with her nose, she fluttered her lashes on my eyelids. Eskimo kiss, butterfly kiss, soul kiss, when I was a young man I collected these kisses the way some daft old women amass spoons from every state in the union, acquiring, until they run out of holes in the collection, dozens of miniature spoons with symbols on the end to pledge their allegiances, a beehive for the beehive state, a keystone for Pennsylvania, a full set and nothing to eat dinner with. Jessica rubbed her forehead against mine, as though she were a patient foreign-language instructor: how would I know what a chin was, unless I felt another chin upon it? Repeat after me: cheekbone, temple, left ear, right ear, toes. I hadn’t known. Really she was three inches shorter than me, but in bed she could make herself my height. In vaudeville I’d seen an act like this, a guy who stood beside a taller man — the short guy slowly elongated himself, put a fraction of an inch between each vertebra, a fraction of an inch at the top of his kneecap and another at the bottom, until he stood next to a shorter man, the same one. The audience blinked, then applauded. That was the whole trick, and it didn’t seem much till Jessica did it: she rubbed her instep over my ankle, then my instep, then the bottom of my foot, never losing track of our kiss, the pulses in our wrists against each other.