Elizabeth McCracken - Niagara Falls All Over Again

“You just want attention, old dog.”

“No. I mean: no. It’s like I want to be near her without her really noticing. Sneak across the room. Put my head on her lap. Maybe she pushes her hand through what’s left of my hair, but she doesn’t even look up from her book. Like she’s used to me being there.”

“Like you’re a dog.”

“Have it your way. Maybe. A good dog. A loved dog.”

“Yeah. Sure.” He stroked his cigar as though he was Aladdin, thinking carefully before he summoned the genie. “That’d be okay.”

I’m Light on Your Feet

Rocky discovered Jessica’s sweet tooth, and liked to try to stuff her full as a piñata. Usually he succeeded: his taste in chocolates, said Jessica, was nothing short of genius, and even during the war managed huge smuggled boxes of European bonbons.

Wasn’t it unseemly for a man other than her husband to supply her with candy?

So I’d top him: I’d build her a candy box of her own, a music box: a dance studio. I hired some set guys from the studio to design and build it at the far end of the back lawn. I told Jessica I was working on a game room, a place for Rock and me to play cards and smoke. The way I figured it, the studio was for her solitary dancing pleasure; I would be her audience. I really was thinking of a music box, my mother’s, where the celluloid ballerina who lived inside sprang up only when someone wanted to see her twirl.

The set guys got fancy: dramatic masks above the entrance, a mirror trimmed in painted velvet ribbon. I took her to it when they were done.

She walked over the threshold. For thirty seconds, I think, she wondered what kind of clubhouse this was. Then she figured it out, and kissed me. “Oh, Mose,” she said. “This is a wonderful place for lessons.”

I managed not to say, “For what ?” (Sometimes I had to work not to be a straight man, not to say every little thing that crossed my mind so that my comic could respond to it.) I looked at the wood floors, the blond untouched barres. “That’s what I thought.”

She inspected the mirror, the small dressing room at the back, the latticed Swiss-style windows, the bathroom, the record player and radio. Her brother, Joseph, still lived in their house; otherwise I’d have paid to have certain details of her old studio (the fireplace, the peach-colored flame-shaped lighting sconces) flown in.

“Wonderful,” she said again. “The barres are too high, but other than that. Easy to fix.” She sat down in the middle of the floor. Her stomach — she was six months pregnant — hid the angles of her crossed legs. She asked if I would leave.

“Sure,” I said. I tried to make it a question.

When I got back to the house, I heard the music. I hadn’t bought any records for the player; she must have snapped on the radio. From the kitchen I could see only one small slice of a studio window, and realized that if I had wanted to watch her, I’d built the place badly. You couldn’t see anything from here, just Jessie occasionally spinning into view and out again. She must have danced through commercials, Ballet Pepsodent, Ballet Lucky Strike . A mistake, I thought: I’d given her something that would keep her from me. That’s the kind of guy I was. She was so happy, and I, kept from her happiness, was miserable.

Soon enough, Jessica offered lessons. In Des Moines, a dance lesson with her was glamorous. Not that she worked to make it so: still, she was the only Bohemian her students ever met, a single woman in leotards, forbidden jazz on the gramophone. A professional dancer, here in our city. You knew you’d never be one yourself, but for an hour a week you could pretend. Then you’d go back to your parents, or husband, or wife. You wouldn’t even tell them how much you’d loved your time in the Ninth Street studio.

But in Hollywood, professional dancers were common as bedbugs. Who hadn’t danced professionally? See that woman crossing the street? She scissored her legs in the two-o’clock spot in a Busby Berkeley kaleidoscope, and she was nothing special. Well, that was the point, to look like all the other girls angling identically for the camera that came in overhead on a crane. From below in the front row, a mother might see a certain turn of ankle. But to everyone else, you looked like the girl on either side, and how would you ever become a star that way? So you took more lessons, while privately assuming you were better than your teacher.

Even the children — Jessica’s specialty — were not impressed. They took dance lessons as a matter of course, even though most of them hated to. They were the children of the rich and famous, and they had one woman who cooked them breakfast and another who buttoned their coats and another who helped them correct their turnout and posture and faulty rhythm. All the world was hired help, wasn’t it? Jess would have taught adults, but they generally studied with people more directly connected to a studio. If I’d been a musical star, they might have signed up with my wife so they could dance loudly, hoping I was hungry for discoveries. Years later she got choreography work in television, and loved it. “All that time with those awful, awful, awful children!” she said. “What a waste!” But it was good for us, like eating loaf after loaf of lousy bread — you pick up some tips on how to get your own dough to rise.

Her only grown-ups were my old pal Johnny Atkinson and his roommate, Alan. Johnny managed to find a part in most of our movies — we always needed a blustery tough-guy to frown at our high jinks. I figured they took tap classes together.

“How’d the lesson go?” I asked Jessica one night when we were in bed.

She sighed. “Well, fine, except that John finally dropped Alan.”

“What?”

“Not hard, dear. Toward the end of the lesson. But he needs to train so it won’t happen again. You know. Adagio is hard work. John’s not the youngest man in the world. Not the thinnest. A person should be one or the other or both. With two men, we must be inventive.”

“One or the other for what?”

“For adagio, ” she said. She gestured with her hands. Then she did it a little more emphatically, and I saw her hands gripped an imaginary waist and tossed an imaginary dancer in the air. “That’s what we’re doing.”

I said, “I didn’t know two men ever danced adagio together.”

“I didn’t, either, until they asked. John and Alan want to dance adagio, so. John’s too heavy to lift, so he lifts Alan, and so he’ll have to get stronger. That’s how it works. You look shocked, dear. They sleep together, I don’t think dancing together is such a surprise.”

I furrowed my brow at her.

“They’re dancers,” she said. “Very common among dancers.”

“Johnny’s not a dancer. He’s a second banana.”

“To you he’s a second banana. To Alan and me, he’s a dancer.”

I sat up and stuffed my pillow behind my back. “I don’t like the idea,” I said. Adagio? Two guys? In front of my wife ?

“Well then,” said Jess, arranging my pillow better, just the way I liked it, in fact, “I suppose he can’t be your friend anymore.”

Most of my life, my education has come this way: someone else being nonchalant about things I had never dreamed of. I don’t mean men who slept with men — plenty of those in Hollywood and vaudeville; the previous Savant had been a nance — I mean friends of mine who were men who slept with men. Johnny and Alan? I sighed. “Invite me to the recital,” I told Jess.

She kissed me. “You’re invited.”

(How had I not known about Johnny? Rocky did. Once I mentioned it, he referred to them as Romeo and Julius, which ended up being the title of one of our movies, though with a different plot than Johnny and Alan’s life.)