Elizabeth McCracken - Niagara Falls All Over Again

“You don’t,” said Rocky. I didn’t point out that he still made sixty percent to my forty. “I need all the money I can get. We have our entire lives to slow down! Tansy,” Rocky pleaded. “Tell him: we have a contract with the studio, and—”

Tansy smiled apologetically. “I don’t think the studio’ll mind, if you lay off a little. The last few pictures. .”

“That’s their fault,” Rocky said.

“Maybe it’s time to move along on TV, that’s all I mean,” said Tansy. “You could rest a little more. Spend time with your kids.”

“I’ll spend time with my kid when I’m retired.” Rocky frowned and tried to peek under Tansy’s blotter. “In twenty or thirty years. Meantime I’m going to make movies, with whoever wants to make them with me.”

“Go ahead,” I told him. “I’m too old for this nonsense. I’m done.”

Rocky slowly sat down on the edge of Tansy’s gargantuan desk. “You’re quitting ?” he said.

Was that what I’d meant? I only knew I was done with the dumb argument that we couldn’t stop making movies because we couldn’t stop making movies. But quitting? Out of the business? Surely not, and yet — what was that I felt? Elation? Why not retire, before we ended up like Skipper Moran, with his skid-row clothes and trembling fingers. We didn’t have our dignity — that we’d sold off at the start of our careers — but at least we had all our teeth, and I had plenty of money, and three kids who’d love to roll around on the carpet with their pop.

“He’s not quitting,” said Tansy.

Rocky stared down at him, then at me. That’s why he stood up, for the height advantage. “Are you quitting?” he asked.

“I’m tired. I’m an old man.” I was thirty-seven. Rocky was forty-three.

“Toughen up!” he barked at me. “Jesus Christ. What would your father think of you, too tired to work?”

“I hate the movies we’re making,” I said. “So does the moviegoing public, apparently.”

“The next one will be better. Look,” he said, kinder now, “I know you pretty well, huh? Today you’re tired, tomorrow you’ll be fine. You’re like your old man: you don’t know how not to work. Right? Don’t give me a heart attack, Mosey. I got alimony and a kid and maybe more alimony in my future — no, I’m kidding, but who knows. I need to work, and I need you to work. I’m not ashamed to say it.” He had his hands together, fingers down, prayerlike but not too showy about it. He was taking this more seriously than I was. “Tell me you’re not quitting.”

“Rocky—”

“Tell me.”

I’d never seen him so earnest. “I’m not quitting,” I said dubiously.

“The kid’s not quitting,” said Tansy. “Sit down in a chair like a human being, would you?”

But I’d spooked him pretty bad. Rocky claimed not to read his own press, but I did, and a couple of months and one above-average but still lousy movie later— What, Us Haunted? — I picked up a movie magazine with an interview with Rocky.

Q. What have been the most important parts of your success?

A. Burlesque, the navy, vaudeville. My lovely wife, of course, and our son.

Q. And your partner?

A. Mike’s a nice guy.

Q. But where would you be without him?

A. Oh, probably somewhere close to where I am, but it wouldn’t be as much fun.

Maybe he was just trying to suggest to the general public that Carter was the essential ingredient of Carter and Sharp, and that, should Sharp devote himself to his family instead of show business, things could go on as they had without him. Chances are the world believed that already. But I had thought I could count on Rock as the one person who didn’t think so. Now I could practically hear him shrug me off. I was fun . Not for the audience, just for him.

I went that night to the Rock Club, with the magazine in hand; there was a painting of Hedy Lamarr looking gorgeous on the cover, her head tipped back to show off her white neck. Rocky was sitting at his favorite banquette in the corner, where Penny had thrown her legs across my lap six years before. The club was half filled. Onstage, a trio of Spanish girl singers tragically harmonized on “Enjoy Yourself — It’s Later Than You Think.” They had red roses tucked behind their ears; the girl in the center held the neck of the mike stand like she couldn’t decide whether to kiss or strangle it.

I shook the magazine at Rocky. “What’s this?”

“Hedy Lamarr,” he said.

“I’ve been reading your press,” I told him.

“Yeah? How’d it come out? The reporter got me a little drunk.” He snuffed his cigar. As though it took someone to get Rocky a little drunk.

“I’m a nice guy ?” I said.

He must not have read the article; he was authentically confused. “Are you trying to establish a reputation as a son of a bitch I don’t know about yet?”

I read him the pertinent passage, then tossed the magazine down on the table, where it careened into the candle. Fine. Let the whole place burn.

“They used that, huh,” said Rock, staring at Hedy Lamarr’s throat. “That’s not so bad.”

“This success,” I said. “This is all your doing?”

He thought for a second. I assumed he was mustering up an apology. Then he looked at me. “This success? This success you’re not so impressed with? Probably not. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have had a different, possibly more interesting success without you. Why do you think I get paid more?”

“That’s a good question. That’s a very good question. Because we have a contract together. And the contract says it’s my turn to get more money. In fact, I’m long overdue. I figure, you owe me .”

The singers finished their song. Rocky clapped, still looking at me. “You know, kid,” he said, “you were more interesting when you didn’t talk about yourself so much.”

“What?”

“When I first met you. You shut up all the time. You never said anything except to ask a question.”

“And I was interesting then.”

“You were fascinating.”

“Watch me shut up,” I told him, and stalked out of the club.

He could have at least lied and said he’d been misquoted. Maybe I’d quit after all! Rocky could find one of those dime-a-dozen straight men. Just lean over and pick one up off the sidewalk, if it was that easy.

It might have been, I think now. Maybe I should have quit the team then, taken that early retirement. We could have been friends for the rest of our lives. I would have forgiven him. He was drunk. He was scared.

But at the moment it felt like Rock had been beating me at an eighteen-year game of poker. If I quit now, I’d never get even. I still had the orginal contract, the one that said that Rocky would get sixty percent more for the first ten years, and then the terms would reverse. He owed me eight years in back wages, the way I figured it. I steamed the page out of my scrapbook and took it to Tansy, who doubted it was legal. He urged me to calm down. “I’ll talk to Rock,” he said. “How’s fifty-fifty? That’s fair, right?”

“Barely,” I said.

But Rocky wouldn’t budge, and then he stopped talking to me completely.

We were shooting a racetrack picture — I played a tout, Rocky a jockey — and he only looked at me when the cameras were rolling. Then he was exuberant. The scene ended, and he walked away in disgust. It made me crazy. You do not exist, you do not exist . “Rocky, this is foolishness,” I told him. He didn’t care. Okay, then. If I didn’t exist, then he didn’t either.

Our first major falling out. After a while, it was almost like we weren’t mad with each other, just shy. We declared nothing. We just stopped talking. For our radio show, we picked up our scripts; for the picture, we hit our marks and said our lines. I don’t think the audience noticed the difference. Everyone was on my side, but everyone humored Rock. Jessica told me I should apologize, if not for me, then for our kids, who missed him.