Elizabeth McCracken - Niagara Falls All Over Again

“What am I apologizing for? Making less money? Being a sucker?”

“We have all the money we need,” she said. “You know Rocky. He won’t apologize. Don’t drag your heels just to punish him.”

“That sounds very wise,” I said, “but I’m not going to roll over. I do it for every single other thing.”

She sighed. “He’s an unhappy man. If a little money makes him happier—”

“It isn’t the money,” I insisted.

“So you keep saying, dear, and then you explain how it is .”

Those couple of months were our first silence: not the longest one, but the deepest. Once you’ve stopped speaking to someone, no matter how sincerely you then make up, there’s a new chance that you’ll stop speaking again. Every time, though, is different: sometimes you’re furious and sometimes merely peevish; sometimes you struggle not to call the other person up in the middle of the night to yell or apologize, and sometimes it’s just something that you do, like the morning crossword or calisthenics. After that first time it was easy: mad? Stop talking.

But that time, of course, we made it up.

Baby in Bright Water

Where was I? At the studio. I figured it out later, I mean, I wrote down everywhere I’d gone that day, and at just what time, accounting for travel, for conversations in hallways, for visits to the canteen and the men’s room. I was sitting in one of those canvas-backed director’s chairs that civilians believe movie people spend all their time in, my name stenciled across the back. We were posing for stills. The most hackneyed shot in the world, both of us leaning back, one careful elbow hooked over the canvas so that we would not obscure our names or the little drawings — mortarboard on my chair, Rocky’s striped shirt (empty of Rocky) on his. In real life we hadn’t spoken to each other in a month, but in publicity photos we were the best of friends, smiling at the camera, our elbows nearly touching. It was supposed to look as though the photographer, strolling up behind us, had said, “Heya, boys!” and snapped the picture. That took two hours.

Then I went to Musso’s with Neddy. We ate tongue sandwiches; that’s what I remember. (Tongue was one of the only things Rocky would not eat. “I only like human tongues in my mouth,” he said, “but past that I’m not particular.”)

“He’ll cool down,” said Neddy. “He never stays mad for long.”

“Maybe I won’t cool down. How come nobody ever worries about that?”

Neddy got the look on his face that meant that if he were a laughing man, by now he’d be in hysterics. He gestured at my sandwich with his sandwich. “Bite your tongue. Because you’ve always cooled down. What do you think is the secret of Carter and Sharp? You’re the only son of a bitch who can take him. You’re the only one who’ll never walk out.”

“That’s all?” I said. “Good God, Neddy, I’d like to think that’s not it. I’d like to think I had some talent . I’d like to think—”

And then the waiter came to our table, and handed me the phone, and it was Jessica saying, “Come home.”

“What is it?” I asked, and she said, “The Baby,” and hung up.

She hung up because she could not bear me asking for specifics. The specifics were this: my beautiful family was in its beautiful home. They had everything they could want, including, behind the house, that heart-shaped swimming pool with the wrought-iron fence. Jessica was the only one who swam; I still didn’t know how. She complained about the shape. You could not travel one long line across the heart without bumping into a point or a curve. Every morning, nearly, she dove into the pool for a few irregular laps, and then she’d get out, and she’d shut the iron gates.

Maybe sometimes she forgot to shut them.

The baby had wandered out of the house. Look: a beautiful shimmering heart in the backyard, glittering romance to a baby girl. There were always little wavelets in our pool, the water holding coins of light between its fingers. The baby doesn’t know the difference between water and light, unless it’s on her skin: one is cold, and the other warm, but how can you tell if you don’t touch? So she tries to touch. She is a magpie; she steals all the shiny things in the house and hides them in her bed, butter knives and costume jewelry and the foil from packs of cigarettes. She walks to the edge of the pool. She doesn’t look around. She doesn’t know this is forbidden. She leans over the water, and now the flash is beyond her reach, so she leans farther, and she is so small there is no splash, and she is so round that she floats, and she is so surprised that she does nothing, nothing at all, and when her mother finds her — only minutes later, says the doctor — she is still floating, little jellyfish, greedy little jellyfish, her hands empty and her face, when they turn her over, disappointed.

You cannot save the dead, though I’d spent years in dreams trying, catching Hattie and catching Hattie and every morning she was still dead. Now, I dreamt I dove into the pool until I remembered that this was a good way to kill myself as well, and then I thought that wasn’t such a bad idea: it didn’t count as suicide if it was accidental, did it? Then I told myself, uncertainly, that I did not want to kill myself. I had responsibilities, so then I tried out other rescues: the net on the long pole that the pool man used to fish out flotsam. A call for help. Too long. Eventually, over and over, I merely locked the gate, with a giant padlock on a chain like a sunken treasure chest.

“If the gate was locked,” I said to Jessica. This was cruelty, I knew even as I said it. Those days after the accident — the gates now actually locked — I wept, and she didn’t. She curled up on the sofa with the boys, or walked into the kitchen, or sat on the floor cross-legged. My slight wife dwindled. She looked as though she’d wandered into another person’s closet to dress, someone bigger and more optimistic. I regret to say that she grew oddly more beautiful: the few pictures I have from those days prove it. Skinny, too skinny to live, but gorgeous.

As for me, I wept, nearly all the time. It’s come to this, I thought: I’d believed that as I got older I got more sentimental, but really I was losing my mind day by day, and this blow knocked me right out of it. “Mike Sharp’s Tragedy,” said the newspapers and magazines. “Tears of a Funnyman.” Documentation everywhere, and well-meaning but horrific bouquets of flowers. Soon the florists knew to deliver to the local hospitals instead. All these years later, I can imagine how it would have been for Jessica, this great interest from the outside world in how I felt, what I had lost, as though by not being famous her own grief was not so compelling. Then, though, I agreed. My grief was as engrossing, as vivid, as unremitting as a hallucination.

I’d fallen into a pool once. I could have drowned! And yet I’d had one installed, I’d never learned to swim, I ignored everything .

Tell us what to do, my sisters said, in telegrams and phone calls. Say the word. I told them to stay home, that Jessica and I were doing our best for the boys now, and that a whole houseful of mourning grown-ups would only make things worse. My sisters agreed: that was how we’d been raised. But Jessica’s brother, Joseph, arrived without warning; he’d heard the news on the radio and drove straight to the airport and once in Hollywood talked his way past the maid, who’d been instructed not to let anyone in. He was the one who arranged the burial — we had no funeral — and bought a plot in Forest Lawn at Babyland, which (I learned this later, though I still have never been by the grave) is a heart-shaped plinth of grass in the center of the park, a place in every way so tasteful that it’s tasteless beyond imagining.