Elizabeth McCracken - Niagara Falls All Over Again

“Say the word,” Rock said. He stood up to leave.

I said, “Thanks.”

She’d been under the bed. I understood. Back when I boarded in other people’s homes, I often had the same dream: I’d been out of the house, and when I returned, there was some guy — sometimes more than one — sleeping in my bed or reading the paper in my chair. Excuse me, I’d say, wrong door, but then it turned out that I’d been sharing my quarters all along: we’d just never happened to be in the same room at the same time.

I wanted to do that now. I wanted to haunt the house, so that I could be around my family without them ever noticing. Couldn’t we live together that way? I’d sleep under the bed and only get up in the middle of the night, make my rounds, look at my boys sleeping, maybe lay out their clothes for the morning, fill the front room with flowers, stick handfuls of candy in their empty shoes. That way, I couldn’t hurt them. I got under Rocky’s guest bed to test. Apparently his maids were more thorough: no cobwebs here. Light came through the sheer bedskirt, and I put my hands up and felt the slats of the bedframe, and then the flimsier slats of the box spring, and I tried to imagine the sweet outline of Jessica over me, the princess and the pea in reverse: a small shape layers and layers above whose tiniest edge lacerated me, from the knot in her sneakers to the buckle on her watchband.

Mostly, though, I spent my time on the sleeping side of the bed, like my wife, fully dressed and half paralyzed. I kept my back straight, my elbows tucked in at my sides, as though I’d been dropped into a swimming pool again, but this time I wasn’t going to fight, this time I wanted to sink to the bottom, I swear I had bruises at my waist from my elbows digging in, my toes were pointed, my hands in a ball at my stomach, but no matter how heavy I tried to make myself, I was buoyant, I was buoyant, something was letting me breathe when I only longed to be drowned. How could I make myself sinkable? Keep your eyes closed. Keep your toes pointed. Keep your mouth shut.

Rocky knocked on the door. “Do you want anything?”

I’d just been picturing somebody — not Rocky, someone in better shape, and without a face — snatching me out of bed and throwing me through the window (not made of sugar in this vision, unlike the panes of glass Carter and Sharp dove through in the movies) and into the swimming pool.

I didn’t think I could ask for that, though.

I said, “I don’t want to die, but I wouldn’t turn down a coma.”

A few hours later — or the next day, or the day after that — I thought, After the baby died, I could move, but now I can’t, and that means I miss Jessica more than I miss the baby, and I ran to the window I’d imagined sailing through and opened it and spent the next five minutes vomiting and then doing a painful impression of vomiting. The recent contents of my stomach (tomato juice, ice water) ran down the pitched roof onto — must be the kitchen, if I remembered the floor plan right. Someone should clean that up. If I’d been drinking, this would be a story we’d tell, the night I got sick and clogged the gutters.

I blamed gravity, which pulled at the hems of everyone I loved: first Hattie, then Betty. What did a guy like me do, except in my movies defy gravity over and over again? If I fell, I bounced back unhurt. I was always sitting on the end of a plank balanced on a barrel, so someone could sit on the other side and launch me into the air, pulled up to the rafters by invisible guy wires. Offscreen, there was nothing for gravity to do but take its revenge. Those days in Rocky’s house I gave in to my fear of the stuff, got as low as I could get so gravity couldn’t knock me farther down, into beds and under them, away from the dangers of pavement and airplanes and cliffs.

People aren’t afraid of heights: they’re afraid of depths.

Every day Rock came in and called Jessica. No answer ever. Was she already gone? No, he said, he’d driven by the house that morning and had seen her through a window. It was like Rocky knew how this was done: your wife is going to leave you, you don’t let her. I told myself that in a few weeks I’d go to Iowa. I’d be better. I could put together a good argument. Now, though, I thought of Jessica with the cobwebs in her hair, and I agreed with her, I was mean, and I did not see how insisting that my family live with me would ease their troubles.

“I’m the problem,” I told Rocky.

“Kiddo, that’s not the case. Do me a favor and give yourself a break.”

“I’d like to give myself several.”

He sat on the bed and bounced. “Let’s go out. Let’s get drunk. Let’s find some pretty girls to be the death of us.”

“I’m a married man!” I said, and I burst into tears.

At the end of the week, I was invited to a party. Initially I suspected that Rocky and Lillian threw it to cheer me up, which made me want to kick them, but then I realized Lil was too much of a worrier to put together anything on three days’ notice. This was another of her horrible theme parties. Just before the baby’s accident, Jessica and I had gone to her Artists and Models Ball, husbands as famous painters, wives as their subjects. I decided on Gauguin — a pair of ragged pants and an old white dress shirt, a little French moustache, a paintbrush in my fist — and Jessica rolled herself in a sarong and filed a hibiscus behind her ear. Lillian kept knocking things over with her petticoats — she was somebody out of Toulouse-Lautrec — and Rocky went around on his knees, sneaking under his wife’s skirt until he got drunk, and then under any skirt he pleased. Mrs. Tansy was the real surprise: she came as a tiny Vargas girl, holding a prop cigar and stretching out on sofas.

This one would be a hobo party. What fun! We’d all dress as though we had no money at all, and we’d eat casseroles cooked for us outside in coffee cans. Boiled coffee laced with cognac; good wine decanted into plonk bottles. I tried to get out of it. Rocky insisted.

“It’ll do you good,” he said.

“I don’t want to be cheered up.”

“Of course not,” he said. “But you’ll have to act human for a few hours, and that won’t kill you. I got no expectations of you. Maybe it’s time to deal with expectations.”

It didn’t take much to turn me into a vagrant: I hadn’t shaved in several days, I’d been sleeping in my clothes. Lillian put some mascara on my face for coal dust. I didn’t know half the people at the party, and the other half I didn’t recognize. Lots of bandanas around, the kind Sharp’s used to sell when the Rock Island roundhouse was still in Valley Junction. The guests were supposed to look like boxcar riders. Lil, as hostess, puttered around nervously. She wore a patched skirt over about a dozen cotton petticoats, not so different from her Toulouse-Lautrec outfit but more ginghamy.

“Mike!” she said. “Are you having a good time?”

“No.”

She tried to look sympathetic. “Are other people?”

I surveyed the room. “I think so.”

She held a napkin with a small slice of beef Wellington on it. How very Rock Island line, I thought. “I don’t know most of them,” she said. “There’s one little bum who gives me the creeps, though. Won’t talk. Stands by the food.”

“Probably Tansy.”

“No, Tansy’s over there. See? That’s the guy I mean.”

The guy in question was slight, with a giant false beard covering most of his face and a giant hat pulled down over his ears, big greasy gloves, dark glasses, torn overalls, a soiled suit jacket. You could hardly see an inch of skin. Suddenly, I felt cheered: maybe an actual bum had crashed the party.

“I think I recognize him,” I lied. “Some burlesque friend of Rock’s.”