Elizabeth McCracken - Niagara Falls All Over Again

“You think?”

“Either that, or the genuine article, looking for a handout.”

Lillian shivered so elaborately her petticoats rattled.

People were getting drunk. I wanted no part of it. Fact was, Rocky was right — standing up did make me feel better, and I didn’t want to. They’d hired a boxcar and parked it next to the pool. I wondered what had happened to the Ferris wheel. Left behind at the old place in the hills, probably. I wandered through the house, stepped out onto balconies I’d never seen before, surprised an off-duty maid and apologized, watched Rocky junior sleeping and nearly burst into tears. What I wanted to do was crawl into bed next to him, but I realized this would not be interpreted as polite behavior from a guest. I ended up going into Rocky’s den, and lying down on a leather sofa identical to the one at my house. My house. Soon to be empty of my family. Maybe I’d have to burn it down when they left. “That’s a joke,” I said out loud.

No good. I got up and went downstairs to the basement. The party roared on above my head. Rocky — out of sentiment or sheer perversity — had duplicated, here in the new house, the bar he and Penny had had in the old place. I wondered if Lillian knew. In the old days, this room would have been filled, but Lillian loved elegance even when slumming, and a cellar didn’t qualify. I don’t know what I was looking for. Some ghost from 1941 or ’46. A patch of air like amnesia that I could walk through.

Same old bar, same black stools with ribbed metal edging. Rock owned a jukebox, too, though not one that bubbled like mine. Pool table, dartboard. I gave the roulette wheel a small sluttering spin.

Suddenly I became aware of someone else in the room. There, in the farthest corner, back against some bookshelves, was Rocky, in his arms the realistic little bum, a coil of chestnut hair falling from the flea-bitten hat. They were necking. Ah, the ghost I’d wanted. I cleared my throat.

The little bum turned to me, Rocky still holding on to one shoulder. Rock looked bewildered: I think I was just kissing someone, but now I appear not to be . The books behind him had been pushed in, a rough outline of a heavy man.

“Mike!” said the little bum, her breath fluttering her false beard — how did you kiss through that ? “Mike! I’ve missed you!”

Someone had told Penny about the party and she’d driven down from San Francisco, where she’d been living, to crash. “Take her out to the pool house, will you, Mosey?” Rocky asked. “I need to make an appearance. I’ll be out in a bit.” Upstairs, the guests had sat down to dinner — we could hear the chairs scraping against the marble floor of the dining room — eating the coffee-can casserole, a layer of potatoes, a layer of meat, a layer of beans.

Penny and I crept along the edge of the swimming pool hand-in-hand like Hansel and Gretel. I tried not to look at it. The boxcar was abandoned. The pool house looked like an oversized ice-cream stand, complete with striped crank-down awnings. We moved with cartoon caution, tiptoed so the heels of our wingtips wouldn’t clonk on the tile, pulled on the door so the latch wouldn’t click. “I feel like I’m harboring a runaway,” I said.

“You are,” Penny told me. “I’m sleeping out here tonight. Rock says it’s okay, so long as I’m quiet as a mouse.”

“You?” I said. “You won’t sing?”

“No singing. Only squeaking.”

The moon cast its silver-dollar glow across the water and into the pool house. Apparently Rock and Lillian were using it for storage: I could make out the shapes of things left over from parties and stolen off sets. A series of easels like lanky birds leaned in one corner, props from the Artists and Models Ball; one wore a damp-looking feather boa. There was a deflated gorilla suit from a jungle picture, and Rocky’s souped-up bumper car from Fly Boys, which Penny eased into.

“The key’s gone, dammit,” she said. She leaned her bony chest against the padded steering wheel.

We couldn’t turn on the light, but I found a pair of beach chairs, striped like the awnings, and unfolded them. I gestured at one for Penny: Madam. She stepped out of the bumper car, and we both stretched out. A couple of tramps on the Riviera. I leaned back and crossed my ankles. Penny pulled off her beard and doffed her fedora; she hung the hat on one of her feet, and the beard on one of mine.

“Look!” she said. She held up the dark glasses. “I finally got specs, the way you told me to.”

“I meant glasses to help you see,” I said. “I didn’t mean any old pair.”

“These do!” She put them on and turned her face from side to side. “Prescription,” she declared. “Do they suit me?”

“They do,” I said. She gave me a delighted smile and kept them on.

“You sweet sneak,” I said admiringly. “Poor Lillian.”

“Whose side are you on?”

“Yours,” I said. “Of course, Penny. But she thought you might be an actual hobo.”

“I’ll kill her,” said Penny, “though if you were a gentleman, you’d offer to kill her for me.”

“Well, I was the one who might have put the thought in her head. You’re very convincing. I think she’d rather a gate-crashing hobo than an ex-wife.”

“I’ll kill you,” she said warmly. “Really? Convincing? See, I told Rocky he should give me a part in a movie.”

We could hear the music and laughter across the pool; it felt like a shrunk-down version of the kind of beach resort Rocky and I had played summers at the start of our career. If you’d asked me an hour before whether anything could cheer me up, I would have said no, but Penny’s arrival did. What romantic stupidity! Besides, she was someone I had known back before: before Jessica had left me, before the baby died. It was so dark and moonplated inside that we both seemed black and white. Penny looked wonderful, and I told her so.

“ You look like hell,” she said.

“The lady of the house put mascara on my face.”

“Did she make you lose ten pounds? Has she been waking you up every hour on the hour? Tough hostess.”

“I’ve had some hard times lately.”

“I know,” she said. She looked at the hat that tilted on her foot, wiggled her ankle, and spun it around. “I’m so sorry about your daughter, Mike.”

I nodded.

“How’s everybody else?” she asked. “How’s your wife?”

I thought about not telling her. We could sit out here and look at the house, at the rich people dressed as paupers who got drunk on good liquor while making jokes about rotgut. See, Penny had it right: the only reason in the world to dress up like that was so you could pass for someone else. So you could walk into a house where you weren’t wanted. Could I go home if I wore a costume? A French maid’s outfit, maybe. Monsieur Sharp haz hired me to help wiz ze packing for ze treep to De Mwainh. He haz azked me to zmell your hair before you go .

“Everything else is not so good,” I said. “My wife is leaving me. Any moment, she will have left me.” And I told her the whole story: my conversation with Jess, what I’d done that week, what I hadn’t done.

Penny kicked her hat in the air and caught it in her hands. Then she flipped her dark glasses on the top of her head. I couldn’t see the expression on her face, though I imagined it was sympathetic. She said, with great sadness, “He gave away my Ferris wheel.”

“I figured you got it in the divorce.”

“Honey,” Penny said to me. Then she tried Rocky’s old pet name: “Darling boy.” That made me smile. “Why would you throw away your family like that?”

That floored me. Hadn’t she been listening? Her beard fell from my foot. “I’m being thrown.”