Elizabeth McCracken - Niagara Falls All Over Again

“Friend, Hebrew, countryman,” he said. “Lend me your ear.”

“Have both,” I offered.

He waved to a waiter, who brought us whiskeys. I sipped mine; I’d been drinking so little lately I’d lost all capacity.

“I’ve missed you, Professor,” he said.

“Where have I been?”

“You tell me. Lying in bed, is my guess.”

“Rocky, I see you all the time.”

He tilted his head to let what seemed to him a lie pass. “Anyhow. Drink your bourbon, it’s good for you. I’m just lonely. Just want some company. How are the kids?”

“Swell,” I said. “Wonderful.”

He nodded. “I miss being married.”

“When you’re married you want to be a bachelor, when you’re single you want a wife.”

He got a thinking look on his face, and I realized he’d misinterpreted me: I meant he wanted to be a bachelor, he wanted a wife, but he’d taken this as some universal wisdom, as though I suffered from the same desires.

“You need to make up your mind, Rocky,” I said.

He’d taken ahold of the salt and pepper shakers, made them dance across the white cloth of the table and then kiss, silver top to silver top. I watched this puppet show. Finally he sighed, as though he’d learned another universal truth from the condiments: even salt and pepper belonged together, but he’d never have anyone to own, to own him, except maybe his straight man. “You know me, Professor. I have such lousy luck.”

For some reason, I saw this all of a sudden for the preposterous lie it was: Rocky had plenty of luck with women. I thought of his four wives; of the landladies, all those years ago, who loved him; of the chorus girls on our show I knew would be happy to cheer him up, at least momentarily. He could charm any woman who didn’t particularly interest him, and even some who did. Long ago, though, he’d decided that he was a failure at love, and had held on to that fact as though it were the striped shirt he still, at forty-seven, wore professionally: a vaudeville prop. He once told me that to be a star, you had to have a spectacular romantic life, or a miserable one. “No one with average luck in love has ever made it big,” he said. “Look it up.”

“So go back to Lillian,” I said now. “She’ll take you.”

“Whatever my problems are, Lillian’s not the solution.”

“So when you say you miss being married, you’re looking for a fifth wife?”

“Oh, who keeps count?”

I could tell he expected me to laugh, the way I would have once. Instead, I told him what his third wife had said to me two years before: “You have a family. Go home to it.”

He looked at me almost hatefully. Go home? In this suit? Then he sighed again, as though he had explained this to me dozens of times but I was too dumb to absorb it. “Well, in the fairy-tale world of Moses Sharensky, maybe that works. You leave, you come back, all is forgiven. Life isn’t so fucking easy for the rest of us.”

“You make yourself miserable, Rock,” I said. I didn’t yell. I didn’t contradict him. “You pick up the hammer and hit your thumb, over and over, and after a while, it gets boring. And maybe that was okay before you had a kid, but now you need to think about him.”

Rocky didn’t say anything. We must have sat there silently for five minutes, and I was proud to think he was considering my advice. Then I said, “Rock?” and he didn’t look at me, and I realized it had happened again. Probably he’d stopped listening when I uttered the word boring . His club, his banquette: he wouldn’t leave. “For Pete’s sake, Rocky,” I said, but he didn’t look at me, he just picked up the salt and pepper shakers and clonked them together, the glass toe of the salt to the silver hat of the pepper, which left dents. Good old salt, surely, was the comic, kicking its highfalutin straight man in the head.

But he forgave me again, on the set of our next rotten motion picture. He needed to complain to someone without being argued with: there’s nothing as dispiriting as making garbage and having some well-meaning person assure you that it’s gold.

God knows we made a of lot movies, garbage and aluminum and fool’s gold if not real gold. Twenty-eight features in thirteen years. Our fan club — oh, our fan club, full of men (mostly) who memorize our statistics the way other men learn baseball scores — has arguments in their newsletter about which of our pictures was best. My daughter Gilda, who reads all that stuff, tells me. “There’s a guy who loves Rock and Roll Rock, ” she said once, naming Rocky’s last movie, a solo effort, middle-aged Rocky in an Elvis Presley — styled pompadour. “Isn’t that interesting?”

“It’s unconscionable,” I said.

The club spends a great deal of time defending my reputation. “A great straight man,” they say. “The greatest!” They write long annotations of our pictures, full of cross-references and games: find Shemp Howard. Look for this flubbed line. And they also mention the saddest fact of all: that everyone knows that Rocky Carter was funnier ( even funnier, they put it) offscreen than on. They wish, more fervently than Carter and Sharp themselves ever did, that just once The Boys had been given a top-notch script to work with. They try to make themselves feel better with Marry Me, Barry, the best of the lot.

Despite the fact that we never made a good picture, they nevertheless over the years got even worse. A little research reveals that most people who’ve wasted time thinking about it would rate Red, White, and Who; Marry Me, Barry; and Ghost of a Chance as our best pictures, all of them made in the first six of our Hollywood years. Problem is, we kept going. We’d always done ghost stories, but after a while our scripts got less and less realistic, probably because the shtick was always to get us in trouble with some unforgiving group, and we’d already antagonized every possible demographic of our time on this earth. So the writers went looking elsewhere: how about pirates? Yo Ho Ho . Mummies? The aforementioned For He’s a Jolly Good Pharaoh . Men from Mars? Elves? Naughty children?

Carter and Sharp Meet Mother Goose was our second color picture. Personally I thought it was pandering, but then our kid fans never particularly cottoned to me, just another grown-up flitting around that large child, Rocky. Rocky played the Piper’s son, Bobby Shaftoe, Little Jack Horner, and Jack Spratt; I appeared as the Piper, Jack Horner’s father, and — in my only drag screen roles — both Mrs. Spratt and Mother Goose herself. Tansy claimed the picture tanked because it came out the same year as Hans Christian Andersen , with Danny Kaye playing so sugary and pure you wanted to bop him in the nose and steal his wooden shoes. But our movie was awful, and we knew it, before we’d even finished filming. Our budget was nothing. I still remember sitting on a hill overlooking a fake lake on the studio back lot; Rocky was

wearing his Bobby Shaftoe outfit, not actually silver buckles slightly below his actual knees. He said to me, “I should have been a silent comedian.”

I said, “What?”

“I would have been famous.”

“You are famous.”

“I would have been great.”

“You are—” I began.

“Like Chaplin,” said Rocky. “Great like that. I’m a B comic. A kid’s comic. I should never have opened my big goddamn mouth.”

But what could have kept him quiet? Nothing. I knew the guy: nothing. Okay, maybe imagine he worked harder, was born a few years earlier, hitchhiked to Hollywood in the teens and talked his way onto a set and then into a movie and then into a scene: All right, the director says, give the kid five minutes of film, let’s see what he can do. The movie’s set in a department store, and Rocky tangos with a tailor’s dummy. Across town, there are men trying to figure out, by means of science, how to make people speak from the screen. For now the fat kid is silent, but dancing. He wants to tell you everything, but he can’t.