Elizabeth McCracken - Niagara Falls All Over Again

So we went inside the house.

“I need to talk to you about this TV thing,” he said.

“I thought it was settled. The Rocky Carter Show . Solo billing. Hundred percent of the salary. Nice TV wife — get a single girl and maybe marry her off-camera too.”

“The sponsors want both of us or neither.”

“Gotta be neither, then, Rocky. I’m telling you: I need time off.”

I don’t think I really understood his desperation then. He looked awful — he’d been gaining weight steadily since he and Lil broke up, from the drink and too many breakfasts. He rarely ate anything but ham and eggs and buttered toast, up to five times a day. He had a scratch under one eyebrow, and his hair needed dyeing, and if I’d been thinking about it I would have known something was wrong, because he was so vain about his hair: he had it colored every two weeks and, for the TV show and movies, painted his scalp black beneath to cut down on the glare. Now I could see a little border of sandy brown at his hairline, like a curtain starting to rise.

He bit his upper lip, and then ran his tongue over his front teeth. I couldn’t tell whether he planned to threaten or beg me.

“Look,” he said. “Commit to a year. One year of the show, and then you’re out. By then it’ll be on its way and they won’t even miss you.”

“No,” I said.

“You son of a bitch,” he said. “After all you’ve done to me?”

He must have meant, after all I’ve done for you .

We stared at each other while we both deliberated over how much of a joke he was making. I could hear Jake knocking with the butt of his gun on the French doors behind me. “Daddy,” he said, his voice muffled through the glass. “Mom says can I have some ice cream.”

I didn’t turn around. “In a minute, honey.”

For some reason, I felt like we were in some ridiculous Western, maybe because I’d watched Jake’s cowboy dance earlier. Rocky and I faced each other. He had the advantage: he could look out on my family sitting on the grass. No telling what he’d do if I let my guard down. I couldn’t tell whether this was a comic Western or a real one, whether I’d be saved by the cavalry or a pull-apart horse.

I said, with some forced kindness, “How’s Junior?”

“He could use the money, same as me. I guess. His mother won’t let me see him. But, see, if I was on TV again, he could watch—”

Good God, what fancy thinking. “ Rocky,” I said. “Do not make this about me keeping you from your kid. Okay? You left. Right? And if your life has not been what you wanted since you and Lil—”

“Since Penny,” he said. “My life’s not been what I wanted since Penny. Look at you. Look at your own life, and look at mine. Your gorgeous children. Your brilliant wife. Do me one fucking favor in your life. Mike,” he said, because I was turning away from him, “wait. Mike . I can make it so you don’t have a choice.”

“Get out your handcuffs,” I said, “and I’ll hire a locksmith. Threaten me with lawyers, and I’ll go abroad. I will not do this show . I don’t know how else to put it.”

He stuck his hands in his pockets and shook them, polished one shoe on the back of the opposite calf. “It’s nice Jess is working,” he offered.

“It’s lovely,” I said, exasperated.

“At the networks.” He said this helpfully, as though I’d misunderstood. “Doing her dance stuff. She likes that, right?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Well, then, I’ll blackball her.”

Poor Rock, to have such a high opinion of himself. This was 1954, not 1944, and though he could convince one or two people not to hire my wife as a personal favor to him, he wasn’t exactly the most powerful man in Hollywood. If he was, he’d be on TV by himself now, wouldn’t he?

And that’s what I told him, laughing.

He flinched a little, as though this was news. Then he said, “That’s not what I meant. I mean, I’ll bring up her past.”

I had no idea of what he was talking about, but I didn’t care. Certainly I’d never known him to make up stories about anyone other than himself, but that must be what he was doing now, he was working on some fake scandal about Jessica, something just awful enough. He would have threatened me directly, but he needed to keep me employable.

Was I going to have to push him out the door? He was heavy, but I’d been building my biceps in my time off. “Rocky,” I said, “go home. Sleep off whatever it is that’s making you this way. Get Tansy to find you some jobs, work on your act, leave me alone .”

He said, “You know what will happen if people find out she’s a communist.”

I laughed again. “Current events, is it? That’s the best story you can come up with? My wife’s a commie.” I turned and pointed through the window. “Is it the blue jeans? No, I get it: you have pictures of her in a red dress. She loves Tchaikovsky?”

He looked puzzled. “She never told you?”

“She doesn’t keep me up to date on your delusions, no.”

Jake had gone back to sit with his siblings, who watched their mother. She was dancing on the grass — she told me later she could hear the two of us fighting, and wanted to distract them. She didn’t know we were arguing about her. An ordinary dance wouldn’t do: Jessica, forty-one, was turning cartwheels, doing back bends, all of those things children think make for really fine ballet.

“I’ll bet you,” Rocky said. “I’ll bet you one year of work.” He swung open one of the French doors and called to her. “Jessie,” he said, and his voice was suddenly more reasonable than it had been all day, or all year. “Would you come in for a minute?”

She walked to the threshold. Rock waved her in like a maître d’, with a small bow and a sweeping hand. “We’ve called you in to settle a bet.”

“What he wants to know, dear,” I said, taking hold of my all-American sweetheart’s hand, “is are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist party?”

There was a pause while she cocked her head at me, then at Rocky. The cartwheels had styled her hair into something island-girlish; she wore it lately to her shoulders, where it hung in lovely waves. The right knee of her blue jeans was grass stained.

She said to me, “You knew that.”

All these decades later, the issue of the hearings seems simple: bad men asked questions they shouldn’t have. What goes on in someone else’s head is none of your business, cannot hurt you. Asking is un-American.

It wasn’t that easy at the time. I turned my back on Rocky because he threatened my wife, yes. He menaced us with a truth instead of a lie, but that made no difference. I felt the way I had when someone in a wartime crowd shouted, “Slacker!” You lack character, he seemed to be saying. I’ll expose you, and your so-called patriotism, Mr. So-called Sharp . If I were a character in a movie, I would have delivered a speech, my eyes shining, about my immigrant father who’d come to this country with nothing and had built up a business, a man who so loved his new home and opportunities that he never mentioned his past life in Lithuania, never spoke his own language again — at this there might be a double exposure of my father, eyes similarly shining, and then another of a waving flag.

“Aha!” said Rocky, like some lawyer who’d been trying to break her for five years.

I still held Jess’s hand, a little tighter now, though of course I didn’t care about her politics, which to be sure had always been left of mine. “ What did I know?” I asked her.

“You were here. When Rocky and I talked about New York. All of my friends in the city were members of the Party. We were artists,” she said. “We wanted great things for the world.”