Elizabeth McCracken - Niagara Falls All Over Again

My sense of humor was getting very black indeed.

“You’re vertical!” said Penny when she saw me.

“Barely,” I said.

“Let’s start again,” said Penny. “Mikey!” She half stood up to greet me. “Buddy!”

Good old Penny. I’d been feeling a little embarrassed, but she treated me like a returning astronaut. I tumbled into the red booth across from her. I’d thought I’d ended the night at the Sahara, but the elevators had opened on Circus Circus, and I expected then to see Penny in clown drag. Instead, she wore a knit pant suit that wrapped around her thin waist. As a young woman, she’d aged badly, but then she stopped. I couldn’t remember how old she was. She looked forty, but that was impossible.

“So,” I said. “We meet again.”

“Always in the most awkward places,” she said. “What are you doing out here? Performing?”

“No,” I said. I’d slept off any delusions I had about finding Rocky, although here was his ex-wife. That should count for something. What was I doing here?

“Jess died,” I said. “I don’t know. I guess I’m avoiding going back to the house.”

“Oh, Mike,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“Somehow I got it into my head — well, I’d gotten to miss Rocky. Instead of missing Jess. It seemed easier. So I came here. Started looking.” I laughed at myself. “I’d leave one place, and I’d be absolutely positive he’d be in the next.”

“But he wasn’t,” she said.

“No.”

Penny shook her head. “He’s not in Vegas.”

“It’s a big town,” I said.

“He’s not here,” she said.

“Have you been looking too?”

“I’m going to get you some breakfast.” She stood up suddenly and edged her way out of the booth. I noticed she hadn’t answered my question. “You’re in a delicate condition. Eggs? Eggs will be good. Toast,” she said very certainly.

Penny had always liked buffets, because that way she didn’t have to read menus. I wondered whether she wore contact lenses now. When she came back, I said, “If he’s not in Vegas, do you know where he is?”

She’d shored up whatever she’d almost let slip before. “Of course not.”

“Are you sure?”

“Well.” She spread some jam on a triangular piece of toast for me. “I did. I’ll admit it. I saw him maybe three years back.”

“Where?”

She thought. “Here.”

“Las Vegas?”

“Sure, that’s what I said. He was coming through, he looked me up, we had a few drinks, he went on.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I beg your pardon,” she said. “I haven’t seen you for thirty years. Thirty years . We’re twice as old as we used to be. Suddenly I’m supposed to know that you’re looking for Rocky? The way he told it, you guys weren’t speaking to each other.”

The math confused me. Weren’t you always twice as old as you used to be? She shuffled then stacked the toast on my plate. It, too, looked like something internal. When she held the ketchup over my eggs, I had to catch her by the wrist before she slaughtered the entire plate. I had a headache. I wondered if a screwdriver would help.

“We were talking to each other,” I said. “I mean, the last time I saw him we were talking to each other.”

“How long ago was that?”

“Nineteen fifty-seven.”

“I’d say if you hadn’t talked to him from 1957 till 1972, which is when I saw him — face it, you weren’t talking to each other.”

“No,” I said. “I guess we weren’t. Do you know where he was living?”

“He wouldn’t say. Somewhere warm, I think. He had a pretty good tan.”

Then we didn’t say anything.

“So,” she said. “When did your wife die?”

“Three days ago.”

She gasped. Then she leaned forward and looked at me. She seemed about to check me for fever. “I figured you meant months—” Very slowly, she said, “Your children. Still in California?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Okay,” she said. “You’ll give me Jake’s number. You remember Jake’s number?”

“Of course,” I said, irritated.

And she drove me back to the airport, and packed me in a plane.

I thought about this conversation all the way back to L.A., examining it for lies and evasions. If you play a character in a movie, sometimes you later confuse it with job experience, and Rocky and I had been detectives — lousy ones, sure, but in the end we always figured it out — in three of our pictures. She knows something . I wasn’t sure what, but I saw the holes, the way she mostly just agreed with what I said. Another time, maybe I could have talked her out of the information. Come on, Penny, aren’t we friends? But then my plane landed, and this time there was somebody there to meet me, Jake, his hands stuffed in his pockets, looking for all the world like he’d lost his best friend in the world, like he had terrible news to break to me, and then I remembered what it was, and I let him drive me home and put me in bed and for the next year I let my kids — chiefly Gilda, as always — take care of me, and then the trail went cold.

Rose and Ed never had kids. He died a month after she did. They’d been married thirty-two years, same as Jess and me. In some ways I thought his death showed the depth of his character: he couldn’t live without her, he wouldn’t even try. They left the store to Ida’s grandson, Paul Schloss, who’d worked in the store every summer and loved it. A family business, after all. My father’s wishes were granted, though Paul and his wife changed the name to Schloss’s Boutique.

Valley Junction is called Valley Junction again, except the name refers to the neighborhood: the city of West Des Moines sprawls all around it, strip malls and housing developments. Fifth Street has become fashionable, in its way, antiques stores and kitchen shops and restaurants, a historic district, a tourist site, if such things can exist in West Des Moines. On the other hand, if a boutique can. .

My sisters died, one by one. Annie, the eldest, went last: she was 102. Like her father before her, she was the oldest citizen in town, and the local schools invited her once a year to deliver a lecture on Valley Junction’s rough-and-tumble childhood.

All this is summary. I’m from the theater, I’d rather: Act Three, ten years later, a house in North Hollywood.

Because that’s where we are now. You know the house.

Hollywood is not such a bad place to grow old. Everything they built back in the thirties was made to be a monument: a newsstand here is not just a newsstand, but an homage to the genre. They never changed a single thing at Musso’s, except the prices, and when I go there for lunch twice a week, I can pretend that all sorts of people who are otherwise disposed might be walking through the door. Outside, I drive around — though my kids wish I wouldn’t — past the billboards that are now, often as not, in Spanish, and I feel like my father, the immigrant, except I haven’t gone anywhere, not in years.

I live alone. I have a comic cat, a little tortoiseshell named Thisbe. (Gilda, always theatrical, named her.) On my lap, she throws her head back. I know just where she likes to be scratched, and her eyes close and her mouth opens in rapture. Never have I seen a being so absolutely in love with what is happening to her at the moment. She doesn’t remember the last time she felt this good. She doesn’t worry that it’s me and my fingers. And after a while, at her highest point of ecstasy, she’ll snap and bite me, and I’ll knock her to the ground. Minutes later she comes back, she’s forgotten. Me too. Clean slate always, me and the cat.