Elizabeth McCracken - Niagara Falls All Over Again

Q: You say that, but you’re crying.

A: I guess I’m thirsty. That usually makes me cry. Anyhow, Gert found me and I’m fine. You’ve got questions there. Ask me another one.

Q: Everyone wonders why Carter and Sharp broke up. I’ve heard a lot of theories.

A: Sure, there are a lot of ’em.

Q: But I’ve never really known why. Was there one reason?

(PAUSE)

Q: If you don’t remember—

A: Don’t you know? Mike slept with my wife.

(PAUSE)

Q: Mom?

A: No, no. Not that I know of. I mean Penny.

Q: While you were married to her?

A: Sure, while I was married to her. That’s the kind of guy he was. In some cultures, if your enemy has something you want, you tear out his heart and eat it. Mike just fucked your wife. The guy had no loyalty.

Q: I always thought he and Aunt Jess—

A: Maybe he was faithful to his own wife. Maybe he believed in the sanctity of marriage, as long as it was his marriage. And maybe he fucked around on her too. I don’t know. I tried to forgive him, but I guess in the end I couldn’t. But we didn’t break up right away.

Q: Are you sure about this?

A: Of course I am. Ask him, maybe he’ll tell you the truth. You know, I did everything for that guy. He was a green kid when I found him. He barely knew how to walk . And I liked him. Well, I’ve never been a good judge of character. I brought him into the act, and I taught him everything, and I mean every single thing. I guess he’s a fancy actor now, but without me he’d be a shopkeeper.

I loved him. I trusted him.

Q: He loved you—

A: Yeah. Sure. No, I know he did.

The Family Business

“He was pretty hard on you,” Charles the diplomat had said. Maybe he assumed his father was lying. But you did . Penny told him, she must have. Still he might have just jumped to a conclusion, might have believed I’d slept with Penny one of those many nights I didn’t. But you did . Rocky and I were together for eleven years after that single, solitary night, and he never said a word. The statute of limitations for any crime except murder had run out. But he was right. You did . Even if he knew, knew the next day, it hadn’t seemed to bother him, and maybe he only brought it up to take the blame off himself. But — Or maybe Penny told him after everything, their divorce and our divorce, at a casino in Reno or Vegas, and he thought: Ah, if I’m ever asked again—

Despite everything, guilty as charged.

Video unnerves me — I like the process, not the medium. I’m a film guy. Used to be I hated it because the quality was so bad, kinescoped copies especially: everyone came through blurry but harsh. Now — it’s too good, I guess. You can see everything. Back when people believed in ghosts but had never seen one (not Topper, not Hugo from What, Us Haunted? ) I don’t know what they imagined, exactly. Then the spirit world started appearing in the movies, and people thought that made sense: if our loved ones managed to slip through the border patrol of heaven to hit the bricks of the real world, they’d look filmed, filmy. Like the movies projected on the walls of the buildings on Fifth Street in Valley Junction. That’s how gentle film is. It looks like a version of heaven.

On video, though, people look like themselves. It’s too painful. I could see a perfectly square chunk of skin on Rocky’s lips, the burst capillaries near his nose. I could practically count the salt crystals in his tears.

Of course I wanted to see him. The guy had done everything for me.

Charles and I drove to Reno in my new Cadillac (not a convertible, I never cared for them the way Jess did), and got lost looking for the trailer park. Then we found it: Reno Acres . There was a small blond girl riding a plastic tricycle near the front gate, the big front wheel stuttering in the dust of the lot. She looked at us, then stood up, and picked up the bike and waddled off with it waggling between her legs.

“Reno Acres ?” I asked.

“That’s it,” said Charles — I am working so hard to call him Charles — pointing at a 1940s silver Airstream trailer parked some distance from the others.

I’d dressed several times that day, as though I was going on a date, and had finally settled on a pair of black slacks and a green sport shirt. No hat. I didn’t want to look like a fuddy-duddy, though in fact I’d never given up hats.

I made Charles knock on the door. A tall nicotine blonde with nervous eyes answered the door. She frowned until she saw Charles. “Sonny!” she said. Then she saw me. “Hello! You are. .?”

I shook her hand. “Mose Sharp,” I said, and she recoiled slightly, then let us in.

Rocky sat just inside the door in an enormous reclining chair. For some reason I’d imagined him in an undershirt, just as I’d imagined Gertrude in curlers, according to some trailer-park dress code. But he wore a button-up-the-front short-sleeved shirt and polyester knit pants. I was an old man myself, but — a fop to the end — I’d told myself knit pants were a sure sign you’d given up. He’d shrunk. At first I interpreted the pale hair as sun bleached from years in the Nevada sun; I’d forgotten how old we both were. The shirt was butter-yellow, and the pants brown.

He turned to look at us. First he saw his son, and smiled. Then he saw his partner.

I watched him very carefully, waiting, as always, for my cue.

He looked at me, then at his hands. And then he beckoned me over.

Oh, God, he looked so bad. Old-mannish and sun cured. How presumptuous of me to pity him, when all of this was his choosing, even Gert, who’d gone outside to have a cigarette. But he was thin, for Christ’s sake, all the folds in his chin had turned vertical instead of horizontal. How could I have let this happen to him?

Every other person I knew was dead, it seemed. I felt avalanched. I sat down at his knees on a hassock in front of his striped chair, the same colors as his clothes, butter and toast. I was ready to promise him everything: Money. A room in my house. A reunion — surely somebody would be interested in that, some late-night talk-show at least. I took hold of his hand, and then I burst into tears.

I don’t know how long I sat there weeping. I didn’t know why I was the one who cried. Every time I looked up, he was — not stony faced, but waiting, and I cried some more. After a while he put his free hand on top of my head, the way the pope — from what I knew about the pope — would to the head of a sinner.

He said, “You take things too seriously, Mosey. You always did.”

The Long Shot

Gert came back in and served us tea and cookies. I felt slightly cheered when she brought out a whiskey bottle, and poured us both a tiny dram, the way Annie had given me coffee as a child, just enough to give my milk a sophisticated color. “Thank you, love,” Rocky said. She tickled him under the chin with scarlet painted nails. The furniture was secondhand; the television antenna was bandaged in tin foil. In the corner was a cabinet of Hummel figurines, little brown boys and girls in lederhosen and caps and yellowish braids — who says Germans can’t be simply darling? We spoke of not a goddamn thing. Well, we exchanged the information that any other old friends would think was crucial — deaths and marriages and births.

“I keep waiting for this one to make me a grandfather,” he said, pointing at his son with a toe.

“Keep waiting,” said Charles.

It was all very fucking civil, Rocky would have said in another life. Very fucking civil indeed.

“You working?” I asked.

“Sometimes. Every now and then I emcee a drag show downtown, and they pay me under the table.”