Niagara Falls All Over Again

by Elizabeth McCracken

  “I’m sorry,” I told him. “We’re newlyweds.”

  He said, “Then I think you would have gotten here earlier.”

  The next morning I took my place in the passenger’s seat. I couldn’t shut up. I told Jessica about my parents, my sisters, every detail I could remember. I told her about Rocky, and how much they’d love each other. “And California!” I said.

  “California I know,” she answered. “I studied with Agnes de Mille and Ted Shawn there, when I was younger, before I moved to New York.”

  “New York?”

  “You’ll catch up.” She drove like a dancer, holding the wheel lovingly but lightly, as if to remind the car that it needed to do its own part. How had I talked her into this? I felt like I’d bribed the rabbi to sneak into Jessica’s bedroom and pronounce her my wife, as though he was tying her shoes together: not till she woke up would she notice the prank. As her passenger I had plenty of time to stare at her face, trying to see if she looked bamboozled or regretful, but every time she looked over and saw me, she smiled.

  “You’ll miss Des Moines,” I said.

  “We have family there. We’ll be back.”

  Is that why I’d married her?

  She hadn’t been lying about not having seen any of my movies. “How many?” she asked.

  “Eleven.”

  She whistled. (She could whistle!) “How old a man are you?”

  “You know how old I am. What can I say? I’ve been keeping busy.”

  “Which is the best?” she asked.

  “The next one. The next one is always the best.”

  “So I’ll see the next one.”

  “If you’re really interested, Rocky has a theater in his house. I don’t know if he owns prints of our pictures, but he could get them.”

  “A theater? You mean, a projector.”

  “Well,” I said, “there’s a projector. It’s in the theater. Which is next to the bar. Near the soda fountain and the Ferris wheel.”

  “A Ferris wheel. That’s handy. How many children?”

  “None.”

  “But he’s married?”

  “Married,” I said. “Maybe.”

  Just then, Utah crawling past our window, I remembered everything I was headed for: not only Rocky, but Penny and Sukey. It wasn’t that I’d forgotten about them, exactly; I’d forgotten that either one of them might care about me getting married. I’d made a hash of things, I saw that now, though I couldn’t imagine that I’d have done anything differently since leaving California. Rocky would have told them about the telegram announcing my engagement, but I hadn’t sent another one saying that we’d actually gotten married. (How could he complain? He’d set the precedent for secret weddings.) Before Jessica, I might have managed to get out of this mess, to get Penny alone and—well, not apologize, a gentleman never apologizes for sleeping with a young lady—I could have explained that despite my dearest wishes, we should simply be friends, that in a perfect world, etc., etc. Maybe it wasn’t too late to try something like it. Sukey I didn’t think would be so much of a problem. She’d shrug me off like she shrugged off everything.

  What I needed was to keep my brain busy, in those moments Jessica and I fell into a companionable silence. I decided to write a song as a late wedding present. The title came first: “My Darling Lives in Des Moines.” I did better with the lyrics when I drove, which was almost never; my concentration was less focused when I merely rode. Jessica let me have the wheel through a large chunk of Arizona, and I noodled around with the verse.

  In the middle of the city

  In the middle of the state

  In the middle of the country

  I count my dreams and wait

  In the middle of my bedroom

  In the middle of the night

  In the middle of my dream of love

  I hold my darling tight

  I had a melody in mind, even though I wasn’t so good at melodies and couldn’t have transcribed it. We passed a sign that said, “When You Ride Alone, You Ride with Hitler.”

  “There’s something wrong with the car!” Jessica said, sitting up in the passenger’s seat.

  I’d been tapping the gas with my foot.

  The Store Was Fresh Out of Camels

  “Earthquakes,” said Jessica, when she first saw my breakable living room.

  “It’s not like we can’t afford to replace things,” I said.

  She laughed. “Broken glass. That’s what I’m worried about. How long would it take to dig out glass from this carpet?”

  I shrugged. She had a point, and still, all I could think of was how I didn’t know, exactly, what everything in this room had cost me. A glorious feeling: I could smash a martini glass every hour, and it wouldn’t make the slightest dent in my bank account. The difference between me and Rocky is that he might have thought the same thing, and then would have gone ahead and shattered the glasses.

  I still live in this house, alone now, and somehow it’s darkened over the years. Dirt? My own failing eyesight? A slight change in the earth’s rotation? When the children were little, the house seemed full of light, and I don’t mean metaphorically: the mirrors seemed as deep as rooms themselves, the window blinds glowed. Eventually we bought rugs the children could spill anything on, we put away the crystal and covered the sofas and chairs in dark green paisley, but still it was brighter than it ever was when I lived alone. On the table, glossy chicken soup or pale warm cream of wheat. In every patch of sunshine was a child, or our calico cat, or my wife the dancer who viewed the floor as a piece of furniture except more practical. Maybe bodies stop sunlight in its tracks. Without them it stumbles through the house and out the back door.

  Rocky arrived at 8:30 that evening. (I’d called him from the California border. He made hurt noises over not being invited to the wedding, but I made it sound as though the marriage had been an emergency: a nice girl, after all. She wouldn’t have come with me otherwise. I have no idea of whether this was true.) First he threw his arms around me, and then he went after Jessica. For a moment, I was afraid that he planned to scoop her up, but instead he took her hand. He said, “You’re a dancer.” She nodded. I didn’t think I’d told him that.

  “You know,” he said, “I can’t even tell you what a pleasure it is to meet you, Jessica.” And then he whooped and scooped her up in his arms and kissed her. “Tour jeté!” he said.

  Meanwhile, I realized he had stuck something in my breast pocket when he embraced me: a giant roll of money. I pulled it out. “Really, Rock,” I said. “A wedding present? Why didn’t you get me something I didn’t already have?”

  “Oh, for your wedding I got you a llama,” he said breezily. He set Jessica down again, just as she said, “A what?” She’d already seen the jukebox, which might have seemed as unlikely a piece of living-room furniture.

  I said, “Joke!”

  “A nice llama,” said Rocky. “Barely spits at all, for a llama. Someone for us to get drunk with. But: am I not an honest man? Didn’t we have a bet going?”

  “Usually several,” I said, though I was hoping to introduce my wife to my bad habits one at a time. I already had the notion—and hope—that she might try to break me of them.

  “We only had one two-thousand-dollar bet,” he said. “The matrimonial one.”

  Penny’s gone, I hoped. To a beautiful foreign country where she’s carried on a litter like Cleopatra. Rocky’s remarried and has already forgotten Penny’s forwarding address, because she’s so gone she’s never coming back.

  “Penny’s come back to me!” he said.

  Rocky threw a party for us the next week. I couldn’t refuse, and I couldn’t, of course, suggest that he not invite his wife and her best friend. Clearly Penny hadn’t told Rocky about Our Secret (as I, a newly married man, decorously thought of it); he was being entirely too sentimental about me. Would I be able to get Penny alone and explain things? With a few insinuations, maybe I could get her to jump to a flattering conclusi
on: I married Jessie because I could not marry her.

  At the party Jessica was whisked away immediately by Tansy. Penny spotted me outside the house and started to bound up. (Well, she didn’t spot me; Rocky pointed.) Did the sight of me always make her so frolicsome? Probably she was thinking the same thing, because she slowed down and walked the rest of the way.

  “Mike!” she said. “Congratulations! I could hardly believe it when Rocky told me! I said, Mike? Mike Sharp? Married? Good grief, then there’s hope for anyone! I said, Rocky, if Mike can get married, then there’s hope for us too! Where is she? That’s her? She’s beautiful. And from Des Moines? Beautiful and from Des Moines? Not that it surprises me, it’s just that I’ve never been to Des Moines. We’ll go sometime. Dancer? She’s a dancer, right? Well, you’ll put her in your movies. Of course you will, but don’t you dare put her in before you put me in. I’ve been twisting Rock’s arm for four years now, I won’t give up that easy. Maybe we can do a scene together, me and your wife. Your wife. You’re married! Do I have a surprise for you.” And then she slapped me on the seat of my pants, hard, kissed me on the nose, and left.

  So I stood for a moment, feeling both the slap and the kiss and hoping that one of them was the surprise. She thought Jessie was beautiful, huh? Penny couldn’t fool me: she couldn’t possibly have seen my beauteous wife from that distance. Red Shaw’s band was there, and they struck up some dance music.

  When I recall nearly any story from those first weeks with Jessica, I decide of every single one, That’s when I knew I was in love with her, even though I don’t remember any surrounding doubt. Here’s another one: that night, we danced. We’d only ever danced during my lessons, but now we jitterbugged. Then double time. Then quadruple. I couldn’t tell whose idea it was to speed up, mine or hers or the band’s, but I realized that everyone else had stopped dancing and had cleared space for us. I’ve always wanted to be that guy, I thought. Maybe they were just doing it because it was our party, but I didn’t care. I spun her from me and then back. I missed her when a step took her farther away, and I tried to prevent sweat from dripping off my nose and onto her face when she was near. We were both laughing, even though laughing was an effort. I could feel my back suddenly soppy wet. Surely the song was nearly over. It wasn’t. I’d never danced this hard in my life, and I couldn’t tell whether I was giddy because I danced or vice versa. People around us clapped, which would have given us permission to stop, but I couldn’t imagine doing that until the end of the song, which in my mind had become our wedding itself, and would I walk out on that? My lungs hurt. My heart felt slightly bruised.

  Finally. End of song (were those sons of bitches putting on all those extra flourishes to kill me?). Applause. Lovely. I collapsed onto a nearby chair. For a second Jessica stood, fanning the backs of her legs with her skirt. Then she sat down primly on my knees. Despite myself, I took her by the waist and slid her closer to me, both of us still panting. When she leaned I could feel that her shirt was soaked through, too.

  She arched her back away from me for a minute, and then settled the backs of her shoulders onto the front of mine. She said, “I’m afraid I’m sticking to you.”

  I said, “Please.”

  Later that night Rocky danced with both Penny and Jessica, twirled one from each wrist. How could a guy who danced that well have any trouble with woman at all? I didn’t like having Penny and Jessica that close together, but at least they weren’t talking.

  Penny’s secret turned out to be completely endearing, if odd. I’d shown Rocky the words to “My Darling Lives in Des Moines,” asking for advice, and his photographic memory had snapped a picture, and his friend Red Shaw had set the lyrics to music—he must have had a spare tune lying around, he managed it so fast. Penny was going to sing with the band. I didn’t recognize it till she began the verse. There was betrayal in her voice, but there was always betrayal in Penny’s voice:

  Indianola, Osceola,

  Cedar Rapids, Cedar Falls,

  But the city I love most

  Is the city that she calls

  Home—

  (Don’t need a map at all)

  Home—

  (To the State Capitol)

  Home—

  My darling lives in Des Moines.

  When it was done, and Jessica kissed me, and we went to thank Penny, she simply shook our hands. “I’m taking this so well,” she said to me, and then, to Jessica, “I might as well admit it, I’ve always had a crush on your husband.”

  “He’s pretty adorable,” Jessie said. Then she turned to me, and yawned in an informational way. “It’s midnight,” she said. “I think I’ll go home.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll get the car.”

  “No,” she answered. She touched my cheek. “You’re having a good time. I want to go, you want to stay, nothing wrong with that. Somebody will drive you. Wake me when you get back.”

  I couldn’t decide if I was delighted by our independence from each other, or crushed. But I’d hardly seen Rocky at the party, so I kissed her and stayed. I ended up in the basement bar, Sukey between me and Rock.

  “So I hear,” Sukey said, “that you got yourself a housewife.”

  “Ain’t it great?” Rocky asked.

  I didn’t know the etiquette. I tried, “She’s not—”

  “A nice Jewish girl, like he always wanted,” said Rocky, though I’d never said that. But he was right, I reflected: that was what I always wanted. “From his hometown,” said Rocky.

  “A city girl,” I corrected. “Next town over.”

  “Forgive me,” said Rocky. “She’s from Des Moines. He’s from West Des Moines.”

  “And who could blame him?” said Sukey. “Lights of Des Moines are liable to dazzle a boy.”

  “Indeed,” said Rocky.

  “It’s what they all want.” Sukey stared into her drink. I worried that I was about to hear the answer to And who could blame him? “They all pretend that they’re big sophisticated men, but then they see a simple little girl and they turn into simple little boys.”

  “Now, wait a minute,” I said.

  “It’s true.” The bartender had gone home, and Sukey knelt on her barstool and grabbed a bottle and poured herself another drink. Whatever she’d snagged colored what was left in her glass green. “They act like big men, but in the end they just want to play house.”

  “Who’s them?” asked Rocky.

  “All of y’all,” said Sukey, suddenly southern with drink. “All of you boys. You want housewives. You’re not real men.”

  “I’m married to Penny,” he said. “You don’t think she’s—”

  “Well, Jesus Christ,” said Sukey. “I’ve been to bed with Penny. How much of a man am I?”

  There was a silence you could have wrapped in a bedsheet then. Finally, Rocky scratched the back of his head and said, hopefully, “By go to bed, you mean—”

  “You know what I mean, funnyman,” Sukey said.

  Rocky shook his head.

  “A waterstain birthmark the shape of Spain on her left hip,” said Sukey, and—whoops!—I said, “Yes.” Rocky didn’t notice. He said, “You mean Italy.”

  “Italy,” she said. “And cold feet.”

  “Yes,” said Rocky.

  “And she likes her waist to be held—”

  “Okay,” Rocky and I said.

  After she left, Rocky said, sadly, “Nobody remembers the shape of Spain.”

  10

  Biblical Slapstick

  I wanted to show my midwestern sweetheart everything about California, but she’d already seen it all. She didn’t like Hollywood Boulevard, which still staggered me so you would have guessed I was a tourist, not a guy whose name appeared with almost mind-numbing regularity on the marquees of the movie palaces, whose footprints could be seen in the cement in front of Grauman’s Chinese. (I swear Rocky wore bigger shoes that day, so that his feet would dwarf mine in perpetuity.) “The ocean!” I said. “It’s nice,” said J
ess. “The mountains!” I explained. “I’ve climbed them,” she told me. One day I dragged her out into the backyard. “Hummingbirds!” I instructed. “Look!”

  She did. She was silent a long time, and then she said, “There are hummingbirds in Iowa.”

  “Never,” I said, looking at the little mechanical genius that now backed out of one flower and hung in the air like a cartoon fairy, looking over what the other blooms offered.

  “I’ll get you a bird book,” she said, “and you can look it up. But isn’t he beautiful?”

  “Beautiful,” I said sadly. “Iowa?”

  “Yes, Mr. Audubon. Iowa.”

  Despite having climbed a mountain, she viewed Nature as mostly an inconsistently lit corridor that led from one building to another. She adored music: Tchaikovsky and Mendelssohn, and big bands, and jazz, anything you could dance to, anything you might—with the right people—reproduce in your living room. She could not sing at all, but she loved to, so she did—not like Hattie, who flaunted her pitchless vibrating alto voice, but softly, so you could hardly hear how wrong she was. She loved in general the works of man, painting and poetry and architecture.

  And she loved me.

  This was a fascinating prospect. She really did love me, my Jessica. I kept thinking that she’d notice she didn’t. Sometimes she could be almost dismissive of my behavior, if it displeased her—sniffing the air for a snuck cigarette, shaking her head as I tried to memorize lines to movies that she never would have gone to, had her husband not been one of the stars—and would give me a look that I well remembered from my days as a boarder under the gaze of a disappointed landlady: Mr. Sharp, is this how you act in your own home? But that was just Jessica: she loved me, but that didn’t mean she’d put up with all sorts of nonsense. Minutes later—she was not mad, she would not brood—she’d call me her boy (how did she know this is what I would want to be?) and outline my ear with her finger. Or she’d sit in a chair across from me, and ask me about my childhood. I told her different stories than I told Rocky: at least, the telling was different. With Rock the point was to be funny, to pump tragedy full of slapstick. You knew that there were awful things in this world—what people had to bear!—but God had rigged up one kind of consolation: you could get a good story out of it. “This,” said Rock, “is the lesson of the Bible.” Jessica did not love comedy, despite loving a comedian; she wanted to be moved by stories unadorned by wisecracks. The sadder the better, and so I told her the whole story of Hattie’s death, a story I had not told at all since I first met Rocky, and only an abridged version then.