Niagara Falls All Over Again

by Elizabeth McCracken

  “She died with me angry at her,” I said to Jessica.

  “Do you think so? Sounds like you had forgiven her.”

  No, I said, I hadn’t. Jessica shrugged. She’d never argue about that sort of thing. But her eyes darkened, which meant they were damp, and she laid a hand upon me—more people should have this knack—that was somehow less about comfort, which I couldn’t have stood, and more about just wanting to touch me. She did not pat, she did not hug, she did not there-there. She just set her hand on my arm. That’s what she always did, she’d touch my elbow or stomach or the back of my neck, as though she wondered what a sad man felt like, so we could be sad together.

  And generally, when she did this, no matter what time it was, we’d go to bed.

  On the other hand, we went to bed when we were happy, too. She was amused by my constant willingness, and I grateful for hers, which in those years was what I believed marriage was. Years of vaudeville meant I never gave a thought to when decent people embarked on carnal embraces: I’d worked nights, and besides, I didn’t know any decent people. Not that I told her this. I mentioned Mimi, but otherwise my past was my past. It was scattered across the middle of the country, and here we were at the edge. Maybe some days in Dayton, Dubuque, Duluth (dear Duluth!), part of my past would walk into a theater, and see me: So that’s what happened to that guy. I felt no need to go likewise looking.

  I had Jessica. In the mornings she stood in the bathroom, naked, winding her hair on the back of her head and fixing it with a two-part contraption, a long skewer and a curved bar; the pieces worked together, like an arrow drawn in a bow, at her nape. The bathroom was so porcelain-white that even pale Jessica looked pink in it. In fact, if I came to the door without my glasses on, I saw an impressionist painting: white, with a smudge of slightly ruddier white; a curl of black; some silver-blue bursting in through the pebbled glass window. In some ways she was fastidious and in others filthy. She showered and powdered herself with talcum and then she’d put on an unwashed leotard covered in fuzzy fabric blemishes and would dance all day. By evening she would smell like something burning—a small something, a thing that shouldn’t be burned. Not consumed, just a spark at the heart of something densely packed.

  What was marriage to me, a guy who had, historically, gotten around? Favors granted endlessly, cheerfully, complicatedly. A certain relaxation of good manners. Permission to stick my nose anywhere. My knuckles had already grazed every part of her body as we danced, as we stepped away from dancing. This was marriage: sticking my nose into every alcove of her body. A skinny ballerina. She had tiny biceps, though her legs were decidedly muscly. You could see her ribs above and below her small breasts. Her sweat smelled like rain-barrel water, sun-warmed and touched with rust.

  “My feet are ugly,” she told me once, a single moment of self-deprecation. They weren’t. They were just covered with the evidence of her work, the bottoms thick and darker than the rest of her skin, a gray lampshade over a white light. The lines of her footprint were slightly darker than that. Her big toes cocked over, and her little toes were beveled: they had distinct edges where they tucked in against the rest of her foot. The grain of her toenails ran side to side, unlike her fingernails, but in this she was probably not unique. Only her arches resembled the rest of her, resembled the talc she doused herself with. I kissed them. Why was a foot curved except for kisses?

  Her hands were well trained, maybe from years of describing things while dancing. Now, they described me. Was my back really my back, before Jessica swept one hand from the top of my head to the hinge of my knees? No, it had been a jumble of parts, the nape of my neck to keep my necktie up, a pair of chummy shoulders, a length of spine, a prat for pratfalls, legs for hightailing it out of there, all certainly previously kissed and bitten and even spanked, but not this: all me. I felt like I could think great thoughts with my skin. She curled her fists into my armpits, then ran her hands (opening) down the underside of my arms past my elbows, till we were chest to chest and her fingers were around my faulty wrists and I wished I could bend them, to take her hands, maybe if I just tried, and then she stretched her arms a little wider, and suddenly we were palm to palm, palm to palm. She had quite a wingspan, my wife. She nudged my nose with her nose, she fluttered her lashes on my eyelids. Eskimo kiss, butterfly kiss, soul kiss, when I was a young man I collected these kisses the way some daft old women amass spoons from every state in the union, acquiring, until they run out of holes in the collection, dozens of miniature spoons with symbols on the end to pledge their allegiances, a beehive for the beehive state, a keystone for Pennsylvania, a full set and nothing to eat dinner with. Jessica rubbed her forehead against mine, as though she were a patient foreign-language instructor: how would I know what a chin was, unless I felt another chin upon it? Repeat after me: cheekbone, temple, left ear, right ear, toes. I hadn’t known. Really she was three inches shorter than me, but in bed she could make herself my height. In vaudeville I’d seen an act like this, a guy who stood beside a taller man—the short guy slowly elongated himself, put a fraction of an inch between each vertebra, a fraction of an inch at the top of his kneecap and another at the bottom, until he stood next to a shorter man, the same one. The audience blinked, then applauded. That was the whole trick, and it didn’t seem much till Jessica did it: she rubbed her instep over my ankle, then my instep, then the bottom of my foot, never losing track of our kiss, the pulses in our wrists against each other.

  She signed up at the Hollywood Canteen as a hostess, of course—we all had to do our part, and Jessica’s specialty was dancing. We went together: I served drinks and dinner, and Jessica danced with soldiers and sailors and flyers: you could see guys walk away from her, delighted by the dance and confused by the conversation. Did she have a boyfriend? they’d ask. Married, she’d answer. Pretend you’re my girl, they’d say, and she’d smile and say she couldn’t. Sure you can, they’d say, but she couldn’t, she was incapable. In some ways she had nearly no imagination, but I can’t say it bothered me much in this instance.

  “You let your wife dance with anybody,” Rocky said, on one of the nights he showed up at the Canteen; we’d performed earlier in the evening.

  “Only with guys in uniform,” I told him. Well, if the most valuable thing I had to give to the war effort was my wife, I’d do it, as long as she came home with me at night. And danced in sight of me at all times. And never, ever got talked into a game of make-believe, not with the suavist officer or the most innocent about-to-be-shipped-out sailor boy.

  Still, soon enough she got pregnant and even the sailor and soldier boys had a hard time pretending she wasn’t another guy’s girl.

  At one elbow, excessive Rocky; at the other, my abstemious wife. When Jessica and I settled into married bliss, it was all I could do not to compare her to Rocky, and not always favorably. She had plenty of rules. She didn’t drink; she hated rich foods; she could deliver a lecture against gravy that made it sound as though gravy had invaded Poland. She couldn’t bear to hear people rhapsodize about food. She strictly forbade indoor smoking.

  “This is just a little cigar,” Rocky told her one night, when he’d come over and demanded an old-fashioned midwestern meal; Jess cooked him a cheese omelette, oeufs Des Moines. She’d sent home the cook, an Irish nineteen-year-old named Nora who specialized in rich cream sauces—liquid gout, said Rocky—and mashed turnips. Jess barely tolerated her, torn between hating hired help and despising housework.

  “Nevertheless,” Jess said.

  “This cigar is next to nothing,” said Rock. But he was already genially sliding it into his jacket pocket. He’d brought over three bottles of champagne and two of wine, all for the three of us, and kept pouring glasses for Jess that she never touched. He emptied his water glass and tried again, as though if he booby-trapped the table with enough vessels she’d eventually fall in.

  “Mr. Carter,” Jessica said. From the very start that was their joke, a cheerful and annoyed formality. “
I don’t drink wine.”

  “A whiskey woman, then. No? Martinis. Gimlets?”

  “Coffee,” said Jessica.

  “I’m just curious,” he said. “If you wanted to have a drink, what would you have? I’ll buy you the best. Vodka? Or kirsch: I bet kirsch. I once knew a ballerina—”

  “I haven’t the slightest,” said Jess. “I’ve never tasted alcohol.”

  “Really?” I said. I mean, I knew she didn’t drink, I just didn’t know she never had. I snagged the bottom of one of the glasses Rocky had poured her and sloshed some wine onto the tablecloth, a gift from my sister Ida. Jess got up and went to the bar for some club soda to sop up the stain.

  “You married this guy sober?” Rocky said.

  “Drunk with love,” Jess said wryly, which even so delighted me.

  “You’ve been to Paris,” said Rocky. “You lived in New York. Sometime, somewhere, a toast, a prayer—”

  “Never,” Jess said.

  “Grounds for divorce,” Rocky told me, but of course I loved it: I loved any new thing I learned about her.

  I stood up from the table. “We’ll smoke outside.”

  “Oh, goody,” he said, “that’s allowed?”

  From the lanai, he surveyed my grounds, as if he couldn’t quite figure out what the place was missing. “She’s something. Is she ever something.”

  “She’s got ideas,” I offered.

  “I noticed.”

  I crossed my legs on my chaise longe. “I was hoping the two of you would hit it off.”

  He laughed then. “We are. Can’t you tell? We adore each other.”

  “Good,” I said dubiously.

  “No! Ask her. Jess—” he called.

  “Don’t do that. She’ll lie. She’s very polite. . . .”

  “No she isn’t,” he said.

  “No she isn’t,” I agreed.

  “But okay. You ask her. Later tonight.” He pulled out the cigar and looked at it. “Oh,” he said, “if only someone would make me straighten up and fly right.”

  “Penny’s not the girl for that,” I told him.

  “She’s not the girl for anything.” He twirled the cigar with the tips of his fingers, let it slide down the back of his hand, caught it, twirled it again. “She’s gone for good, this time.”

  “She’ll be back.”

  “Not this time. I told her not to. Penny can take anything except a lack of admiration. I told her”—he sighed—“told her I wasn’t attracted to her. Not after that Sukey business.”

  “That Sukey business.”

  “Well, really. It’s not that she slept with a girl. It’s that it was Sukey. If Penny was looking, I would have found her a nice date. No, I would have! Some dancer. But Sukey Decker? Who hates me?”

  “You finally figured that out, huh? Well, look at it this way. With Penny’s eyesight she probably didn’t realize it wasn’t you till it was too late.”

  He pursed his lips.

  “Rocky?”

  “You’ll pardon me, you son of a bitch, if that doesn’t make me feel any better.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Sorry and laughing, sure. Anyhow, it’s not all Sukey’s fault. Penny’s moved in and out so often I should install a turnstile. Charge admission.”

  “Offer to sell her a season pass.”

  “You misunderstand. She’s gone. You know, I thought the one advantage of marrying a simple woman was that I’d be able to understand her.”

  “You think Penny’s simple?”

  “Not dumb. Just not complicated. I thought.”

  “You were wrong. She’s plenty complicated.”

  “Tell me more.”

  “Uh-uh. I’m drunk. I’m liable to say things I don’t mean.”

  “Fair enough. Educate me some other way, Professor. Tell me about your wife.”

  “She’s not simple either.”

  “No kidding. Tell me—tell me what the two of you talk about. It’s late. You’re in the living room. What happens next?”

  “Depends.”

  “You love her?”

  “Yes. I do. Did I forget to tell you that’s important in a marriage?”

  “There’s always been plenty of love in my marriage, kid. It’s just that me and the missus have lousy aim. Okay: so you’re in the living room. She’s sitting in her chair. You’re on the sofa. You look at her. What do you think?”

  “Mostly, I think it would be nice to crawl across the room on my hands and knees and sit by her feet.”

  “Jesus. Well, that’s you. I don’t kowtow to women.”

  “You just kowtow with money. You just throw money at the problem. Anyhow, I don’t want to crawl across the floor to kowtow, I don’t think.”

  “Then what?”

  “I don’t know. It’s a big room. I think maybe I just want to get across it.”

  “Walk.”

  “I want to get across it without her asking me where I’m going, and would I get her something while I’m up, and is it time for bed already? I want to get from one side of the room to the other without her noticing.”

  “Yeah, but what do you want to do once you get to the other side?”

  “I don’t know. Sit there. Put my hand on her ankle.” (Put my hand on her ankle, and feel that tendon at the back of her heel, as subtly lined as a run in a stocking. Put my head in her lap.)

  “You just want attention, old dog.”

  “No. I mean: no. It’s like I want to be near her without her really noticing. Sneak across the room. Put my head on her lap. Maybe she pushes her hand through what’s left of my hair, but she doesn’t even look up from her book. Like she’s used to me being there.”

  “Like you’re a dog.”

  “Have it your way. Maybe. A good dog. A loved dog.”

  “Yeah. Sure.” He stroked his cigar as though he was Aladdin, thinking carefully before he summoned the genie. “That’d be okay.”

  I’m Light on Your Feet

  Rocky discovered Jessica’s sweet tooth, and liked to try to stuff her full as a piñata. Usually he succeeded: his taste in chocolates, said Jessica, was nothing short of genius, and even during the war managed huge smuggled boxes of European bonbons.

  Wasn’t it unseemly for a man other than her husband to supply her with candy?

  So I’d top him: I’d build her a candy box of her own, a music box: a dance studio. I hired some set guys from the studio to design and build it at the far end of the back lawn. I told Jessica I was working on a game room, a place for Rock and me to play cards and smoke. The way I figured it, the studio was for her solitary dancing pleasure; I would be her audience. I really was thinking of a music box, my mother’s, where the celluloid ballerina who lived inside sprang up only when someone wanted to see her twirl.

  The set guys got fancy: dramatic masks above the entrance, a mirror trimmed in painted velvet ribbon. I took her to it when they were done.

  She walked over the threshold. For thirty seconds, I think, she wondered what kind of clubhouse this was. Then she figured it out, and kissed me. “Oh, Mose,” she said. “This is a wonderful place for lessons.”

  I managed not to say, “For what?” (Sometimes I had to work not to be a straight man, not to say every little thing that crossed my mind so that my comic could respond to it.) I looked at the wood floors, the blond untouched barres. “That’s what I thought.”

  She inspected the mirror, the small dressing room at the back, the latticed Swiss-style windows, the bathroom, the record player and radio. Her brother, Joseph, still lived in their house; otherwise I’d have paid to have certain details of her old studio (the fireplace, the peach-colored flame-shaped lighting sconces) flown in.

  “Wonderful,” she said again. “The barres are too high, but other than that. Easy to fix.” She sat down in the middle of the floor. Her stomach—she was six months pregnant—hid the angles of her crossed legs. She asked if I would leave.

  “Sure,” I said. I tried to make it a question.
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  When I got back to the house, I heard the music. I hadn’t bought any records for the player; she must have snapped on the radio. From the kitchen I could see only one small slice of a studio window, and realized that if I had wanted to watch her, I’d built the place badly. You couldn’t see anything from here, just Jessie occasionally spinning into view and out again. She must have danced through commercials, Ballet Pepsodent, Ballet Lucky Strike. A mistake, I thought: I’d given her something that would keep her from me. That’s the kind of guy I was. She was so happy, and I, kept from her happiness, was miserable.

  Soon enough, Jessica offered lessons. In Des Moines, a dance lesson with her was glamorous. Not that she worked to make it so: still, she was the only Bohemian her students ever met, a single woman in leotards, forbidden jazz on the gramophone. A professional dancer, here in our city. You knew you’d never be one yourself, but for an hour a week you could pretend. Then you’d go back to your parents, or husband, or wife. You wouldn’t even tell them how much you’d loved your time in the Ninth Street studio.

  But in Hollywood, professional dancers were common as bedbugs. Who hadn’t danced professionally? See that woman crossing the street? She scissored her legs in the two-o’clock spot in a Busby Berkeley kaleidoscope, and she was nothing special. Well, that was the point, to look like all the other girls angling identically for the camera that came in overhead on a crane. From below in the front row, a mother might see a certain turn of ankle. But to everyone else, you looked like the girl on either side, and how would you ever become a star that way? So you took more lessons, while privately assuming you were better than your teacher.