“You want to call her?” Rocky asked.
I shook my head.
“We’ll call her.” He sat on a chair by the bed, his knees up against the nightstand. The phone was a confection that Lillian had installed, all gold scroll and black inlay, better suited for a pinup to hold to her ear, saucily shocked at her caller. The receiver looked too small in Rocky’s hand. “No answer,” he said.
“Didn’t think so.”
“Buddy,” he told me, “you need to do something.”
Our radio show was on summer replacements—our bandleader, West Thompson, had taken over—and we weren’t shooting a picture.
“We’ll go out,” he said.
I shook my head. Actually, I did nothing so athletic, I just stirred the air in front of my face lightly with my nose.
“Say the word,” Rock said. He stood up to leave.
I said, “Thanks.”
She’d been under the bed. I understood. Back when I boarded in other people’s homes, I often had the same dream: I’d been out of the house, and when I returned, there was some guy—sometimes more than one—sleeping in my bed or reading the paper in my chair. Excuse me, I’d say, wrong door, but then it turned out that I’d been sharing my quarters all along: we’d just never happened to be in the same room at the same time.
I wanted to do that now. I wanted to haunt the house, so that I could be around my family without them ever noticing. Couldn’t we live together that way? I’d sleep under the bed and only get up in the middle of the night, make my rounds, look at my boys sleeping, maybe lay out their clothes for the morning, fill the front room with flowers, stick handfuls of candy in their empty shoes. That way, I couldn’t hurt them. I got under Rocky’s guest bed to test. Apparently his maids were more thorough: no cobwebs here. Light came through the sheer bedskirt, and I put my hands up and felt the slats of the bedframe, and then the flimsier slats of the box spring, and I tried to imagine the sweet outline of Jessica over me, the princess and the pea in reverse: a small shape layers and layers above whose tiniest edge lacerated me, from the knot in her sneakers to the buckle on her watchband.
Mostly, though, I spent my time on the sleeping side of the bed, like my wife, fully dressed and half paralyzed. I kept my back straight, my elbows tucked in at my sides, as though I’d been dropped into a swimming pool again, but this time I wasn’t going to fight, this time I wanted to sink to the bottom, I swear I had bruises at my waist from my elbows digging in, my toes were pointed, my hands in a ball at my stomach, but no matter how heavy I tried to make myself, I was buoyant, I was buoyant, something was letting me breathe when I only longed to be drowned. How could I make myself sinkable? Keep your eyes closed. Keep your toes pointed. Keep your mouth shut.
Rocky knocked on the door. “Do you want anything?”
I’d just been picturing somebody—not Rocky, someone in better shape, and without a face—snatching me out of bed and throwing me through the window (not made of sugar in this vision, unlike the panes of glass Carter and Sharp dove through in the movies) and into the swimming pool.
I didn’t think I could ask for that, though.
I said, “I don’t want to die, but I wouldn’t turn down a coma.”
A few hours later—or the next day, or the day after that—I thought, After the baby died, I could move, but now I can’t, and that means I miss Jessica more than I miss the baby, and I ran to the window I’d imagined sailing through and opened it and spent the next five minutes vomiting and then doing a painful impression of vomiting. The recent contents of my stomach (tomato juice, ice water) ran down the pitched roof onto—must be the kitchen, if I remembered the floor plan right. Someone should clean that up. If I’d been drinking, this would be a story we’d tell, the night I got sick and clogged the gutters.
I blamed gravity, which pulled at the hems of everyone I loved: first Hattie, then Betty. What did a guy like me do, except in my movies defy gravity over and over again? If I fell, I bounced back unhurt. I was always sitting on the end of a plank balanced on a barrel, so someone could sit on the other side and launch me into the air, pulled up to the rafters by invisible guy wires. Offscreen, there was nothing for gravity to do but take its revenge. Those days in Rocky’s house I gave in to my fear of the stuff, got as low as I could get so gravity couldn’t knock me farther down, into beds and under them, away from the dangers of pavement and airplanes and cliffs.
People aren’t afraid of heights: they’re afraid of depths.
Every day Rock came in and called Jessica. No answer ever. Was she already gone? No, he said, he’d driven by the house that morning and had seen her through a window. It was like Rocky knew how this was done: your wife is going to leave you, you don’t let her. I told myself that in a few weeks I’d go to Iowa. I’d be better. I could put together a good argument. Now, though, I thought of Jessica with the cobwebs in her hair, and I agreed with her, I was mean, and I did not see how insisting that my family live with me would ease their troubles.
“I’m the problem,” I told Rocky.
“Kiddo, that’s not the case. Do me a favor and give yourself a break.”
“I’d like to give myself several.”
He sat on the bed and bounced. “Let’s go out. Let’s get drunk. Let’s find some pretty girls to be the death of us.”
“I’m a married man!” I said, and I burst into tears.
At the end of the week, I was invited to a party. Initially I suspected that Rocky and Lillian threw it to cheer me up, which made me want to kick them, but then I realized Lil was too much of a worrier to put together anything on three days’ notice. This was another of her horrible theme parties. Just before the baby’s accident, Jessica and I had gone to her Artists and Models Ball, husbands as famous painters, wives as their subjects. I decided on Gauguin—a pair of ragged pants and an old white dress shirt, a little French moustache, a paintbrush in my fist—and Jessica rolled herself in a sarong and filed a hibiscus behind her ear. Lillian kept knocking things over with her petticoats—she was somebody out of Toulouse-Lautrec—and Rocky went around on his knees, sneaking under his wife’s skirt until he got drunk, and then under any skirt he pleased. Mrs. Tansy was the real surprise: she came as a tiny Vargas girl, holding a prop cigar and stretching out on sofas.
This one would be a hobo party. What fun! We’d all dress as though we had no money at all, and we’d eat casseroles cooked for us outside in coffee cans. Boiled coffee laced with cognac; good wine decanted into plonk bottles. I tried to get out of it. Rocky insisted.
“It’ll do you good,” he said.
“I don’t want to be cheered up.”
“Of course not,” he said. “But you’ll have to act human for a few hours, and that won’t kill you. I got no expectations of you. Maybe it’s time to deal with expectations.”
It didn’t take much to turn me into a vagrant: I hadn’t shaved in several days, I’d been sleeping in my clothes. Lillian put some mascara on my face for coal dust. I didn’t know half the people at the party, and the other half I didn’t recognize. Lots of bandanas around, the kind Sharp’s used to sell when the Rock Island roundhouse was still in Valley Junction. The guests were supposed to look like boxcar riders. Lil, as hostess, puttered around nervously. She wore a patched skirt over about a dozen cotton petticoats, not so different from her Toulouse-Lautrec outfit but more ginghamy.
“Mike!” she said. “Are you having a good time?”
“No.”
She tried to look sympathetic. “Are other people?”
I surveyed the room. “I think so.”
She held a napkin with a small slice of beef Wellington on it. How very Rock Island line, I thought. “I don’t know most of them,” she said. “There’s one little bum who gives me the creeps, though. Won’t talk. Stands by the food.”
“Probably Tansy.”
“No, Tansy’s over there. See? That’s the guy I mean.”
The guy in question was slight, with a giant false
beard covering most of his face and a giant hat pulled down over his ears, big greasy gloves, dark glasses, torn overalls, a soiled suit jacket. You could hardly see an inch of skin. Suddenly, I felt cheered: maybe an actual bum had crashed the party.
“I think I recognize him,” I lied. “Some burlesque friend of Rock’s.”
“You think?”
“Either that, or the genuine article, looking for a handout.”
Lillian shivered so elaborately her petticoats rattled.
People were getting drunk. I wanted no part of it. Fact was, Rocky was right—standing up did make me feel better, and I didn’t want to. They’d hired a boxcar and parked it next to the pool. I wondered what had happened to the Ferris wheel. Left behind at the old place in the hills, probably. I wandered through the house, stepped out onto balconies I’d never seen before, surprised an off-duty maid and apologized, watched Rocky junior sleeping and nearly burst into tears. What I wanted to do was crawl into bed next to him, but I realized this would not be interpreted as polite behavior from a guest. I ended up going into Rocky’s den, and lying down on a leather sofa identical to the one at my house. My house. Soon to be empty of my family. Maybe I’d have to burn it down when they left. “That’s a joke,” I said out loud.
No good. I got up and went downstairs to the basement. The party roared on above my head. Rocky—out of sentiment or sheer perversity—had duplicated, here in the new house, the bar he and Penny had had in the old place. I wondered if Lillian knew. In the old days, this room would have been filled, but Lillian loved elegance even when slumming, and a cellar didn’t qualify. I don’t know what I was looking for. Some ghost from 1941 or ’46. A patch of air like amnesia that I could walk through.
Same old bar, same black stools with ribbed metal edging. Rock owned a jukebox, too, though not one that bubbled like mine. Pool table, dartboard. I gave the roulette wheel a small sluttering spin.
Suddenly I became aware of someone else in the room. There, in the farthest corner, back against some bookshelves, was Rocky, in his arms the realistic little bum, a coil of chestnut hair falling from the flea-bitten hat. They were necking. Ah, the ghost I’d wanted. I cleared my throat.
The little bum turned to me, Rocky still holding on to one shoulder. Rock looked bewildered: I think I was just kissing someone, but now I appear not to be. The books behind him had been pushed in, a rough outline of a heavy man.
“Mike!” said the little bum, her breath fluttering her false beard—how did you kiss through that? “Mike! I’ve missed you!”
Someone had told Penny about the party and she’d driven down from San Francisco, where she’d been living, to crash. “Take her out to the pool house, will you, Mosey?” Rocky asked. “I need to make an appearance. I’ll be out in a bit.” Upstairs, the guests had sat down to dinner—we could hear the chairs scraping against the marble floor of the dining room—eating the coffee-can casserole, a layer of potatoes, a layer of meat, a layer of beans.
Penny and I crept along the edge of the swimming pool hand-in-hand like Hansel and Gretel. I tried not to look at it. The boxcar was abandoned. The pool house looked like an oversized ice-cream stand, complete with striped crank-down awnings. We moved with cartoon caution, tiptoed so the heels of our wingtips wouldn’t clonk on the tile, pulled on the door so the latch wouldn’t click. “I feel like I’m harboring a runaway,” I said.
“You are,” Penny told me. “I’m sleeping out here tonight. Rock says it’s okay, so long as I’m quiet as a mouse.”
“You?” I said. “You won’t sing?”
“No singing. Only squeaking.”
The moon cast its silver-dollar glow across the water and into the pool house. Apparently Rock and Lillian were using it for storage: I could make out the shapes of things left over from parties and stolen off sets. A series of easels like lanky birds leaned in one corner, props from the Artists and Models Ball; one wore a damp-looking feather boa. There was a deflated gorilla suit from a jungle picture, and Rocky’s souped-up bumper car from Fly Boys, which Penny eased into.
“The key’s gone, dammit,” she said. She leaned her bony chest against the padded steering wheel.
We couldn’t turn on the light, but I found a pair of beach chairs, striped like the awnings, and unfolded them. I gestured at one for Penny: Madam. She stepped out of the bumper car, and we both stretched out. A couple of tramps on the Riviera. I leaned back and crossed my ankles. Penny pulled off her beard and doffed her fedora; she hung the hat on one of her feet, and the beard on one of mine.
“Look!” she said. She held up the dark glasses. “I finally got specs, the way you told me to.”
“I meant glasses to help you see,” I said. “I didn’t mean any old pair.”
“These do!” She put them on and turned her face from side to side. “Prescription,” she declared. “Do they suit me?”
“They do,” I said. She gave me a delighted smile and kept them on.
“You sweet sneak,” I said admiringly. “Poor Lillian.”
“Whose side are you on?”
“Yours,” I said. “Of course, Penny. But she thought you might be an actual hobo.”
“I’ll kill her,” said Penny, “though if you were a gentleman, you’d offer to kill her for me.”
“Well, I was the one who might have put the thought in her head. You’re very convincing. I think she’d rather a gate-crashing hobo than an ex-wife.”
“I’ll kill you,” she said warmly. “Really? Convincing? See, I told Rocky he should give me a part in a movie.”
We could hear the music and laughter across the pool; it felt like a shrunk-down version of the kind of beach resort Rocky and I had played summers at the start of our career. If you’d asked me an hour before whether anything could cheer me up, I would have said no, but Penny’s arrival did. What romantic stupidity! Besides, she was someone I had known back before: before Jessica had left me, before the baby died. It was so dark and moonplated inside that we both seemed black and white. Penny looked wonderful, and I told her so.
“You look like hell,” she said.
“The lady of the house put mascara on my face.”
“Did she make you lose ten pounds? Has she been waking you up every hour on the hour? Tough hostess.”
“I’ve had some hard times lately.”
“I know,” she said. She looked at the hat that tilted on her foot, wiggled her ankle, and spun it around. “I’m so sorry about your daughter, Mike.”
I nodded.
“How’s everybody else?” she asked. “How’s your wife?”
I thought about not telling her. We could sit out here and look at the house, at the rich people dressed as paupers who got drunk on good liquor while making jokes about rotgut. See, Penny had it right: the only reason in the world to dress up like that was so you could pass for someone else. So you could walk into a house where you weren’t wanted. Could I go home if I wore a costume? A French maid’s outfit, maybe. Monsieur Sharp haz hired me to help wiz ze packing for ze treep to De Mwainh. He haz azked me to zmell your hair before you go.
“Everything else is not so good,” I said. “My wife is leaving me. Any moment, she will have left me.” And I told her the whole story: my conversation with Jess, what I’d done that week, what I hadn’t done.
Penny kicked her hat in the air and caught it in her hands. Then she flipped her dark glasses on the top of her head. I couldn’t see the expression on her face, though I imagined it was sympathetic. She said, with great sadness, “He gave away my Ferris wheel.”
“I figured you got it in the divorce.”
“Honey,” Penny said to me. Then she tried Rocky’s old pet name: “Darling boy.” That made me smile. “Why would you throw away your family like that?”
That floored me. Hadn’t she been listening? Her beard fell from my foot. “I’m being thrown.”
“No, you’re not.” She slid to the very edge of her chaise and pinned the false beard to the floor benea
th her toe. “Of course you’re not. Why a week? Why on earth would she wait a week to leave?”
“She needed to pack.”
“Take it from me, Mike. Take it from one with years of experience. Nobody needs to pack. Especially if you’ve been thinking about it. Even if it’s just the smallest niggling thought, I might leave, you somehow walk around with escape supplies: money, passport, car keys. Extra underwear in your purse. Why let her go?”
“I’m not. She’s going anyhow.”
“Don’t let her,” Penny said. She crossed her arms under the bib of her overalls. “You’re one of those people who can’t be alone. Anyone can see it. You know,” she said, “you’re not near so suave as you think you are.”
“My suavity’s at an all-time low, Penn.”
“You never were. Girls wanted to take care of you, that’s why they like you. They think, he’ll starve to death without me. I know I did. Nobody ever looked at Rock and thought that, and I don’t just mean his weight. But he’s the same as you, he just doesn’t know it. He can’t be alone. Can’t take care of himself. Doesn’t like his own company. I had to be married to him for a while before I saw that. And once I did, he started picking fights with me. He throws people away, Mike. You’re the only one he doesn’t. You know he’s going to leave Lillian? He wrote me a letter. Take a lesson from your partner. Whatever he does matrimonially, do the opposite.”
“Which is?”
“‘Faint heart ne’er won fair lady.’ You know that. Maybe you’re not so slick as you believe, but you never were fainthearted. Go home. Tonight. Talk to her. Don’t let pride make you stupid.”
“Do I look like a proud person?” I spread my arms to display my sorry self.
“It’s pride or cowardice,” said Penny.
The door opened, and Rocky walked in, his arms around a stack of bedclothes. He switched on the light with his elbow. “Why’re you sitting around in the dark, children?” he asked. Lillian had darkened his chin with a slightly opalescent eye shadow. He was drunk; he probably hadn’t noticed at the main house, among his sozzled peers. You could tell, though, that here in the sober outpost he felt a little self-conscious.
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