Niagara Falls All Over Again (24 page)

And then Annie walked up to Rabbi Kipple's portrait and took it off the wall, wrapped it in brown paper, and handed it over.

“How did you know?” I asked.

“You always loved it,” she said, though I knew that we'd all always loved it.

It was March, and the night before our wedding there had been a freak snowstorm, and so Jessica had come to her wedding dinner with a toboggan under her arm—she'd asked me if there was a hill—and wearing slacks.

“Slacks!” Annie said to me, and then, “They suit her.”

We'd been married in the morning of March 9, 1943. Jessica spent the afternoon sliding down the Eighth Street hill, and then came through the back door in her wedding slacks, dappled with snow. Dripping, really, on the clean kitchen floor, and so she took off the offending slacks, and walked through the house in her leotard and tights. She sat down to dinner that way.

And the Sharp family, all of us, gaped.

Our Honeymoon Song

We left after dinner—no time to waste—and drove out of town between the fallow cornfields patterned with pig houses and melting snow. The freakish cold had turned to ordinary warmth. It's easy to forget the beauty of Iowan skies, especially when you're keen to leave them: they have the look of reverse glass paintings, backlit and full of a kind of smudged clarity. Our honeymoon sky was blue-jay blue, blueberry blue, mellowing slowly into serge black. The horizon seemed precisely as close as the stars over our heads.

I drove Jessica's car; she seemed to think that my sisters should see me at the wheel as we went off to our new life. Ahead of us the empty road stretched steady as a sharpshooter's arm. “Here,” I said to my wife, “take the wheel a minute.” She reached over and held it with one hand, and I leaned over and put my fingers at the back of her hair and kissed her. With her free hand she braced herself against my right hip. We were still driving. I'd thought it would be a momentary kiss, a silly thing, because though we'd been married ten hours, we hadn't kissed seriously yet: by which I mean, without a rabbi watching us. But we continued to drive and we continued to kiss, my foot on the gas and her hand on the wheel. I could see the barest edge of the road in my peripheral vision.

“Mmmmm,” she said through the kiss, and I understood this meant that we planned to pull over. I felt the steering wheel turn against the left side of my waist, and I put my foot on the brake, and we narrowly avoided tipping into the ditch that fronted the fields. I'm sure we wouldn't have cared if we had.

We kissed in the car awhile.

“What I don't get,” I said, “is why you were willing to marry me so fast.”

She shrugged, my practical wife. “I knew I was going to marry you someday,” she said. “That much was clear. Might as well be sooner than later.”

I laughed.

“I'm dead serious,” she said. “Best advice my father ever gave me: never do anything for the principle of the thing. I knew I was going to marry you, and then you asked, and saying anything but yes would have been for the principle of the thing.”

Before this year—my thirty-second on earth—if you'd asked me about romantic love, I would have told you that I believed in it after a fashion. I knew about longing and affection; certainly I believed that people fell in love with other people, and that this state caused them to do stupid, heroic things. But in all of my study of the subject, it seemed that love was a table tennis game: you swung your paddle at the ball, or your partner did, but physics demanded that you waited your turn. One player would eventually pull ahead. Sure, people fell in love, of course they did, but for two people to fall at the same time and to the same depth seemed like the kind of unbelievable coincidence that movie comedy was made of: the keys are in the car you need to steal; the guy who chases you will find you, even six counties away from the start of the pursuit; you sit on the button of the tape recorder just as the villain starts to confess.

With other girls—those girls I was forgetting, just the way songs say you will (though they never mention that eventually your memory returns)—I could think of her, or I could think of me, and I believed that much of my romantic success was my ability and willingness to think more often of my date than myself. Why not? She was mesmerizing, I was not. But with Jessica—once we were married, in hotel rooms from Vee Jay to L.A. and ever after—I somehow kept both of us in mind at once. This seemed more a trick of the mind than of the body, as though for years I'd had to write down the simplest mathematical equation and carry ones and twos and threes and count on my fingers, and then one day discovered that I could multiply ten-digit numbers in my head without even trying.

“Should we find a place to stay the night?” Jessica asked when we went bumping out of the edge of the ditch and back onto the road. I shook my head. All that night we drove, Jessica leaning on my shoulder, kissing it sometimes, my hand on her knee, her knuckles brushing the bottom of my ear, and every time we came to a town she suggested that we stop and I drove past it. I couldn't explain. I think I needed to turn my longing for her into something noble, a state I withstood for as long as I could. I loved even that. I wasn't quite done loving it. Maybe that's why she insisted on driving for most of the rest of the trip. Just because she was now technically a wife didn't mean she liked being subject to a smitten husband's whims. It was two in the morning when we pulled off in a town on the far side of Nebraska, where we had to wake the gaunt desk clerk. He wheezed like a bulldog and he sniffed the air like a bulldog but he looked like a collie awakened from a coma, all nose and no brain. He squinted as though we were the most brightly lit things he had ever seen.

“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 conclusion: 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.