Niagara Falls All Over Again (40 page)

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.”

“A what?” I asked, sure I'd misheard.

“Drag show. Female imps. I'm so old the only women who'll flirt with me are men. I like it, though. At a drag show, it's like
every
one's senile.
Nobody
knows what the hell is going on.”

“I do not like this,” Gertrude said, though I already had started eyeing her with suspicion. Then we fell silent again.

Well, what was I expecting? We hadn't seen each other in three decades, and if I'd called ahead he would have told me not to come. I finished the licorice-scented biscuit on my plate, and wondered if I'd hug Rocky before I left or solemnly shake his hand. Then Charles said, “Let's give them some time alone.”

“Oh,” Gert said. She put her hand on the kitchen counter, as though she'd have to be pulled out.

“It's all right, Gert,” Rocky said.

“You know,” Rocky said confidentially, once they were gone, “she's a Nazi.”

“Yeah?” I said.

He nodded. “My own darling Nazi.”

I felt my shoulders relax. This we'd done many times. Rocky's paranoia was one of our running jokes. “She's German,” I said. “And won't let you drink that much. But that doesn't mean she's eyeing world domination. Besides, she's, I don't know, forty? She's too young.”

He shrugged. “
You
try living with her. Today this trailer, tomorrow, the trailer next door. Younger women, boy. I think; soon I'll be dead, and I want to leave her something, but what have I got? Nothing.”

“Oh,” I said. I looked around the joint and couldn't argue. Anything posh he'd left in California thirty years before, or sold off for taxes and alimony. Maybe I had something at home, some award we'd gotten for fund-raising, a piece of Jessica's jewelry that I could claim somehow rightly belonged to him. “I'm sure—”

He interrupted me. “I think I thought up something.” He leaned on his hand dreamily. “I have a little plan worked out.”

“Is it legal?” I asked.

“This is Nevada,” he said dismissively. Then he put his hands out,
voilà
. “Me.”

“Why not give her something she doesn't already own?”

“You misunderstand me,” he said. “
After
I'm dead. Some men leave their bodies to science. I'm leaving mine to Gert.”

“That's some Catholic thing,” I said. “Right? Lie around in a glass coffin, breath like roses? You told me about this once. Some saint you had a crush on. Let me think: if your body remains uncorrupted twenty days—I'm trying to remember this part—well, let's just say that would be a lifetime record.”

“
Funny
man,” he said, smiling.

“Or you were thinking maybe of taxidermy?”

“Nothing that fancy, no. I told you: she's a Nazi. Lampshades.” He fingered his now half-sunk anchor tattoo. “Nautical theme, maybe. I figure, the place could use some sprucing up, right? I got enough skin for a whole chandelier. Maybe a couple of rings from the gold in my teeth—”

“
Jesus,
Rocky.” I laughed and closed my eyes in happy horror.

Happy, no kidding. A happy ending: two old men joking about the worst thing in the world in an Airstream trailer. Another time I would have explained to him why there was nothing the least bit funny about what he'd just said, but right now I found it hilarious, may God and the Audience forgive me.

One of our ongoing fights: Rocky asserted that with enough diligence and joie de vivre, you could turn anything to comedy. If he'd been born twenty years later, he would have made completely different films. Farces. Movies with mean streaks. But he hit it big in the 1940s, when everybody—moviegoers, politicians, censors, and me—believed that certain things were
not
funny, could not be made funny, would not be made funny. The physics of censors meant that a funny joke about something unfunny was even less funny than a clunker.

When I'd asked Junior to bring me to Reno, the best I'd hoped for was something sentimental, apologies and forgiveness. A movie might have shown us launching into an old routine, a soft shoe choreographed for men who could no longer pick up their feet so well. Not this: both of us with senses of humor so funereal nobody young could even see the jokes. What kind of act would we work up now?
The Two Undertakers. The Ghouls. Black and Barry: Comedy with a Grievous Touch
.

“You know,” I said, “I read where the chemicals in the human body are worth upwards of thirty-seven dollars.”

He nodded. “I'm asking fifty a pint. I put a lot of money into this thing”—he slapped his missing belly—“and I'm not going to let anybody lowball me. Speaking of which—”

But then Gert and Junior walked back in, to find us laughing.

“You're in a good mood,” Gert said accusingly. She probably thought we'd gotten into the liquor.

“We were just talking, my only love, about the human atrocities of your fatherland,” said Rocky.

Junior looked at his shoes. “Socko stuff, I'm sure.”

“I've
told
you,” Gert said to Rocky, and he showed his palms in surrender.

Then he turned to me, as though his ladyfriend and son weren't there. He leaned forward out of his chair, and I realized he hadn't stood up the entire time. “I sort of hope she does it. What I said? Let the light go through me. Think of me when the sun goes down. Maybe you'd like one too.”

“Rocky,” I said, shuddering.

“You know?” he said. “Might as well make myself useful.”

When we got up to leave, Rocky said, “This was nice.”

“It was,” I agreed.

“But you know, Professor,” and that was the first time he'd called me by that name, the first time in ages anyone had, “we can't be buddies.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, though I had some inkling.

“We can't be buddies. Glad you came down with the kid. Would have told you not to—you know that—glad you did it, but that's that, right?
This
is my life now.” He gestured around the trailer to the TV, the Hummels, everything—and, I saw now, a total lack of memorabilia. No photos, no plaques, no souvenirs. No copies of his movies on tape. “This is
it,
” he said, in a voice I couldn't interpret,
I don't want anything else,
or
Please don't make me want anything else
. “And,” he said, though I'd already figured it out, I wanted to stop him, “you're not in it.”

“I know.”

“We're not picking up where we left off.”

“Sure not.”

“Don't want you going off and telling people where I am. Don't want—listen, this one's important—you telling any reporters, and the one guy whose editor maybe thinks I'm this human interest story actually sends him down to find me, already with the lead: ‘You won't find Rocky Carter's place on any map of the stars' homes.' ”

“Of course, Rock.”

“Right? Right.” He clapped his hands together.

I stood up to go. Rocky caught my eye, and said, “You understand me?”

“You know me, Rocky,” I said. “I always do.”

“So did you?” Rocky junior said on the way home.

“What?” I answered, playing dumb.

He sighed and tapped the steering wheel. His hands were mammoth. “Penny,” he said at last.

I had never told anyone, not even Jessica. A drunken escapade; bad behavior, but hadn't I been mostly good? What could it matter, then or now?

“It's complicated,” I said.

He ran a hand through his black hair, and switched on the radio. The Caddy had a fine radio, with big knobs that were a pleasure to turn. We drove twenty miles without talking before he said, “Well, then, I guess I'm provincial.”

We drove another forty miles.

“So it
was
your fault the act broke up,” he said. He turned his head to me one last time. How was it possible he looked so much like his father? I realized he cultivated the resemblance, combed his hair the same way, ate the same way, for all I knew drank the same way. I wanted to confess to him all the sins of my life: Hattie's death, my father's, Betty's, all the hours I should have been by Jess's sickbed when I paced the house, how I'd stomped in food when my mother died, danced the night my father died. Look, I would have said, you want to know about
guilt
?

Fancy thinking. A coward always feels guilt over the things he's not guilty of. The things he really did he never mentions.

My fault?

“Well, yes,” I said to Rocky junior. “It certainly seems that way.”

What's the difference between a comedy team and two people who happen to be funny together? Not just longevity, though that's part.

The movie starts: two people. Could be two men, two women, some of each, several of one or the other. You recognize them instantly, by their clothes and their silhouettes and the way they stand in relation to each other. Laurel will always cry; Hardy will always look at the camera in consternation; Gracie Allen will always gaze at her husband chin tilted up; George Burns will always look back at his wife, chin tucked to his chest. George will feed his wife a straight line. Gracie will say, “Don't be silly,” and offer a punch line.

They will never change, and if they ever do, it's for a moment, and
that's
a joke: suddenly the comic is sensible and the straight man humiliated, but never for long. They are bound together. You will never see them meet for the first time. You will never see them part forever.