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.