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 beneath 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.
“The head hobo.” Penny gave him a little salute.
“You’ll be okay out here, Penn? I told Lil some buddies of mine are sleeping off a few too many drinks, so she won’t bother you. I’ll come out at breakfast time.”
“Sure. Thanks. And in the morning you’ll toss me out on the street?”
“Don’t say that, Penny,” said Rocky. “You can stay as long as you want, if you lay low. And anyhow, you keep turning up.”