“Like a bad Penny,” she said.
He said, cheerfully, “Very bad.”
He set the sheets behind her on the chaise, then sat upon them. He looked at both of us, then, sighing, set his cheek on the back of his ex-wife’s shoulder. “Don’t mention it. We’ll harbor anyone. The Carter Home for Little Wanderers.”
This little wanderer, however, wandered home. Rocky shook my hand, bewildered, and Penny kissed my cheek and said, “Nobody ever takes my advice!” Faint heart ne’er won fair lady. I did feel fainthearted. I’d felt that way all week. Not brokenhearted, which suggests that you know that your life is over, but faint, which is why I’d spent so much time in bed. Should I get some flowers to court my wife? No, it was late, no florist would be open, and in my hobofied state, if I crawled through someone’s garden I’d probably be arrested. I considered this: would it be romantic to be taken in and tell the desk sergeant to call my wife to make my bail? Look what trouble I get into without you. Then I remembered that it would be written up in the papers — Mike Sharp Arrested for Pinching Peonies — and that would be hard to explain to our sponsors.
Even though I’d spent the past week repenting the misery I’d inflicted on my wife and my boys, I hadn’t really fathomed it. In the car, as I drove to the house, I began to. I tried to plan what I would say to Jessica, but no matter what I came up with, I saw her frowning at me. I nearly turned around at one point, so I could ask Penny, Okay, so I’m going back, but what do I say?
Fact was, Jess had been right a week ago: I hadn’t forgiven her. Now I somehow had. (I knew better than to make this the thesis of my speech.) I’d spent a week suffering like she had for a year: inconsolable, and in private.
There was my driveway. At the end was my house. Inside was my family.
Everyone was asleep when I went prowling in, the boys in their beds, and Jessica in a nest of blankets on the carpet at the foot of ours. I heard a voice — my father’s, actually — bawling me out: What did you do to that girl? Apologize, right now. On the way over, I’d imagined her the way we’d last met, in bed, lying like a tin soldier beneath the covers, plenty of room for me to crawl in next to her. Instead she lay on her side, knees tucked up and heels behind, soapy water going down a drain. I didn’t recognize that blanket; she’d probably packed her aunt’s quilt. The moonlight at Rocky’s was cheap nickel, but the light from our hallway was rose gold. I got down on my hands and knees and crawled toward her. I tried to fold myself into that swirl.
She woke up. She looked at me. I’d gotten a long streak of fake coal dust on her pillow. She said, “Where have you been?”
“Out riding the rails,” I answered. “Tramped around. Saw this place and figured the lady of the house was softhearted. Can you spare something?”
“Always with the jokes,” she said, but with some love. We both knew: for the past year, it had not been always with the jokes. It had been ages since I cracked wise unless paid to do so.
“This leaving,” I said.
“Whose?”
“Everyone’s.” I brushed the hair at the back of her neck, and then just kept brushing, at the feathery edge at one side of her nape, then the place at the very back where her hair came down in a point. Not a widow’s peak: that was the V of hair on the other side of her head. What was this called? “Cancel everything,” I said. I couldn’t tell if she didn’t argue because she was so sleepy. Then she turned around underneath the blankets and looked at me.
“You’re in a good mood,” she said. “I hardly recognize you.”
I nodded. If that’s what she thought, I could ease into one.
All through that night, I made promises, I explained things, I swore to be better, less angry. She stayed under the covers, and eventually I wormed my way under them, too, in my wrinkled suit. I kept talking. In the morning, I went to the boys’ room and woke them up and kissed them. They seemed mostly confused that I had been away on a trip and had come back without any presents, an unheard-of thing in our house.
For a while, I believed that I’d apologized my way back into the house, that my eloquence convinced Jess not to go. That wasn’t it, though. She only let me talk to make me feel better. It was that first joke, she said, and the way I brushed the hair off her neck: she could tell my misery had broken like a fever, and it had been my misery that she planned to leave.
Not that all was forgiven, of course, on either side. Still, we vowed to be kinder to each other. It’s amazing how far a vow can go. I had the pool filled in, and the entire back lawn torn out and then reseeded. We started a foundation in Betty’s name, for underprivileged children, and Rock and I did a benefit to get it going.
“How’d you do it?” he asked me, looking at Jess and the boys.
“Do what?”
“Go back in time,” he said.
Rock himself was going forward. He’d left Lillian, just as Penny had said he would, though he hadn’t fully realized that this meant leaving Junior too. So he rented a beach house in Malibu, thinking the kid would like that, forgetting that his estranged wife knew some people who’d recently lost a child to drowning: no swimming for Rocky junior. They’d have to meet in town. So he stayed in the house by himself, and called me up to say that he couldn’t figure out where to put the sofa, as though what he missed most about Lil was her good sense concerning furniture.
“Let’s go out,” he’d say, but I was sticking close to home. These days, I mostly saw him on movie sets and at the radio studio. I thought a lot about what Penny had said the night of the hobo party: that Rocky threw people away, even as he kept their photographs—“I suffer,” he once told me, “from memoraphilia.” Sometimes I thought she’d been right: here was a man about to go through his fourth divorce, who wouldn’t visit his own parents. Other times I thought, Well, I’m still here, aren’t I? So’s Tansy, and so’s Neddy. I wanted to talk to Penny about it, as though she were a friendly, reasonable devil, and we were negotiating for Rocky’s soul. If I put up a sound enough defense, he’d be saved.
But I don’t know when Penny moved out of the pool house. I didn’t see her again, not for years.
Every day, Rocky drove around for hours: up the coast, to see Junior, to his lawyers, to the nearly bankrupt nightclub, to Tansy’s office. They were talking about TV again.
“What do you think, Mosey?” Rock asked.
“You and Tansy fight it out,” I said. “I’ll go along.”
In the meantime, I was a homebody, maybe for the first time in my life. Up until then, I’d looked for ways to sneak out, wherever I lived: to downtown Des Moines with Hattie, and then to vaudeville without her; to bars and restaurants and strange girls’ rooms; to Sukey’s, back in my bachelor days. Even during my marriage I’d done my share of nightclubbing. Jessica wanted to stay home with the kids, away from the smokers and drinkers. I loved going out. I loved walking into a room full of strangers, a party, a club. I loved watching other people perform. Don’t get me wrong, movies were the luckiest break I ever got, but I’d still rather see the clumsiest comic fiddle player struggle in the flesh with “The Flight of the Bumblebee” than watch Heifetz on a screen. People are so dear, in person. They implicate you in their talent. I know I keep talking about luck, but I never felt luckier than when I was anywhere — a hole-in-the-wall bar, someone’s living room, some swank joint that cheated you on the drinks — and heard someone really good sing. Or dance or do magic tricks or jump, suddenly, onto a table. Even the things I could do seemed better done by someone else — and to think, if I’d stayed home I would have missed it.