But after my strange week at Rocky’s, anyplace that wasn’t my house, with my family, couldn’t hold my interest. “Your spirit’s been broken,” Rock said to me, newly bachelored and looking for company. No: I’d had a taste of my own medicine. Maybe I hadn’t been in the habit of throwing people away, but I’d left plenty behind in my long wandering career. I’d always hated to say good-bye to people — which isn’t anything special, of course, most people are miserable failures at farewells. I’d do anything to get out of them. Even now, when Jess and I and the kids went to Des Moines to see family, I’d get anxious the day of our exit, because I’d have to say good-bye to all my sisters, to Ed Dubuque, who I loved, to Jessica’s Joseph, who I didn’t. Bad luck to say, This is the end. Better: Soon. Still. I made it, you see, a nearly religious belief, a twist on my mother’s curses. If you never say good-bye, no one will ever leave you.
Then Jessica said she would, and though she decided against it I developed a fear of the thing itself, and not just the word.
Gilda was born a year later, nearly prescribed by Jessica’s doctor. That’s what doctors did in those days: when a woman lost a child, they told her to have another, a make-up baby, as quickly as possible, to help you over the grief. We named her for my mother, and after that I barely went out at all.
Looking back, I think the team died that week I spent at Rocky’s. I’d thrown myself into work; now I wanted to throw myself into family.
“A couple years more,” said Rocky. “Then we can retire. We gotta crack TV, for instance. You gotta let the boys see you on TV.”
“I guess,” I said, though privately I believed that television was a fad, a waste of material; between the radio show and the movies, we barely had enough anyhow. We’d look awful, too, shrunk down and fishy. Who’d want to watch that?
Remember, I’m the guy who thought vaudeville would never die.
13. Live from Hollywood
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome—
(FANFARE)
It’s the Carr Oil Comedy Hour!
(FANFARE)
Starring this week’s hosts—
(DOUBLE FANFARE)
Rocky Carter and Mike Sharp—
with their guests
(HORNS)
Don Ameche!
Martha Raye!
The Dove City Dancers!
And now, ladies and gentlemen—
(HORNS)
Carter and Sharp!
(THE BAND BREAKS INTO “MY DARLING LIVES IN DES MOINES”)
(THE CAMERA SHOWS AN EMPTY STAGE, A CRUDELY PAINTED BACKDROP OF A PARK)
Carter and Sharp!
(HORNS. BAND STARTS AGAIN)
Where are those guys!
(A WHISTLE FROM THE HOUSE)
ROCKY: Camera three! Over here, camera three!
(APPLAUSE)
And the camera swivels to find two mugs in the audience, Carter and Sharp, hands in pockets, the surrounding crowd cracking up for no reason.
I’d been wrong. I loved TV.
We broke into television as the once-a-month hosts of a weekly hour-long live variety show. By 1951, our movie career was mostly over, and we were back where we’d begun, except famous, rich, and middle- aged: a thin man and a fat man on a stage, willing to do anything for a laugh. We were shameless. We insulted the band leader, we knocked down scenery on purpose, we tried to crack each other up. We broke props we’d need later, just so we could improvise first about the breakage, and then about the lack of props. Our old wheezing vaudeville jokes were new again, thanks to the postwar baby boom: the country was full of brand-new people with blissfully unsophisticated senses of humor. You could see Rocky search for the red light that told us which camera was paying attention, doing a slow burn and then saying, “Watch me, camera two,” and tipping his hat. You could see me shove an extra cream puff in his mouth in a banquet scene, so he couldn’t deliver his next line.
Sometimes we laughed so hard we ended up in each other’s arms, even if offstage we weren’t speaking. We spent a lot of time not speaking.
I can’t remember what tipped off that round of fights. No, wait, I do: yes. He’d wanted to talk, and called me up. “Come out to the club,” he said, meaning his own.
“Can’t you come here?”
“No,” he said. “It makes me too sad. You got your happy family there, and what have I got?”
So I went to the Rock Club, into which Rock now poured all of his spare money. He couldn’t stand the idea of it closing — a guy can spend all day in his own bar drinking, and it’s business; a guy drinking in another man’s bar is bad behavior. Chances are Rock deducted his martinis off his taxes. That night, he wore a light brown gabardine suit, a mustard-colored shirt, and a yellow tie. He probably thought he looked spiffy, but mostly he resembled a large cheese sandwich. A cigarette burned in his hand, a bad sign: he favored cigars unless he was upset enough to chain-smoke.
“Friend, Hebrew, countryman,” he said. “Lend me your ear.”
“Have both,” I offered.
He waved to a waiter, who brought us whiskeys. I sipped mine; I’d been drinking so little lately I’d lost all capacity.
“I’ve missed you, Professor,” he said.
“Where have I been?”
“You tell me. Lying in bed, is my guess.”
“Rocky, I see you all the time.”
He tilted his head to let what seemed to him a lie pass. “Anyhow. Drink your bourbon, it’s good for you. I’m just lonely. Just want some company. How are the kids?”
“Swell,” I said. “Wonderful.”
He nodded. “I miss being married.”
“When you’re married you want to be a bachelor, when you’re single you want a wife.”
He got a thinking look on his face, and I realized he’d misinterpreted me: I meant he wanted to be a bachelor, he wanted a wife, but he’d taken this as some universal wisdom, as though I suffered from the same desires.
“You need to make up your mind, Rocky,” I said.
He’d taken ahold of the salt and pepper shakers, made them dance across the white cloth of the table and then kiss, silver top to silver top. I watched this puppet show. Finally he sighed, as though he’d learned another universal truth from the condiments: even salt and pepper belonged together, but he’d never have anyone to own, to own him, except maybe his straight man. “You know me, Professor. I have such lousy luck.”
For some reason, I saw this all of a sudden for the preposterous lie it was: Rocky had plenty of luck with women. I thought of his four wives; of the landladies, all those years ago, who loved him; of the chorus girls on our show I knew would be happy to cheer him up, at least momentarily. He could charm any woman who didn’t particularly interest him, and even some who did. Long ago, though, he’d decided that he was a failure at love, and had held on to that fact as though it were the striped shirt he still, at forty-seven, wore professionally: a vaudeville prop. He once told me that to be a star, you had to have a spectacular romantic life, or a miserable one. “No one with average luck in love has ever made it big,” he said. “Look it up.”
“So go back to Lillian,” I said now. “She’ll take you.”
“Whatever my problems are, Lillian’s not the solution.”
“So when you say you miss being married, you’re looking for a fifth wife?”
“Oh, who keeps count?”
I could tell he expected me to laugh, the way I would have once. Instead, I told him what his third wife had said to me two years before: “You have a family. Go home to it.”
He looked at me almost hatefully. Go home? In this suit? Then he sighed again, as though he had explained this to me dozens of times but I was too dumb to absorb it. “Well, in the fairy-tale world of Moses Sharensky, maybe that works. You leave, you come back, all is forgiven. Life isn’t so fucking easy for the rest of us.”