Six years before, I’d threatened to quit the act, but waffled. This time I stood my ground: I wanted to take a break, at the very least. Jake was ten, Nathan nine, and Gilda three. Betty would have been seven. Rocky called all the time to twist my arm. The last time was March 17, 1954. The kids and Jess and I were in her studio, watching Jake practice a Western dance — he had a cowboy outfit he loved, with chaps and a holster and a hat he wore slung back on his shoulders, its string across the hollow of his throat. I could hear the phone ring in the house. By that time we had no live-in help to answer, just a maid who came in the mornings and a cook who came at night. Normally I would have let it alone, but my sister Sadie’s husband, Abe, had been sick, and I worried she might be calling with bad news. I took the call in my study, so if we needed to fly to Des Moines for a funeral I could check my calendar to see what I’d have to cancel.
“I want to talk about this television thing,” Rocky said without prelude.
“You never rest,” I said.
“You hang around the house enough as it is.” He said this like it was a new argument, though we’d been having it since 1943. Used to persuade me.
“We’ve been working for almost twenty-five years steady,” I said. “Don’t you want to take some time off?”
That was a stupid question.
He said, “How much time?”
I pretended to think carefully. “Three years.”
“In three years,” Rocky said, “every jerk’s going to have a show. In three years, Tansy’ll have a program. Live, from Hollywood: the Buddy Tansy Hour. He’ll look at the camera and bare his teeth and pull down millions.”
“I’ll be happy for him. All that thwarted promise, finally realized.”
“But it should be us.” He tried to appeal to the actor in me. “Same character, every week. You can develop it. You’ll be married. Hey,” he said, and lowered his voice, “—I bet we could swing it so Jess can play your wife, and your kids can play themselves. How about that?”
Once upon a time this might have sounded swell to me. In the early days of our radio show, I listened to our competitors — at home, of course, never around Rock — and got jealous. Not of the laughs: of the on-air marriages. George Burns, Jack Benny, Fred Allen, Goodman Ace, Fibber McGee — those guys got to work with their wives, got to broadcast to the country that they were married, even if they didn’t play married. I loved to hear Portland Hoffa on the Fred Allen program say, in her slightly stiff, slightly boop-oop-a-doop voice, “Oh, Mister A-a-a-allen.” He’d answer, and the audience would applaud, as though both he and the people in the studio had had no idea she’d show up that night. I knew that an on-air romance resembles an off-mike one only in the names, but through the radio it sounded wonderful.
But now Jess had a job: she’d just started choreographing variety-show dance numbers at the networks. She had no interest in being in front of the camera. Besides, I couldn’t think of anything worse, my whole family on TV. “I’m not putting my kids to work,” I said. “Who am I, Fagin?”
“I was thinking Ozzie Nelson,” said Rocky, “but okay. We’ll get kid actors.”
“No, Rock. I don’t want to do this.”
“Tell me why, and I’ll tell you why you’re wrong.”
My den was in the back of our house, on the first floor so I could shuffle papers without being disturbed. The window looked out on a little patch of foliage. Fifteen years in California, and I still couldn’t identify the flora. I wished I could see Jess’s studio, though I thought I could hear Gilda and Nate and Jessica applauding Jake. Yes, there was Nate, yelling in his oddly husky voice, “Brava,” which was what I called out to his mother when she danced. Jess must have corrected him, because now he yelled, “Bravo, Bravo, Braveeeeessssssimo!” How had I come up with a kid so smart? I thought about telling Rock this story, but he was after business and it had been years — I realized with a start — since I’d told him such things. It felt like bragging.
“Two guys, two wives,” I said instead, “one guy, one wife. What’s the difference? Call it The Rocky Carter Show. Who’ll notice that I’m gone?”
He said, brusquely, “If that’s the way you want it,” and hung up.
Two hours later he drove over. He found us in the yard. Jake was on his back, idly firing his toy guns in the air; Nathan, our critic, was telling his mother a long story about a little girl at school who liked to lick other people’s sandwiches. Gilda had put on Jake’s hat and was rattling it around on her head. Everyone but me wore blue jeans. The Mike Sharps at Home, the picture in a movie magazine would have said, though we hadn’t posed for any such stories since Betty died. Before then, we did a couple, plus a newsreel piece of Jake’s fourth birthday party, Rocky standing by the heart-shaped pool and waving, me threatening fiercely to push him into the pool, then kissing him on the cheek.
“Mike,” said Rocky, which gave me a shock — he never called me Mike. “Spare a moment?”
“Hey!” said Jake, still Rocky’s particular favorite.
“Howdy pardner,” Rock said with no real enthusiasm. “Mike?”
So we went inside the house.
“I need to talk to you about this TV thing,” he said.
“I thought it was settled. The Rocky Carter Show. Solo billing. Hundred percent of the salary. Nice TV wife — get a single girl and maybe marry her off-camera too.”
“The sponsors want both of us or neither.”
“Gotta be neither, then, Rocky. I’m telling you: I need time off.”
I don’t think I really understood his desperation then. He looked awful — he’d been gaining weight steadily since he and Lil broke up, from the drink and too many breakfasts. He rarely ate anything but ham and eggs and buttered toast, up to five times a day. He had a scratch under one eyebrow, and his hair needed dyeing, and if I’d been thinking about it I would have known something was wrong, because he was so vain about his hair: he had it colored every two weeks and, for the TV show and movies, painted his scalp black beneath to cut down on the glare. Now I could see a little border of sandy brown at his hairline, like a curtain starting to rise.
He bit his upper lip, and then ran his tongue over his front teeth. I couldn’t tell whether he planned to threaten or beg me.
“Look,” he said. “Commit to a year. One year of the show, and then you’re out. By then it’ll be on its way and they won’t even miss you.”
“No,” I said.
“You son of a bitch,” he said. “After all you’ve done to me?”
He must have meant, after all I’ve done for you.
We stared at each other while we both deliberated over how much of a joke he was making. I could hear Jake knocking with the butt of his gun on the French doors behind me. “Daddy,” he said, his voice muffled through the glass. “Mom says can I have some ice cream.”
I didn’t turn around. “In a minute, honey.”
For some reason, I felt like we were in some ridiculous Western, maybe because I’d watched Jake’s cowboy dance earlier. Rocky and I faced each other. He had the advantage: he could look out on my family sitting on the grass. No telling what he’d do if I let my guard down. I couldn’t tell whether this was a comic Western or a real one, whether I’d be saved by the cavalry or a pull-apart horse.