“What’s the matter?”
She began to cry, just slightly and silently, and I thought she must be in terrible pain. Where was Annie?
But Rose said, “Jessica died. Annie told me, and then somehow I forgot, and I’ve been sitting here talking about myself like some jerk. What is wrong with me?”
“It’s okay, Rose,” I said.
“You must really hate me.” She picked up Mickey Mouse and threw him across the porch into a screen, where he frightened several insects.
“Rose, Rose, of course not.” Actually I liked it (though I never would have said so)—I’d found a place where it seemed possible for minutes at a time for me and anybody else to forget that Jess had died. I had work here. Grief makes you do things, pick up knitting, weed the yard, keep your hands busy, but best is talk, jokes, X marks the spot. She was funny, my kid sister. Surely Rose was the one we couldn’t spare. I remembered her wanting to be on the radio as a teenager, how I’d teased her, how she’d put the idea of vaudeville back in my head. She’d run away from home, but only got as far as Kansas City before being snatched back by Annie. You didn’t run far enough, I wanted to tell her. You should have come with me. That wasn’t fair: now she had Ed, and dying in California was no more picturesque than dying in Valley Junction, I knew that much.
I picked up the doll and tucked him back into bed. Of course I didn’t hate her. “I love you,” I said, smoothing the sheet over the doll’s disturbingly pink stomach.
This took her by surprise. She said, somewhere between laughing and crying, “You love Mickey Mouse?”
“I love Mickey Mouse,” I said. “And I love you, Minnie Mouse Dubuque.”
“Who is,” she said, wincing but definitely laughing, “a pain in the ass.”
I said, “Rose, ssshh. Don’t give your doctor any ideas.”
When Jessica was sick—
I can’t.
When Jessica died, when she died, when the nurse came out of her hospital room, from which I had been banished minutes before (one o’clock in the morning, they let me sleep there) and told me she was dead, I got in the car and drove around and then I called my children and then I was occupied for a great deal of time, which was good, because while she was sick I kept extremely busy all the time doing things for her and at one in the morning what seemed terrible was that I had suddenly run out of things to do, as though I’d been handed my pictures. Fired. Let me cut down on the euphemisms. This isn’t a vaudeville house, I can say anything I fucking well please, as Rocky would tell me. Then we had the service and then I arranged for her to be flown back to Des Moines, which was the first time Jessica had ever been on an airplane—she once said, “The only way I will ever get on a plane is if I drive somewhere far away and die and they have to fly my body back,” and I’d always loved this fear, even though it made travel difficult—we drove and took trains and steamers and ferries, and sometimes I flew and she and the kids would catch up in the car. My darling, let me kiss your phobia.
I remember everything. Her shoe size, her dress size, the seventeen times she winked at me in our thirty-two years of marriage—“Only seventeen?” Rocky, a spendthrift winker himself, would have said, but Jess knew if she did it more often it wouldn’t mean anything, each time I had forgotten that it was something she did, but then we’d be separated in a crowd, and maybe I was bored or maybe I missed her, and she’d look at me and wink.
I just always had a crush on her.
“I’m going, my darling,” she’d said the day she died. “Where are you going?” I asked. She took my hand and said, “Out the window on gossamer wings.”
And now here I was alone in Iowa, an out-of-work actor. I considered staying. “I could help with Rose,” I told Annie later that afternoon. “I’ve picked up a few nursing skills lately.” And I could make jokes, I thought, all day long. I’d dig up every slapstick routine I could.
Annie kissed my cheek. “Sweet boy. No. If you stay around she’ll think she’s dying for sure.”
“I’m sure she knows.”
“Don’t say that. She’s better some days. Go on home to your kids. How many times a day do they call here? And you think they can spare you?”
“I guess not,” I said, and she said, “Ed’ll drive you to the airport.”
I packed my little leather bag in my father’s empty house. Years of vaudeville had made me proud of how little I needed to travel. Ed picked me up in a new Chevy, which I admired.
“I’ll park and come in,” he said at the airport curb, but I waved him away.
“No more big good-byes,” I told him.
Inside the airport, a tired young woman in an airline uniform leaned on the ticket desk, a red cloth flower in her buttonhole. Apparently, I was the only person leaving Des Moines today. I thought of Rocky—I often thought of Rocky—running away from home. He’d been gone eighteen years now, and had stayed in touch with people just enough to make it clear that somewhere he was alive. He’d called Tansy, drunk, from a pay phone four years ago, mumbling about a comeback. He sent Rocky junior postcards that had been hand canceled, no legible city. (“Do you think he’s in town, and just slips them into my mailbox?” Junior asked. “I think he’s charmed a postmistress,” I answered.) He never called me. He never wrote. “I’m beginning to think you don’t love me,” I said aloud.
Maybe I’d pull a Rocky. I wouldn’t go home. I’d write my kids: Off traveling. I’m sure we’ll meet again someday.
I imagined stepping onto the tarmac and hailing a plane like you’d hail a taxi, a gag we’d pulled in Fly Boys, though this was the Des Moines International Airport, which meant I could only get as far away as nearest Canada. Who was I kidding, anyway? Of course I’d go home.
Not right away, though.
Nearly two decades before, when people asked me my theories on Rocky’s whereabouts, I couldn’t think of an answer. Mexico, I thought sometimes, speaking Spanish and getting brown as a berry. London: he loved the pubs there. Some big city where no one knows him. He’s gotten a crew cut, wears glasses. Once I’d outfitted him, I had to employ him. Bartender? Handyman? Gigolo? I remained unconvinced.
No: Las Vegas. Naturally Las Vegas. What kind of idiot had I been? He’d even said so, sort of, after This Is Your Life: he claimed he’d been booked there. Las Vegas was perfect for Rock, a twenty-four-hour town, free drinks, gambling, endless strangers. Girl singers in every casino. Strippers.
I bought a ticket from the weary agent in Des Moines, and on the flight to Chicago, and then to Las Vegas, I constructed his new existence. The crew cut and the glasses could stay. He worked at a casino, probably as a dealer. He told jokes as he took people’s money. Though he’d just turned seventy, he couldn’t afford to retire. After all, he’d recently been married for the twelfth time.
I almost expected him to meet my plane. “You figured it out!” he’d say, and he’d tow me to the airport bar and order me a drink. “What took you so long? Any day now, I kept thinking.” The bartender would set down two bright pink drinks and Rocky would pay in chips and soon we’d be two bright pink drunks and he’d raise his glass:
“To us! To me! Especially to me!”
There was nobody looking for me at the gate in Vegas. I took a taxicab to the strip, undeterred.
Picture me going from joint to joint, a double exposure of bubbly neon and bubblier cocktails across my increasingly bewildered face. Any cliché you choose will probably fit. At some point it occurred to me that I had come to Vegas so that I could get as drunk as I wanted, which is to say extremely. No: Rocky. He was here somewhere. I examined every dealer, every bartender, every cigarette girl. Mostly, I knew this was a delusion. I needed to keep my mind busy, that was all, so I’d invented this one-object scavenger hunt. What’s more: whenever someone died, I suffered from the belief that he or she was actually alive and living elsewhere. Well someone had died, that was true, but Rocky—as far as we could tell—was alive, did live elsewhere. Might be, in fact, found! How c
razy was that?
To one confused but pretty cocktail waitress I claimed to be a private eye trying to locate an unsuspecting heir to a million-dollar fortune. I sat down at a roulette table and instantly won $350. Someone brought me another drink, and I threw half the chips on her tray and filled my pockets with the rest and stumbled on to the next casino, where I was sure I’d find Rocky. I went from the Dunes to the Sands to the Sahara: Moses in the desert.
According to my watch it was somewhere after midnight. I had to hold my wrist steady to see. Just this morning I’d been in Iowa. I’d buried my wife. I’d realized I would soon bury another sister. Only hours ago I’d been responsible and sober, a loved father and grandfather and brother. But not a husband, not a husband, and I sat down on the edge of a fountain in the lobby of a hotel and rubbed my face. That water would sober me up if I jumped in. Across the lurid carpet a security guard sized me up, wondering if I was a dangerous drunk or just an ordinary one. Dangerous, I wanted to say, because I was, and unlocatable, and drunker than I’d ever been in my life, looking for a man who seemed to be my only friend in the world even though we hadn’t spoken in nearly two decades.
It had taken years for Rocky to hit bottom; it had taken me fifteen hours.
I reached behind me to wet my fingers, splashed my forehead, and then somehow stood up and launched myself through the hotel lobby and into the casino behind it. I could hear a woman singing in a middle-aged and sexy voice.
My kisses are like cigarettes
Try one, you’ll want a pack
But you’ll find they’re killing kisses
I need a warning printed on my back
When the doctor cuts you open
He won’t know what turned your heart so black.
I tried to locate the source. Ah: tucked in a corner, a small bar and a stage, entertainment for people who wanted to sit down but weren’t willing to cough up the dough for the show. Me. I squinted at the figure onstage. Her chestnut hair shone cherryish from the red gels on the lights, and the microphone she gripped cast a shadow like a port-wine birthmark across her face. Sequins, of course, emerald-green against her pale skin.
The space between me and the stage was packed with small round tables on stalks and big round chairs on wheels. Barely any floor space at all, but the chairs were so huge you wouldn’t feel crowded once you sat, though it might be hard to get up if you’d arrived sober and stayed through a couple of sets: you could lose track of how drunk you were.
I knew precisely how drunk I was. See that old man? Pathetic. Where’s his wife? She should take him home. I instructed myself to marshal up some dignity, then found that I had none, so I held on to the backs of the chairs, apologizing to the few occupants I encountered, all the way to the little stage, at which point I fell over at the singer’s feet. I grabbed her by the ankle and looked up: Penny O’Hanian Carter.
A bouncer came to remove me. I was seconds away from being thrown out of a casino at one in the morning. Penny shook her head at him: I was fine, I could stay. She sang her next verse to me.
My love is just like bourbon
It’s so smooth that it’s a sin
The thirst runs in your family
Your parents called again.
They swear they’ll leave each other
Long as I will take them in.
Wotta professional. She made me part of her act.
Penny must have checked me into the hotel room. Everything was red and braided; it felt like waking up in somebody else’s stomach. Better his than mine. I went to the bathroom to vomit.
Hadn’t I grown up any? I found a note taped to my shirtsleeve from Penny, suggesting that if I was able, I should meet her downstairs at the buffet nearest the elevators, the elevators nearest my room, at ten o’clock. I wondered whether Rocky had ever told her of pinning a similar note with similar directions some forty years before. Okay, I had enough time to call downstairs to have a razor and toothbrush sent up. I’d have to go in the wretched clothes I was wearing, because I’d managed to lose my case. Thank God I had buried Joseph’s ashes in Des Moines. I saw myself placing the tin can on the roulette board. What would you win if you bet a corpse?
My sense of humor was getting very black indeed.
“You’re vertical!” said Penny when she saw me.
“Barely,” I said.
“Let’s start again,” said Penny. “Mikey!” She half stood up to greet me. “Buddy!”
Good old Penny. I’d been feeling a little embarrassed, but she treated me like a returning astronaut. I tumbled into the red booth across from her. I’d thought I’d ended the night at the Sahara, but the elevators had opened on Circus Circus, and I expected then to see Penny in clown drag. Instead, she wore a knit pant suit that wrapped around her thin waist. As a young woman, she’d aged badly, but then she stopped. I couldn’t remember how old she was. She looked forty, but that was impossible.
“So,” I said. “We meet again.”
“Always in the most awkward places,” she said. “What are you doing out here? Performing?”
“No,” I said. I’d slept off any delusions I had about finding Rocky, although here was his ex-wife. That should count for something. What was I doing here?
“Jess died,” I said. “I don’t know. I guess I’m avoiding going back to the house.”
“Oh, Mike,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“Somehow I got it into my head—well, I’d gotten to miss Rocky. Instead of missing Jess. It seemed easier. So I came here. Started looking.” I laughed at myself. “I’d leave one place, and I’d be absolutely positive he’d be in the next.”
“But he wasn’t,” she said.
“No.”
Penny shook her head. “He’s not in Vegas.”
“It’s a big town,” I said.
“He’s not here,” she said.
“Have you been looking too?”
“I’m going to get you some breakfast.” She stood up suddenly and edged her way out of the booth. I noticed she hadn’t answered my question. “You’re in a delicate condition. Eggs? Eggs will be good. Toast,” she said very certainly.
Penny had always liked buffets, because that way she didn’t have to read menus. I wondered whether she wore contact lenses now. When she came back, I said, “If he’s not in Vegas, do you know where he is?”
She’d shored up whatever she’d almost let slip before. “Of course not.”
“Are you sure?”
“Well.” She spread some jam on a triangular piece of toast for me. “I did. I’ll admit it. I saw him maybe three years back.”
“Where?”
She thought. “Here.”
“Las Vegas?”
“Sure, that’s what I said. He was coming through, he looked me up, we had a few drinks, he went on.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I beg your pardon,” she said. “I haven’t seen you for thirty years. Thirty years. We’re twice as old as we used to be. Suddenly I’m supposed to know that you’re looking for Rocky? The way he told it, you guys weren’t speaking to each other.”
The math confused me. Weren’t you always twice as old as you used to be? She shuffled then stacked the toast on my plate. It, too, looked like something internal. When she held the ketchup over my eggs, I had to catch her by the wrist before she slaughtered the entire plate. I had a headache. I wondered if a screwdriver would help.
“We were talking to each other,” I said. “I mean, the last time I saw him we were talking to each other.”
“How long ago was that?”
“Nineteen fifty-seven.”
“I’d say if you hadn’t talked to him from 1957 till 1972, which is when I saw him—face it, you weren’t talking to each other.”
“No,” I said. “I guess we weren’t. Do you know where he was living?”
“He wouldn’t say. Somewhere warm, I think. He had a pretty good tan.”
Then we didn’t say anything.
> “So,” she said. “When did your wife die?”
“Three days ago.”
She gasped. Then she leaned forward and looked at me. She seemed about to check me for fever. “I figured you meant months—” Very slowly, she said, “Your children. Still in California?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Okay,” she said. “You’ll give me Jake’s number. You remember Jake’s number?”
“Of course,” I said, irritated.
And she drove me back to the airport, and packed me in a plane.
I thought about this conversation all the way back to L.A., examining it for lies and evasions. If you play a character in a movie, sometimes you later confuse it with job experience, and Rocky and I had been detectives—lousy ones, sure, but in the end we always figured it out—in three of our pictures. She knows something. I wasn’t sure what, but I saw the holes, the way she mostly just agreed with what I said. Another time, maybe I could have talked her out of the information. Come on, Penny, aren’t we friends? But then my plane landed, and this time there was somebody there to meet me, Jake, his hands stuffed in his pockets, looking for all the world like he’d lost his best friend in the world, like he had terrible news to break to me, and then I remembered what it was, and I let him drive me home and put me in bed and for the next year I let my kids—chiefly Gilda, as always—take care of me, and then the trail went cold.
16
Living History
Rose and Ed never had kids. He died a month after she did. They’d been married thirty-two years, same as Jess and me. In some ways I thought his death showed the depth of his character: he couldn’t live without her, he wouldn’t even try. They left the store to Ida’s grandson, Paul Schloss, who’d worked in the store every summer and loved it. A family business, after all. My father’s wishes were granted, though Paul and his wife changed the name to Schloss’s Boutique.
Valley Junction is called Valley Junction again, except the name refers to the neighborhood: the city of West Des Moines sprawls all around it, strip malls and housing developments. Fifth Street has become fashionable, in its way, antiques stores and kitchen shops and restaurants, a historic district, a tourist site, if such things can exist in West Des Moines. On the other hand, if a boutique can . . .