10

Biblical Slapstick

I wanted to show my midwestern sweetheart everything about California, but she’d already seen it all. She didn’t like Hollywood Boulevard, which still staggered me so you would have guessed I was a tourist, not a guy whose name appeared with almost mind-numbing regularity on the marquees of the movie palaces, whose footprints could be seen in the cement in front of Grauman’s Chinese. (I swear Rocky wore bigger shoes that day, so that his feet would dwarf mine in perpetuity.) “The ocean!” I said. “It’s nice,” said Jess. “The mountains!” I explained. “I’ve climbed them,” she told me. One day I dragged her out into the backyard. “Hummingbirds!” I instructed. “Look!”

She did. She was silent a long time, and then she said, “There are hummingbirds in Iowa.”

“Never,” I said, looking at the little mechanical genius that now backed out of one flower and hung in the air like a cartoon fairy, looking over what the other blooms offered.

“I’ll get you a bird book,” she said, “and you can look it up. But isn’t he beautiful?”

“Beautiful,” I said sadly. “Iowa?”

“Yes, Mr. Audubon. Iowa.”

Despite having climbed a mountain, she viewed Nature as mostly an inconsistently lit corridor that led from one building to another. She adored music: Tchaikovsky and Mendelssohn, and big bands, and jazz, anything you could dance to, anything you might—with the right people—reproduce in your living room. She could not sing at all, but she loved to, so she did—not like Hattie, who flaunted her pitchless vibrating alto voice, but softly, so you could hardly hear how wrong she was. She loved in general the works of man, painting and poetry and architecture.

And she loved me.

This was a fascinating prospect. She really did love me, my Jessica. I kept thinking that she’d notice she didn’t. Sometimes she could be almost dismissive of my behavior, if it displeased her—sniffing the air for a snuck cigarette, shaking her head as I tried to memorize lines to movies that she never would have gone to, had her husband not been one of the stars—and would give me a look that I well remembered from my days as a boarder under the gaze of a disappointed landlady: Mr. Sharp, is this how you act in your own home? But that was just Jessica: she loved me, but that didn’t mean she’d put up with all sorts of nonsense. Minutes later—she was not mad, she would not brood—she’d call me her boy (how did she know this is what I would want to be?) and outline my ear with her finger. Or she’d sit in a chair across from me, and ask me about my childhood. I told her different stories than I told Rocky: at least, the telling was different. With Rock the point was to be funny, to pump tragedy full of slapstick. You knew that there were awful things in this world—what people had to bear!—but God had rigged up one kind of consolation: you could get a good story out of it. “This,” said Rock, “is the lesson of the Bible.” Jessica did not love comedy, despite loving a comedian; she wanted to be moved by stories unadorned by wisecracks. The sadder the better, and so I told her the whole story of Hattie’s death, a story I had not told at all since I first met Rocky, and only an abridged version then.

“She died with me angry at her,” I said to Jessica.

“Do you think so? Sounds like you had forgiven her.”

No, I said, I hadn’t. Jessica shrugged. She’d never argue about that sort of thing. But her eyes darkened, which meant they were damp, and she laid a hand upon me—more people should have this knack—that was somehow less about comfort, which I couldn’t have stood, and more about just wanting to touch me. She did not pat, she did not hug, she did not there-there. She just set her hand on my arm. That’s what she always did, she’d touch my elbow or stomach or the back of my neck, as though she wondered what a sad man felt like, so we could be sad together.

And generally, when she did this, no matter what time it was, we’d go to bed.

On the other hand, we went to bed when we were happy, too. She was amused by my constant willingness, and I grateful for hers, which in those years was what I believed marriage was. Years of vaudeville meant I never gave a thought to when decent people embarked on carnal embraces: I’d worked nights, and besides, I didn’t know any decent people. Not that I told her this. I mentioned Mimi, but otherwise my past was my past. It was scattered across the middle of the country, and here we were at the edge. Maybe some days in Dayton, Dubuque, Duluth (dear Duluth!), part of my past would walk into a theater, and see me: So that’s what happened to that guy. I felt no need to go likewise looking.

I had Jessica. In the mornings she stood in the bathroom, naked, winding her hair on the back of her head and fixing it with a two-part contraption, a long skewer and a curved bar; the pieces worked together, like an arrow drawn in a bow, at her nape. The bathroom was so porcelain-white that even pale Jessica looked pink in it. In fact, if I came to the door without my glasses on, I saw an impressionist painting: white, with a smudge of slightly ruddier white; a curl of black; some silver-blue bursting in through the pebbled glass window. In some ways she was fastidious and in others filthy. She showered and powdered herself with talcum and then she’d put on an unwashed leotard covered in fuzzy fabric blemishes and would dance all day. By evening she would smell like something burning—a small something, a thing that shouldn’t be burned. Not consumed, just a spark at the heart of something densely packed.

What was marriage to me, a guy who had, historically, gotten around? Favors granted endlessly, cheerfully, complicatedly. A certain relaxation of good manners. Permission to stick my nose anywhere. My knuckles had already grazed every part of her body as we danced, as we stepped away from dancing. This was marriage: sticking my nose into every alcove of her body. A skinny ballerina. She had tiny biceps, though her legs were decidedly muscly. You could see her ribs above and below her small breasts. Her sweat smelled like rain-barrel water, sun-warmed and touched with rust.

“My feet are ugly,” she told me once, a single moment of self-deprecation. They weren’t. They were just covered with the evidence of her work, the bottoms thick and darker than the rest of her skin, a gray lampshade over a white light. The lines of her footprint were slightly darker than that. Her big toes cocked over, and her little toes were beveled: they had distinct edges where they tucked in against the rest of her foot. The grain of her toenails ran side to side, unlike her fingernails, but in this she was probably not unique. Only her arches resembled the rest of her, resembled the talc she doused herself with. I kissed them. Why was a foot curved except for kisses?

Her hands were well trained, maybe from years of describing things while dancing. Now, they described me. Was my back really my back, before Jessica swept one hand from the top of my head to the hinge of my knees? No, it had been a jumble of parts, the nape of my neck to keep my necktie up, a pair of chummy shoulders, a length of spine, a prat for pratfalls, legs for hightailing it out of there, all certainly previously kissed and bitten and even spanked, but not this: all me. I felt like I could think great thoughts with my skin. She curled her fists into my armpits, then ran her hands (opening) down the underside of my arms past my elbows, till we were chest to chest and her fingers were around my faulty wrists and I wished I could bend them, to take her hands, maybe if I just tried, and then she stretched her arms a little wider, and suddenly we were palm to palm, palm to palm. She had quite a wingspan, my wife. She nudged my nose with her nose, she fluttered her lashes on my eyelids. Eskimo kiss, butterfly kiss, soul kiss, when I was a young man I collected these kisses the way some daft old women amass spoons from every state in the union, acquiring, until they run out of holes in the collection, dozens of miniature spoons with symbols on the end to pledge their allegiances, a beehive for the beehive state, a keystone for Pennsylvania, a full set and nothing to eat dinner with. Jessica rubbed her forehead against mine, as though she were a patient foreign-language instructor: how would I know what a chin was, unless I felt another chin upon it? Repeat after me: cheekbone, temple, left ear, right ear, toes. I hadn’t known. Really she was three inches shorter than me, but in bed she could make herself my height. In vaudeville I’d seen an act like this, a guy who stood beside a taller man—the short guy slowly elongated himself, put a fraction of an inch between each vertebra, a fraction of an inch at the top of his kneecap and another at the bottom, until he stood next to a shorter man, the same one. The audience blinked, then applauded. That was the whole trick, and it didn’t seem much till Jessica did it: she rubbed her instep over my ankle, then my instep, then the bottom of my foot, never losing track of our kiss, the pulses in our wrists against each other.

She signed up at the Hollywood Canteen as a hostess, of course—we all had to do our part, and Jessica’s specialty was dancing. We went together: I served drinks and dinner, and Jessica danced with soldiers and sailors and flyers: you could see guys walk away from her, delighted by the dance and confused by the conversation. Did she have a boyfriend? they’d ask. Married, she’d answer. Pretend you’re my girl, they’d say, and she’d smile and say she couldn’t. Sure you can, they’d say, but she couldn’t, she was incapable. In some ways she had nearly no imagination, but I can’t say it bothered me much in this instance.

“You let your wife dance with anybody,” Rocky said, on one of the nights he showed up at the Canteen; we’d performed earlier in the evening.

“Only with guys in uniform,” I told him. Well, if the most valuable thing I had to give to the war effort was my wife, I’d do it, as long as she came home with me at night. And danced in sight of me at all times. And never, ever got talked into a game of make-believe, not with the suavist officer or the most innocent about-to-be-shipped-out sailor boy.

Still, soon enough she got pregnant and even the sailor and soldier boys had a hard time pretending she wasn’t another guy’s girl.

At one elbow, excessive Rocky; at the other, my abstemious wife. When Jessica and I settled into married bliss, it was all I could do not to compare her to Rocky, and not always favorably. She had plenty of rules. She didn’t drink; she hated rich foods; she could deliver a lecture against gravy that made it sound as though gravy had invaded Poland. She couldn’t bear to hear people rhapsodize about food. She strictly forbade indoor smoking.

“This is just a little cigar,” Rocky told her one night, when he’d come over and demanded an old-fashioned midwestern meal; Jess cooked him a cheese omelette, oeufs Des Moines. She’d sent home the cook, an Irish nineteen-year-old named Nora who specialized in rich cream sauces—liquid gout, said Rocky—and mashed turnips. Jess barely tolerated her, torn between hating hired help and despising housework.

“Nevertheless,” Jess said.

“This cigar is next to nothing,” said Rock. But he was already genially sliding it into his jacket pocket. He’d brought over three bottles of champagne and two of wine, all for the three of us, and kept pouring glasses for Jess that she never touched. He emptied his water glass and tried again, as though if he booby-trapped the table with enough vessels she’d eventually fall in.

“Mr. Carter,” Jessica said. From the very start that was their joke, a cheerful and annoyed formality. “I don’t drink wine.”

“A whiskey woman, then. No? Martinis. Gimlets?”

“Coffee,” said Jessica.

“I’m just curious,” he said. “If you wanted to have a drink, what would you have? I’ll buy you the best. Vodka? Or kirsch: I bet kirsch. I once knew a ballerina—”

“I haven’t the slightest,” said Jess. “I’ve never tasted alcohol.”

“Really?” I said. I mean, I knew she didn’t drink, I just didn’t know she never had. I snagged the bottom of one of the glasses Rocky had poured her and sloshed some wine onto the tablecloth, a gift from my sister Ida. Jess got up and went to the bar for some club soda to sop up the stain.

“You married this guy sober?” Rocky said.

“Drunk with love,” Jess said wryly, which even so delighted me.

“You’ve been to Paris,” said Rocky. “You lived in New York. Sometime, somewhere, a toast, a prayer—”

“Never,” Jess said.

“Grounds for divorce,” Rocky told me, but of course I loved it: I loved any new thing I learned about her.

I stood up from the table. “We’ll smoke outside.”

“Oh, goody,” he said, “that’s allowed?”

From the lanai, he surveyed my grounds, as if he couldn’t quite figure out what the place was missing. “She’s something. Is she ever something.”

“She’s got ideas,” I offered.

“I noticed.”

I crossed my legs on my chaise longe. “I was hoping the two of you would hit it off.”

He laughed then. “We are. Can’t you tell? We adore each other.”

“Good,” I said dubiously.

“No! Ask her. Jess—” he called.

“Don’t do that. She’ll lie. She’s very polite. . . .”

“No she isn’t,” he said.

“No she isn’t,” I agreed.

“But okay. You ask her. Later tonight.” He pulled out the cigar and looked at it. “Oh,” he said, “if only someone would make me straighten up and fly right.”

“Penny’s not the girl for that,” I told him.

“She’s not the girl for anything.” He twirled the cigar with the tips of his fingers, let it slide down the back of his hand, caught it, twirled it again. “She’s gone for good, this time.”

“She’ll be back.”

“Not this time. I told her not to. Penny can take anything except a lack of admiration. I told her”—he sighed—“told her I wasn’t attracted to her. Not after that Sukey business.”

“That Sukey business.”

“Well, really. It’s not that she slept with a girl. It’s that it was Sukey. If Penny was looking, I would have found her a nice date. No, I would have! Some dancer. But Sukey Decker? Who hates me?”

“You finally figured that out, huh? Well, look at it this way. With Penny’s eyesight she probably didn’t realize it wasn’t you till it was too late.”

He pursed his lips.

“Rocky?”

“You’ll pardon me, you son of a bitch, if that doesn’t make me feel any better.”

“Sorry.”

“Sorry and laughing, sure. Anyhow, it’s not all Sukey’s fault. Penny’s moved in and out so often I should install a turnstile. Charge admission.”

“Offer to sell her a season pass.”

“You misunderstand. She’s gone. You know, I thought the one advantage of marrying a simple woman was that I’d be able to understand her.”

“You think Penny’s simple?”

“Not dumb. Just not complicated. I thought.”

“You were wrong. She’s plenty complicated.”

“Tell me more.”

“Uh-uh. I’m drunk. I’m liable to say things I don’t mean.”

“Fair enough. Educate me some other way, Professor. Tell me about your wife.”

“She’s not simple either.”

“No kidding. Tell me—tell me what the two of you talk about. It’s late. You’re in the living room. What happens next?”

“Depends.”

“You love her?”

“Yes. I do. Did I forget to tell you that’s important in a marriage?”

“There’s always been plenty of love in my marriage, kid. It’s just that me and the missus have lousy aim. Okay: so you’re in the living room. She’s sitting in her chair. You’re on the sofa. You look at her. What do you think?”

“Mostly, I think it would be nice to crawl across the room on my hands and knees and sit by her feet.”

“Jesus. Well, that’s you. I don’t kowtow to women.”

“You just kowtow with money. You just throw money at the problem. Anyhow, I don’t want to crawl across the floor to kowtow, I don’t think.”

“Then what?”

“I don’t know. It’s a big room. I think maybe I just want to get across it.”

“Walk.”

“I want to get across it without her asking me where I’m going, and would I get her something while I’m up, and is it time for bed already? I want to get from one side of the room to the other without her noticing.”

“Yeah, but what do you want to do once you get to the other side?”

“I don’t know. Sit there. Put my hand on her ankle.” (Put my hand on her ankle, and feel that tendon at the back of her heel, as subtly lined as a run in a stocking. Put my head in her lap.)

“You just want attention, old dog.”

“No. I mean: no. It’s like I want to be near her without her really noticing. Sneak across the room. Put my head on her lap. Maybe she pushes her hand through what’s left of my hair, but she doesn’t even look up from her book. Like she’s used to me being there.”

“Like you’re a dog.”

“Have it your way. Maybe. A good dog. A loved dog.”

“Yeah. Sure.” He stroked his cigar as though he was Aladdin, thinking carefully before he summoned the genie. “That’d be okay.”

I’m Light on Your Feet

Rocky discovered Jessica’s sweet tooth, and liked to try to stuff her full as a piñata. Usually he succeeded: his taste in chocolates, said Jessica, was nothing short of genius, and even during the war managed huge smuggled boxes of European bonbons.

Wasn’t it unseemly for a man other than her husband to supply her with candy?

So I’d top him: I’d build her a candy box of her own, a music box: a dance studio. I hired some set guys from the studio to design and build it at the far end of the back lawn. I told Jessica I was working on a game room, a place for Rock and me to play cards and smoke. The way I figured it, the studio was for her solitary dancing pleasure; I would be her audience. I really was thinking of a music box, my mother’s, where the celluloid ballerina who lived inside sprang up only when someone wanted to see her twirl.

The set guys got fancy: dramatic masks above the entrance, a mirror trimmed in painted velvet ribbon. I took her to it when they were done.

She walked over the threshold. For thirty seconds, I think, she wondered what kind of clubhouse this was. Then she figured it out, and kissed me. “Oh, Mose,” she said. “This is a wonderful place for lessons.”

I managed not to say, “For what?” (Sometimes I had to work not to be a straight man, not to say every little thing that crossed my mind so that my comic could respond to it.) I looked at the wood floors, the blond untouched barres. “That’s what I thought.”

She inspected the mirror, the small dressing room at the back, the latticed Swiss-style windows, the bathroom, the record player and radio. Her brother, Joseph, still lived in their house; otherwise I’d have paid to have certain details of her old studio (the fireplace, the peach-colored flame-shaped lighting sconces) flown in.

“Wonderful,” she said again. “The barres are too high, but other than that. Easy to fix.” She sat down in the middle of the floor. Her stomach—she was six months pregnant—hid the angles of her crossed legs. She asked if I would leave.

“Sure,” I said. I tried to make it a question.

When I got back to the house, I heard the music. I hadn’t bought any records for the player; she must have snapped on the radio. From the kitchen I could see only one small slice of a studio window, and realized that if I had wanted to watch her, I’d built the place badly. You couldn’t see anything from here, just Jessie occasionally spinning into view and out again. She must have danced through commercials, Ballet Pepsodent, Ballet Lucky Strike. A mistake, I thought: I’d given her something that would keep her from me. That’s the kind of guy I was. She was so happy, and I, kept from her happiness, was miserable.

Soon enough, Jessica offered lessons. In Des Moines, a dance lesson with her was glamorous. Not that she worked to make it so: still, she was the only Bohemian her students ever met, a single woman in leotards, forbidden jazz on the gramophone. A professional dancer, here in our city. You knew you’d never be one yourself, but for an hour a week you could pretend. Then you’d go back to your parents, or husband, or wife. You wouldn’t even tell them how much you’d loved your time in the Ninth Street studio.

But in Hollywood, professional dancers were common as bedbugs. Who hadn’t danced professionally? See that woman crossing the street? She scissored her legs in the two-o’clock spot in a Busby Berkeley kaleidoscope, and she was nothing special. Well, that was the point, to look like all the other girls angling identically for the camera that came in overhead on a crane. From below in the front row, a mother might see a certain turn of ankle. But to everyone else, you looked like the girl on either side, and how would you ever become a star that way? So you took more lessons, while privately assuming you were better than your teacher.

Even the children—Jessica’s specialty—were not impressed. They took dance lessons as a matter of course, even though most of them hated to. They were the children of the rich and famous, and they had one woman who cooked them breakfast and another who buttoned their coats and another who helped them correct their turnout and posture and faulty rhythm. All the world was hired help, wasn’t it? Jess would have taught adults, but they generally studied with people more directly connected to a studio. If I’d been a musical star, they might have signed up with my wife so they could dance loudly, hoping I was hungry for discoveries. Years later she got choreography work in television, and loved it. “All that time with those awful, awful, awful children!” she said. “What a waste!” But it was good for us, like eating loaf after loaf of lousy bread—you pick up some tips on how to get your own dough to rise.

Her only grown-ups were my old pal Johnny Atkinson and his roommate, Alan. Johnny managed to find a part in most of our movies—we always needed a blustery tough-guy to frown at our high jinks. I figured they took tap classes together.

“How’d the lesson go?” I asked Jessica one night when we were in bed.

She sighed. “Well, fine, except that John finally dropped Alan.”

“What?”

“Not hard, dear. Toward the end of the lesson. But he needs to train so it won’t happen again. You know. Adagio is hard work. John’s not the youngest man in the world. Not the thinnest. A person should be one or the other or both. With two men, we must be inventive.”

“One or the other for what?”

“For adagio,” she said. She gestured with her hands. Then she did it a little more emphatically, and I saw her hands gripped an imaginary waist and tossed an imaginary dancer in the air. “That’s what we’re doing.”

I said, “I didn’t know two men ever danced adagio together.”

“I didn’t, either, until they asked. John and Alan want to dance adagio, so. John’s too heavy to lift, so he lifts Alan, and so he’ll have to get stronger. That’s how it works. You look shocked, dear. They sleep together, I don’t think dancing together is such a surprise.”

I furrowed my brow at her.

“They’re dancers,” she said. “Very common among dancers.”

“Johnny’s not a dancer. He’s a second banana.”

“To you he’s a second banana. To Alan and me, he’s a dancer.”

I sat up and stuffed my pillow behind my back. “I don’t like the idea,” I said. Adagio? Two guys? In front of my wife?

“Well then,” said Jess, arranging my pillow better, just the way I liked it, in fact, “I suppose he can’t be your friend anymore.”

Most of my life, my education has come this way: someone else being nonchalant about things I had never dreamed of. I don’t mean men who slept with men—plenty of those in Hollywood and vaudeville; the previous Savant had been a nance—I mean friends of mine who were men who slept with men. Johnny and Alan? I sighed. “Invite me to the recital,” I told Jess.

She kissed me. “You’re invited.”

(How had I not known about Johnny? Rocky did. Once I mentioned it, he referred to them as Romeo and Julius, which ended up being the title of one of our movies, though with a different plot than Johnny and Alan’s life.)

There never was a recital, though I did imagine it: Johnny in his white shirt and striped tie, a cigar in his mouth, dancing with little Alan, struggling only momentarily to get him airborne.

In March of 1943, I had been a man-about-town in Hollywood, promised to no one (but Rocky), responsible for no one (but Rocky), enamored of no one (but Rocky). By New Year’s, I was a father, besotted by my new life, save for the few moments it absolutely terrified me. Jessica had our first child, Jacob, named for my father, on the last day of December. He seemed as good a resolution as any. Before, I had never wanted to be a father, particularly. I’d have been happy to honeymoon for the rest of my life. In this I was perhaps like my own father, who hadn’t even started on the enterprise until he was in his forties, and then he never stopped.

But a baby! What a fascinating invention. They were so sleek and new and cunning, I wanted to believe that they too must be native only to California. Jake, for instance, was a shrugging, squinch-faced, black-haired newborn. I held him; he touched his fist to his chin, and then to mine. A communicator, is what I mean. When he got older, he liked to untuck my tie, like a girl in one of our movies.

“My hummingbird,” Jess called him when he cried, reading my mind as usual. He was a tightly wound kid, florid, a flapper, worried already. A regular hummingbird.

Nathan was born a year later. “How’re things in the Fertile Crescent?” Rocky asked Jessica. “Mind your business, Mr. Carter,” she said, blushing for once. “Your neighborhood, I meant!” he said with a whoop. “Not your own personal Fertile Crescent. I would never ask about that. Not in front of your husband.” Natey was Jake’s opposite, mild mannered, white-skinned where his brother was ruddy, a baby you could tuck under your arm like a football while you attended to the business of the day. Jessica refused a nanny, but we had plenty of help by then, a housekeeper, a gardener, a cook, a driver, and Nathan was passed from arm to arm. He could sleep anywhere, he smiled all the time, but he only laughed while he was around his mother.

“She’s not so funny,” I told him. “Me, I’m funny. Everyone says so.”

“Give!” Rocky said, putting out his arms. So I did. “I’ll make him laugh.” He tried everything, surefire bits from 1,000 Jokes for Infants and Calvacade of Silly Faces. Nothing worked. He put Nathan back in Jessica’s arms, where he began to chuckle.

“My laugh!” said Rocky, pointing. But everyone knew it wasn’t true. He sat on the sofa morosely. “She always was the funny one.”

“Ain’t it the truth,” I said.

That was the night before V-J Day. Neddy and I had planned to meet at Musso’s for lunch that noon, but there was no going anywhere on Hollywood Boulevard. We decided to meet there anyhow, not knowing it would be impossible. You couldn’t call it a crowd, or a throng, or a mob—all those people, all that flittering paper, all that joy: from storefront to storefront, a giant animal made up of hands and arms and kissing mouths. I stood on one of the side streets, looked for Neddy, and laughed at the thought of finding him, and then stepped in. How long had it been since I’d been a part of a crowd? Usually I stood in front of one at personal appearances, walked down a center aisle at premieres. No one knew me here, sans toup, sans mortarboard, sans flashing egghead glasses and prissy fussbudget expression. A man in kitchen whites slapped my flank; a woman in a tweed suit kissed my cheekbone, then moved away, still kissing, as though she were a fish that moved by suction, a rare Angeleno smooch fish, except everywhere you looked there they were: women and men, their mouths tilted up and down and sideways. And no one knew me. All we knew was that we’d won! All of us! Standing on the sidewalk or the gutter or smack in the center of Hollywood Boulevard, we’d done it, we’d given things up and we’d slaughtered them, Hitler first and now the Japs and we loved ourselves, we loved each other, every elbowing, kissing, caressing stranger on the street. I began to lose a sense of myself. Just another guy on the street, his mouth full of lipstick and damp confetti. The people in this world who actually knew me were back at my house, my sons and my wife, and who else’s attention did I need? Maybe even then I knew, surrounded by ecstasy, that my work here, by which I mean as a Hollywood headliner, was done: Carter and Sharp had won the war, too, we’d contributed everything we could to the effort. We were soldiers; we’d done our country proud. Soon enough, we’d be discharged, though not right away, when there was so much peacetime celebrating to do.

Loaded for Bear

First scene: a double bed in a boardinghouse. Snoring beneath a crazy quilt, two men. Right side of the bed: a thin man sleeping at attention in striped pajamas. Left side: a plump lump, a pair of plump feet resting on the pillows where a head should be. The thin man’s snores are orderly and girlish; the fat man gerphlumphs like a clogged drain.

The alarm clock rings. The two men sit up—the fat man is wearing a top hat—and manage to bump heads. The top hat flies into the air with a champagne-cork pop.

In silence, they dress. The fat guy is wearing a full-length nightshirt with a ruffled front; a pair of tuxedo pants hang by their suspenders from one bedpost. What a good idea: first he finds his hat and puts it back on, then he drags one side of the suspenders to the other bedpost, and jumps from the foot of the bed into the trousers. The hat pops off, the suspenders ricochet onto his shoulders like slingshots. He finds a bow tie on an elastic string, snaps it around the collar of his nightshirt, his hat pops off, he dons it again, locates a pair of tails, struggles into them, loses the hat, picks it up, reaches in, finds an elastic string, which he snugs under his double chin as he lowers the hat on his head.

Meanwhile, the other guy is doing deep knee-bends, deep breathing exercises. His pajamas look silk but are actually an awful nylon. He gargles. He gargles. He tilts his head, not gargling, just thinking, then gargles again. He steps out of the room for five seconds and reenters in a tux and a mortarboard.

“Barry,” the thin man says, “it’s your big day.”

“I got cold feet,” says the little man.

“Let’s take a look.” The thin man drops to his friend’s feet, discovers a pair of bunny slippers, and takes them off angrily. Then he catches himself, and tries to warm the fat man’s toes with his hands. “Sit down, why dontcha? Here, sit down. Cold feet? You’re marrying a beautiful girl, a beautiful rich girl. With all that money you could buy a million pairs of shoes! You could buy me a million pairs of shoes! Don’t louse this up for me, Barry. I’ve been waiting forever for this wedding.” By now he’s practically throttling his friend’s feet. “After all I’ve done for you, and now this? Cold feet?”

“She is beautiful, isn’t she?”

“And rich!”

“Oh,” says the little fat man, “my mama told me never to marry for money. Only love.”

The thin man stands up. “Fair enough. You take the love. I’ll take the money.”

We never made a serious picture, but Marry Me, Barry was the silliest, giddy with its own jokes and costume changes and slamming doors. The war was over, and we could do whatever we wanted. I’ve always loved a wedding: Marry Me, Barry featured seven. Neddy Jefferson wrote it, our first flick made for just us alone, not an old script or a retread of an old script. Neddy even put in private jokes: Professor Mervin keeps betting Barry that he won’t get married again. (In real life, Rocky’d bet me a post-Penny three thousand dollars.) Soon Barry’s handing over bags of cash, sorrowfully, because every time he tries to marry the girl of his dreams—the poor-but-honest daughter of a greengrocer—he somehow ends up standing in front of an altar or a justice of the peace or, in one case, a movie of a justice of the peace, at his side a different bucktoothed harridan. At the end, of course, he finally weds his girl, who carries a bouquet of carrots. When she tosses them over her shoulder, I catch and share them with his third wife, the jilted pony.

Marry Me, Barry came out the first week of 1946, my favorite year ever. Rocky arrived at Jake’s second birthday party with a bottom-heavy dishwater-blond woman in a Chinese dress that made her look more Ming vase than Suzie Wong. “This is Lillian,” he said. Lillian cleared her throat and raised a set of eyebrows so plucked they looked like two columns of marching ants. Rocky slapped her shoulder. She cleared her throat again. “Oh!” said Rocky. “Of course. My current wife.” Current, Lillian mouthed to herself, and hooked her arm through his arm. He’d married the interior decorator he’d hired to spiff up his now obsolete bachelor pad. I put out my hand for my money, and Rock obliged.

The war was over, and Carter and Sharp—like everyone else—were out of uniform and full of optimism. I was a father in peacetime: I’d won the war for them, hadn’t I? A father of three—in May, we brought home our postwar boom baby, Betty. Okay, then: three kids, just right.

I loved my sons, no mistake, but I’d never longed for an heir. What I wanted was a girl baby, a baby girl, and that’s what we called her: the baby. Where’s the baby? How are you, baby? Hey, over there, you know who you are? The baby.

“I want one of those,” Rocky said, when he came to meet her, bringing with him a box of chocolates and a giant, scowling teddy bear that looked like Lon Chaney, Jr.

“Not this one.” The baby was cuddled into the crook of my arm. Already I’d decided we were each other’s favorite. She liked to slip her fingers between my shirt buttons, and she had a luxurious sigh when she was happy. In her crib, she’d sob; all she wanted was to be held, all the time, round the clock, and I obliged her. “Let her cry it out,” Jessie suggested. “Your mother’s heartless,” I told the baby, rescuing her from her misery.

I bought Jess a fur coat to celebrate. I hadn’t planned to: I’d just gone to the Wilshire Bullock’s, looking for a present, and I was assured that any woman’s dearest wish was a fur. “Really?” I said.

“Sir,” said the salesgirl. That was all she said, but she made it sound significant.

Who knew? I was out of the habit of women, so maybe I’d once known this fact and forgotten. The salesgirl offered me a pink-upholstered chair, and then she had other girls—models? store employees? aspiring actresses who’d happened by and heard I was there?—don the coats in the dressing room and then parade in front of my chair. Well, I’d have to shop for women’s clothing more often. Who knew the merchandise would have actual women in it? Pretty girls in fur coats, trying their best to act rich and privileged.

I knew, at least, that Jessica would not wear a full-length fur coat. She’d want something a little more eccentric, something you could use as a prop. Out came a blond girl in a short white coat, ermine, I think, though it could have been Samoyed.

“Let me see that one on a brunette,” I asked. So the girl turned around and left. They thought it more elegant not to let me see them put the furs on, and I couldn’t think of a way to ask without sounding filthy. They merely walked out of the dressing room as though they’d been born wearing fur, and opened one wing of the coat to display the satin lining: camel or black or silvery white. Just one wing: a woman in a fur coat did not fly, she was chauffered. I would have loved to have seen the blond girl take off that pale fur made of whatever unfortunate animal, careful not to let her ring snag the satin, and hand it over to the brunette, help her on with it, let the weight and the leftover warmth settle.

But I couldn’t ask. I just bought the coat.

When Jessica lifted the lid off the box, she said, “Oh, for God’s sake.”

“What?” I said.

She saw how she’d hurt my feelings, and said, softly, “A fur coat? We live in California. It’s summer.”

“So?”

“I can’t.” She pulled the coat from its box and laid it on her lap, as though it were a dead beloved pet. Several of them. She stroked the fur. My wife was not someone who made nice over unsuccessful gifts: she believed that was both dishonest and wasteful. “We’ll send it to Annie. Iowa winters are cold.” We’d visited Des Moines summers since the end of the war, and Jessie, an older sister herself, was particularly fond of the oldest Sharp girl.

“Do you recall how many sisters I have? If I send one to her, I have to send one to everybody.”

“Then return it,” she said. “The store will take it back.”

She knew I never would.

“Okay,” I told her. “We’ll send it to Annie. I’ll swing by Bullock’s and buy out the department. You work on commission, or something?”

I imagined my oldest sister, by then in her fifties, in this coat that had been modeled that very day by two pretty girls. Annie would wear it to Friday-night services at the temple, explaining that it was a gift from her brother. She’d offer up an arm to any interested party: go ahead, feel. Annie had, as she had aged, developed a weakness for foolishness and grandeur. Her roommate, Bessie Mackintosh, an old school chum, was foolish and grand herself. She’d moved in after Rose had married Ed, and now Annie and Bessie lived in my childhood home, two plump midwestern ladies who had pooled their money and their family china.

“It’s so practical of Annie,” my sister Ida wrote; we were all glad that Annie did not have to live alone. Practical, yes, I agreed. Our last visit home, when I kissed Annie—who’d always seemed perfumed by boiled parsnips—I noticed that she smelled wonderful, like hot spice. Then I kissed Bessie, who did too. Annie told me, looking fondly at her friend, “Bessie is my best girl.” I knew that she would not believe that they smelled the same, that she was in any way like Bessie: who, Annie would say to me, was anything like Bessie?

I sent Annie the original fur, and my other sisters near duplicates. “Thank you for the beautiful coat,” Annie wrote back to me. “We take turns wearing it.” And so I went back to the store—I must have been a running joke by then, it’s amazing my habits didn’t turn up in the gossip columns—and bought the same style in a different, darker animal, and sent it to Bessie. I wasn’t thinking, of course: taking turns was part of the pleasure of the fur, the settling weight, the leftover warmth.

I Will Be a Sister to You

Tuesday nights I kissed my kids and wife and then drove down to the radio studio for the Carter and Sharp Show. A show-business father has access to all kinds of magic working stiffs don’t: my family turned on the radio and—though they’d seen me walk out the door minutes before!—heard my voice in the playroom (or living room, or kitchen, or dance studio; our house was crazy for radios). There he is, plain as day: Daddy.

Jessica tried to explain it to them. Jake, at three, was scientifically inclined and understood how my voice could make it through a bramble of electrical wires and atmosphere and arrive at our house, but was puzzled by the things I said; Nate, two, knew I was pretending but figured I must be hiding in a closet as a joke. As for the baby, she crawled across the floor and tried to turn up the volume, smart girl. Jessica was never sure about letting them listen to their old man talking such nonsense with their uncle Rocky—at home we all got along, so why did I always sound so angry with him Tuesday nights at seven? Sometimes when I got home, they’d grill me.

“How come, Daddy, did you do that?” Jake asked.

“Do what, sweetheart?”

“Hit him?”

“I didn’t,” I said, and he, the literal kid, gave me a dirty look, and said, “I heard.”

At least they weren’t the kids of a matinee idol or screen siren, which would have been worse, according to Jessica: you’d have to watch your parents necking with all kinds of strangers and family friends. That was before Rocky cooked up a romance for me on the radio show: he decided that we’d invite on one of his fake sisters, Ida, who’d always been described as the beauty of the family. (My own Ida was vain, and I’d hoped she’d like this piece of flattery.) The Professor would develop a crush on her from afar: “Tell me, Rocky, is she single?” he’d ask.

“Is she ever!” Rocky would answer, and then, when she showed up (according to the script) she’d be so fat I’d say that calling her single was stretching the truth. Rocky wanted a fat actress, so that the moment she stepped onto the stage the folks in the studio would start laughing, which would set off the audience at home.

“You know someone?” Rocky asked me. “Someone who needs steady work? Could be a regular character. Here’s your chance to cast your own Heloise, Abelard.”

I didn’t.

“I’ll take care of it,” said Rocky, who usually left everything up to the writers and studio bosses. “Someone good,” he mused. “Someone funny and fat.”

Well, of course he was playing a trick on me. I’d show up, and there he’d be in drag—that would make perfect sense, of course. In a movie, who else would play Rocky’s sister but Rocky? Not much of a joke, sure, but he and I were busy married men these days, and we’d take our laughs when we could.

But when I arrived at the afternoon run-through, there was Rock in his street clothes, and, with her back turned to me, a terrifically fat blonde. She was shaped like a fir tree, fatter the farther down you looked. Her ankles seemed to almost cover her tiny black pumps; her hair was platinum, nearly translucent. She and Rocky were reading from the script already, and I could hear that her timing was good, that her voice could go from sultry seductive purr to angry foghorn blare in the same sentence. I felt even worse than usual that we’d given Rocky’s sisters my own sisters’ names.

I walked across the stage to introduce myself. Rocky said to the woman, “Don’t take it hard, Ida honey, you’re just too much woman for a guy like the Professor.”

“No, I’m not, I’m just enough.”

“Hello,” I said. The woman turned and looked at me. She was younger than I’d expected, and her face wasn’t as fat as the rest of her. I couldn’t decide whether this was lucky or a mean trick. “I’m Mike Sharp. Your love interest.”

She laughed, and set her hand on my arm. It reminded me of something. “Is that what you are?”

“So they tell me.”

The woman flexed her eyebrows at me. She had a thin nose that sprang from her face like a swan dive. Otherwise, she looked like a giant, bratty, lovable baby. “Mose,” she said. “Mose. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten me.”

And at that I almost fainted like my on-screen self would have, to be reunited with someone he’d thought dead. It took some looking, but there she was: Miriam, Mimi, my giant bratty lovable lost child.

Still, I was the real Mike Sharp, not the celluloid one, and I had my wits about me: I kissed her cheek. I tried to get my arms around her, but I couldn’t. I felt like crying.

She said, “You probably didn’t recognize me because I got my nose fixed.”

“That must be it,” I said gallantly.

She burst out into her beautiful raucous laugh, and that was the moment I did fully, completely recognize her. “Must be,” she said, “because I can’t imagine how else I’ve changed.”

I looked at Rocky, who was beaming, either evilly or paternally: I couldn’t tell. “She’s got the part,” I told him.

“Of course she does!” he said. “Let’s go out to lunch!”

“Sure,” said Mimi.

Her curls were a parody of her old blond wig; I could see how short hair would no longer have suited her. All I could think was, Is lunch a good idea? But I offered her an elbow and said to Rocky, “You’re not invited.”

“No?” Rocky thought he was invited to every meal in the world. “Oh, okay. Old times. I understand.”

“Good,” I said.

I took her to Musso’s, my favorite spot, to a table up front.

“So,” she said, as she struggled into the booth, “I don’t have to ask what you’ve been up to.”

“Don’t believe everything you hear on the radio.”

“Carter’s hijacked your sisters, has he?”

“For the time being. Listen, I’m a smart date. What have you been up to?”

She set her fingers on the table. The backs of her hands were dimpled like a baby’s. “Radio work. In New York, mostly. I moved here a few months ago. Carter recognized me on the street. How about that? Saw me play Boston twenty years and a hundred pounds ago, picks me out walking down Sunset, comes up with a role for me. I don’t usually play fat women, so this is a stretch. You’re married,” she said.

“Is that a question?”

“Of course not. Can’t I read the magazines? You’re married.”

“You?” I said, though I’d already noticed her ringless fingers.

“Not anymore. I was married to Savant for a while.”

“You mean a new Savant.”

“Same old Savant.”

“I thought he liked the saxophone player.”

“Did. Does. All I can say is it seemed like a good idea at the time. He was a good husband, but a lousy lay. According to me, I mean. The saxophone player might think he’s a great fuck.”

I’d forgotten how she could scandalize me, and how much I liked it. All though our conversation, I kept losing the thread of her, of my Miriam, until she did something in particular—laugh, bawl me out merrily, touch the bottom of her hair with her fingertips—and then I’d recognize her, and then I’d lose her again. It was like hearing slightly familiar music coming from another room and thinking, Oh, that’s what the song is . . . hold on, no, it’s not. I couldn’t decide what made me sadder: all the weight or the butchered nose. The surgeon had just scooped out the center like a grapefruit.

“It’s not fair,” she said. “Look at me, and then look at you.”

“What?”

“You haven’t changed! We’re both eighteen years older, and you look exactly the same! And you’re older than me. You still’re older than me, aren’t you?”

“I’ve changed,” I said.

“You haven’t.”

And so, sitting in Musso’s, I dipped my fingers in my water glass and put them to my hairline and softened the glue, and took off my toupee. I dropped it over the bread basket. Surely I looked like hell, bits of glue still stuck to my scalp.

“Well,” I said, “I haven’t changed much,” but Miriam couldn’t hear me, she was laughing so hard. God knows I was ready to drop my pants to keep her laughing like that, to hear that wonderful mocking noise.

She applauded me, as though she was—well, what she really was: my first teacher, pleased that her student has finally extravagantly succeeded at his course of study. “Jesus, Mose,” she said. “Jesus Christ. Look at us!”

She was wonderful on the show that night, eerie though it was to stand next to her on a stage. We were cheek to cheek at the same mike, though this time she played voracious and I played prim. She seemed taller to me. Her current boyfriend, a nice-looking man with a hysterical infectious giggle, sat in the audience, good as gold; I don’t know when we got bigger laughs. Back during my old days on the road, I thought any girl I’d ever slept with was mine to sleep with forever, so long as I charmed her, and I could see that the statute of limitations might never have expired. If I wasn’t married. If I wasn’t a father. If she wasn’t so heavy. If I wasn’t very, very careful. She had the same charismatic crackle as always, the same perfect unlined skin, the same pink round cleft tongue that flashed when she spoke. When Ida embraced the Professor over the air, Miriam embraced me in front of the audience, and because of her size and a well-deployed script, nobody could see her proprietary upstage fingers and where, exactly, they tickled me. She wore the same sinful cologne she’d favored as a teen, and she’d grown into it.

“Now,” Rocky said after the broadcast, “it’s time for a cocktail, and I am invited.” He had his arm around Miriam’s waist. Twenty years ago they would have looked nothing alike, a dark-haired exotic beauty and a pie-faced, snub-nosed Irish comedian. But, boy, she did look like his sister now. “Where shall we go? The Mocambo?”

“I need to go home,” I said, yawning. “Promised the kids. Rock? Could I talk to you a second? Business?”

“Now?”

“Now,” I said. I backed off the stage, beckoning him with one hand, waving good-bye to Miriam with the other. I could see her face change when she realized that this was our farewell; she lifted one hand and gave a toodling wave with the ends of her fingers, like the little girl she once pretended to be. I kept backing away till we turned the corner into a hallway and we couldn’t see her.

“Not bad, huh?” said Rock. “She’ll be a regular, I think. There she was, walking out of the pancake house, and I almost told you a million times, but—”

“She’s fired,” I said.

“What? She was great. Did you hear those laughs?”

“I don’t care,” I said. “My heart can’t take it. I guess I’m lucky you didn’t bring her over to the house, but Rock, listen: I can’t do this.”

“But why?”

I shrugged. It was sadness over what seemed to me her ruin. Fear over turning into the kid she’d dumped in Madison, Wisconsin, someone so completely abandoned he’d forget all the people who hadn’t left him. A little bit of habitual desperate lust. Years ago, I’d convinced myself that I’d only wanted to be friends with her, but I didn’t know how to do that now. I’d never had even a day’s practice.

“Okay,” said Rock, pulling at his ear. “I think it’s mean—”

“I don’t care,” I said. “Kiss her for me.”

When I got home, the kids were already asleep. “I put them to bed early,” said Jessica. “Too much of Daddy’s girlfriend on the show tonight.” She was sitting on the floor in her usual spot, her back against the sofa. I sat down next to her.

“They would have understood.”

“Maybe.” She turned and gave me a kiss on the cheek, an impersonation of our sound guy’s drawn-out ultrasuction pucker. Then she said, “You do have a girlfriend! Lipstick on your collar.”

I pulled up my collar to see. Pink. A guy in the movies could always say, “Can’t you tell? It’s my own shade.”

“I must have bumped the actress,” I said.

“Who was she?” she asked. “She was awfully good. You know me, I don’t laugh for just anyone. She really had you going, though. I mean, you were awfully good too.”

“Thanks,” I said. “The actress was just someone Rocky dug up.”

She mussed my hair fondly. “They have credits on your show, you know, at the end. ‘Playing the part of Ida Carter, Miriam Veblen.’ It’s all right.” She got up—she always stood up from the floor like she was levitating, as though it took nothing—and then pulled me to my feet. “She scared the hell out of you, huh? Come on, Romeo. I’ll fix you a snack.”

My Platinum Blonde

Children, like all of us, are sensitive to class differences. They love two kinds of grown-ups: those who address children as genuine equals, and those who act like large children themselves. Rocky was the second sort. Children could wrestle him to the ground in seconds. My own kids adored him. The rest of our sophisticated friends would say to Jake, now age five, “Are you married?” Jake was the kind of serious boy who took this kind of joking for what it was, a polite but preposterous lie. “Not yet,” he’d say. “Maybe when I’m thirty.” That left his inquisitor with nothing to do with his next line. (“Handsome guy like you? Got a girl, at least?”)

Jake’s seriousness evaporated at the first sight of Rock. He flat-out loved the guy. He even stole chocolates from his mother’s supply (she noticed, of course), to press, only slightly melted, into Rocky’s pocket. Rocky in turn brought firecrackers and comic books.

“For me?” said Jake, hopeful.

Rocky flopped on the ground and tiredly pushed his hair off his forehead so it would flop right back down, juvenile-delinquent style. “I dunno. You like these things?”

Jake nodded cautiously.

“Whattya got to trade?”

“Hey,” I said. “Are you gambling with my child?”

“I am bartering,” said Rock. “I am trading away these very fine, hardly thumbed comic books for your house. There is no gambling involved.”

“The house is pretty big,” Jake offered. “You don’t have too many comics.”

“I’ll just take your bed,” Rocky told him, “and I’ll throw in the fireworks. The kid owns his bed, right?” he asked me.

Rock sat in the front row for all of Jessie’s recitals—usually just our kids clowning around for our friends—and applauded loudest. I couldn’t figure out how he could have been so often married without kids of his own. When we went to visit Tansy and his wife and children—talk about a fertile crescent! they had seven—Rocky brought individual presents. It took some talking to wrangle an invite, though.

“Why are you keeping your kids from us?” Rocky asked.

“Who says I’m keeping them from you?”

If Tansy himself was small, Mrs. Tansy could hardly be seen with the naked eye. Rocky said that Jessica and I looked ready to stand on top of a wedding cake for a full-sized couple; the Tansys could have stood on ours.

Small, small people, Mr. and Mrs. T. A screen door wouldn’t keep them out of your kitchen. The children seemed normal sized, though there were so many of them it was hard to keep track of ages.

“How do you manage?” I asked Mrs. T., a good-humored, slouch-shouldered woman who loved to feign grumpiness and absentmindedness.

“Who manages?” she said. “I just figure we keep production at this level, we’re bound to turn a profit eventually.”

“Aren’t there seven kids in your family?” Tansy asked me.

“Sure, but that’s different.”

“Why? We like children. They keep showing up. We should send them to the pound?”

“I’ll take your surplus,” Rocky said. There was a set of twin Tansy girls, and they were riding around on Rocky’s feet, one twin per shoe, holding on to his belt.

“When are you going to have your own?” said Tansy.

“These’re good. They match each other, and I think they’ll spruce up the living room. I’ll take them. Fifty cents a pound sound okay?”

“We’re using those,” said Mrs. Tansy.

“We all have to pitch in, Mrs. T. I have no kids, you have extras.”

“Stop bothering Tansy’s wife,” I told him. “Bother your own wife. That’s where babies come from.”

“You better not bother me,” said Mrs. Tansy.

Later, when Mrs. Tansy had gone to put the kids to bed, which involved rounding them up as though she were a Border collie, Rocky and Tansy and I went to their dining room to smoke. The table was covered with white rings from the kids’ milk glasses, burn marks from hot dishes—the Tansys took everything casually. We sat at one end. Rocky poured himself a glass from a decanter that wore a little nameplate that said Gin, though the liquid was brown.

“Don’t think I don’t want kids,” he said. “It’s just not working out that way for Lillian.”

“Oh,” said Tansy.

“She gets pregnant, but then . . .” He sighed with the hopeless mystery of it. “Four times. Probably we should—”

“You leave that poor girl alone!” said Tansy. His passion surprised both of us, probably the way Rocky’s casual confession had surprised him, and me. Rocky and I stared at him, and finally I cleared my throat and said, “You’re a fine one to talk, Mr. T.”

“The sadness, I mean.” Tansy settled back in his chair. His feet didn’t touch the ground. “No woman should have to bear that sadness.”

It hadn’t occurred to Rocky to blame himself in any way until Tansy yelled at him. What was he if not an innocent bystander? Nevertheless, within a few months, Lillian and he had adopted Rocky junior, a fat, chortling black-haired baby. Rocky senior joked to the press that in order to keep up with the Sharps, he and Lil had considered taking home half the ward at the Marymount Orphanage, but for now they were just keeping up with Rocky junior.

“We picked out the one who’ll laugh at anything,” Rocky told me. He’d brought the baby over so Lillian could get some beauty rest. She required a great deal of beauty rest, apparently—she turned down all invitations that involved leaving her own house, though she liked throwing theme parties. Rocky made it sound as though she spent hours every day rearranging the furniture.

Junior was ten months old when they brought him home, an excellent age for a baby. Our own baby, nine months older, was fascinated by him. They sat together on the grass where our back lawn sloped down toward the gated swimming pool I’d had installed for Jessica, shaped like a heart because in California you couldn’t have a swimming pool shaped like a mere swimming pool. (I’d suggested the state of Iowa, itself nearly swimming-pool shaped, but Jessica vetoed that.) Our two babies poked at each other and laughed—our baby, like Rocky and Lil’s, was a prodigious giggler.

“This kid—” said Rocky. But then he stopped. “He’s a good kid. Probably above average, but I don’t care if he’s a dope. I hope he is one.”

“He’s not a dope,” I said.

“I just hope he doesn’t remember too much, you know?”

“No,” I said. “You mean whoever his actual mother was? Who remembers that far back?” Rocky junior turned over in the grass and began to graze. His father seemed unconcerned, but I went and flipped him back sunny-side up.

“Me,” said Rocky. “I remember the crib, sure. My father once dropped a slice of meat loaf on my head. You know, that’s my problem. No, no, don’t say it, not the meat loaf: I just remember too much. Everything, every single embarrassing thing I ever did, every rotten name anyone ever called me, every rotten name I ever called someone else . . .”

I sat back down. “Comes in handy, that memory.”

“I’d trade it away in a minute if I could. That’s why I want the kid to be forgetful. Happy.”

“He won’t have any bad memories to wish away,” I said, “his childhood will be milk and chocolate cake—”

“He’ll find a way to fuck it up,” said Rocky. “It’s human nature. All’s that matters is how quick you get over it. If you’re lucky, you’ll forget what you need to and revise what you can’t.”

“What a philosophy!” I said. I looked at our kids, both now dozing in the shade of a midget palm tree. Maybe he couldn’t tell, but I knew they were both geniuses, beloved, as lucky as a pair of loaded dice.

Compared to Rocky junior, our own baby was not really a baby anymore: she was nearly two, though she was still as plump and milky as an infant. One day you look at your kid and see that she’s become a child, a little person, but it happens to every kid at a different time. Thinner arms and legs, a more muscular mouth, hair that needs cutting. The whole world of noninfant expressions: babies do not smirk, but toddlers can. Our baby had not outgrown her baby ways, though her older brothers had become actual little people by the time they were one year old. Betty—I love that name, the way it sounds like Hattie but luckier—did not talk much. She gestured. She waved like a starlet. And then there was her giggle, God how she giggled, slow at other things but at laughter a genius!

“An audience,” said Jessica, dryly.

So what if the baby was not in a hurry to be a kid, a toddler, a refuser of fatherly advice? Maybe she just enjoyed the condition of infancy. In my own childhood home we’d always known that there were good babies and bad babies. There wasn’t any pattern: good babies could grow up to be miserable people, and bad babies saints. My father always said that Fannie, the mildest and quietest of my sisters, had been such a squalling vomiting bundle that sometimes he threatened to take her to the store and put her in the case that held smaller accessories, white handkerchiefs for businessmen, bandanas for the railroad men. “I could have gotten a good price for her,” my father said, and Fannie smiled, and apologized for her earlier behavior.

Just as I’d planned, Betty was my favorite and I was hers. The boys preferred their mother, and who could blame them? The baby stuck to me. She gave her mother what I called the House Detective Glare, a kind of polite suspicion. Jessica probably wasn’t stealing the towels, but she bore watching. I sat on the sofa, and the baby backed up between my knees and slung her arms across my thighs, watching her mother stretching on the floor.

“Where did you come from, my little blondie?” I asked her. It seemed impossible that Jess and I could have produced such a creature.

“She’ll darken,” said Jess. “I was blond as a child.”

“What?” That seemed even more impossible.

“Sure. My hair didn’t turn this dark till I was a teenager.”

“A former blonde,” I said musingly. “No kidding. All the women I know are former brunettes.” Already I felt sad that Betty might become like the rest of us. I loved her this way, different, my changeling, my little bubblehead. Don’t darken, I thought, and of course later I could hear my sister Annie whispering in my ear, See? See? Things you wish for will be granted, in the worst possible way. Wishes are fatal.