15

He Left a Hole in Sadie Sow

I thought I’d gotten used to life without Rocky. Two years practice, though, turned out to be nothing. We hadn’t been speaking, but he was around, everywhere, really, in stories my kids told each other, in sly questions from Tansy and offers from Vegas, stored in the box we called television in the family room. I snubbed him at every turn, but he’d been available.

Then he wasn’t.

The morning papers covered his disappearance, coming as it did five days after he’d announced the end of Carter and Sharp. Do you know where he went? reporters asked me. Surely he must have told you. They’d seen us together on This Is Your Life, looking like the best of chums. Nobody had asked me about Rocky in some time, but now I spent several hours a day discussing his whereabouts. And so Rock, in leaving, had managed what he’d failed to do in staying: he reteamed Carter and Sharp. Suddenly, I was responsible for the guy again, and I’d let him slip through my fingers.

People kept asking why we’d split. I should have come up with a consistent story. We were old. I wanted to retire. Rocky had always wanted to do something especially for children. He left me for a pig. We’d gone as far with the act as we could. When asked, I chose the answer that seemed most true at the time.

I continued to make movies after Rocky left. I played fathers and grandfathers and mayors of small towns, men who glanced, befuddled, over the tops of newspapers. In Fair Warning, I played an elderly junkie who tells the hero it’s not too late, he can change, he doesn’t have to die of dope; then I died of dope. I always had work. Jessica too: she continued to choreograph for TV, and then when variety began to die on the tube (as it had years before in real life) she took up choreographing for a local theater company, where she was beloved and feared. When I went to opening nights with her, I held her hand, jealous of all the young people who brought her bouquets of flowers.

Tansy took on more clients and two assistants. Sadie Sow found a young fellow in a sport shirt with whom she seemed quite smitten. Old movie stars disappeared every day, of course. Obscurity was not front-page news. A year passed, and then another. People forgot that Rocky had gone missing. He was just gone.

Our kids got older, the way kids will. Rocky junior, too, who we took under our wing some; Lillian thought we were good influences, I guess. He and the boys were about the same age, and here he was, a fatherless kid. A really nice kid, too, a little heavy (like his father he ate when nervous, which was often), but completely at ease around grown-ups. He called us Aunt Jess and Uncle Mose, as our kids had called his father Uncle Rocky.

The freeway came through Los Angeles. The freeway came through Des Moines. Jess’s hair turned snow white all of a sudden, and I had some idea of what she must have looked like, all those years ago, as a blonde: spectacular. Jake went to college, then Nathan, and then they both went to medical school, and before long—it felt like no time at all—Jess and I were the parents of a gynecologist and a dentist. They did not appreciate the jokes I made about this pairing. Two practical young men! They married nice Jewish girls and settled in southern California and began to have children: Nathan, for some reason I still cannot fathom, changed his last name to Sharensky, to honor the grandfather he’d never met. These boys had been taught at an early age how to do a spit take, how to tap-dance and project when they sang, and so they both ran away and joined the circus, by which I mean ordinary life.

Gilda, however, wanted to follow her father’s footsteps. I’d been right, all those years ago: she grew up to look like Hattie, long limbed and red-haired. She danced on television, and wrote some sitcom scripts. She never got married. I thought she clung to us, the way children born to older parents sometimes will: there was hardly a gap between us taking care of her and her taking care of us. A charming, pushy young woman; our make-up baby. When she visited, she’d go through our medicine cabinets and come out with the prescription bottles.

“What’s this for?” she’d demand. “Oh, and it says it’s supposed to be stored away from the damp.”

When Jess got sick in ’74, Gilda wanted to do everything, and so did I. We fought all the time. So she moved into her old bedroom, and took over the invisible, thankless jobs that I couldn’t remember to do and therefore didn’t notice when they were done. I drove Jess to the doctor’s, for the diagnosis, and then the mastectomy, then the chemo. I did not care about the breast, but I wanted to shake the doctor, who seemed to think my tiny wife, ninety pounds now, had a single ounce of weight to spare.

I’d always thought of myself as the most competent of men. I could patch, hem, darn; I could even take in and let out suits, thanks to childhood lessons from Ed Dubuque. I could starch and iron a shirt till it glowed like a snowy lawn, capable of bending but not creasing. I could clean. I had beautiful manners. My wife had never once had to straighten my tie.

But I could not cook. I’d never had to. For years during my vaudeville days, I never so much as switched on a stove. And then Jess got sick, and I wanted to cook for her.

“Anyone can make bouillon,” said Gilda. Not me. I snatched the kettle off the burner and poured the water, lukewarm, over the cube, where it managed to suck off a little flavoring but nothing else. Or I forgot to stir, and left a nugget at the bottom. All of the things the world claims you can cook if you can boil water, I failed at. The water would boil eventually, sure; the laws of thermodynamics would not bend to my incompetence. I brewed coffee you could read magazines through. I forgot to latch the tea ball, and poured cups of what looked like a river that had jumped its banks.

Then I’d walk around the house. Somehow, I would have slipped two bouillon cubes in my pants pocket. I’d shake them like dice. Why square, I’d wonder, why not round? A question like that could absorb me for hours. My aluminum palate seemed a colossal character flaw: I should have prepared. I should have taken lessons.

Jessica thanked me for everything. She couldn’t eat anyhow: the chemo was poison, of course. I should have sent out for prop meals every day, set them on the nightstand beside her bed, and saved the trouble. She spent two months in bed; I spent two months looking at her profile, the long nose, the thinning hair combed up off her forehead, that Roman-coin beauty. Then she got sicker, and even her beauty was gone.

I took care of my wife, though when I think back on the months she was really sick, I remember all the time I spent in other rooms, putting off going back to her side. She was so sick it left me gasping.

People had died before, of course, and people would die hence. But really, but really, hadn’t I—shouldn’t the one person—

—I know I had a warning this time, but the one person—

—just this once—

A Double Act

At the memorial service, Gilda gave a eulogy. I could not. Her words made everyone cry, but she got it wrong. She said: “It was like my parents were one person.”

No, I thought. We were like two people. We did not share one soul, or one mind: simple division shows you the folly of that. Before Jessica, I’d wandered around, very much like one person, no matter whose company I was in. It wasn’t always fun. She did the same thing. Every now and then, maybe we’d find someone to be the disappointment act, to fill out the bill for the evening, or a week. Then Jess and I met, and were never, not for one moment, anything like one person.

But Rocky and I were. I think that was the problem. Onstage, in front of the cameras, we knew exactly what the other guy was thinking. No: we just thought the same thing at the same time, a comic animal with four legs and four arms and two heads bumping, bumping. The animal slaps itself across the face, throws itself over a balustrade. Time to step this way. Time to pause. No surprise, how did you know? We knew. It was our job.

One person, yes, but the one person we were like was Rocky.

When Jess died, all of us—my kids, and me, and Tansy—thought Rocky might show up. What a eulogy he could have given! The phone rang and rang, and it was never him. My sisters stayed in Des Moines again, at my request. I’d be out there soon enough and they could comfort me then, because I was bringing Jess’s body back to be buried at Greenwood Cemetery.

“Shall we come with you?” the kids asked. “We’ll come.”

“No,” I said. We’d already had the memorial in L.A., and while I’d wanted it to be small, barely noticeable, it was filled with weeping dancers and amateur actors, all the people she’d choreographed over the years. They seemed to shudder and sob in unison, as though they’d been instructed, and they unfurled their hankerchiefs with unsettling grace.

“I just promised her,” I told my kids, which was a lie. Jessica did not care where she was buried. I couldn’t bury her by Betty, who was still in Babyland, and I had no interest in an exhumation, a word that made me want to throw myself in an open grave. I couldn’t bury her by Joseph, who like his father had died of a heart attack in his fifties: Joseph, or his ashes, were in our front hall in a tin can. This had bothered me at first. “One of these days we’ll scatter him,” Jessica had said. “We’ll think of a nice place.” So we stuck the can in the cloak closet. After a while, I got used to the idea—I started calling him Prince Albert—and then even jealous. I would have liked Hattie’s ashes, something so homely and ridiculous. Where’s Hattie? Ah, yes: behind that door, up on the shelf, among the hats.

But I could bury Jessica beside her parents. So in September of 1975, the Howard kids traveled back to Iowa together in one box: Jessica, intact, in a casket; Joseph tucked at her feet. Her parents’ graves were in the Jewish section of Greenwood, a stone or three’s throw from my parents’ and Hattie’s—Rabbi Kipple had been interred across town, in a tiny Jewish graveyard that now had a view of the interstate.

Really, that’s why I brought Jessica back: I could think, She lives in Des Moines now. Far away and safe. No graveside service, and the day I buried her I wished I’d had her cremated: the ground was so cold, and the sky was so blue.

I stayed in Vee Jay with Annie, who was in her early eighties and in remarkable health. Sweet Bessie Mackintosh, her friend, had died the year before. I figured maybe Annie would be a distraction from my grief—she was an old woman, and lonely, and I could look after her—but in fact she was in better shape than me. All of the oldest girls had become sturdy old women. But Little Rose, our baby, had spent the past two years having nearly everything removed—her uterus, then part of her stomach, then her ovaries. Annie spent most of the time at the Dubuques’ house, since Ed frequently ran away to the store. “You know how men are,” Annie said. “He can’t take the fact that she’s in pain.”

“No,” I said.

Then Annie looked sympathetic. “Rose’ll love to see you. You’ll go over to their place today?”

“Of course.”

“Can you be cheery? I hate to ask you. I know this isn’t a cheery time for you. But we have to keep her in good spirits, doctor says. So can you?”

“I’m an actor,” I said, “I can be cheerful no matter what.”

She pursed her mouth cynically then, which I took as a comment on my talents.

Once again to downtown Valley Junction. The Lyric Theater had become a theatrical shop, with rubber masks of Nixon and Agnew in the window, gorilla suits, feather boas: it looked like Rocky’s pool house. Down the street, antique-store windows glittered with cut glass and old china cups; a few new restaurants had been decked out to look old-timey. There wasn’t a pool hall anywhere. And Sharp’s Gents’ was now Sharp’s Ladies’. All they stocked for men were handkerchiefs and pocket flashlights in the front case. Ed Dubuque looked like a Dutch farmer, his hair gone white but still sticking up. “Master Sharp,” he said to me when I came in. “I hope you’re not looking for clothes.”

“I’m thinking of doing a drag act,” I said. “I always looked good in lilac.”

“We have several things in a nice wash and wear,” he said seriously.

I leaned on the counter. The wooden sign on the back wall still said SHOES in thirties flat-topped serpentine script, but the footwear on the stands were sandals and high-heeled pumps, a few kids’ sneakers. This is where I spent my childhood, I thought, but of course it wasn’t: the place had moved, the railroad men were dead or retired, my father was gone. I tried to remember the smell of the old original building, a kind of leathery tang tamped down by dust, a hint of whiskey blown in from the tavern next door. “Don’t you miss the menswear?”

“It’s what Rose wanted,” he said. “I’m happier surrounded by ladies than she was by men.”

“How is she?”

“Not well, Master Sharp. Annie’s over there now. I’ll go home after lunch, when my high school kid comes in. I should stay with her all the time, but work . . .”

“Helps,” I offered. He nodded.

I went to their house on Sixth Street, an old property of my father’s that he’d signed over to Ed in the thirties. Rose was on their screened-in porch on the front of the house, Annie beside her. She’d seen Rose come into this world. Now she’d see her go out.

They’d moved a wheeled hospital bed onto the porch; it must have been Rose’s main form of transportation these days. Annie’s nursing hadn’t changed. The bed had been made up in white sheets and a pink blanket so neatly that Rose looked like a love letter waiting to be sealed and sent. A child’s Mickey Mouse doll with a plush body and a plastic face had been slid under the covers next to her, his head on the edge of the pillow. That embarrassed me more than anything else.

“Hey, kiddo,” I said. “How’re you feeling?”

“Like springtime.”

“You look it.”

She coughed, but her voice didn’t sound so bad. Annie gave me her chair, then went into the house to get another.

Rose said, “Now if I could only get that doctor to leave me alone.”

“He bothering you, kid? Point him out and I’ll take care of him for you.”

“He just got ahold of my ovaries. I told him, ‘Put them in a jar so we can keep them on the mantelpiece.’”

“Rose!” Annie said, from inside the house.

“Well, I miss them,” Rose muttered. “I suppose I was done with them, but still.”

“I’ll punch his lights out,” I said.

“Thanks. Hand me that glass of water on the table? I think he’s got one of those treasure maps left over from your movies, except it’s of me, so he keeps digging.” She accepted the water with one hand, and with the other traced two lines on the blanket above her torso. “X marks the spot. What movie was that?”

“Yo Ho Ho.”

“Yo Ho Ho,” she said. “I liked that one. I wish you’d make movies like that one again.”

“Like what?”

“You know. Silly. Broad jokes. People falling down. Whales blowing water in your face. You were good at that. Oh, I’ve hurt your feelings. I mean, I like the movies you make now, but I liked the old ones too. Nobody makes stupid funny movies anymore.”

Annie’s face appeared briefly at the window; she was giving the two littlest kids some time alone. I never palled around with Rose when we were young—Hattie, of course—and now I wished I had. She’d offered to be my vaudeville partner once, and now, partnerless, I wanted her to offer again.

“You didn’t hurt my feelings,” I said. “I’m serious about punching your doctor. He’s not a big guy, is he?”

She shrugged in slow motion. “Who knows? I haven’t met him when we’ve both been standing up. Oh!” she said. I jumped to my feet.

“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 crazy 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.