Niagara Falls All Over Again by Elizabeth McCracken Page B

wanted to make it in the movies you had to choose between funny and handsome: Fred Astaire and Stan Laurel could be brothers, but which one’s the heartthrob? Even a voice makes a difference in how good-looking you are, and Rock’s real voice was knowing and slow. He could have made a living off of it, if things had gone differently. The stuff he colored his hair with washed out. (Rubbed off, too, I learned later. I was the one who told him to either dye it or give up: I was tired of finding bootblack on my good clothes.) He was handsome the way Babe Ruth was handsome, a combination of confidence and being glad to see you. A backslapping man. A handshaker. A kisser of babies and pretty girls. Just like Babe Ruth, he’d peek past a curtain at the one old lady who hadn’t smiled for anyone and point:
She’ll be laughing hysterically by the time I’m done
.
    So there he was, my sandy-haired partner with the big hands.
    â€œHey!” he said. I couldn’t believe that anyone who’d drunk as much as we had the night before could look so pink and bright: healthy, really. He stood up and gave me a quick hug, surprising both me and the waitress, who had arrived with his breakfast. “How do you feel?”
    â€œLike a wrung-out sponge,” I told him.
    â€œYou need to eat.”
    â€œI need not to.”
    â€œThat’s okay too.” He sat down in front of his just-delivered plate, which was filled with a jumble of food. “Do you mind,” he said, picking up his fork. He took a couple of quick bites before I replied. Each time he lifted the fork with his left hand, he brought his right hand up delicately, palm down, beneath it. After the third bite I realized he did this to protect his shirtfront.
    Then he set the fork down. I thought he was formulating some elaborate question—he had an expression of concerned concentration on his face—but all he said was “So?”
    â€œSo?” I answered.
    His deep-set eyes—on film they looked comical, like buttons on an overstuffed mattress—were round and complicated, halfway between brown and green. He tapped his fork on the edge of his plate. “So. Still a good idea, the two of us striking out?”
    â€œWe have a contract,” I said seriously.
    â€œI know
that
.” He smiled and patted his shirt pocket. “I was just wondering whether I’d have to take you to court.”
    We did have a contract, drawn up at some point overnight. The terms: Rocky would get sixty percent, I would get forty, but on the tenth anniversary of our partnership the terms would reverse, and then reverse again ten years after that. Rocky put that clause in: he claimed it’d give us incentive to stick together. For all I know, the percentages were nothing but misdirection—
Pay no attention to
this,
which says you’ll get less, but to
this,
which says you’ll get more
. Later I found out that for Rocky, the future was like Mozambique: he believed in it, he just had no interest. What were the chances he’d get there?
    Now he took the sorry thing out of his pocket. Even the paper had a hangover: it was crumpled and mottled with whiskey, nearly illegible.
    â€œYou think it’s valid like that?” I asked.
    â€œIt looks like the Magna Carta. If anything, it’s
more
valid.” He read it over nostalgically. “Someday,” he said, “this will be an important historical document.”
    â€œAha,” said a nearby voice, but not loud enough that I thought it was directed at us. Then louder, “A-
ha!
” Fred Fabian. I felt like a correspondent in a divorce case. Who knows how he found us. Maybe Rocky had pinned a note to him too. He had the look of a man who had slept too much or too little.
    Listen, before you feel sorry for Freddy Fabian, I insist he wouldn’t have had a career anyhow. Though in real life his face was unobjectionable, it would have photographed