I watched him. He’d say something deadpan, and then laugh out loud. He was a slob, and yet he had fancy etiquette-book manners; he found a napkin and touched it to the corner of his mouth after every bite. Somehow he never spoke with a full mouth, which he managed more through efficient consumption than waiting things out. Every now and then he’d ask a personal question. “You’re not married?”
“No,” I said.
“Close, ever?”
I thought about Miriam and then I shook my head.
He threw his napkin in his plate and then rested his chin on one hand. “I imagine you’re lucky with girls. Right?”
What could I say? I said, smiling, “I wouldn’t call it luck.”
“Okay, okay then, you understand women.”
Well, I had a lot of sisters, that was true. He was looking at me as though I could teach him things. I never lied, mind you, I just implied that he was right. “I wouldn’t say that either. Let’s just say I’ve studied the issue.”
He nodded, still leaning into his hand, wistful. “I’ve studied it myself, with no success. I had a feeling about you. Here’s my theory: good straight man is good with women. It comes from the same part of your brain. Charm. I always wanted to go on the road with a guy who had a talent for meeting women. Me and Fabian, we sat in bars and played hearts. But that’s not good enough for guys like us,” he said, indicating me, then him. “We have to be ambitious in everything, even girls.”
Guys like us, I thought, tickled to be a guy like him. Already I was wondering how I could become a ladies’ man. “You ever been close to married?”
“You should eat something.” He lifted the napkin from the plate to see if anything edible had escaped his notice: no. “I’ve never had a near miss, but I do have a distant missus. I’m married.”
“Where’s your wife?”
“A good question. Florida? I think that’s what the note under the milk bottle said. Plus it said: Don’t try to find me. Personally I think she ran away with the milkman. I never did get a bill for that bottle.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“It was easier with the second wife. The next one, number three? That’ll be true love, whoever she is. See what I mean? Ambition.”
He flagged down the waitress for a plate of pancakes and some toast. “I’m trying to gain weight,” he said. “While you’ve been studying women, I’ve been studying comedy, and I think fat men are funnier.”
“Not always,” I said.
“Not always,” he agreed. “Not Chaplin. But Chaplin might be funnier if he got heavy. There’s no telling.”
“No,” I said, fascinated.
“Don’t you gain weight, though,” he said. “You look fine. Wouldn’t be funny, you being fat. But you’re going to need a wig.”
“What?” I’d been so happy, flinging that wig to the sidewalk below.
“A piece,” he said. “You’re losing your hair. I mean, you don’t need to do anything about it today. Just keep an eye out.”
My fingers were in my hair, trying to find what he was talking about.
“Right here,” he said, and he reached across the table and touched my forehead where, if I’d had horns, they would have sprouted. “Look, you’re not bald, but one day?”
“I have a widow’s peak,” I said. “It just depends how I comb it.”
“You can fool the mirror,” he said, “but you can’t fool the balcony. Okay, Sharp, if everything goes right, I’ll buy you a mirror and you can see what I’m talking about. Get your fingers out of your hair.”
“Sorry.” I set my hands down on the table so he could watch them.
“You’re still worried,” he said. “About what Freddy told you. Don’t be. Please don’t be. I don’t remember how long you’ve been on the circuit, but take it from me, six partners in two years is nothing. That’s what you do. You switch around till you find someone who matches up. That’s us. On my honor. Thirty years from now there’ll be books about me and you. Movies. National holidays. I promise. Believe me, I never promised Freddy a national holiday, or any of those other guys. This meal’s on me, by the way, so order something. Come on, eat something, don’t be so delicate. Do you cook? I learned in the navy, myself. I’d offer to make you dinner sometime, but I can’t cook for less than two hundred.”
He paused here, and ate some toast thoughtfully.
“If it’s a matter of the math,” I said, “I can help you with it.”
“No, Clever Hans,” he said, “it’s not a matter of the math.”
If all of this sounds like romance, it was, in its way. I’m not talking about any kind of funny business. But an act is a marriage — years later, when I met my future wife, I thought Yes, I remember this. You meet someone, and you take all sorts of things on faith, but it doesn’t feel like faith. You have to be a little faithless to talk of faith; if you believe, it’s all facts. We will be together forever; the two of us will be a smash. If you had any inkling of the odds against you — and I’m talking both of show business and Wedded Bliss — you’d break up the next day and save yourself a lot of trouble.
I loved the guy. It’s hard to describe it, exactly; it’s even hard for me to remember, what with everything that came later. I’d idolized Hattie, but I’d known her all my life. Rocky was bluff and sometimes mean and funny and smart and a stranger, so I couldn’t take any of it for granted. All day long, he surprised me.
He took a shine to me, too. Who is so adorable as a devoted fan with a nice personality?
Dogs Like Eggs
But I wasn’t transformed, not yet. I was still myself, a nice Jewish boy from Iowa who’d stumbled from one act to another. My transformation came the next week, when we’d moved on to the Milwaukee Palace to play on a motley bilclass="underline" Archie Grace and Sammy, a ventriloquist act; Dr. Elkhorn and his canines, all of them, man and dogs, fancy and stump-legged and mournful — I wouldn’t have been surprised to see the doctor baying at the moon with his pack; and the headliner, Jack Robertson, the human cobra, a monopede dancer from Aberdeen who’d somewhere misplaced his right leg and left arm. Back in my Mimi-and-Savant days, I’d played the Kalamazoo Magestic with the admirable Robertson: he shimmied up a rope and twined himself around it so fast it was hard to tell what was man and what was rope. “I used to have a tank act,” he told the audience, “a big tank filled with water, but I kept going in circles.” He’d gotten even more muscular since Kalamazoo, and had added a bit that involved bending backward, grasping his ankle, and rolling around the stage like a thrown hubcap.
There was a bad flash act, a big musical number featuring one juvenile singer who seemed composed of slightly chewed candy (licorice hair, jelly-bean lips, round gumdroppish feet that stuck to the stage) and five unpretty girls dressed up as flowers. Sisters, I realized when I looked at them, and he was probably the sole brother, creepily singing to each one, “My violet, my daisy, my Irish rose/My buttercup, I’ll eat you up. . ” The opener was a zaftig contortionist who called herself the Indian Rubber Maid, by which she must have meant that she looked like she’d bounce.
The stage was so uneven we had to watch where we put our feet. Well, I only had to stand still. Rocky kept tripping, on purpose, and when he jumped into my arms at the end of the act it was a flying leap. How I caught him I’ll never know, but I did, and the audience roared: they thought we’d made the whole thing up just for them. “Where did you come from?” I asked my armful, and he answered, “Daddy says from heaven, but Mama says the Sears, Roebuck catalog.”
After the second show, around 10:00 P.M., Rocky said, “A drink? I know a place.” Jack Robertson was still onstage; he’d left his crutch, as usual, in the wings. His simplest running hop was worthy of applause.