“You love her already, and you know it,” I said.
“Yeah, sure. I’ll tell you the truth, Professor. I’ve never seen a woman so quickly ruined by marriage.” He said this as though he was not the man who instigated the marriage, and therefore the ruin.
“She looks fine,” I said. I was a matrimonial amateur, but it struck me as unseemly to talk about your wife that way. Then I said it: “I know I’m an amateur—”
“That’s right,” said Rocky. “You’ll learn. You know”—he reached across the table and flicked at my lapel—“I’ve never seen you look so unpressed.”
“Unimpressed?”
“Wrinkled,” said Rocky.
Penny arrived then, yawning and smoking. She slid in next to Rocky and reached across him to grind out her cigarette in the ashtray.
“Mike’s a mess,” said Rocky.
“He looks swell,” said Penny, for whom wrinkles were a kind of sartorial braille.
Poor kid. She was wearing a great deal of makeup, which just made her look more exhausted. I don’t think Rocky really was to blame. Nightclub singers don’t age well — all that smoke and liquor and nightly pining. Besides, someone who liked to flirt as much as Penny did would be miserable married: she was like a dog chasing a rabbit for years only to discover that, upon cornering the thing, she didn’t much care for rabbits. I started really liking Penny, once she was married to Rock: as she put it (somewhat to my embarrassment), we shared a husband. That would get me into trouble later.
A marriage of convenience. What marriage isn’t? Penny and Rocky, getting hitched in New York. My father marrying my mother so the neighbors don’t talk. Love is inconvenient; marriage makes it less so. Years later, me and Jessica, my fancy dancer, as Rocky called her: I wanted to marry Jessie so that in the morning, when we woke up, there we’d be, married, convenient, sufficient. Rose on the highway with Quigley at the wheel, Rose leaving Iowa. Marry your driver, girls, and you’ll get where you’re going faster.
“What next?” Penny said now, which is what she always said. Once it meant she was looking forward to the next adventure; this time it sounded as though she was addressing a punishing God.
“What indeed?” said Rocky, not catching the tone. “What heights shall we soar to now?”
8. The Boys in Hollywood
By 1939, when I arrived, Hollywood had already made plenty of pictures about Midwestern bumpkins such as myself who came to the land of sunshine and either triumphed or lost their minds. We were cheerful gawkers, one hand on our cardboard grips, one holding our hats to the crowns of our heads. I was set to strike that pose, but Rock’s first act in Los Angeles — we were standing on the platform of the station — was to light a cigar and suggest getting drunk.
“All right,” Penny said amiably. She’d tucked herself under Rock’s arm, so she wouldn’t get lost. “But where are the oranges?”
Rocky pulled her closer. “What oranges, my love?”
“Oranges,” she explained. “Whenever I pictured myself in California, I always had an orange in my hand.”
“You thought they doled them out at the border?”
“Maybe.”
“They only take away your old fruit,” said Rocky. “They don’t give you replacements.”
“We should have oranges,” said Penny. “And honey. And — what do they drink here? Is there such a thing as an orange julep?”
“I’ll invent them for you,” said Rocky. “Orange juleps, honey juleps, milk-and-honey juleps, grape juleps. Name your julep.”
“Honey,” she answered, shivering in her lilac Swiss-dotted frock, part of her California trousseau. She had a diaphanous shawl that she pulled around her shoulders, though it didn’t look like it could warm a wax dummy.
The studio had arranged a couple of neighboring bungalows for us on Melrose Avenue, and Rocky directed a taxi to take our luggage to them: Penny had packed so many trunks we couldn’t have ridden along even if we’d wanted to.
In any case, she insisted on sight-seeing before drinking, though with her vision that meant dropping to a squat in the front of Grauman’s Chinese so she could trace Norma Shearer’s tiny footprints with her fingers. The movie palaces themselves were red-and-gold smudges to her, and she could not see the letters on Mount Lee that in those days still read HOLLYWOODLAND.
“It’s like Stonehenge,” I said.
“It’s parochial,” Rock answered. “It’s advertising. There should be a giant sign next to it saying when and where the local Rotary club meets.” (He was right, of course. It had originally been an ad for a nearby housing development of the same name.)
“Aha!” I said. “Mystery of Stonehenge solved. Odd Fellows meet here third Thursday of every month. See it, Penn? Over there?”
“I only read menus. Let’s eat,” said Penny.
“Let’s drink,” said her husband, and so we did. We went to the Trocadero, and then to the Mocambo. Rocky was looking for the brass band he assumed would welcome him to California: if we just kept looking, surely they would show up. “I’d settle for one lousy sousaphone,” he said. “A flugelhorn. Anything.” At three in the morning we went to a diner to eat ourselves sober, at least a little, and at dawn we were in yet another cab, which took us to the beach. Even Penny could see the ocean: the size of it seemed to knock her over onto the sand, where she sat in her lilac dress, the shawl wrapped several times around her head.
“How very blue.” She pointed at the sky, and then at the sea. “I’d like a dress that shade,” she said, and passed out.
“Whaddya think?” Rock asked.
I answered despite myself, “God is mighty.”
“I am mighty!” Rocky said, and began to strip off his shoes and socks and pants. Having conquered the West Coast, he’d now whip its ocean into shape. Maybe he could work Hawaii in before breakfast.
“I’ve never seen the ocean before,” I said.
“Yes, you have,” said Rocky. “I saw you see it.”
“You did?”
“The East Coast,” he said. “The East Coast.”
I laughed at my own stupidity: of course. I had seen city harbors, I had even gone across one so I could stand at the feet of the Statue of Liberty, but that wasn’t the ocean ocean. Here it was, miles of ocean ocean, the ocean blue, slapping waves on the sand and then pulling them back like a cardplayer who’s misdealt. Waves. That’s what I hadn’t seen before, the way a wave curled over and stretched and showed its underside, sea green! before it broke. I rolled up my pant legs. Rocky strode into the water in his shorts and undershirt.
Could water around your ankles make you seasick? I closed my eyes and tilted my face up; even the insides of my eyelids seemed sea-green instead of the usual hot orange. Probably I was just hungover. Despite the nausea and a pressing headache around the edges of my brain, I felt pretty terrific. For years I’d felt like I’d jumped bail in my hometown, and now I’d settled my business there and I was free and brave and in California.
We waded out farther. Suddenly Rocky dove forward and began to swim.
“Come on,” he said.
“Can’t. Don’t know how.”
He turned over in the water and wiggled his toes at me. “Everyone knows how to swim,” he said, but then he shrugged his way into a backstroke, and then a front stroke, and kept going.
Behind us on the beach, Penny slumbered next to a pile of clothing shaped like her husband. I thought about covering her with Rock’s jacket, but she looked comfortable enough.
When I turned back and scanned the horizon, Rocky was gone. I searched for a waterspout, the crook of his elbow slicing up like a shark fin, the backs of his heels making whitecaps on the waves. For eight years Rocky had been in plain sight. Where was he now? I looked up the deserted beach and down the deserted beach and back to the ocean, and I could only come to one conclusion: Rocky had drowned. He’d stumbled drunk into the Pacific and sunk to the bottom.