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.