Until I Find You

by John Irving

  Jack was on his usual diet--mostly proteins, maybe a little light on the carbs for all the time he spent on the cardiovascular machines. He was taking it easy with the free weights: nothing heavy, just lots of reps. He wasn't trying to bulk up. His job, meaning getting one--the next role, and the role after that--depended on his staying lean and mean.

  Jack was lightheaded with hunger by the time he left the gym every night, when he went back to get Emma and they drove out again to eat--and his stomach was falling in on itself every morning. You could say that Jack was burning the candle at both ends, too--but not like Emma.

  One night, when she was wolfing down her mashed potatoes at Kate Mantilini, Emma noticed that Jack hadn't finished his salad. He'd stopped eating and was watching her eat; his expression was one of concern, not disgust, but Jack should have known that Emma would have found his disgust more acceptable.

  "Are you thinking I'm gonna die young?" she asked him.

  "No!" he said, too quickly.

  "Well, I am," she told him. "If my appetite doesn't kill me, the vaginismus will."

  "The vaginismus can't kill you, can it?" Jack asked her, but Emma's mouth was full; she just shrugged and went on eating.

  22

  Money Shots

  Batman and Lethal Weapon 2 were among the top-grossing movies of 1989, but the Oscar for Best Picture would go to Driving Miss Daisy. Jack's second film with William Vanvleck was called The Tour Guide; it wouldn't win any awards.

  The Anne Frank House has been reinvented in Las Vegas. A tacky shrine to a dead rock-'n'-roll star clearly modeled on a prettier Janis Joplin--that would be Jack--draws morbid fans of the late sexpot, who, earlier in the movie, chokes to death on her own vomit following a drunken binge. The dead singer's name is Melody; her group, Pure Innocence, gets its start in the beatnik haunts of Venice and North Beach in the early 1960s. They abandon their folk-jazz-blues roots for psychedelic rock, finding an audience and a home for themselves among the flower children in San Francisco in 1966.

  Everything in a William Vanvleck remake was stolen from something else; Pure Innocence and Melody's leap to fame coincides with when Janis Joplin started singing with Big Brother and the Holding Company. Melody's first hit single, "You Can't Handle My Heart Like It Was Somethin' Else," sounds suspiciously like Big Mama Thornton's "Ball and Chain." Jack didn't sing it half badly.

  Jack-as-Melody promptly dumps Pure Innocence and goes solo. By '69, Melody's albums have gone gold and platinum and triple-platinum. She returns to being a blues singer with her last hit single, "Bad Bill Is Gone," an ode to an abusive ex-boyfriend--the former lead guitarist in Pure Innocence, whom the tabloids allege Melody once tried to kill by lacing his favorite marijuana lasagna with rat poison. (That "Bad Bill Is Gone" sounded like "Me and Bobby McGee" couldn't be a coincidence.)

  Jack-as-Melody dies passed-out drunk and choking on his-as-her puke in a Las Vegas hotel room, following a concert there--hence the shrine to Melody's short life and intense fame opens as yet another rock-'n'-roll museum, this one at the Mandalay Bay end of the strip. The crass display of Melody's less-than-innocent underwear is out of place and easy to overlook among those casinos and hotels on the strip, but The Mad Dutchman had always wanted to make a movie in Las Vegas, and The Tour Guide was it.

  Certainly Wild Bill could have found a better singer for Melody, but maybe not a hotter girl. ("You were hot, baby cakes," Emma told Jack. "Your singing lacked a little something, but you were hot--I'll give you that.") Jack wasn't bad as the guy, either--the eponymous tour guide himself.

  "Let's keep it simple," Wild Bill Vanvleck told Jack. "Let's call the tour guide Jack."

  Jack-as-Jack is a devoted fan of Pure Innocence, in the group's short-lived Melody years. Jack is still in college when Melody splits from the group; he has only recently graduated when the singer dies. His adoration of Melody is deeper than the after-her-death kind. (In the film, Jack appears to be dancing when he walks--"Bad Bill Is Gone" or "You Can't Handle My Heart Like It Was Somethin' Else" is pounding in his head.)

  The sleazy manager of the Melody Museum, as the shameless shrine is called, hires Jack-as-Jack as a tour guide, but Jack is disapproving of some of the displays, which he sees as exploiting Melody--not that the slut singer didn't do plenty to exploit herself. Her collected musical instruments are innocent, as are the photos of her tours and the music itself. But there are "compromising" photographs--of Melody consorting with the lead guitarist who beat her, of Melody drunk and passed out on various motel-room beds. And there are her clothes, especially her "intimate apparel"; no one should see or paw over her underwear, Jack believes. Jack also disapproves of the collection of empty wine bottles; some of the dates on the labels indicate that Melody died before the wines were bottled.

  The manager, a precursor of the Harvey Keitel character in Holy Smoke, tells Jack that the wine bottles are for "atmosphere"; as for the displayed underwear, a pink thong, among others--these items are "essential."

  Just as Rachel imagines that Anne Frank could have gotten away, Jack convinces himself that Melody didn't have to die. If only he'd been around and had known her, he could have saved her. Jack believes that the shrine to Melody is a betrayal of her; the seedier of her collected things are mocking her.

  One night, when the Melody Museum is closed, Jack lets himself in--he has a key. He brings a couple of empty suitcases and packs up the items he considers too intimate, or too damaging to Melody's reputation; the latter, apparently, is sacred only to him. Two cops in a patrol car see lights in the closed building and investigate. But Jack-as-Jack has transformed himself into Jack-as-Melody. Dressed as the dead singer, he carries the suitcases past the stunned policemen--out onto the Vegas strip. (Not every guy can get away with emerald-green spangles on black spandex.) It is The Mad Dutchman's sole directorial touch of genius: until the scene when Jack-as-Melody walks out of the Melody Museum, toting the suitcases, the audience has never seen the strip at night in its garish neon splendor.

  Inexplicably, the cops let Jack-as-Melody go. Do they think he's Melody's ghost? (They don't look frightened.) Do they know he's a guy in drag? (They don't look as if they care.) Or do the cops--like Jack, like the audience--recognize that the Melody Museum is a twisted place? Do they think the shrine ought to be robbed?

  Wild Bill Vanvleck doesn't explain. It's the image The Remake Monster cares about--Jack-as-Melody walking up the strip in emerald-green heels and that hot dress, lugging those obviously heavy bags. As Jack is leaving, disappearing into the night--reborn as Melody, maybe, or just looking for an affordable hotel--the sleazy manager sees him-as-her walking away. Jack looks so perfect that the manager doesn't try to intervene. He merely shouts: "You're fired, Jack--you bitch!"

  In Melody's voice, Jack says: "It's a good job to lose." (Jack Burns's contribution to Vanvleck's god-awful script--he was right about that line having legs.)

  The Tour Guide was by no means the worst movie of the year. (Or of the following year, which produced Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Die Hard 2.) And the shot of Jack Burns in drag, when he's saying, "It's a good job to lose"--well, everyone would remember that. The film may have been forgettable, but not that shot--not that line.

  At the 1991 Academy Awards, Billy Crystal was the host. He was good, but he may have been a bit too fast with one of his jokes. It was a pretty knowing audience at the Shrine Civic Auditorium, but most of them missed the joke. Not Jack, who was watching the show on TV; he got it, but that's because it was his line.

  Billy Crystal was talking about the possibility of being replaced as the host of the Academy Awards. The audience groaned in protest at the very idea; most of them then missed Billy saying, in a pointedly feminine way, "It's a good job to lose."

  That was when Emma and Jack knew he had made it. "Shit, did you hear that, baby cakes?" They were in Mrs. Oastler's house--Emma and Jack were back in Toronto, visiting their mothers--but Alice and Leslie were whispering to each other in the kitchen;
they missed Billy Crystal's homage to Jack's famous end line in The Tour Guide, and they would go to bed before Dances with Wolves won the Oscar for Best Picture.

  Jack had not only heard Billy Crystal's joke; he was genuinely impressed by Billy's imitation of Jack-as-Melody. "Christ," he said.

  "No more Mad Dutchman, honey pie," Emma said. "I can't wait for your next movie." Jack and Emma were on the couch in the grand living room of what he used to think of as the Oastler mansion. (That was before he'd seen some of those real mansions in Beverly Hills.) If Jack looked over Emma's shoulder, he could see the foyer at the foot of the main staircase, where Mrs. Machado had landed her high-groin kick with such devastating results.

  Emma had sold her second novel for big bucks. She'd taken the manuscript to Bob Bookman at C.A.A. before she submitted it to her publisher. She had no intention of making the film rights unsalable this time. Bookman got her a movie deal before the novel was published, which was just the way Emma wanted it.

  Called Normal and Nice, Emma's second Hollywood novel was about what happens to a young couple from Iowa who go to Hollywood to fulfill their dreams of becoming movie stars. The husband, Johnny, gives up his dream before his wife, Carol, gives up hers. Johnny is too thin-skinned to make it as an actor; a couple of rough auditions and he packs it in. Besides, he's a real clean liver--a nondrinker, an overall straight arrow. With boyish charm and a spotless driving record, Johnny gets a job as a limo driver; soon he's driving a stretch.

  Given Emma's knack for irony, Johnny ends up driving movie stars. His lingering desire for the actor's imagined life is reflected by his ponytail, Johnny's sole emblem of rebellion among limo drivers. His ponytail is neat and clean, and not very long. (Emma describes Johnny as "attractive in a delicate, almost feminine way.") Long hair suits him; Johnny feels fortunate that the limousine company lets him keep the ponytail.

  His wife, Carol, isn't so lucky. She goes to work for an escort service--much to Johnny's shame but with his reluctant approval. Carol tries one service after another, in alphabetical order--Absolutely Gorgeous, Beautiful Beyond Belief, and so on.

  Johnny draws the line at Have You Been a Bad Boy? But it doesn't matter; as Carol discovers, they're all alike. Whether at Instant Escorts or Irresistible Temptations, what's expected of her is the same--namely, everything.

  At one escort service, Carol might last a week or a month or less than a day. It all depends on how long it takes for her to meet what Emma calls an "irregular" customer. Once Carol starts refusing to do what a client wants, her days at that particular escort service are numbered.

  Not unlike The Slush-Pile Reader, Normal and Nice reveals Emma's sympathy for damaged, deeply compromised relationships that somehow work. Carol and Johnny never stop loving each other; what holds them together is their absolute, unshakable agreement concerning what constitutes normal and nice behavior.

  Carol does outcalls only. She always phones Johnny and tells him where she's going--not just the hotel but the customer's name and room number--and she calls Johnny again when she gets to the room, and when she's safely out. But irregular requests are commonplace; Carol loses her job at one service after another.

  Finally, Johnny has a suggestion: Carol should have her own listing in the Yellow Pages. The best thing Carol ever has to say about a client is that he was "nice." Nice means "normal"--hence Carol calls her escort service Normal and Nice.

  Emma writes: "She might have attracted more customers with a service called Maternity Leave. Who calls an escort service for normal and nice?"

  Johnny starts pimping for Carol. He has some regular limo clients, people Johnny feels he knows--movie stars among them. "You're probably not interested," Johnny says to the outwardly nicer of the gentlemen he drives around in his stretch, "but if you're ever tempted to call an escort service, I know one particularly nice woman--normal and nice, if that's what you like. Nothing irregular, if you know what I mean."

  The first time Johnny says this to a famous actor, it is heartbreaking. The reader already knows that, instead of becoming a movie star, Johnny is driving them. Now Carol is fucking them!

  It seems that only older men are interested; most of them aren't movie stars, either. They're character actors--villains in the great Westerns, now with ravaged faces and unsteady on their feet, old cowboys with chronic lower-back pain. As children, Carol and Johnny had seen these classic Westerns; they were the movies that made them want to leave Iowa and go to Hollywood in the first place.

  At home, in their half of a tacky duplex in Marina del Rey--close enough to hear and smell the L.A. airport--Carol and Johnny play dress-up games, their roles reversed. She puts her blond hair in a ponytail and dresses in his white shirt and black tie; this prompts Johnny to buy Carol a man's black suit, one that fits her. She dresses as a limo driver, then undresses for him.

  Johnny lets Carol dress him in her clothes; she later buys him his own bra, with falsies, and a dress that fits him. She brushes out his shoulder-length hair and makes him up--lipstick, eye shadow, the works. He rings the doorbell and she lets him-as-her in; he pretends to be the escort, arriving in a stranger's hotel room. "This is their only opportunity to act--together, in the same movie," Emma writes.

  A veteran cowboy actor is in town to promote his new film--what Emma calls a "nouvelle Western." Lester Billings was born Lester Magruder in Billings, Montana; he's an actual cowboy, and nouvelle Westerns offend him. It's a sore point with Lester that Westerns have become so rare that young actors don't know how to ride and shoot anymore. In the so-called Western that Lester is promoting, there are no good guys, no bad guys; everyone is an anti-hero. "A French Western," Lester calls it.

  Johnny sends Carol to Lester's hotel room--after Lester confesses to a hankering for a nice, normal woman. But Lester really is a cowboy; he climbs on Carol. ("There was nothing too irregular--at first," she assures Johnny.) Then, while they're proceeding in the regular way, Lester puts a gun to his head. It's a Colt .45--only one chamber of the revolver is loaded. Lester calls this cowboy roulette.

  "Either I die in the saddle or I live to ride another day!" he hollers. As Lester pulls the trigger, Carol wonders how many girls in L.A. escort services have heard the click of that hammer striking an empty chamber, while Lester lived to ride another day. Not this time. It's Lester's day to die in the saddle.

  In the midafternoon, there aren't many guests in The Peninsula Beverly Hills to hear the gunshot. Besides, the hotel doesn't cater to an especially youthful crowd; maybe the guests in nearby rooms are napping or hard of hearing. Emma describes The Peninsula as being "sort of like the Four Seasons, but with a few more hookers and businessmen."

  Because the hotel is adjacent to C.A.A., possibly an agent hears Lester Billings blow his brains out, but nobody else. And what would an agent care about a gunshot?

  Carol calls Johnny. She knows that no one noticed her crossing the lobby and getting on the elevator, but what if someone sees her leave? She is understandably distraught; she believes that she looks like a hooker. She doesn't, really. Carol has always dressed like a studio exec having lunch; in keeping with normal and nice, she doesn't look like a call girl.

  Johnny saves her. He comes to Lester's hotel room with the requisite changes of clothes, for Carol and himself. The limo driver's suit for Carol, together with the dress and bra and falsies Carol bought for him; by the time Carol has applied his makeup and brushed out his shoulder-length hair, Johnny looks a lot more like a prostitute than Carol ever has.

  He tells her where the limo is parked. It's not far--nor is it parked within sight of the entrance to The Peninsula. He says he'll come find her.

  When Johnny-as-a-hooker leaves The Peninsula, he makes sure he's noticed. Johnny has used a little bottle of bourbon from the minibar in Lester's hotel room as a mouthwash. He struts up to the front desk, where he-as-she seizes a young clerk by his coat lapels and breathes in his face. "There's something you should know," Johnny-as-a-hooker says in a husky voice.
"Lester Billings has checked out. I'm afraid he's really left his room a mess." Then Johnny-as-a-hooker releases the young man and sways through the lobby, leaving the hotel. He and Carol drive home to Marina del Rey, where they change into their regular clothes.

  At the end of the novel, they've stopped for the night in a motel room off Interstate 80 somewhere in the Midwest. They're on their way back to Iowa to find normal jobs and live a nice life. Carol is pregnant. (Maternity Leave, as an escort service, might have been wildly successful, but Carol wants no part of the business--not anymore--and Johnny is through with driving movie stars.)

  In the motel room off the interstate, there's an old Lester Billings movie on the TV--an authentic Western. Lester is a cattle rustler; he dies in the saddle, shot dead on his horse.

  Normal and Nice turned out to be a better movie than a novel, and Emma knew it would be. The film was already in production while the novel was still on the New York Times bestseller list. Many book reviewers complained that the novel was written with the future screenplay in mind. Naturally, Emma wrote the screenplay, too; among film critics, there was some speculation that she might have written it before she wrote the novel. Emma wouldn't say.

  Jack didn't know the details of the deal she made with Bob Bookman at C.A.A., but while Bookman didn't normally represent actors, he agreed to represent Jack. Whether it was in writing--or something that was said over lunch, or in a phone call--it was understood that Emma and Jack were attached to the movie that would be made from Normal and Nice. Emma would write the script and Jack would be Johnny. Of course Emma had Jack in mind for the part from the beginning--a sympathetic cross-dresser. And this time his shoulder-length hair would be real, not a wig.

  Mary Kendall played Carol--as innocent an escort as you'd ever see. Jake "Prairie Dog" Rawlings played Lester Billings--his first role in a long time, and his only screen appearance not in a Western.

  When Mary Kendall and Jack are holding hands in that Interstate 80 motel room, just watching TV, they have no dialogue. In the same scene in the novel, watching Lester Billings get shot, Carol says, "I wonder how many times he got killed in his career."