by John Irving
That was the last Jack saw of Mimi Lederer, and he liked Mimi--he really did. But she didn't like him anymore after that morning at The Mark. Mimi said when she left that she didn't know who he was. But the scary thing was that Jack didn't know who he was.
As an actor, he could be anybody. On-screen, the world had seen Jack Burns cry--as a man and as a woman. He'd made his mascara run many times--anything for a movie! Yet Jack couldn't cry for Emma; he didn't shed a single tear that morning at The Mark.
It was still pretty early when he left the hotel for the airport. The front-desk clerk was a young man Jack hadn't seen before--probably the same young man who'd put through Alice's call. Of course the clerk knew it was the Jack Burns--everyone did. But as Jack was leaving, the clerk called out--his voice full of the utmost sincerity, of the kind that young people express when they genuinely want to please you. "Have a nice day, Mr. Rainbow!"
As it turned out, Jack had been wrong to envision Emma's death as a heart attack, which typically has some familiar symptoms antecedent to death--like sweating, shortness of breath, light-headedness, and chest pains. But Emma Oastler died of a heart condition called Long QT Syndrome; an inherited disease, it affects the sodium and potassium channels in the heart. (This, in turn, leads to abnormalities in the heart's electrical system.) Emma died of a sudden arrhythmia--ventricular fi-brillation, her doctor told Jack. Her heart suddenly stopped pumping; Emma died before she was even aware of not feeling well.
With Long QT Syndrome, often sudden death is the first indication of a problem. In sixty percent of patients, a resting EKG would indicate an abnormality, which would alert a doctor to the possibility of the condition. But the other forty percent would have completely normal examinations--unless exercise EKG's were used. (Emma's doctor told Jack that Emma had never had one.)
Her doctor went on to tell him that a fatal episode could be triggered by a loud noise, extreme emotion, exertion, or an electrolyte imbalance--which, in turn, could be caused by drinking alcohol or having sex.
The boy from Coconut Teaszer--whose name would never be made public--said that Emma had collapsed on him so spontaneously that he'd thought it was simply the way she liked to have sex, which he was having for the first time. He'd done exactly what Emma had told him to do; he hadn't moved. (He was probably too afraid to move.) After he'd managed to extricate himself from Emma's last embrace, the kid called the police.
Given the genetic nature of the syndrome, Emma's surviving family would eventually be screened for it. Leslie Oastler was the sole survivor, and she showed no signs of the abnormality. Her ex-husband, Emma's father, had died several years earlier--apparently, in his sleep.
"What a pisser," as Leslie would put it.
Jack arrived home before he had time to prepare himself for Mrs. Oastler. On the plane, he'd been thinking about Emma--not Leslie. (He'd been considering his lack of emotion, if that was the right word for what he lacked.)
Leslie Oastler was all over Jack, like a storm. "I know Leslie," Alice had said. "She'll break down, eventually." But Mrs. Oastler's grief was not yet evident--only her anger.
Leslie greeted him at the door. "Where the fuck is Emma's novel, Jack? I mean the new one."
"I don't know where Emma's novel is, Leslie."
"Where's your novel, Jack? Or whatever the fuck it is that you're supposed to be writing--you don't even have a computer!"
"I don't work at home," he answered. This was not exactly a lie--regarding the writing part of his life, Jack didn't work anywhere.
"You don't even have a typewriter!" Mrs. Oastler said. "Do you write in longhand?"
"Yes. I happen to like writing by hand, Leslie." This wasn't exactly a lie, either. What writing he did--shopping lists, script notes, autographs--was always in longhand.
Mrs. Oastler had been all through Emma's computer. She had searched for Emma's novel under every name she could think of; nothing on Emma's computer had a name that contained the word novel, or the number three, or the word third. There was nothing resembling a title of a work-in-progress, either.
The boy from Coconut Teaszer must have been very believable, because the police never treated the house on Entrada as a crime scene. And because Emma was a famous author--not that the boy even knew she was a writer--both the police and Emma's doctor had concluded their business promptly, and without making much of a mess.
Mrs. Oastler, on the other hand, had ransacked the house. Whatever damage had been done by Emma spontaneously dying on top of the kid from Coconut Teaszer was minimal in comparison to Leslie's frenzied searching, which resembled a drug-induced burglary--drawers and closets flung wide open, clothes strewn about. She'd found a couple of pairs of Jack's boxers in Emma's bedroom, and a pair of Emma's panties and two of her bras under Jack's bed; she'd found Emma's cache of porn films, too. "Did you watch them together?" Mrs. Oastler asked.
"Sometimes--for research," Jack said.
"Bullshit!"
"We should get out of here, Leslie--let me take you to dinner." Jack was trying to imagine what else Mrs. Oastler might have discovered in her search.
"Were you fucking each other or not?" she asked him.
"Absolutely not," he told her. "Not once."
"Why not?" Mrs. Oastler asked. Jack had no good answer to that question; he said nothing. "You slept together but you didn't do it--is that the way it was, Jack?" He nodded. "Like the script reader and the porn star in Emma's depressing novel?" Leslie asked.
"Kind of," was all he could say. Jack didn't want to give Mrs. Oastler the impression that he was too big for Emma, which would imply they had tried. But Leslie had come to her own conclusions--at least in regard to how Emma had handled her vaginismus. (Top position; young boys she could boss around, usually.)
Jack had been right to ask Emma if her vaginismus had a cause--of course it did, not that Emma could ever have told him. She'd been sexually abused when she was nine or ten--one of her mother's bad boyfriends had done it. He would be Mrs. Oastler's last boyfriend. Emma had been so traumatized that she'd missed a year of school. "Some problem at home" was all Jack remembered hearing about it; he'd assumed that this had something to do with Leslie's divorce.
Mrs. Oastler's final boyfriend gave new meaning to Emma's saga of the squeezed child; at twelve, perhaps this had been her first attempt to fictionalize her personal grievances. "Of course there were any number of traumatic visits to doctors' offices, beginning with Emma's first gynecological examination," Leslie told Jack. "And she hated her father--naturally, he was a doctor."
Jack didn't know that Emma's dad had been a doctor. Whenever Emma or her mother mentioned him, the word asshole was dominant. The word doctor, if Jack had ever heard it, had been drummed out of his memory by asshole.
"Let me take you to dinner, Leslie," Jack repeated. "Let's go someplace Emma liked."
"I hate to eat," Mrs. Oastler reminded him.
"Well, I usually have just a salad," Jack said. "Let's go somewhere and have a salad."
"Which one of you liked the Japanese condoms?" Leslie asked. (She'd even found Jack's Kimono MicroThins!)
"Those are mine," he told her. "They have great salads at One Pico." His old boss--Carlos, from American Pacific--was now working as a waiter there. Jack called and asked Carlos for a table with a view of the ocean and the promenade.
There were a lot of messages on the answering machine, but Mrs. Oastler assured Jack they were not worth listening to--she'd already done so. Condolences from friends--even Wild Bill Vanvleck had called. (The Mad Dutchman hadn't made a movie in years. Jack had worried that he might be dead.)
The only thing even mildly interesting, Leslie said, was the call from Alan Hergott--informing Jack that he'd been named literary executor in Emma's will. (Alan was also Emma's lawyer.) And Bob Bookman, their agent, had called; it was important, Bookman said, that he and Jack meet with Alan to discuss Emma's will. (Jack had only recently learned--from his last, unpleasant conversation with Emma--that she had
a will, and that she'd supposedly taken good care of him in it.)
"I'll bet she's left you everything," Mrs. Oastler remarked, with an encompassing wave of her thin arm--indicating the ransacked ruin of the wretched house on Entrada Drive. "Lucky you."
While Leslie had a shower and changed her clothes, Jack played the messages on the answering machine at low volume. Both Bob Bookman and Alan Hergott made him think that his role as "literary executor" was a bigger deal than he might be anticipating; their voices had an unexpected urgency, which Mrs. Oastler had missed or chosen to ignore.
Leslie had changed into a sexy backless dress with a halter-type neckline. Only nine years older than Alice, Mrs. Oastler had just turned sixty, but she was so sleek and unwrinkled that she looked ten years younger--and she knew it. Her dark, boyish pixie was dyed to its roots, her small breasts didn't droop, her small bottom looked firm. Only the veins on the backs of her hands betrayed her, and her hands were never at rest--as if to deny you a lingering look at them.
Leslie announced that Emma's bedroom had the ambience of a crime scene, and that she wouldn't sleep there. Jack offered her his bedroom, or the guest room, but Mrs. Oastler told him that she had reserved a room for them at Shutters. After all, they were going to eat at the restaurant there. "We might as well spend the night," she said.
"We?" he asked her.
"I shouldn't be left alone," she told him. "If you slept with Emma and didn't do it, I guess you can sleep with me and not do it, too, Jack."
He put her small carry-on bag in the backseat of the Audi and drove her to Shutters. The sun had set, but a faded-pink glow served as a backlight to the Santa Monica Pier; the lights on the Ferris wheel were on. On the promenade below One Pico, people on Rollerblades swept past incessantly. Leslie drank a bottle of red wine with her salad; Jack had about a gallon of iced tea with his.
"I wonder what you're the literary executor of," Mrs. Oastler remarked. (Carlos had told him, while she'd gone off to register in the hotel, that Leslie was the best-looking date he'd seen Jack with in a long time.)
"Her novel, maybe," Jack said.
"In which case, what would you do with it, Jack?"
"Maybe Emma wanted me to decide if it was fit to publish or not," he replied.
"It doesn't exist, Jack. There is no third novel. It wasn't her novel that was growing too long--it was the period of time in which she'd written nothing," Leslie said.
"Emma told you that?" he asked, because it suddenly sounded true.
Mrs. Oastler shrugged. "Emma never told me anything, Jack. Did she talk to you?"
"Not about her third novel," he admitted.
"There is no third novel," Leslie repeated.
It turned out that Mrs. Oastler had called Alan Hergott. Alan said something vague to her: the proceedings were "of a literary nature"; in fact, Emma had specified that her mother be excluded from the process. Even the reading of the will was a private matter, Alan told Mrs. Oastler; only Bob Bookman and Jack were allowed to hear what Emma wanted done with her estate.
"But are you guessing, or do you know there's no third novel--not even a work-in-progress?" Jack asked Leslie.
"I'm only guessing," Mrs. Oastler admitted. "With Emma, I was always guessing."
"Me, too," he said.
Surprisingly, Mrs. Oastler held his hand. He looked at her pretty face--her bright, dark eyes, her thin-lipped mouth with that seductive smile, her perfectly straight little nose--and wondered how a creature of Emma's outsize dimensions could ever have come forth from such a lean, taut body.
What Mrs. Oastler said surprised him. "Emma's death was not your fault, Jack. You were the only person she cared about. She told me once that taking care of you was all that mattered to her."
"She never told me that," he admitted. It would have been a good time to cry, but he still couldn't. And if, in his mother's estimation, Leslie Oastler would eventually break down, now was apparently not her moment to fall apart, either.
"Let's get the check," Leslie said. "I can't wait to see what sleeping with you and not doing it is like."
Jack thought they should tell his mother where they were spending the night. Alice would be worried about Leslie--and about Jack, to a lesser degree. What if his mom called the house on Entrada and got only the answering machine? Alice would be calling him on his cell phone all night.
"I'll call her while you use the bathroom," Mrs. Oastler said.
He'd forgotten to bring a toothbrush. For a host of historical reasons, Jack was disinclined to use Leslie's toothbrush, but he took a dab of her toothpaste and smeared it on his teeth with his index finger.
"Please feel free to use my toothbrush, Jack," Mrs. Oastler said through the closed bathroom door. "In fact, if you have any expectations of kissing me, please do use it."
He had no expectations of kissing Leslie Oastler--that is, not until she brought it up. Against his better judgment, Jack used her toothbrush to brush his teeth.
When he exited the bathroom, Mrs. Oastler had already undressed. She was naked except for her black bikini-cut panties--a sinister match to the bikini cut of her C-section scar and Alice's signature Rose of Jericho. Leslie crossed her arms over her small, perfect breasts as she slipped past Jack, into the bathroom, with a modesty that was as unexpected as her kisses a few minutes later.
She was an intimidating kisser, excitable and feral--without once closing her bright, watchful eyes. But Jack had the feeling that everything about her was an experiment, that she was merely conducting a test.
When they'd kissed to the point of exhaustion--either they had to stop or they had to progress to a more serious level of foreplay--Mrs. Oastler calmly asked him: "You did this with Emma, didn't you? I mean you kissed."
"Yes, we kissed."
"Did you touch each other?"
"Sometimes."
"How?" He took Mrs. Oastler's breasts in his hands. "Is that all?" she asked.
"That's the only way I touched Emma," he told her.
"Where did she touch you, Jack?"
He couldn't say penis--with all the penis-holding in his life, God knows why. Jack let go of Leslie's breasts and rolled over, turning his back to her. Mrs. Oastler didn't hesitate; her thin arm snaked around Jack's waist, her small hand closing on his penis, which was already hard. "Like that," was all he said to her.
"Well, that's not very big," Leslie said. "I don't think Emma would have had an involuntary muscle spasm over that. Do you, Jack?"
"Maybe not," he said.
Mrs. Oastler went on holding him. He tried to will his erection away, but it endured. Leslie Oastler would always have a certain power over him, he was thinking. She had entered his childhood at a vulnerable time, first with her push-up bra--before he even met her--and later by showing him her Rose of Jericho, when Jack was of such a young age that the way she trimmed her pubic hair would become the model of the form for him.
In this way, in increments both measurable and not, our childhood is stolen from us--not always in one momentous event but often in a series of small robberies, which add up to the same loss. For surely Mrs. Oastler was one of the thieves of Jack's childhood--not that she necessarily meant to hurt him, or that she gave the matter any thought one way or another. Leslie Oastler was simply someone who disliked innocence, or she held innocence in contempt for reasons that weren't even clear to her.
She'd been disillusioned by her doctor ex-husband, whose great wealth was family money, which both he and Mrs. Oastler took for granted. (Dr. Oastler didn't make all that money as a doctor--not in Canada.) As a result, Mrs. Oastler had dedicated herself to the task of disillusioning others; and because Leslie met Alice, Jack just happened to fall under Leslie's spell.
In any case, when Emma had held his penis, his erection always subsided before long--not so with Mrs. Oastler. Jack was sure he had a hard-on that would last as long as she held him, and Leslie gave no indication that she was about to let go. He attempted to distract her with conversation of
an inappropriate kind, but this only inspired her to alter her grip--or to alternately stroke and pull his penis in a maddeningly indifferent way.
"I feel that I never thanked you properly," Jack began. His betrayal of Emma's strongly expressed wish--namely, that he not thank her mother--made him feel as disloyal to his dear, departed friend as his continuing erection in her mother's hand.
"Thanked me for what?" Mrs. Oastler asked.
"For buying my clothes--for Redding, and for Exeter. For paying my tuition at both schools. For taking care of us--I mean my mother and me. For all you did for us, after Mrs. Wicksteed--"
"Stop it, Jack." He would have stopped without her telling him to do so, because her grip on his penis had tightened--painfully. Leslie Oastler pressed her open mouth between his shoulder blades, as if she were preparing to bite him; maybe she was smothering a scream. But all she said was, "Don't thank me."
"But why not, Leslie? You've been very generous."
"Me, generous?" Mrs. Oastler asked. He felt her hand relax at last; her fingers lightly traced an imaginary outline of his penis, which had not relaxed at all.
Jack remembered a lull between customers at Daughter Alice, when his mom had said to him--as if it were part of an ongoing conversation, which it wasn't, and not out of the blue, which it was--"Promise me one thing, Jack. Don't ever sleep with Leslie."
"Mom, I would never do such a thing!" he'd declared.
And there was that night at the Sunset Marquis, a small West Hollywood hotel where Jack had been banging a model; she had a private villa on the grounds, not one of those cheap rooms in the main building. A noisy bunch of musicians--rock-'n'-rollers and their groupies--were partying in an adjacent villa, and Jack's model wanted to crash their party. Jack just needed to crash, but not there--he wanted to go home. To prevent him from leaving, the model flushed his car keys down the toilet.
Jack could have gone to the front desk and asked someone to call him a taxi, but he didn't want to leave the Audi at the Sunset Marquis overnight; bad things had happened there. Besides, except for her bra, the model had dressed herself in Jack's clothes and gone off to the musicians' party. He would have had to leave the hotel wearing her clothes, and they weren't a good fit. (She was a size six, or something.)
