by John Irving
Jack had called Emma, who was writing. He'd begged her to take a taxi and bring him the spare set of keys to the Audi; they were in the kitchen drawer, by the telephone, he was explaining, when she interrupted him. "Promise me one thing, Jack. Just don't ever sleep with my mother."
"Emma, I would never do such a thing!"
"I'm not so sure, baby cakes. I know she would."
"I promise," he'd told her. "Please come get me."
The model had gone off with Jack's wallet, which was in the left-front pocket of his suit pants, so he had to crash the rock-'n'-rollers' party and find her. He made himself up pretty well--the lipstick, the eye shadow, the works. Her bras were so small that Jack mistook one for a thong, but he managed to stuff each cup with half a tennis ball; he'd cut the ball in two.
The model had "twitches" in her fingers--the result of some deficiency in her diet, probably--and her personal trainer had prescribed squeezing a tennis ball as a remedy. There were tennis balls all over the villa; Jack had used her nail scissors to cut one in half.
He crammed himself into a lime-green camisole with a bare midriff, which unfortunately exposed the line of dark hair that ran from his navel below his waist. But Jack shaved this off with the model's razor. At the same time, he shaved his legs in her sink--cutting one shin. He stuck a piece of toilet paper on the cut and painted his toenails a blood-red color, which matched his wound.
Jack found a pair of peach-colored panties with a lace waistband, but the leg holes would have cut his circulation off if he hadn't snipped them with the nail scissors. Naturally, he couldn't close the zipper on the short navy-blue skirt, but the half-zipped look, which revealed the lace waistband of his panties, more or less went with the overall portrait. He looked very trashy, but so did half the hangers-on and groupies who hung out at the bar at the Sunset Marquis.
In the full-length mirror, Jack saw that he'd painted his nails in too hasty a fashion--it appeared that he'd had a barefoot accident with a lawn mower. The skirt fell off one hip, and he'd torn one side of the camisole, which exposed the tight, twisted back strap of the ivory-colored bra. Jack's tennis-ball breasts were noticeably smaller than his biceps. He looked like a field-hockey player, maybe three or four months pregnant, just starting to show.
He would have forgone the toenail polish if he could have worn his shoes, but the model had used them to weigh down his suit jacket, which was under about four inches of water in the bathtub.
It was just a musicians' party--Jack didn't expect that the dress code would be very severe. He thought it was adequate that he'd used a gob of the model's extra-body conditioner and then blow-dried his hair. He looked like a slightly pregnant former field-hockey player (now a hooker) who'd been struck by lightning, but compared to the girls who were the usual groupies with the rock-'n'-rollers at the Sunset Marquis, Jack was head and shoulders above the competition.
Except for the model--she was hot. She'd stripped off Jack's suit pants and the white dress shirt; she was dancing up a storm in his boxers and her bra. The musicians and their entourage were so wasted that Jack could have been Toshiro Mifune in drag, and no one would have noticed him. All but one guy, who appeared to be giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to his harmonica. He stopped playing and stared at Jack--well, at Jack's tennis ball in two halves, specifically.
"Did you come with her?" he asked Jack, nodding to the dancing model.
"I recognize the boxers and the bra," Jack said. It was a Jack Burns kind of line--it gave him away.
"You could pass for Jack Burns," the harmonica player said. "I'm not shitting you."
"Really?" Jack asked him. "Any idea where the honey in the boxers ditched the rest of her clothes?"
The harmonica player pointed to a couch, where a tall young woman was stretched out; she was asleep or passed out or dead. (Unmindful of the din, whichever the case.) She'd covered herself with Jack's white dress shirt, which either she or the model had used to blot her lipstick. Jack found his suit pants and took the wallet out of the left-front pocket. There was no point in keeping the pants--not with the suit jacket under water in the model's bathtub--and he had a hundred white dress shirts. It was the kind of night when you cut your losses and left.
The model was still dancing. "Tell her she can keep the boxers, but I want my bra back," Jack said to the harmonica player, who was yowling away on his instrument like a runover cat; he barely nodded in Jack's direction.
There was a bouncer-type who'd not seen Jack come in. The bouncer followed Jack out, into the semidark grounds, where there were other villas--some lit, some not. There was already dew on the grass. "Hey," the bouncer said. "Someone said you were that weirdo Jack Burns."
Jack's face came up to the broad chest of the bouncer's Hawaiian shirt; he was blocking Jack's way. Ordinarily Jack would have sidestepped him; he could have easily outrun him to the lineup at the velvet rope out in front of the bar. The bouncer wouldn't have messed with Jack in a crowd. But Jack's skirt was so tight that his knees were brushing together when he walked; he couldn't have run anywhere.
"Is that you, honey pie?" he heard Emma say. The bouncer stepped aside and let him pass. "Just look at you--you're half unzipped!" Emma said to Jack. She threw her big arm around his hip, pulling him to her. She kissed Jack on the mouth, smearing his lipstick. "What happened to your shoes, baby cakes?" she asked.
"Under water," Jack explained.
"They better not have been your Manolo Blahniks, you bad girl," Emma said, putting her big hand on Jack's ass.
"Dykes!" the bouncer called after them.
"I've got a dildo that would make you cry like a little baby!" Emma yelled at the bouncer, who looked suddenly pale in the bad light.
A tall, floppy guy, like a scarecrow, had fallen on the velvet rope in front of the bar; he was draped over it like a coat over a clothesline.
"I think it's illegal to drive barefoot in California," Emma was telling Jack.
"I promise I won't sleep with your mother," he whispered to her.
Jack was almost asleep, with his penis still stiff in Mrs. Oastler's hand, when Leslie spoke to him. "I had to promise your mom I wouldn't sleep with you, Jack. Of course, we're not really sleeping together--not the way Alice meant--are we?"
"Of course not," Jack told her.
One of Mrs. Oastler's fingernails nicked the tip of his penis, and he flinched against her. "I'm sorry," she said. "I haven't played with anyone's penis in quite some time."
"It's okay," he said.
"You gotta talk to your mom, Jack," Leslie said, the way Emma might have said it.
"Why's that?" he asked.
"Talk to her while there's still time, Jack."
"Still time for what?"
"Emma and I didn't talk enough," Mrs. Oastler said. "Now we're out of time."
"Talk to my mom about what?"
"You must have questions, Jack."
"She never answered them!" he told her.
"Well, maybe now's the time," Mrs. Oastler said. "Ask her again."
"Do you know something I don't, Leslie?"
"Definitely," she said. "But I'm not telling you. Ask your mom."
Outside, someone was screaming--probably in the parking lot near the hotel, but at Shutters on the Beach you could hear someone screaming all the way from the Santa Monica Pier. Perhaps it was the screaming that did it, but Jack's erection finally subsided.
"Oh, cute!" Mrs. Oastler said. (She was making a considerable effort to bring his penis back to life.) "It's like it's going away!"
"Maybe it's sad," he suggested.
"Remember that line, Jack," Emma had told him. "You can use it." And to think he hadn't been able to imagine under what circumstances an admission of your penis's sadness would be of any possible use!
But the word sad affected Leslie Oastler in a way Jack wouldn't have predicted. She let go of his penis and rolled over, turning her back to him. He didn't know she was crying until he felt the bed tremble; she was crying
without making a sound. Jack guessed that this was the eventually his mother had meant when she'd said that Leslie would break down, but--even in the act of falling apart--Mrs. Oastler was contained. Her small body shook, her face was wet with tears, her breasts were cool to his touch, but she never said a word.
When Jack woke up, he could hear Mrs. Oastler in the shower; room service had come and gone, unbeknownst to him. The pot of coffee, which was all that Leslie had ordered, was lukewarm. She'd already packed her small suitcase, and had laid flat (at the foot of the bed) the clothes she would wear on the plane--a black pantsuit, her bikini-cut panties, the little push-up bra. On her pillow, Mrs. Oastler had left a surprise for Jack: that photograph of Emma, naked, the one he'd kept. Leslie must have found it in the Entrada house; she wanted him to know she'd seen it.
The photo regarded Jack critically--Emma at seventeen, when Jack was ten and heading off to Redding. She had never been fitter. There was evidence of a matburn on one of her cheeks; probably Chenko, or one of the Minskies, had given it to her.
When Leslie Oastler came out of the bathroom, she was wearing a Shutters bathrobe and her hair was still wet. "Cute picture, huh?" Mrs. Oastler asked.
"Charlotte Barford took it," he said.
"Then she probably took more than one--didn't she, Jack?"
"An ex-girlfriend made me throw them away," he told her.
"She probably thought you threw all of them away, Jack."
"Right," he said.
"A famous guy like you shouldn't have pictures like that lying around," Mrs. Oastler told him. "But I'm not going to throw it away for you. I'm not likely to throw any photographs of Emma away--not now."
"No, of course not," he said.
Jack went and stood naked at the window, overlooking the parking lot; there was a partial view of the dead, motionless Ferris wheel, which resembled the skeleton of a dinosaur in the bleached-gray light. Santa Monica wasn't an early-morning town.
Mrs. Oastler came and stood behind him, holding his penis in both her hands; he had a hard-on in a matter of seconds. It seemed like such a betrayal of Emma--all of it. That was when Jack began to cry. He could tell that Leslie was naked because she was rubbing herself against his bare back. If she'd wanted to make love, he would have; that was probably why he was crying. The promises he'd made to Emma and his mother meant nothing.
"Poor Jack," Leslie Oastler said sarcastically. She let him go and dressed herself; her hair was so short, she could dry it easily with a towel. "You're going to have a busy day, I'm sure," she told him, "doing whatever literary executors do." Jack could have cried all day, but not in front of her. He stopped. He found his clothes and started to get dressed, putting Emma's photo in his right-front pocket. "Your mother will no doubt call you before I'm back in Toronto," Mrs. Oastler was telling him. "She'll want to know all about our night together--how we didn't sleep together, and all of that."
"I know what to say," he told her.
"Just be sure you talk to her, Jack. Ask her everything, while there's still time."
Jack finished dressing without saying anything. He went into the bathroom and shut the door. He tried to do something about his hair; he washed his face. He was grateful to Mrs. Oastler for leaving him her tube of toothpaste, if not her toothbrush, which he presumed she'd packed. He smeared a dab of toothpaste on his teeth with his index finger and rinsed his mouth in the sink. Jack heard the hotel-room door close before he was finished in the bathroom; when he came back out into the room, Leslie was gone.
He had some trouble leaving Shutters. Mrs. Oastler had paid the bill, but the paparazzi were waiting for him. Thankfully, they'd missed Mrs. Oastler. Someone had spotted Jack Burns having dinner with a good-looking older woman at One Pico; someone had figured out that they'd spent the night at Shutters.
"Who was the woman, Jack?" one of the photographers kept asking.
There were a few more paparazzi waiting for him at Entrada Drive, but that was to be expected. Jack wondered why they hadn't been there the night before; they could have followed him and Leslie to Shutters. He stripped Emma's bed and put her linens and towels in the washing machine; he straightened up the place a little. His mom called before he'd managed to make himself any breakfast. He told her that Leslie was already on the plane, and that they'd had a comforting night together.
"Comforting? You didn't sleep with her--did you, Jack?"
"Of course not!" he said with indignation.
"Well, Leslie can be a little lawless," Alice said.
Jack could only imagine how Mrs. Oastler might have reacted to that. He would have guessed that, in their relationship, his mom was the more lawless of the two. But he didn't say anything. Jack knew he was supposed to talk to his mother, but he didn't know what to say.
"Leslie said I should talk to you, Mom. She said I should ask you everything, while there's still time."
"Goodness, what a morbid night you two must have had!" Alice said.
"Mom, talk to me."
"We are talking, dear."
She was being coy. Jack simply turned against her. There was a time when he'd tried to ask her everything, and she'd wanted no part of it. Now he didn't want to give her the opportunity to unburden herself. What did Jack care about any of it now--what did it matter? When he was a kid, when it would have mattered, she was silent. Jack was the one who was silent now.
"If there's anything you want to ask me, dear, ask away!" his mother said.
"Are you faithful to Leslie?" he asked. "Isn't she more faithful to you than you are to her?" That wasn't what Jack really cared about--he was just testing his mother's willingness to give him a straight answer.
"Jackie--what a question!"
"What kind of guy was my dad? Was he a good guy or a bad one?"
"Jack, I think you should come home to Toronto for a few days--so we can talk."
"We are talking, Mom."
"You're just being argumentative, dear."
"Please tell Leslie that I tried to talk to you," Jack said.
"You didn't sleep with her, really?" his mom asked.
Jack almost regretted that he hadn't really slept with Leslie Oastler, but all he said was: "No, Mom, I did not."
After that, their conversation (such as it was) slipped away. When Jack told his mother that he'd thanked Mrs. Oastler for all she'd done for him--for them, he meant--his mom responded with her usual "That's nice, dear."
He also should have said that Leslie was funny about his thanking her, but he didn't.
Jack was on the cordless phone, looking out the window at a TV crew in his driveway. They were filming the exterior of the Entrada Drive house, which really pissed Jack off. He was distracted and didn't understand what his mom was saying about some tattoo convention in Woodstock, New York.
Out of the blue, Jack asked her: "Do you remember when I was at Redding? One year, you were going to come see me in Maine, but something happened and you couldn't come. I was at Redding for four years, but you never came to see me."
"Well, that's quite some story--why I didn't come to Redding. Of course I remember! I'll have to tell you that story sometime, Jack. It's a good one."
Somehow this didn't strike him as what Mrs. Oastler meant by talking to his mother. They were talking in circles. Jack had lived with Emma for ten years; now Emma was gone, and he and his mom couldn't talk to each other. They never had. It was pretty clear that she didn't want to tell him anything, ever.
Alice wanted to know what was entailed in being a literary executor--not that Jack knew. "I guess I'll find out what's involved," was all he could say.
Jack was surprised to see that there was only one message on the answering machine, which he played while his mom was still on the phone. It was Mildred ("Milly") Ascheim, the porn producer, calling with her condolences. Her voice was so much like Myra's that, for a moment, Jack thought that Myra was summoning him from the grave. "Dear Jack Burns," Milly Ascheim said, as if she were dictating a letter to him. "I'
m sorry you've lost your friend."
She didn't leave her number or say her name, but she must have known that he knew the Ascheim sisters spoke with one voice. He was touched that she'd called, but once again he was distracted from what his mom was saying--something about Mrs. Oastler, again.
"Jack, are you alone?"
"Yes, I'm alone, Mom."
"I heard a woman's voice."
"It was someone on television," he lied.
"I asked you if Leslie kept her clothes on, Jack."
"Well, I think I would have noticed if she'd taken them off," he told her.
"Actor," Alice said.
"Mom, I gotta go." (It was the way Emma would have said gotta, they both noticed.)
"Good-bye, Billy Rainbow," his mother said, hanging up the phone.
24
The Button Trick
A St. Hilda's Old Girl, like Leslie Oastler, would often choose to have her funeral or memorial service in the school's chapel, where the Old Girls had both fond and traumatizing memories of their younger days, many of which had not been spent in the contaminating presence of boys--except for those little boys, who were neither a threat nor a temptation to the much more grown-up girls. (Except for Jack Burns.)
It's unlikely that Emma would have chosen the chapel at St. Hilda's for her memorial service, but she had left her mother no instructions regarding how she wanted to be "remembered." That Mrs. Oastler chose the St. Hilda's chapel was only natural. After all, it was in Leslie's neighborhood and she had already chosen it for her own service.
Alice called Jack to convey Leslie's request: Mrs. Oastler wanted him to "say a little something" at Emma's service. "You're so good with words, dear," Jack's mother said. "And for how many years now have you been writing something?"
Well, how could he refuse? Besides, Jack's mom and Mrs. Oastler had no idea how the myth of his writing something, which Emma had so presciently set in motion, was now a reality.
In her will, Emma had indeed left him everything. ("Lucky you," Leslie had remarked--little knowing just how lucky he would soon be.) Jack was Emma's "literary executor" in more ways than one--the exact terms of which would never be known to anyone other than Bob Bookman, Alan Hergott, and Jack Burns himself--for if ever a will were ironclad, that would aptly describe how Emma had set him up.
