(2005) Until I Find You

by John Irving

  “Yeah, with Wolf-Head,” Emma said.

  “But why do we have to be early?” he asked.

  “Because I’m a big girl, honey pie. Big girls gotta warm up.”

  “Oh.”

  There was already a note on the kitchen table when they padded downstairs in their bare feet—they were trying to be as quiet as they could. Emma must have written the note the night before. (“I’m taking Jack to the gym,” or a message to that effect.)

  Emma and Jack walked to Forest Hill Village and had breakfast in a coffee shop on Spadina. He had a scone with raisins in it, and his usual glass of milk and glass of orange juice. Emma just had coffee, and a big bite of Jack’s scone.

  They cut over to St. Clair and he pointed out the dirty, dark-brown apartment building where Mrs. Machado lived. He was a little afraid of how purposefully Emma kept walking; it wasn’t like her to not say anything. She seemed so angry that Jack thought he should tell her a nice story about Mrs. Machado—something sympathetic. To his shame, he basically liked Mrs. Machado. (He would recognize only later that this was part of the problem.)

  “Mrs. Machado has to keep changing the locks on her apartment door, because her ex-husband keeps breaking in,” Jack told Emma.

  “Did you see the new locks?” Emma asked.

  Now that Jack thought about it, he hadn’t. “I can’t remember seeing any,” he said.

  “Maybe there aren’t any new locks, baby cakes.”

  It wasn’t the conversation he’d had in mind.

  They were at the Bathurst Street gym so early that Krung hadn’t yet arrived. A couple of pretty good kickboxers were going at each other. Chenko was sitting on the rolled-up wrestling mats, drinking his coffee. “Jackie boy!” he said, when he saw Emma. “Did you bring your girlfriend?”

  “I’m Jack’s new workout partner,” Emma told him. “Jack’s too young to have a girlfriend.”

  Chenko stood up to shake Emma’s hand. The Ukrainian was in his early sixties—a little thick in the waist, but the muscles in his chest and arms were well-defined slabs, and he was very light on his feet for a man who weighed one-eighty or one-ninety and was only five feet ten.

  “This is Emma,” Jack said to Chenko, who bowed his head to her when he shook her hand. Emma regarded the snarling wolf on Chenko’s bald pate as if it were a family pet. (Jack had told her all about it.)

  “You must be five-eleven, Emma,” Chenko said.

  “Five-eleven-and-a-half,” Emma told him. “But I’m still growing.”

  Emma and Jack helped Chenko roll out the mats before they went to their respective locker rooms to change into their workout gear. Emma didn’t have any wrestling shoes, just socks. “I’ll find you some wrestling shoes, Emma,” Chenko said. “You’ll slip on the mat in those socks.”

  “I don’t slip a whole lot,” Emma told him.

  “What does she weigh, do you suppose?” Chenko whispered to Jack—the Ukrainian was finding Emma a pair of shoes—but Emma heard him.

  “I weigh one-sixty-five, on a good day,” she answered.

  “On a good day,” Chenko repeated, watching her put on the shoes.

  “Maybe one-seventy-five today,” Emma said.

  “You’re a little out of Jack’s weight class, Emma,” Chenko said.

  “I’ll start with you,” Emma told Chenko. “You look big enough.”

  “Well—” Chenko started to say, but Emma was out on the mat; she was already circling him.

  “I suppose you should start by telling me the rules,” Emma said. “If there are any rules, I guess I should know them.”

  “There are some rules, not many,” Chenko began. “You can’t poke your opponent in the eyes.”

  “That’s too bad,” Emma said.

  Chenko started with a little hand fighting—just grabbing Emma’s wrists and controlling her hands—but she got the idea and peeled his fingers off her wrists, grabbing his hands and wrists instead. “That’s the way,” Chenko said. “You seem to have a feeling for hand control. You just have to remember to grab a whole fistful of fingers at a time, at least three or four. No grabbing a thumb or a pinkie by itself and bending it.”

  “Why not?” Emma asked.

  “You can break someone’s finger that way,” Chenko told her. “It’s illegal. You have to grab a bunch of fingers.”

  “There’s no biting, I suppose,” Emma said. (She sounded disappointed.)

  “No, of course not!” Chenko said. “And no pulling hair, no grasping clothes. And no choke holds,” Chenko added.

  “Show me a choke hold,” Emma said.

  He put her in a front headlock, jerking her head down and holding the back of her neck against his chest with his forearm across her throat. “This is an illegal headlock,” Chenko explained, “because I don’t have your arm, too.” He incorporated one of Emma’s arms in the headlock; this kept Chenko’s forearm off her throat. “You headlock someone, you have to take his arm, too. You can’t wrap your arm around someone’s neck and just choke him.”

  “That’s too bad,” Emma repeated.

  Chenko showed her a proper stance and a pretty basic knee-pick. He showed her an underhook and a double-underhook, and how you get from a collar tie-up into a front headlock. “With the arm,” Chenko made a point of repeating. He showed Emma a lateral drop; he even let her do a lateral drop on him. (Jack could tell that Chenko landed a little harder than he expected, with all of Emma’s weight on him.) “You’ve got good—” Chenko started to say; then he stopped. He was pointing at the middle of her body.

  “Hips?” Emma said.

  “Good hips, yes,” Chenko said. “Your hips are the strongest part of your body.”

  “I always thought so,” Emma replied.

  They were down on the mat—Chenko was showing Emma an arm-bar—when Jack noticed that Mrs. Machado had come out on the mat in her workout gear. She was just stretching, but he could tell she had her eye on Emma. “Who ees the beeg girl, dahleen?” Mrs. Machado asked him.

  Jack was as tongue-tied as he was in any dream; he couldn’t speak. Emma was still rolling around on the mat with Chenko. “Mrs. Machado is molesting Jack,” Emma told the Ukrainian. “She made his little penis sore.” Chenko had rolled into a sitting position; he was staring at Jack and Mrs. Machado. Emma was already on her feet and walking toward them.

  “Jack, did you tell thees beeg girl our secret?” Mrs. Machado asked.

  It was no contest, Chenko would tell Boris and Pavel later. Emma poked Mrs. Machado in the eyes, in both her eyes. Mrs. Machado cried out in pain and covered her face with her hands. Emma grabbed the pinkie on Mrs. Machado’s right hand and bent it back, breaking it. The finger stood up at a right angle from the back of her hand. Mrs. Machado screamed as if she’d been stabbed.

  Emma slapped a collar tie-up on Mrs. Machado and snapped her neck forward, putting her into an illegal front headlock—without the arm. Emma dropped her weight on the back of Mrs. Machado’s head; with Emma’s forearm across her throat, Mrs. Machado couldn’t breathe.

  Jack realized only then that Krung was there. The former Mr. Bangkok may have noticed the wrestling because Emma and Mrs. Machado had rolled off the mat, but Emma hadn’t let up with her choke hold. Mrs. Machado couldn’t breathe but her legs were still thrashing.

  “Who’s the new girl?” Krung asked Chenko.

  “She’s a fast learner, isn’t she?” Chenko said. Emma had hit three illegal moves in under ten seconds; it was hard to imagine a faster learner. No wonder she wanted to know the rules!

  “Aren’t you going to stop it?” Krung asked the Ukrainian.

  “In a minute,” Chenko said. Mrs. Machado was flat on her belly; her legs had almost stopped moving, but one foot was feebly kicking. She didn’t have a high-groin kick left in her.

  “I guess this has gone far enough,” Chenko said to Jack. He knelt beside the wrestlers and put a three-quarter nelson on Emma. “You can’t believe how I had to crank on her to get her to let go of t
hat headlock!” he would tell Pavel and Boris that afternoon when he introduced them to Jack’s new workout partner.

  Mrs. Machado never said a word. By the time the defeated woman left the Bathurst Street gym, which was as soon as she was able to stand up and walk, her throat was so sore that she couldn’t speak. Emma did the talking. It may have been lost on Mrs. Machado when Emma called her “not exactly mail-order-bride material,” but she understood what Emma meant when Emma called herself “Jack’s only workout partner.” However this registered with Mrs. Machado, both Krung and Chenko were suitably impressed—albeit a trifle afraid for the boy.

  Mr. Bangkok tried to interest Emma in a kickboxing class, but Emma said she would stick to the wrestling. “I only like kicking something when it’s on the ground,” she told Krung, who ultimately looked relieved, even grateful, that Emma was committed to the mat.

  When Pavel and Boris came to the gym to wrestle that afternoon, Emma rolled around with them, too. Jack needed a break by that time. He had a mat burn on his cheek and a sore shoulder—Chenko had shown Emma a fireman’s carry, which she had a natural feeling for—and Jack was nursing his first cauliflower ear.

  When Emma saw that Pavel and Boris had cauliflower ears that were almost as bad as Chenko’s, she insisted that Jack get his cauliflower ear fixed. It was news to Jack that one could fix a cauliflower ear, but although Chenko and the Minskies disapproved of “draining” cauliflower ears, they knew how.

  “I’m sorry, baby cakes—this may hurt, but it would be criminal to let you grow up with ears like these poor guys. You’re gonna be too good-looking to ruin your prospects for the future with dog-turd ears.”

  Jack could tell that Chenko and Pavel and Boris were offended. Their cauliflower ears were badges of honor, not dog turds! But Emma Oastler had made Jack’s future her business, and she was not to be denied.

  A so-called cauliflower ear is caused by fluid; when the ear gets rubbed on the mat, or against your opponent’s face, it bleeds and swells. When the fluid hardens, you have a lump where you used to have an indentation. The trick is not to let the fluid harden. You drain it with a needle and a syringe. Then you take some gauze, dipped in wet plaster, and press it into the contours of the ear. When the plaster hardens, your ear can’t swell—it can’t keep filling with fluid. The original shape of the ear is retained.

  “It’s a little uncomfortable,” Chenko forewarned Jack.

  “It’s better than a sore penis, honey pie.” (Even the Minskies agreed with Emma about that.) So Jack went home with a gauze plaster on one ear and a mat burn oozing on the opposite cheek.

  “Look at your Jackie, Alice,” Leslie Oastler said, when they were eating takeout that night. “Those thugs at the Bathurst Street gym are going to kill him.”

  “It’s better than a sore penis,” Jack said.

  “Not to mention the language those Russians are teaching him,” Mrs. Oastler said.

  “Jack, I’ll ask you to watch your language,” his mother said.

  The next night, Emma had a cauliflower ear. Jack and Emma were pretty proud of their matching gauze plasters. He’d caught her in a cross-face cradle, and while he was grinding his right temple against her left ear, she kicked out of the cradle and pinned him with a reverse half nelson.

  “You can’t cradle someone who’s built like her, not if you’re built like you,” Chenko told Jack.

  True enough, but Jack knew that it was good for him to have a workout partner as tough as Emma Oastler. The wrestling turned out to be good for Emma, too. She lost eight pounds in a week. Jack knew that Boris and Pavel had impressed her—if not their ears, at least their diet. The Minskies were disciplined—not only their workouts, but what they ate. “You could have saved your money by sending me to the Bathurst Street gym instead of the fucking fat farm,” Emma told her mom.

  “I’ll ask you to watch your language, too, young lady,” Mrs. Oastler said.

  “Penis, penis, penis—” Jack chanted.

  “That about covers it,” Leslie Oastler said.

  “Go to your room, Jack,” his mom told him.

  But Jack didn’t care. He wanted to say, “You’re making Emma be a miserable boarder and you’re sending me to fucking Maine, and you want us to watch our language!” Instead, he said, “Penis, penis, penis,” all the way up the stairs.

  “That’s really mature, Jack!” his mother called.

  “Don’t be angry with him, Alice—he’s just upset about going away to school,” Jack heard Leslie Oastler say.

  “No shit—that’s fucking brilliant,” Emma said.

  “Go to your room, Emma,” Mrs. Oastler told her.

  “Enjoy washing the dishes!” Emma said as she stomped upstairs. (Emma was usually the dishwasher.)

  Emma and Jack were workout partners in more ways than one. They had at last become true friends—in part because their mothers were separating them. With each mat burn, split lip, black eye, or cauliflower ear that they gave each other, Emma and Jack thoroughly convinced Alice and Mrs. Oastler that the contact between them—whatever it was—wasn’t sexual. Jack could get up in the middle of the night and go to Emma’s room and get into bed with her—or she could come to his room and get into bed with him. Their mothers said nothing.

  The summer was almost over anyway. What did Alice and Leslie Oastler care if Emma and Jack beat each other up at the Bathurst Street gym all day? (Not that Jack ever “beat up” Emma, but he succeeded with a shot or two.)

  “It’s just hormones, in Emma’s case,” Mrs. Oastler said. In Alice’s mind, Jack was still about the business of learning how to defend himself from boys.

  In two weeks, Emma had lost twelve pounds—and it was clear that she would lose more. It wasn’t just the workouts; her eating habits had changed. She liked Chenko. “Everything but his ears.” With the exception of their ears, Emma liked Boris and Pavel, too.

  When Jack lay next to Emma in her bed, or when she held him in her arms in his, it pained him to ask her who she was going to work out with—he meant after he had gone to Maine.

  “Oh, I daresay I’ll find someone else I can beat the shit out of, baby cakes.”

  Jack had learned how to kiss her and keep breathing, although the temptation to hold his breath until he fainted was strong. And Emma’s attention to the little guy never wavered; true to her word, his penis had healed. A combination of the moisturizer, which Emma continued to apply to the little guy—long after Jack could discern any visible need for it—and the welcome cessation of Mrs. Machado’s attention to his penis, which evidently had been excessive.

  “Do you miss her, Jack?” Emma asked him one night. He had been thinking that he missed some of the things Mrs. Machado did, but not that he missed her. He felt awkward telling Emma about the things he missed. Jack didn’t want her to feel that he was ungrateful to her for saving him from Mrs. Machado. But they were true friends and workout partners. Emma understood him. “It sounds like you were excited but frightened,” Emma said.

  “Yes.”

  “I shudder to think what kind of trouble the little guy can get into in Maine,” Emma said.

  “What do you mean, Emma?”

  They were in her room. Emma had a king-size bed, if you didn’t count the stuffed animals. Jack was wearing just his boxers, and Emma was wearing a T-shirt that Pavel or Boris had given her. It was from a wrestling tournament in Tbilisi, but you had to be able to read Georgian to know where it was from; more to Emma’s liking, the T-shirt was faded and torn and it had old bloodstains on it.

  “Take off your boxers, honey pie.” Emma was removing her T-shirt under the covers, which created a little chaos among the stuffed animals. “I’m going to show you how not to get in trouble, Jack.” She took his hand and placed it on his penis. “Use your other hand, if you prefer,” Emma told him. “Just do whatever’s comfortable.”

  “Comfortable?”

  “Just beat off, Jack! You can do that, can’t you?”

  “Beat wha
t?”

  “Don’t tell me this is your first time, honey pie.”

  “It’s my first time,” he admitted.

  “Well, take your time—you’ll get the hang of it,” Emma told him. “You can kiss me, or touch me with your other hand. Just do something, Jack—for Christ’s sake!”

  Jack was trying. At least he wasn’t frightened. “I think my left hand works better,” he told her, “even though I’m right-handed.”

  “It’s not as complicated as a Russian arm-tie,” Emma said. “We don’t have to discuss it.”

  He hugged her as hard as he could—she was so strong, so solid. When she kissed him, Jack remembered to breathe—at least at the beginning. “I think it’s working,” he said.

  “Try not to make a mess all over the place, baby cakes,” Emma said. “I’m just kidding,” she quickly added.

  It was becoming difficult to kiss her and keep breathing—not to mention talk. “What exactly are we doing? What is this?” he asked Emma.

  “This is how you survive Maine,” Emma told him.

  “But you won’t be there!” he cried.

  “You have to imagine me, baby cakes, or I’ll send you pictures.” Oh, that aurora borealis—those northern lights! “Well, if that isn’t ‘all over the place,’ I don’t know what is,” Emma was saying, while Jack practiced breathing again. “Just look at this mess. I never want to hear you say I don’t love you.”

  “I love you, Emma,” the boy blurted out.

  “You don’t have to make a commitment or anything,” Emma said. “That you’re my best friend is enough of a miracle.”

  “I’m going to miss you!” Jack cried.

  “Shhh, don’t cry—they’ll hear you. Don’t give them the satisfaction.”

  “The what?”

  “I’m going to miss you, too, honey pie,” she whispered. She was putting her T-shirt back on—more stuffed animals were getting out of her way, in whatever way they could—when Jack heard his mother in the hall. Emma’s bedroom door was partially open.

  “Was that you, Jackie?” his mom was calling. (No doubt he’d been making unusual sounds.)

  Both Emma and Jack knew he hadn’t put his boxers back on. He didn’t even know where they were; he hoped they were under the covers. His head was on Emma’s shoulder; one of her arms was thrown loosely around his neck. The “loosely” made it not yet a headlock, but there was no question that they were snuggled together, under the covers, when Alice came into the room.