by John Irving
The husband’s lunch sent forth an odor of cauliflower, caraway seeds, and smoked sausage—maybe kielbasa. Something too powerful to be contained in the oven, anyway. Strong stuff—like Mrs. Stackpole herself, Jack was thinking.
“I wonder,” Jack said to Noah once, in their senior year at Exeter, “if older women can look at younger boys and know the ones who are attracted to them—even if no one else is.”
“Why would you wonder about that?” Noah asked.
Jack then told him almost everything—about Mrs. Machado, too. But somewhere, maybe from his mother, he’d learned to be selective about telling the truth. He didn’t tell Noah that he’d slept with Leah, or even about Mrs. Adkins. (Jack knew that Noah loved his sister, and Noah had been awfully fond of Mrs. Adkins.)
Jack’s mistake was that Noah simply told the truth; he wasn’t at all selective about it. Noah told Leah that Jack had an unusual older-woman thing; he told his sister about the dishwasher and about Mrs. Machado, too.
At Exeter, where his fellow students were absorbing all manner of requisite information—at the highest level of learning—Jack chiefly learned how one can fuck up a friendship by telling the truth selectively, which of course amounts to not telling it. It was Leah, not Jack, who told Noah that she’d been pregnant with Jack’s child; she told her brother about the abortion, too. So when Leah dropped out of Radcliffe again—this time, for good—Jack knew he thoroughly deserved to lose Noah Rosen as a friend.
Jack had spent what felt like a lifetime in childhood, but his adolescence passed as quickly and unclearly as those road signs out the window of his wrestling team’s bus. Jack Burns had no better understanding of women, or what might constitute correct behavior with them, than poor Lambrecht did of frost heaves—or that it was sorrow and boredom that drove Mrs. Adkins and Mrs. Stackpole and Leah Rosen to sleep with Jack, when they knew he was nothing but a horny boy.
When Jack graduated from Exeter in the spring of 1983, Noah Rosen wouldn’t shake his hand. For years, Jack couldn’t bear to think of him. In essence, Jack had obliterated Noah from his life—at a time when Noah was the warmest presence in it.
Both of Noah’s parents were academics, theorists in early-childhood education. From their appearance, and that of their Cambridge household—not to mention Noah’s scholarship to Exeter, and Leah had gone to Andover and Radcliffe on scholarships—Jack guessed that there was little money to be made in early-childhood education. (A pity, because it was inarguably very formative to Jack.)
The Rosens had a high regard for education at every level; it must have devastated them that Leah left Radcliffe. She went to Madison, Wisconsin, and got into some trouble there. It wasn’t drug trouble; it was something political—the wrong bunch of friends, Noah implied. “There was a succession of bad boyfriends,” Noah told Jack, “beginning with you.”
Leah Rosen ended up dead, in Chile. That’s all Jack knew. At least there wasn’t any water involved—not the absurd Nezinscot, the so-called river that claimed Mrs. Adkins.
Jack hadn’t meant these people any harm! Not Mrs. Stackpole, either; her body was found in the Exeter River, below the falls. Above the falls, the river was freshwater and not very deep. Below the falls, the water was brackish—the lower river was tidal—and Mrs. Stackpole was discovered in the salt water, in the mudflats at low tide. The water had receded enough for a golfer to spot the body, or maybe it was a rower on the Exeter crew. Distracted by his impending graduation, Jack couldn’t remember. In either case, the academy’s former dishwasher was unrecognizable; she’d been underwater too long.
She’d been strangled, the town newspaper said, and then dumped in the river—she hadn’t drowned. Had Mrs. Stackpole told her husband about Jack? Had her husband somehow found out? Was there someone else she was seeing, in addition to Jack? As so often happened in New Hampshire, everyone suspected the husband who worked in the gasworks and came home for lunch. But he was never charged.
Nor was Jack charged, except by Noah Rosen—and not even Noah accused Jack of the actual murder. “Let’s just say you probably contributed to it,” Noah said.
He might have said worse, had Leah died in Chile before Mrs. Stackpole was found in the Exeter River. But Leah was still in Madison, Wisconsin, though no doubt she was already in a Chile frame of mind.
In those years away at school, Jack extended the distance between his mother and himself—a process Alice had initiated when Jack was still at St. Hilda’s. But what little he saw of Emma was always elevating, and their fondness for each other grew. He was too young—and too inclined to think of women as novelties—to acknowledge that he adored Emma.
Only Emma understood why, for four years at Exeter, which was a coed school, Jack never really had a girlfriend. Emma knew he liked older women; the Exeter girls were just girls. When Jack was in grade nine, when he was fourteen going on fifteen, some of the Exeter seniors, who were seventeen or eighteen, attracted him, but he was no longer a pretty little boy. He was a gawky young teenager; in his first two years at Exeter, the older teenage girls ignored him.
Naturally, Jack saw something of Emma in those years—and not only over school vacations or for parts of every summer. Upon her graduation from St. Hilda’s, Emma had gone to McGill in Montreal, which Mrs. Oastler, who was a fiercely loyal Torontonian, considered an un-Toronto (or an anti-Toronto) thing to do.
Emma was quickly bored, not by McGill but with the Quebecois. She was always an excellent student, although French wasn’t her favorite subject; she discovered that she liked French movies better with subtitles. It was movies themselves that Emma decided she liked.
She got into NYU, where she declared herself a film major. Her grades had been good at McGill; she was able to transfer all her credits, and she loved living in New York. When Jack began at Exeter, in the fall of 1979, Emma was starting her second year of university but her first at NYU. On her invitation, Jack traveled to New York to see her for a weekend that fall. It wasn’t much of a weekend. Exeter had a half-day of classes on Saturday; getting from New Hampshire to New York City took the rest of the day, and Jack was required to be back at the academy by eight o’clock Sunday night.
Nevertheless he had a thrilling Saturday night and Sunday morning with Emma and her film-major friends. They went to an all-night cinema that was playing Billy Wilder movies. Jack wasn’t that familiar with Wilder, although he’d seen Some Like It Hot in Toronto with his mother; he must have been nine or ten. When Marilyn Monroe sang “I Wanna Be Loved by You” in that sequined dress, Jack got a boner and made the mistake of showing it to his mom. (Alice’s sarcasm toward her son’s penis could be brutal. She didn’t say, “Just like your father,” but the look she gave Jack said it for her.)
In New York, the first film Emma and her friends and Jack saw was Five Graves to Cairo, but Jack would remember only the beginning: that ghost tank transporting dead soldiers through the desert. After the tank, he forgot everything that happened to Franchot Tone—largely because Emma put her hand in his lap and held his penis for the rest of the movie. It was not until years later that Jack realized Erich von Stroheim had been Rommel.
There was more penis-holding through The Lost Weekend, during which Jack got the idea that Ray Milland looked like his father—or like what he imagined his dad might look like if William were drunk.
Jack had fallen asleep on Emma’s shoulder for the whole of Sunset Blvd.; then he woke up and although he had to pee, he watched every minute of Ace in the Hole. On Sunday morning, over breakfast, Emma’s film-major friends said Jack should have slept through Ace in the Hole and stayed awake for Sunset Blvd.
“That’s what I love about you, honey pie—don’t listen to them,” Emma said. Jack didn’t like her friends very much, but being with Emma was worth every minute of that long trip.
He would never be a Billy Wilder fan, although Wilder was born in Vienna and Jack could see what was European about even the most American of his films. It was the European filmmakers
who first interested Jack, and it was Emma Oastler who introduced him to them. Whether with Emma on weekends in New York, or with Noah on weekends in Cambridge—when they would see all the foreign films in Harvard Square—Jack became a fan of films with subtitles. With the exception of Westerns, he didn’t like American movies at all.
On the subject of not being like his father, it would occur to Jack that if William had met Emma when he was a young man, he probably would have had sex with her—and from everything she’d heard about Jack’s father, Emma agreed that she would have submitted to his charms.
“That’s one reason you can be happy that we haven’t had sex,” Emma told Jack. As to how she felt about not having sex with Jack, Emma didn’t say.
Every winter term at Exeter, Jack’s weekends were taken up by wrestling. Emma would often rent a car and come to see his matches; she herself had stopped wrestling and was once again struggling with her weight. Emma was a binge eater, but she was a binge weightlifter, too. She would take up smoking, quit smoking, start overeating, stop, and then go kill herself in the gym. When the cycle began again, Emma seemed powerless to interrupt its predictable course.
What she needed was Chenko, her favorite workout partner, but Chenko was not only far away in Toronto—he was waiting for a hip replacement. Boris had gone back to Belarus. “A family matter,” was all Pavel, who had moved to Vancouver, would say. He’d married a woman from British Columbia—someone he met in his cab.
Jack’s second year at Exeter, when he was fifteen going on sixteen, Emma was twenty-two. After the wrestling matches, most Saturdays, Emma took Jack to the movie theater in Durham, New Hampshire. Durham was an easy drive from Exeter, and it was a university town; they had an art-house kind of cinema, where they showed both old and current foreign films. At Exeter, they showed only the old ones.
Jack loved Fellini’s La Strada, which he saw (more than once) with Emma holding his penis. They both believed that Chenko could have kicked the crap out of the Anthony Quinn character, but only in those days before Chenko needed a new hip. Jack wasn’t as crazy about La Dolce Vita. The Marcello Mastroianni character was the playboy Jack imagined his father to be—the sex-seeker Jack feared he would become. And he didn’t like 81⁄2 at all—Mastroianni again.
Fellini won Jack Burns back with Amarcord. Emma had already seen the film in New York, but she made a point of taking Jack to Durham to see it. She wanted to witness his response to the tobacconist with the huge hooters. With her hand in Jack’s lap, Emma knew the little guy’s reaction almost before Jack knew it. “How’s that for an older woman, baby cakes?”
They committed to memory the little-known name of the actress who played the big-breasted tobacconist from Rimini. When Emma called Jack in his dorm at Exeter, she would occasionally adopt an Italian accent and say to whoever answered the phone: “Pleeze tell-a Jack Burns—eet’s Maria Antonietta Beluzzi on da fon-a!”
More often, when Emma phoned, she just said she was Jack’s sister. Jack had stopped calling Emma his stepsister; he referred to her as his older sister instead.
No one at Exeter was insensitive enough to comment on the lack of a family resemblance—with the exception of Ed McCarthy, Jack’s wrestling teammate, who was hit-and-miss in his attention to details. At wrestling practice, McCarthy once forgot to wear a jock; his penis slipped out of his shorts and lay like a slug on the mat, where his workout partner, a fellow one-hundred-and-seventy-seven-pounder, stepped on it.
Jack felt like stepping on McCarthy’s penis the day he made an unkind remark about Emma. “It’s too bad you got all the good looks in your family, Burns. Your sister looks more like a wrestler than you do.”
They were in the locker room—wooden benches, metal lockers, cement floors—getting dressed for practice. Jack underhooked one of McCarthy’s arms and collared the bigger boy’s neck with his right hand, snapping him forward. When McCarthy pulled away, his weight shifting to the heel of his right foot, Jack caught him with a foot-sweep and McCarthy fell on his bare ass on the cement floor—hitting his back on an open locker door and giving his elbow a whack on the bench on his way down.
Jack assumed that McCarthy would get to his feet and beat the shit out of him, but McCarthy just sat there. “I could kick the crap out of you, Burns,” he said.
“Do it then,” Jack told him.
Even in his senior year, Jack never once wrestled above one-forty-five. After he stopped growing, he was five-eight, but only if he stood on his toes—and he competed better at one-thirty-five than he did at one-forty.
Jack was one of Exeter’s better wrestlers in his final two years at the academy. Ed McCarthy would never be better than unexceptional as a wrestler. Jack might have beaten McCarthy in a wrestling match, but not in a fight. Even a mediocre one-seventy-seven-pounder can take a halfway decent one-thirty-five-pounder, and McCarthy knew it. He got to his feet, rubbing his back and his sore elbow.
As Mr. Ramsey had advised Jack, although this time it was unintentional, he had an audience. “You shouldn’t call anyone’s sister ugly, Ed,” one of the lightweights said.
“Jack’s sister is ugly,” McCarthy replied.
That’s what saved Jack—not McCarthy’s belligerence but his insistence on the word ugly. While there were no rules regarding niceness at Exeter, no points off for saying something derogatory or dismissive—in fact, the intellectual fashion at the school favored everything negative and derisive—it was true that, for a few sentimental souls, sisters were sacred, especially if they weren’t good-looking. And with Emma, who had just missed being pretty, there was also the problem with her weight.
“Who got all the good looks in your family, McCarthy?” the team’s heavyweight asked. His name was Herman Castro; he was a scholarship kid from El Paso, Texas, and while he was a halfway decent wrestler, he might have stolen a few matches by frightening his opponents. He was so scary-looking that one was ill advised to use the word ugly within his hearing.
“I wasn’t speaking to you, Herman,” Ed McCarthy said.
“You are now,” Herman Castro told him, and that was the end of it. Or it would have been, if Jack had let it be the end of it. His loyalty to Emma was fierce.
Ed McCarthy wasn’t ugly—although his penis was, especially after that guy had stepped on it—but he wasn’t at all handsome, either. He didn’t have a girlfriend till his senior year, and the best he could do was a startled-looking girl with red hair and freckles who was only in grade ten. The redhead had just turned sixteen; McCarthy was eighteen. It was almost certainly not a sexual relationship, but it was probably the first relationship of any kind for both of them.
Jack toyed with the idea of seducing her—certainly not to have sex with her, because she was far too young and startled-looking for him, but simply to turn her against McCarthy, who’d said such cruel things about Emma.
Jack found Ed McCarthy’s girlfriend in the cafeteria—she was at the salad bar. During wrestling season, Jack lived on salad; he could not weigh in at one hundred and thirty-four and a half pounds and eat much else. (He had a bowl of oatmeal for breakfast, sometimes with a banana; salad for lunch; salad for supper, occasionally with another banana.)
The redhead with the freckles became even more startled-looking than usual when Jack spoke to her. “Is he treating you okay?” Jack asked.
Her name was Molly—he didn’t know her last name—and she was staring at him as if she expected some unknown and uncontrollable reaction from her body, as if he’d just injected one of her veins with a hallucinogenic drug.
He touched her hand, which, unbeknownst to her, had slipped into the stainless-steel bin of raw mushrooms, where it lay like something severed. “I mean McCarthy,” Jack said. “He can be cruel to women, and superficial. I hope he’s not like that with you.”
“Did he hurt someone you know?” Molly asked; she seemed truly frightened of McCarthy.
“I suppose he only hurt my feelings—about my older sister,” Jack said.
> As he had taught himself to do, his eyes welled up with tears. All those movies, with Emma holding his penis, had conditioned him to imagine the close-up. By then Jack had seen Anthony Quinn in tears maybe half a dozen times. If Zampanò, the strongman, could cry, so could he.
Jack had not done much acting at Exeter. He had too much schoolwork to take part in most of the productions chosen by the school’s dramatic association, the Dramat.
He was neutral to Death of a Salesman, which was the fall play in his ninth-grade year. Jack knew he was too boyish-looking to play Willy Loman, and too small to be either of Willy’s sons, Happy or Biff. He bravely auditioned for the part of Linda, beating out a bunch of girls in the process—two seniors who were fourth-year members of the Dramat among them. But in Jack’s first experience with dramatic criticism, The PEAN, the school yearbook, described Jack’s performance as “overly distraught,” and The Exonian, the school newspaper, stated that Linda was miscast—“resulting in the kind of sexual parody audiences must have been forced to endure in those dark ages when Exeter was an all-boys’ school.” What do they know? Jack thought. Try telling Linda that she’s “overly distraught”!
After that, when Jack realized how hard the academic workload was for him, he pretended to be disdainful of what the Dramat chose for its plays. For the most part, this wasn’t hard; many of the choices reflected the taste of the dated hippie who was the dramatic association’s faculty adviser. More to the point, Jack was saving himself for the occasional Shakespeare, which not even amateurs could seriously harm.
His fellow thespians in the Dramat had resented his female impersonation of Linda in Death of a Salesman. They tried to force male roles on him, urging him to audition for Mister Roberts—as if the movie hadn’t been bad enough. Talk about dated! Jack evoked Wendy Holton. “I’d rather die,” he said.
This was excellent for his reputation as an actor—playing hard-to-get worked. (And what was the risk?)
