by John Irving
“She has a sister?” Jack asked.
“Myra Ascheim is legit,” Hank said. “Mildred is the porn-producer side of the Ascheim family.”
Jack saw that Mildred Ascheim had joined Muffy the vampire hooker in the doorway. “Stop stalling, Hank!” Milly yelled.
“What is Myra Ascheim legit at?” Jack asked.
“She’s some kind of agent,” Hank told him. “She used to represent Val Kilmer, or maybe it was Michael J. Fox—lots of people like that, anyway. It’s all about who you meet out here,” he added. Hank was walking back to the house like a man about to have nonstop sex with a vampire hooker. He looked less than thrilled.
“Good luck!” Jack called to him.
“I’ll look for you on the big screen,” Hank said, pointing skyward—as if the big screen, in both their minds, lay in a heavenly direction.
“Good luck, little schlong!” Milly called to Jack.
Hank stopped and walked back to Jack for a minute. “If you ever meet Myra, don’t tell her you’ve met Mildred,” he warned Jack. “That would be the kiss of death.”
“It’s not as if I actually auditioned,” Jack said.
“This was an audition, kid. I’ll look for you,” Hank said again.
Jack would look for him, too, although he didn’t tell Hank that at the time. His porn name was Hank Long—a big, handsome guy, no stranger to a weight room, always with minimal dialogue, no doubt because of his high, nasal voice. Jack would see him in fifteen or twenty “adult” movies after their first meeting—for the most part, nothing memorable by title or plot.
Jack could have recognized Hank’s penis all by itself—Emma could have, too. They watched Hank Long movies together, after Jack’s not-exactly-an-audition in Van Nuys.
“Never go to Van Nuys,” he told Emma, when he got home. “There are a lot of guys with huge schlongs out there.”
“Like that would really keep me away,” Emma said somewhat ambiguously.
Jack told her the whole story—how his penis, in Mildred Ascheim’s estimation, didn’t cut it; how he was “cute,” according to Muffy the vampire hooker, but not in a league with Hank Long.
“I wouldn’t say you were tiny, baby cakes, but I’ve seen bigger.” More than Milly’s small-schlong assessment, Emma’s bluntness left Jack a little crestfallen. “For Christ’s sake, you’re not trying to be a porn star!” Emma said, trying to cheer him up.
She called Lawrence at C.A.A. immediately, beginning the conversation by telling him she would never fuck him. “Let’s get that out of the way,” was how Emma put it. “Do you have any other brilliant ideas about which agents Jack should see?” Emma covered the mouthpiece of the telephone and turned to Jack. “He says no,” she reported.
“Ask him if he knows Myra Ascheim,” Jack said.
Emma got a quick answer to her question over the phone. “Lawrence says she’s a has-been, honey pie. She’s been let go by everyone. She doesn’t even have an assistant anymore.”
“She sounds like a good place to start,” Jack said. “Ask Lawrence if he’ll make a call—just one call.”
Emma asked the bastard. “Lawrence says Myra doesn’t even have an office.”
“She sounds perfect for me,” Jack said.
Emma conveyed Jack’s feelings to Lawrence over the phone. “He says not to mention Myra’s sister,” Emma told Jack.
“I know,” Jack said. “It’s Myra, not Mildred. I know, I know.”
That night there were three messages on the answering machine when Jack got back from American Pacific. He was anxious that one of the messages might have been from a housewife he’d been banging in Benedict Canyon. The woman was insane; she claimed that from her bedroom she could see part of the estate on Cielo Drive where Sharon Tate had been murdered, but Jack couldn’t see it. When the Santa Anas were blowing, she said she could hear the screams and moans of Ms. Tate and the other victims—as if the murders were ongoing.
She called Jack frequently, often to reschedule their rendezvous. Usually the postponement had something to do with her husband or one of her children, but the last time the family dog had been to blame. The unfortunate animal had eaten something it shouldn’t have; the complications were so severe that the vet had promised to make a house call.
Emma said that Jack should learn to read between the lines—clearly the housewife was also sleeping with the vet. Emma loved listening to all the reasons the Benedict Canyon woman found not to sleep with Jack, or at least to postpone the illicit act. But Emma had been writing; she’d not answered the phone that night. She and Jack listened to the answering machine together after Jack came home.
Both Lawrence and Rottweiler said they had called Myra Ascheim and told her she should meet Jack; they’d given her his phone number. The third message was from Myra. Her voice was alarmingly like her sister’s. Jack first thought it was Mildred, calling to further abuse his small schlong.
“There’s two people, both assholes, who say I should meet you,” Myra Ascheim’s message began. “So where the fuck are you, Jack Burns?”
That was the message—not very elegant, and she didn’t even leave her name. Jack knew it was Myra only because he’d met Milly and recognized the sisterly voice. (It was a voice with more Brooklyn in it than L.A.)
Emma must have noticed the despondency in Jack’s expression when he replayed the three messages, again and again. That some word from the insane housewife in Benedict Canyon was not among the messages appeared to pain him. Only Emma knew Jack well enough to guess that, although he was relieved to let the relationship slip away, he missed the woman’s madness.
Emma Oastler’s first novel was called The Slush-Pile Reader, which was almost entirely based on Emma’s job—not that “slush-pile reader” was her job’s official title. (With an uncustomary dignity, as if her job were a pinnacle of the profession, the studio called Emma a “first” reader—a part of the process also called “screenplay development.”)
Emma read not only unsolicited manuscripts; she read the scripts submitted by agents who were less than name brands, and the occasional script by a marquee screenwriter whose agent had recently jerked the studio around. Very few screenplays were eventually produced—and most of those had more important first readers than Emma, but Emma would eventually read those scripts, too.
What bothered Emma about her job was not how many screenplays she had to read, or even how badly written most of them were. Emma’s principal gripe was with the studio execs—they read her notes but not the screenplays. Emma discovered that for the majority of scripts she read, she was the only reader. This inclined her to be overgenerous in her notes, even in the case of bad screenplays; she didn’t want to be the sole reason a film wasn’t produced, even though Emma’s foremost complaint about many of the movies she saw was that they should never have been made in the first place.
“But why would a studio hire a script reader, especially for the slush pile, if the studio execs wanted to read a bunch of bad screenplays?” Jack asked her. It seemed perfectly natural to him that, in most cases, a first reader meant an only reader.
Not to Emma; she was both indignant and unreasonable about it. “The execs should still read them, even if they’re bad,” she insisted.
“But they hired you, Emma, so they wouldn’t have to read all the junk!”
“Someone wrote that junk, baby cakes. It took hours and hours.”
Emma surely exaggerated what she called wasting her time as a film major. What was the point of learning to appreciate good films? Emma argued. The way the movie industry worked had nothing to do with film as an art form. Jack thought that Emma’s motive for revenge was misguided; it was the machinations of the movie industry that had wasted her time, not her having been a film major.
Emma insisted that the studio execs were responsible for making many terrible movies that should never have been made; therefore, to make some small measure of atonement for their crimes, they should read their fair share of bad
screenplays.
Jack argued that Emma should have been more upset about what happened in that rare case of an unknown screenwriter who wrote a script the studio execs actually read and liked. On only two occasions had Emma loved an unsolicited screenplay; both times, she’d managed to persuade the execs to read it. In each case, they promptly bought the rights and offered the screenwriter a fee to write a second draft; they rejected the second draft, paid off the screenwriter, and hired an established writer to reconstruct the story in all the usual, conventional ways. Whatever quality had been good enough to catch Emma’s attention (in the original script) was lost, but the studio now owned and continued to develop what they called “the property.”
This didn’t upset Emma at all. “It’s the writer’s fault—the writer caved to the money. That’s what the damn writers do. You want to maintain control of your screenplay, you take no money up front—you don’t even let the fuckers buy you lunch, honey pie.”
“But what if the writer needs the money?” Jack asked. “The writer probably needs lunch!”
“Then the writer should get a day job,” Emma said.
Arguing with Emma drove Jack crazy. It also worried him about Emma’s novel—that the writing would descend to a level of autobiographical complaining; that it would be an unimagined story, without an iota of invention, full of rantings and accusatory anecdotes he’d heard before. That the main character of The Slush-Pile Reader was a young Canadian woman—a newcomer to L.A. who’d gone to school “back East” and had Emma’s job—did not, Jack thought, bode well. But it turned out that Emma had invented a character who seemed most unlike herself; she’d actually imagined a story, one that was far more interesting than her own. And, sentence by sentence, she wrote well—she’d taken the necessary pains to revise herself.
Furthermore, Emma had envisioned a heroic character—one capable of touchingly unselfish gestures—notwithstanding that Emma was generally too cynical to be heroic herself. The main character of The Slush-Pile Reader, the eponymous reader, is not a cynic. On the contrary, Michele Maher (of all names!) is a pure-hearted optimist with an indestructibly sunny disposition. Michele Maher—that is, Emma’s character—is such a good girl that her purity survives her most degrading experiences, and she has a few.
Unlike Emma, Michele is a preternaturally thin young woman who has to force herself to eat. She haunts gyms and health-food stores, gagging on protein powder and popping all the dietary supplements that bodybuilders use, but she never manages to put on a pound. Despite all her weightlifting, she looks like a wire. Michele Maher has the body and metabolism of a twelve-year-old boy.
Also unlike Emma, Michele is conscience-stricken by the bad scripts she reads. The worst, most self-deluded screenwriters break her heart. Michele wants to help them be better writers; to that futile end, she writes them encouraging letters on the studio letterhead. These letters are very different in content and tone from the notes Michele submits to the studio execs; in those notes, she is critical in the extreme. In short, Michele does her job well: she tells her bosses all the reasons why they shouldn’t waste their time reading this crap.
But to the rock-bottom writers themselves, Michele Maher is an angel of hope; she always finds something positive to say about their most abhorrent excrescences. In the first chapter of The Slush-Pile Reader, Michele writes a warm, enthusiastic letter to a heavily tattooed bodybuilder and porn star named Miguel Santiago. His porn name is Jimmy.
In his pathetic screenplay, which is the story of his life, Santiago describes himself as a porn star who hates his work. The only way Santiago can have sex on command is to imagine he is a young James Stewart falling in love with Margaret Sullavan in The Shopworn Angel, or submitting to the sentimental bliss of domestic life with Donna Reed in It’s a Wonderful Life. Santiago manages to stay the course through such epics as Bored Housewives 4 and Keep It Up, Inc., by imagining he is the one and only Jimmy Stewart in these black-and-white soap-opera masterpieces.
There’s no story: we see Miguel Santiago lifting weights and getting tattooed, we see him memorizing lines from The Shopworn Angel and It’s a Wonderful Life, and of course we see him performing as the other Jimmy. In her notes to the studio execs, Michele Maher states that such a film is “not makable”—easily a third of it would be a porn movie! But in her letter to Miguel Santiago, Michele calls his screenplay “a bittersweet memoir.” And her letter takes a personal turn: she asks Miguel where he works out.
Santiago, of course, imagines that Michele Maher is a studio exec—not a slush-pile reader. Little does he know that she goes to the video store and rents all four of the Bored Housewives movies. In one of her more self-degrading moments, Michele masturbates to Keep It Up, Inc.; sexually repressed, she goes to the gym where Miguel Santiago (alias Jimmy) trains, just to watch him work out. In this respect, Michele Maher is like Emma: she has a thing for bodybuilder-types. But unlike Emma, Michele doesn’t usually act on her cravings. And what bodybuilder would ever hit on Michele? She’s built like a pencil.
What makes The Slush-Pile Reader moving is that Miguel Santiago is a dim-witted but genuinely nice guy. When Michele Maher gets up the nerve to introduce herself to him, she confesses she’s no exec—she’s just a first reader who felt sorry for him. They begin a relationship that one reviewer of The Slush-Pile Reader would call “L.A. dysfunctional”—this was in praise of the novel, which generally got terrific reviews. “More noir than noir,” said The New York Times.
Miguel and Michele end up living together—“within breathing distance of a sushi Dumpster in Venice.” (Jack knew where that came from.) They don’t have sex. His schlong is too big for Michele—it hurts. She just holds it. (Jack knew where that came from, too—if not the “too big” part.)
Over time, out of his growing and abiding love for her, Miguel introduces Michele to other bodybuilders he knows at the gym; he’s seen them in the shower, so he knows who’s got the small schlongs. Michele sleeps with them. “A muted pleasure,” as she puts it to Miguel. Holding his porn-movie penis with mixed emotions, she tells him she’s happy.
As for Miguel Santiago—a.k.a. Jimmy, the penile phenomenon—he gets all the sex he wants or needs at his day job, which he stoically endures. He accepts his relationship with Michele for what it is. Michele sleeps with the occasional small schlong, but she always goes home to Miguel and they lie in bed together, she holding his huge, unacceptable penis—the two of them not saying anything—while they watch Waterloo Bridge on the VCR, the 1940 remake with Vivien Leigh and Robert Taylor. It’s Miguel’s kind of movie, a real tearjerker.
At the end of Emma’s novel, Michele Maher and Miguel Santiago are still living together. Michele doesn’t write letters of encouragement to bad screenwriters anymore; she restricts her comments to the notes she gives the studio execs, who never read the screenplays she reads. The worst scripts still break her heart, but she doesn’t talk about her day when she comes home to Miguel; naturally, he doesn’t talk about his. They consume some protein powder and dietary supplements, and they go to the gym. He says he likes it when she sleeps in a World Gym tank top—her small, almost nonexistent breasts are easy to touch under the angry gorilla holding the bending barbell.
“There are worse relationships in L.A.,” Emma writes; it was a line quoted in a lot of her reviews, and a pretty good setup to the novel’s last sentence: “If you or your partner is in a bad movie, or in any number of bad movies—even if you’re perpetually in the act of rewriting the same bad movie—there are worse things to be ashamed of.”
Jack liked the novel’s first sentence better: “Either there are no coincidences in this town, or everything in this town is a coincidence.”
Take the message on the answering machine from Myra Ascheim, for example. Jack didn’t know that Emma already knew who Mildred Ascheim was, not to mention that Emma had been watching porn films day and night—“research” for The Slush-Pile Reader, she later called it—and this was before he happen
ed to meet Hank Long on the set of Muffy the Vampire Hooker 3 and Jack and Emma started watching Hank Long movies together.
Jack told Emma that he couldn’t read about Miguel Santiago without seeing Hank Long in the part, but Emma objected to his premature conclusion that her novel would one day be a film. “Spare me the movie talk, baby cakes,” was how she put it. “You’re getting ahead of yourself.”
Jack first read The Slush-Pile Reader while the manuscript was still making the rounds of New York literary agents; Emma had decided she was more American than Canadian and she wanted to sell the U.S. rights before she even showed the novel to a Toronto publisher—notwithstanding that Charlotte Breasts-with-Bones-in-Them Barford, her old pal from St. Hilda’s, was a young up-and-comer in Canadian publishing.
“Did you have to call her Michele Maher?” Jack asked Emma. “I adored Michele Maher, I worshiped her. I will always worship her. You never even met her, Emma.”
“You kept her away from me, Jack. Besides, Michele is a very positive character—in the book, I mean.”
“Michele is a very positive character in real life!” Jack protested. “You’ve given her the body of a twelve-year-old boy! You’ve made her this pathetic creature who’s enslaved to bodybuilders!”
“It’s just a name,” Emma said. “You’re overreacting.”
Naturally, Jack was sensitive about the small-schlong business, too—that part about sleeping with a guy with a small penis being “a muted pleasure.”
“It’s a novel, honey pie—a work of fiction. Don’t you know how to read a novel?”
“You’ve been holding my penis for years, Emma. I didn’t know you were making a size assessment.”
“It’s a novel,” Emma repeated. “You’re taking it too personally. You’ve missed the point about penises, Jack.”
“What point is that?”
“When they’re too big, it hurts, baby cakes. I mean, it hurts if the woman is too small.”
Jack thought about it; he hadn’t known that a woman could be too small. (Too big, maybe, but not too small.) Did Emma mean that “a muted pleasure” was preferable to pain? Was that the point? Then he saw that Emma was crying. “I liked the novel,” he told her. “I didn’t mean that I didn’t like it.”
