by John Irving
“You don’t get it,” Emma said.
Jack thought she was talking about The Slush-Pile Reader, which he believed he’d understood fairly well. “I get it, Emma,” he said. “It may not be exactly my cup of tea—I mean it’s hardly an old-fashioned novel with a complicated plot and a complex cast of characters. It may be a little contemporary for my taste—a psychological study of a relationship more than a narrative, and a dysfunctional relationship at that. But I liked it—I really did. I thought the tone of voice was consistent—a kind of sarcastic understatement, I guess you’d call it. There was a deadpan voice in the more emotional scenes, which I particularly liked. And the relationship, imperfect though it is, is better than no relationship. I get that. They don’t have sex, they can’t have sex, but—for different reasons—not having sex is almost a relief for them.”
“Oh, shut the fuck up!” Emma said; she was still crying.
“What don’t I get?” he asked.
“It’s not the novel you don’t get—it’s me!” she cried. “I’m too small, Jack,” Emma said softly. “Even not-very-big guys hurt me.”
Jack was completely surprised. Emma was such a big girl, such a strong young woman, and she was always battling her weight; she was much taller and heavier than Jack. How was it possible that she was too small? “Have you seen a doctor?” he asked.
“A gynecologist—yes, several. They say I’m not too small. It’s all in my mind, apparently.”
“The pain is in your mind?” he asked her.
“No, that’s not where the pain is,” she said.
Emma’s condition had an uncomfortable-sounding name. Vaginismus, Emma explained, was a conditioned response; often a spasm of the perineal muscles occurred if there was any stimulation of the area. In some women, even the anticipation of vaginal insertion could result in muscle spasm.
“You want to avoid penetration?” Jack asked Emma.
“It’s involuntary, honey pie. I can’t help it—it’s chronic.”
“There’s no treatment?”
Emma laughed. She’d tried hypnosis—an attempt to retrain the muscles to relax instead of involuntarily contracting. But even the psychiatrist had forewarned her that this worked with only a small percentage of sufferers, and it hadn’t worked with Emma.
On the advice of a Toronto gynecologist, Emma had experimented with a treatment known as systematic desensitization—or the Q-tip method, as her Los Angeles gynecologist disparagingly called it. By inserting something as narrow as a Q-tip—and when this was accomplished, progressively inserting slightly larger objects—
“Stop,” Jack told her; he didn’t want to know all the treatments she’d tried. “Has anything worked?” he asked Emma.
The only thing that worked (and this didn’t work every time) was the absolute cooperation of a partner. “I have to be on top, baby cakes, and the guy can’t move at all. If he makes even one move, I get a spasm.” Emma had to be in complete control. All the moves were her moves; only that worked. It went without saying that such a willing partner was hard to find.
Jack was thinking many things, most of them unutterable. How Emma’s attraction to bodybuilders wasn’t the best idea; how her longstanding interest in boys much younger than herself made more sense. And he remembered how adamant Emma was about not having children. No doubt the vaginismus was a reason—a more compelling one than fearing she’d be a bad mother, or like her mother.
It would have been insensitive to ask her if she’d inquired about a surgical solution to her problem. Emma felt squeamish in a doctor’s office; she dreaded everything medical, most of all surgery. Besides, it didn’t sound as if there was a surgical solution to vaginismus—not if it was all in her mind.
Jack didn’t have the heart to tell Emma that she should consider revising The Slush-Pile Reader. He thought that the vaginismus would make a better story than all the small-schlong, big-schlong business—not to mention the unlikelihood of the Michele Maher character having a vagina that was too small. But he understood that Emma’s fiction was a purer choice—a fable of acceptance, and as close as Emma could allow herself to approach her problem. A life in the top position; a lifetime looking for the unmoving partner. It seemed too cruel. Or would this method eventually train her perineal muscles to relax?
“What causes vaginismus?” Jack asked, but Emma might not have heard him, or she was distracted. Maybe she didn’t know what caused it—maybe nothing did—or else she didn’t want to discuss it further.
They took off their clothes and went to bed. Emma held his penis. Jack got very hard—unusually hard, it seemed to him—but all Emma said was, “You’re not really all that small, Jack. Smallish, I would say. If I were you, honey pie, I wouldn’t worry about it.”
Emma didn’t exactly say she’d seen smaller—he’d only heard her say she’d seen bigger—but Jack didn’t press her. It was enough that she held his penis. He was awfully fond of the way she held it.
“We should move,” Emma said sleepily.
“Maybe roommates aren’t the best readers,” Jack ventured to say, touching her breasts.
“I didn’t mean we should stop living together, Jack. I meant I’m sick of Venice.”
That struck Jack as too bad, but he didn’t say anything. He would miss Venice—even l’eau de Dumpster from Hama Sushi. He had grown fond of World Gym, and—despite Emma’s bad experience—he occasionally went to Gold’s, though Jack Burns was no bodybuilder; in both gyms, when he wanted to use the free weights, he did his lifting at the women’s end of the weight room.
“You’re going to be a strong boy, Jack—not very big, but strong,” Leslie Oastler had told him.
“Do you think so?” he’d asked her.
“I know so,” Mrs. Oastler had said. “I can tell.”
Jack lay there remembering that, with his smallish penis as hard as a diamond in Emma’s big, strong hand. Jack had small hands, like his mother. He lay there thinking how strange it was that he hadn’t thought of his mom in months. Maybe Jack didn’t like to think of her because he believed he more and more reminded her of his father; and while it wasn’t his physical resemblance to his dad that bothered Jack, surely any resemblance he bore to William would have been upsetting to Alice. Jack just got the feeling that his mother didn’t like him.
Jack was also wondering where he and Emma might move. He’d once mentioned the Palisades to Emma. It was like a village; you could walk everywhere. But Emma said the Palisades was “swarming with children”—it was, in her view, “a place where formerly sane people went to breed.” Jack guessed that they wouldn’t be moving there.
Clearly Beverly Hills was too expensive for them; besides, it was too far away from the beach. Emma said she liked to see the ocean every day—not that she ever set foot on the beach. Malibu maybe, Jack was thinking, or Santa Monica. But given Emma’s revelation that sex hurt her—quite possibly, it hurt her most of the time—it would have been insensitive of Jack to pursue a conversation about where they might move. Save it for another time, he thought.
“Say it in Latin for me,” he said to Emma.
She knew what he meant—it was the epigraph she’d set at the beginning of her novel. She went around saying it like a litany, but until now Jack had not realized she meant them.
“Nihil facimus sed id bene facimus,” Emma whispered, holding his penis like no one before or since.
“We do nothing but we do it well,” Jack said in English, holding her breasts.
It was the fall of 1988. Rain Man would be the year’s top-grossing film and would clean up at the Academy Awards. Jack’s favorite film that year was A Fish Called Wanda. He would have killed to have had Kevin Kline’s part, for which Kline would win an Oscar for Best Actor in a Supporting Role.
Jack Burns was twenty-three. Emma Oastler was thirty. Boy, were their lives about to change!
Jack met Myra Ascheim at a breakfast place on Montana, shortly after he and Emma had moved to a rental in Santa Monica.
Emma, who bought all Jack’s clothes, dressed him for his meeting. A coffee-colored, long-sleeved shirt—untucked, with the top two buttons unbuttoned—medium-tan chinos, and the dark-brown loafers he wore as a waiter. His hair was a little long, with more gel in it than usual, and he hadn’t shaved for two days—all of which was entirely Emma’s decision. She said he was “almost feminine” when he was clean-shaven, but three days’ growth made him “too Toshiro Mifune.” The shirt was linen. Emma liked the wrinkles.
Jack was reminded of Mrs. Oastler buying his clothes for Redding—later, for Exeter—and he commented to Emma that he felt remiss for never thanking her mother. Emma was spreading the gel through his hair with her hands, a little roughly. “And she paid my tuition at both schools,” Jack added. “Your mom must think I’m ungrateful.”
“Please don’t thank her, honey pie.”
“Why not?” he asked.
“Just don’t,” Emma said, yanking his hair.
It was evident that no one had dressed Myra Ascheim as attentively as Leslie Oastler and Emma had dressed Jack. He first mistook Myra for a homeless person who’d wandered east on Montana from that narrow strip of park on the Pacific side of Ocean Avenue. She was smoking a cigarette on the sidewalk in front of the Marmalade Café—a woman in her late sixties, maybe seventy, wearing dirty running shoes, baggy gray sweatpants, and a faded-pink, unlaundered sweatshirt. With her lank, dirty-white hair—in a ponytail that protruded from an Anaheim Angels baseball cap, from which the halo had fallen off the letter A—Myra bore no resemblance to her younger and far more stylish sister, Mildred.
She even toted an overstuffed shopping bag, in which she carried an old raincoat. Jack walked right by her. It wasn’t until Myra spoke to him that he recognized her, and then it was only because she had Milly’s porn-producer voice. “You should lose the stubble,” she said, “and go easy on the gel in your hair. You look like you’ve been sleeping under a car.”
“Ms. Ascheim?” he asked.
“What a bright boy you are, Jack Burns. And don’t listen to Lawrence—you’re not too pretty.”
“Lawrence said I was too pretty?” Jack asked, holding the door for her.
“Lawrence is a fink and a liar. You can’t be too pretty in this town,” Myra Ascheim said. “Or too successful.”
The issue of how successful, or not, Myra Ascheim had ever been was never made clear to Jack—or, to his knowledge, to anyone else. No one had either corroborated or repudiated the Hollywood legends attached to Myra, all of them stories about who she used to be. Was she once an agent whom I.C.M. wooed away from William Morris, or did C.A.A. woo her away from I.C.M.? Was she eventually fired from all three agencies, or did she go off on her own of her own volition? Did she once represent Julia Roberts? Was it Sharon Stone she was supposed to have “discovered,” or was that Demi Moore? And was Myra truly the first person to refer to Demi as Gimme Moore?
Jack later ran into Lawrence at the bar of Raffles L’Ermitage—not Jack’s favorite hotel in Beverly Hills, but a watering hole Lawrence loved. Lawrence told Jack that Demi Moore’s nickname of “Gimme” was his idea, not Myra’s. But Myra was right—Lawrence was a fink and a liar. And whether or not Myra Ascheim ever represented Julia Roberts, Myra had maintained her contacts with casting directors—almost all of whom liked her. Even if Myra no longer represented anyone, casting directors still returned her calls.
Bob Bookman, who was Emma’s agent at C.A.A. before he became Jack’s, told Jack a story about Myra’s identifying baseball cap. She wasn’t an Anaheim fan—she didn’t even like baseball. She liked the A on the hat, but she detested the halo. “It’s an A-list hat, but I’m no angel,” she liked to say.
According to Bob Bookman, Myra bought an Angels cap every year and removed the halo with a pair of fingernail clippers. “I saw her do it over lunch,” Bookman said. “Myra snipped off the halo while she was waiting for her Cobb salad.” The Cobb salad made the story ring true; aside from breakfast, a Cobb salad was all Jack ever saw Myra eat.
Alan Hergott—who became Jack’s entertainment lawyer—said that Myra always left the same message on his answering machine. “Call me back or I’ll sue your pants off.” That sounded like Myra.
“In this town, you get tired of hearing something you already know,” Alan told Jack. “You’re supposed to sound or at least look interested, but you know more about the story than the guy who’s telling you the story does. Myra’s different. She always knows something you don’t know. True or not—it doesn’t matter.”
In Hollywood, there were as many Myra Ascheim stories as there were stories about Milton Berle’s penis. And to think that Jack Burns met her because his schlong was small, or smallish—and only because he met her porn-producer sister, Milly, first! In fact, if it hadn’t been for Lawrence, Jack might never have met the Ascheim sisters, and he met Lawrence only because the fink wanted to bang Emma. (Knowing Emma, she probably had an instinct that steered her away from Lawrence—maybe his schlong was all wrong for her, or she knew that Lawrence would never relinquish the top position.)
“Actually, I’m no longer an agent,” Myra told Jack over their breakfast at Marmalade. They were sitting at a kind of picnic table—communal dining in Santa Monica. “My sister and I have created a talent-management company.” This information confused Jack, given his limited (albeit specific) knowledge of the other Ascheim. But he would make a point of never trying to grasp how the industry worked. From the beginning, Jack Burns realized that his job was getting a job. He already knew how to be an actor.
A man had spread a newspaper over one end of the picnic table; he sat on the bench beside Jack, muttering, as if he bore a lifelong grudge against the news. At the other end of the table, nearer to Myra than to Jack, was a family of four—a young, harried couple with two quarreling children.
Like Rottweiler, Myra Ascheim had plucked Bruno Litkins from Jack’s résumé. “The gay heron,” as Jack had called Bruno, was the only marketable name among Jack’s earliest supporters. “I don’t suppose you are a transvestite—you just know how to look like one,” Myra said.
“I just know how to look like one,” Jack concurred.
“I’ll let you know, Jack, when I sense a surfeit of transsexual roles.”
The children at Myra’s end of the table were bothering her. A little boy, maybe six or seven, had ordered the oatmeal with sliced bananas; then he picked all the bananas out. He wanted some of his older sister’s bacon instead, but she wouldn’t give him any. “If you wanted bacon, you should have ordered it,” the children’s mother kept telling him.
“You can have my bananas,” the boy told his sister, but the bacon was not negotiable—not for bananas.
“Look—there’s a lesson here,” Myra said crossly to the little boy. “You want her bacon, but you’ve got nothing she wants. That’s not how you make a deal.”
In the movie business, Jack was learning, meeting people was an audition. You didn’t even have to know which part you were auditioning for; you just picked a part and played it, any part. Jack looked at the little girl who had the bacon. She was nine or ten; she had three strips of bacon. She was his audience of one, for the moment, but Jack was auditioning for Myra Ascheim, and Myra knew it.
In Blade Runner, Rutger Hauer plays the blond android—the last to die. He holds Harrison Ford’s life in his hands, but Rutger is dying; he’d rather have someone to talk to than die alone. “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe,” Rutger Hauer says. That was the moment Jack had in mind.
That was the tone of voice Jack adopted when he spoke to the girl about her bacon. “I have a younger brother,” Jack-as-Rutger-Hauer began. “He was always asking me for my stuff—he wanted my bacon, just like your brother wants yours. Maybe I should have given him the bacon, at least one strip.”
“Why?” the girl asked.
“I was in a motorcycle accident,” Jack said. When he touched his side, he winced; his sudden intake of breath made the lit
tle boy squish one of his banana slices. “The handlebars went in here—they went right through me.”
“Not while we’re eating,” Myra Ascheim said, but the children and Jack-as-Rutger-Hauer ignored her.
“I thought I was going to be okay—I lost only one kidney,” Jack explained. “We have two,” he told the little boy. “You have to have at least one.”
“What’s wrong with the one you’ve got?” the little girl asked.
Jack shrugged, then winced again; after the handlebars, apparently it hurt to shrug, too. (He was thinking of the way Rutger Hauer says, “All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.”) Jack said: “My one remaining kidney is failing.”
“ ‘Time to die,’ ” Myra Ascheim said, with a shrug. (Those are Rutger Hauer’s last words in Blade Runner. Myra obviously knew the movie, too.)
“Of course I could ask my brother for one of his kidneys,” Jack went on. “Only a brother’s body-part would work inside me—only a brother’s or a sister’s, and I don’t have a sister.”
“So ask your brother!” the girl said excitedly.
“I suppose I better ask him,” Jack agreed. “But you see the problem. I never gave him my bacon—not even one strip.”
“What’s a kidney?” the boy asked.
His sister carefully placed a strip of bacon beside his bananaless bowl of oatmeal. “Here—take this,” she told him. “You don’t need a kidney.”
“I’ll let you know, Jack, when I sense a surfeit of Rutger Hauer roles,” was all Myra Ascheim said, but Jack knew he’d nailed the audition.
The girl sat watching her brother eat the bacon; Jack could tell she was still thinking about the accident. “Can I see the scar, from the handlebars?” she asked.
“Not while we’re eating,” Myra said again.
Jack had been so focused on his audience of one, he’d not noticed when the man with the newspaper had left. In any performance, even a good one, somebody always walks out. But after breakfast, out on Montana, Myra was critical of Jack’s audition. “You lost the newspaper guy. He didn’t buy the handlebars, not for a minute.”
