(2005) Until I Find You

by John Irving

  Wild Bill Vanvleck doesn’t explain. It’s the image The Remake Monster cares about—Jack-as-Melody walking up the strip in emerald-green heels and that hot dress, lugging those obviously heavy bags. As Jack is leaving, disappearing into the night—reborn as Melody, maybe, or just looking for an affordable hotel—the sleazy manager sees him-as-her walking away. Jack looks so perfect that the manager doesn’t try to intervene. He merely shouts: “You’re fired, Jack—you bitch!”

  In Melody’s voice, Jack says: “It’s a good job to lose.” (Jack Burns’s contribution to Vanvleck’s god-awful script—he was right about that line having legs.)

  The Tour Guide was by no means the worst movie of the year. (Or of the following year, which produced Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Die Hard 2.) And the shot of Jack Burns in drag, when he’s saying, “It’s a good job to lose”—well, everyone would remember that. The film may have been forgettable, but not that shot—not that line.

  At the 1991 Academy Awards, Billy Crystal was the host. He was good, but he may have been a bit too fast with one of his jokes. It was a pretty knowing audience at the Shrine Civic Auditorium, but most of them missed the joke. Not Jack, who was watching the show on TV; he got it, but that’s because it was his line.

  Billy Crystal was talking about the possibility of being replaced as the host of the Academy Awards. The audience groaned in protest at the very idea; most of them then missed Billy saying, in a pointedly feminine way, “It’s a good job to lose.”

  That was when Emma and Jack knew he had made it. “Shit, did you hear that, baby cakes?” They were in Mrs. Oastler’s house—Emma and Jack were back in Toronto, visiting their mothers—but Alice and Leslie were whispering to each other in the kitchen; they missed Billy Crystal’s homage to Jack’s famous end line in The Tour Guide, and they would go to bed before Dances with Wolves won the Oscar for Best Picture.

  Jack had not only heard Billy Crystal’s joke; he was genuinely impressed by Billy’s imitation of Jack-as-Melody. “Christ,” he said.

  “No more Mad Dutchman, honey pie,” Emma said. “I can’t wait for your next movie.” Jack and Emma were on the couch in the grand living room of what he used to think of as the Oastler mansion. (That was before he’d seen some of those real mansions in Beverly Hills.) If Jack looked over Emma’s shoulder, he could see the foyer at the foot of the main staircase, where Mrs. Machado had landed her high-groin kick with such devastating results.

  Emma had sold her second novel for big bucks. She’d taken the manuscript to Bob Bookman at C.A.A. before she submitted it to her publisher. She had no intention of making the film rights unsalable this time. Bookman got her a movie deal before the novel was published, which was just the way Emma wanted it.

  Called Normal and Nice, Emma’s second Hollywood novel was about what happens to a young couple from Iowa who go to Hollywood to fulfill their dreams of becoming movie stars. The husband, Johnny, gives up his dream before his wife, Carol, gives up hers. Johnny is too thin-skinned to make it as an actor; a couple of rough auditions and he packs it in. Besides, he’s a real clean liver—a nondrinker, an overall straight arrow. With boyish charm and a spotless driving record, Johnny gets a job as a limo driver; soon he’s driving a stretch.

  Given Emma’s knack for irony, Johnny ends up driving movie stars. His lingering desire for the actor’s imagined life is reflected by his ponytail, Johnny’s sole emblem of rebellion among limo drivers. His ponytail is neat and clean, and not very long. (Emma describes Johnny as “attractive in a delicate, almost feminine way.”) Long hair suits him; Johnny feels fortunate that the limousine company lets him keep the ponytail.

  His wife, Carol, isn’t so lucky. She goes to work for an escort service—much to Johnny’s shame but with his reluctant approval. Carol tries one service after another, in alphabetical order—Absolutely Gorgeous, Beautiful Beyond Belief, and so on.

  Johnny draws the line at Have You Been a Bad Boy? But it doesn’t matter; as Carol discovers, they’re all alike. Whether at Instant Escorts or Irresistible Temptations, what’s expected of her is the same—namely, everything.

  At one escort service, Carol might last a week or a month or less than a day. It all depends on how long it takes for her to meet what Emma calls an “irregular” customer. Once Carol starts refusing to do what a client wants, her days at that particular escort service are numbered.

  Not unlike The Slush-Pile Reader, Normal and Nice reveals Emma’s sympathy for damaged, deeply compromised relationships that somehow work. Carol and Johnny never stop loving each other; what holds them together is their absolute, unshakable agreement concerning what constitutes normal and nice behavior.

  Carol does outcalls only. She always phones Johnny and tells him where she’s going—not just the hotel but the customer’s name and room number—and she calls Johnny again when she gets to the room, and when she’s safely out. But irregular requests are commonplace; Carol loses her job at one service after another.

  Finally, Johnny has a suggestion: Carol should have her own listing in the Yellow Pages. The best thing Carol ever has to say about a client is that he was “nice.” Nice means “normal”—hence Carol calls her escort service Normal and Nice.

  Emma writes: “She might have attracted more customers with a service called Maternity Leave. Who calls an escort service for normal and nice?”

  Johnny starts pimping for Carol. He has some regular limo clients, people Johnny feels he knows—movie stars among them. “You’re probably not interested,” Johnny says to the outwardly nicer of the gentlemen he drives around in his stretch, “but if you’re ever tempted to call an escort service, I know one particularly nice woman—normal and nice, if that’s what you like. Nothing irregular, if you know what I mean.”

  The first time Johnny says this to a famous actor, it is heartbreaking. The reader already knows that, instead of becoming a movie star, Johnny is driving them. Now Carol is fucking them!

  It seems that only older men are interested; most of them aren’t movie stars, either. They’re character actors—villains in the great Westerns, now with ravaged faces and unsteady on their feet, old cowboys with chronic lower-back pain. As children, Carol and Johnny had seen these classic Westerns; they were the movies that made them want to leave Iowa and go to Hollywood in the first place.

  At home, in their half of a tacky duplex in Marina del Rey—close enough to hear and smell the L.A. airport—Carol and Johnny play dress-up games, their roles reversed. She puts her blond hair in a ponytail and dresses in his white shirt and black tie; this prompts Johnny to buy Carol a man’s black suit, one that fits her. She dresses as a limo driver, then undresses for him.

  Johnny lets Carol dress him in her clothes; she later buys him his own bra, with falsies, and a dress that fits him. She brushes out his shoulder-length hair and makes him up—lipstick, eye shadow, the works. He rings the doorbell and she lets him-as-her in; he pretends to be the escort, arriving in a stranger’s hotel room. “This is their only opportunity to act—together, in the same movie,” Emma writes.

  A veteran cowboy actor is in town to promote his new film—what Emma calls a “nouvelle Western.” Lester Billings was born Lester Magruder in Billings, Montana; he’s an actual cowboy, and nouvelle Westerns offend him. It’s a sore point with Lester that Westerns have become so rare that young actors don’t know how to ride and shoot anymore. In the so-called Western that Lester is promoting, there are no good guys, no bad guys; everyone is an anti-hero. “A French Western,” Lester calls it.

  Johnny sends Carol to Lester’s hotel room—after Lester confesses to a hankering for a nice, normal woman. But Lester really is a cowboy; he climbs on Carol. (“There was nothing too irregular—at first,” she assures Johnny.) Then, while they’re proceeding in the regular way, Lester puts a gun to his head. It’s a Colt .45—only one chamber of the revolver is loaded. Lester calls this cowboy roulette.

  “Either I die in the saddle or I live to ride another day!” he
hollers. As Lester pulls the trigger, Carol wonders how many girls in L.A. escort services have heard the click of that hammer striking an empty chamber, while Lester lived to ride another day. Not this time. It’s Lester’s day to die in the saddle.

  In the midafternoon, there aren’t many guests in The Peninsula Beverly Hills to hear the gunshot. Besides, the hotel doesn’t cater to an especially youthful crowd; maybe the guests in nearby rooms are napping or hard of hearing. Emma describes The Peninsula as being “sort of like the Four Seasons, but with a few more hookers and businessmen.”

  Because the hotel is adjacent to C.A.A., possibly an agent hears Lester Billings blow his brains out, but nobody else. And what would an agent care about a gunshot?

  Carol calls Johnny. She knows that no one noticed her crossing the lobby and getting on the elevator, but what if someone sees her leave? She is understandably distraught; she believes that she looks like a hooker. She doesn’t, really. Carol has always dressed like a studio exec having lunch; in keeping with normal and nice, she doesn’t look like a call girl.

  Johnny saves her. He comes to Lester’s hotel room with the requisite changes of clothes, for Carol and himself. The limo driver’s suit for Carol, together with the dress and bra and falsies Carol bought for him; by the time Carol has applied his makeup and brushed out his shoulder-length hair, Johnny looks a lot more like a prostitute than Carol ever has.

  He tells her where the limo is parked. It’s not far—nor is it parked within sight of the entrance to The Peninsula. He says he’ll come find her.

  When Johnny-as-a-hooker leaves The Peninsula, he makes sure he’s noticed. Johnny has used a little bottle of bourbon from the minibar in Lester’s hotel room as a mouthwash. He struts up to the front desk, where he-as-she seizes a young clerk by his coat lapels and breathes in his face. “There’s something you should know,” Johnny-as-a-hooker says in a husky voice. “Lester Billings has checked out. I’m afraid he’s really left his room a mess.” Then Johnny-as-a-hooker releases the young man and sways through the lobby, leaving the hotel. He and Carol drive home to Marina del Rey, where they change into their regular clothes.

  At the end of the novel, they’ve stopped for the night in a motel room off Interstate 80 somewhere in the Midwest. They’re on their way back to Iowa to find normal jobs and live a nice life. Carol is pregnant. (Maternity Leave, as an escort service, might have been wildly successful, but Carol wants no part of the business—not anymore—and Johnny is through with driving movie stars.)

  In the motel room off the interstate, there’s an old Lester Billings movie on the TV—an authentic Western. Lester is a cattle rustler; he dies in the saddle, shot dead on his horse.

  Normal and Nice turned out to be a better movie than a novel, and Emma knew it would be. The film was already in production while the novel was still on the New York Times bestseller list. Many book reviewers complained that the novel was written with the future screenplay in mind. Naturally, Emma wrote the screenplay, too; among film critics, there was some speculation that she might have written it before she wrote the novel. Emma wouldn’t say.

  Jack didn’t know the details of the deal she made with Bob Bookman at C.A.A., but while Bookman didn’t normally represent actors, he agreed to represent Jack. Whether it was in writing—or something that was said over lunch, or in a phone call—it was understood that Emma and Jack were attached to the movie that would be made from Normal and Nice. Emma would write the script and Jack would be Johnny. Of course Emma had Jack in mind for the part from the beginning—a sympathetic cross-dresser. And this time his shoulder-length hair would be real, not a wig.

  Mary Kendall played Carol—as innocent an escort as you’d ever see. Jake “Prairie Dog” Rawlings played Lester Billings—his first role in a long time, and his only screen appearance not in a Western.

  When Mary Kendall and Jack are holding hands in that Interstate 80 motel room, just watching TV, they have no dialogue. In the same scene in the novel, watching Lester Billings get shot, Carol says, “I wonder how many times he got killed in his career.”

  “Enough so he wasn’t afraid of it,” Johnny says.

  But Emma thought it was better if they didn’t say anything in the film. It’s more of a movie moment—to just see them watching the old cowboy die. Their dreams, to be movie stars, have died, too; something of that is visible in Carol’s and Johnny’s resigned expressions. That green or blue-gray light from the television screen flickers on their faces.

  But Jack would have liked to say the line. (“Enough so he wasn’t afraid of it.”)

  “Maybe you’ll get to use it later,” Emma told him, “but not this time. This time, I’m the writer.”

  Emma was more than that. She was the architect of Jack’s future in film, the reason he would make the leap from Wild Bill Vanvleck to more-or-less mainstream. Of course Jack Burns was still best known in drag, but suddenly he was serious.

  It was quite a surprise when Jack was nominated for an Academy Award; he hadn’t thought of the cross-dressing limo driver as being that sympathetic a part. It was no surprise that Jack wouldn’t win that year. It was Mary Kendall’s first Oscar nomination, too, and she wouldn’t win, either. But they were both nominated, which was more than they’d ever imagined.

  The Silence of the Lambs would win Best Picture, and Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins Best Actress and Best Actor, respectively—it was their year.

  Emma wasn’t nominated. Screenwriters were nominated by screenwriters; Emma’s famous script notes still rankled. Emma went to the Oscars as Jack’s date, which made it fun. They generally agreed who the assholes were; identifying the assholes was an important activity at an event like that.

  Billy Crystal, again the host, made a joke about the evening being delayed—“because Jack Burns is still changing his bra.”

  Emma had a very noticeable hickey on her throat. Jack had given it to her, at her request. She hadn’t gone out with anyone in a long time, she thought she was ugly, and she hated her Oscar dress. “At least make it look like someone’s kissing me, honey pie.”

  Mrs. Oastler spotted Emma’s hickey on TV in Toronto. “Couldn’t you have put a little concealer on it?” Leslie asked Emma.

  It was March 30, 1992—the first time Mrs. Oastler and Alice stayed up to watch the entire Academy Awards show, although Jack told them not to bother. He knew Anthony Hopkins was going to win Best Actor, but Leslie and Alice stayed up to watch Jack not win, anyway.

  They always showed a film clip of the nominated actors. Jack knew the shot he wanted them to use for him. It’s his face at the wheel of the limo—Jack-as-Johnny glances once in the rearview mirror at his wife, Carol, who’s all alone in the long backseat of the stretch. Carol is trying to put her hair and lipstick in order; she’s looking a little messy from a hotel-room groping by an overeager tourist at the Beverly Wilshire. Jack’s eyes go briefly to the rearview mirror, then back to the road. It’s a look between stoic and noir; he was proud of that close-up.

  But with marketing, there’s no such thing as too obvious. The film clip they showed instead was the call-girl shot: Jack-as-a-hooker is breathing bourbon into the face of the front-desk clerk at The Peninsula Beverly Hills. “There’s something you should know,” Jack-as-a-hooker tells the clerk in that husky voice. “Lester Billings has checked out. I’m afraid he’s really left his room a mess.”

  “The money shot,” Myra Ascheim called it, when Emma and Jack ran into her at the Oscar party at Morton’s. It had taken ages to get in; the limos were backed up on Robertson as far as they could see.

  Jack was unfamiliar with the phrase. “The money shot,” he repeated.

  “He’s Canadian,” Myra explained. Jack saw that she was sitting with her sister, Mildred.

  “Two tough old broads in a power booth,” Emma would say later.

  “In a porn film,” Milly Ascheim explained, without looking at Jack, “the money shot is the male-ejaculation moment. You don’t get it, you got no
thin’. Either the guy delivers the goods, or he can’t.”

  “What’s it called when you don’t deliver, or you can’t?” Emma asked the porn producer.

  “Crabs in ice water,” Milly said. “You gotta deliver the money shot.”

  “The equivalent of that shot of you as a hooker, Jack,” Myra said condescendingly. Perhaps she was peeved with him because he hadn’t recognized her. (She wasn’t wearing her baseball cap.)

  “I get it,” Jack told the Ascheim sisters. He was anxious to leave. Emma was holding his hand; Jack could tell she wanted to leave, too. The two tough old broads were looking her over, and it wasn’t a friendly assessment.

  “It doesn’t matter that you didn’t win, Jack,” Myra continued, staring at Emma.

  “It only matters when you win,” Milly corrected her.

  “Well, we gotta go—there’s another party,” Emma said. “A younger one.”

  “Nice hickey,” Mildred Ascheim told Emma.

  “Thanks,” Emma said. “Jack gave it to me—it’s a real doozy.”

  Mildred shifted her examining gaze to Jack. “He’s cute, isn’t he?” Myra asked her sister. “You can see what all the fuss is about.”

  Jack could tell that Milly Ascheim was thinking over the word cute. In her world, Jack knew, cute didn’t cut it. “I think he’s cuter as a girl,” Mildred Ascheim said; she was scrutinizing Emma again, ignoring Jack. He thought that Milly was weighing whether or not to expose him.

  That was when Myra said, “You’re just jealous, Milly, because I met Jack first.”

  Uh-oh—here it comes, Jack thought. But Mildred Ascheim surprised him. She gave Jack a withering look, just to let him know she remembered how small his schlong was; yet she didn’t give him away. It was not a reassuring look—on the contrary, Milly wanted Jack to know that she hadn’t forgotten a single disappointing detail of his audition in Van Nuys. This just wasn’t the time for her to bear witness.

  “For Christ’s sake, Myra, it’s Oscar night,” Milly told her sister. “We oughta let these kids enjoy it.”