by John Irving
Wherever the convention was—Dallas or Dublin, the so-called Meeting of the Marked in Pittsburgh, the annual Man’s Ruin in Decatur, Illinois—Daughter Alice went.
She had been to Boston and to Hamburg, Germany. To her great disappointment, Herbert Hoffmann had retired, but she met Robert Gorlt in Hamburg. “He’s six-nine and played basketball in Canada,” she told Jack.
Tattoo artists from all over the world came to these conventions: from Tahiti, Cyprus, Samoa; from Thailand and Mexico, and from Paris, Berlin, and Miami. They even came from Oklahoma, where tattooing was illegal. (There was nowhere Alice wouldn’t go to meet with her colleagues—including some Sheraton in the Meadowlands.) And it was always the same people who went.
“If it’s always the same weirdos, why go?” Jack asked his mother. “Why go again and again?”
“Because we are the same weirdos, Jack. Because we are what we do. We don’t change.”
“For Christ’s sake, Mom, do you have any idea what sort of shit can happen to you in a Hyatt Regency in Columbus, Ohio, or in a fucking Sheraton in the Meadowlands?”
“If Miss Wurtz could hear you, Jack,” his mother said. “If poor Lottie, or Mrs. Wicksteed—may she rest in peace—could hear you. It’s so sad what’s happened to your language. Is it California or the movie business that’s done this to you?”
“Done what to me?”
“Maybe it’s Emma,” Alice said. “It’s living with that foul-mouthed girl—I know it is. It’s for Christ’s sake this and fucking that. To hear you talk, you’d think that shit were an all-purpose noun! And you used to speak so well. You once knew how to talk. You enunciated perfectly.”
She had a point, but it was just like Alice to change the subject. Here Jack was, trying to impress upon her—a middle-aged woman—that these tattoo conventions were freak shows, and his mother got all in a knot about his language. The conventions were absolutely terrifying. The full-body wackos turned up; they had contests! Ex-convicts were tattooed—prison tattoos were a genre as distinctive as biker tattoos. Strippers were tattooed, not to mention porn stars. (Jack’s “research,” meaning countless Hank Long films, had taught him that.)
Just who did Daughter Alice think these conventions were for? Jack had seen those angry voodoo dolls and the slashed heart with the dagger in it—the latter inscribed NO REGRET—at Riley Baxter’s Tabu Tattoo in West L.A. (On Baxter’s business card, under one such voodoo doll, it said DISPOSABLE NEEDLES.)
Alice’s waist had thickened, but she’d not lost her pretty smile; her hair, once an amber or maple-syrup color, was streaked with gray. But her skin was surprisingly unwrinkled, and her choice in clothing took noticeable advantage of her full breasts. She liked dresses with an empire waist, and usually a scoop or square neckline. At her age, she wore an underwire bra—she liked red or fuchsia. That day in Daughter Alice, she wore a peasant-style dress with a neckline that dropped from the apex of her shoulders; her bra straps were showing, but they usually were. Jack thought that she liked her bra straps to show, although she never wore a dress or blouse with a revealing décolletage. “My cleavage,” Alice liked to say, “is nobody’s business.” (Strange, Jack used to think—how his mom wanted everyone to know she had good breasts, but she never bared even a little bit of them.)
And what was a woman who wouldn’t bare her breasts doing at tattoo conventions? “Mom—” Jack tried to say, but she was fussing with a pot of tea; she’d turned her back on him.
“And the women, Jack. Do you know any nice girls? Or have I just not met them?”
“Nice?”
“Like Claudia. She was nice. What’s happened to Claudia?”
“I don’t know, Mom.”
“What about that unfortunate young woman who had an entry-level job at the William Morris Agency? She had the strangest lisp, didn’t she?”
“Gwen somebody,” he said. (That was all he remembered about Gwen—she lisped. Maybe she was still at William Morris, maybe not.)
“Gwen is long gone, is she?” his mom asked. “Do you still take honey in your tea, dear?”
“Yes, Gwen is long gone. No, I don’t take honey—I never have.”
“Actresses, waitresses, office girls, meat heiresses—not to mention the hangers-on,” his mom continued.
“The what?”
“Do you call them groupies?”
“I don’t know any groupies, Mom. There are more groupies in your world than there are in mine.”
“What on earth do you mean, dear?”
“At the tattoo conventions, there must be,” he said.
“You should go to a tattoo convention, Jack. Then you wouldn’t be so afraid.”
“I took you to the Inkslingers Ball,” he reminded her.
“Yes, but you wouldn’t go inside the Palladium,” she said.
“There was a motorcycle gang outside the Palladium!”
“You said it was bad enough to see a bunch of fake boobs at night—you weren’t going to hang around a bunch of fake boobs in broad daylight. That’s exactly what you said. Honestly, your language—”
“Mom—”
“That Brit you were with in London—she was as old as I am!” Alice cried. Jack watched her put honey in his tea.
The door to Queen Street opened and a little bell tinkled, as if Daughter Alice were a shop selling lace doilies or birthday cards. The girl who came in was suffering some kind of inflammation from her latest piercing; an object that looked like a cufflink made her lower lip stick out. She had a ball and chain attached to one eyebrow, which was shaved, but only her lower lip was inflamed.
“What can I do for you, dear?” Alice asked her. “I just made some tea. Would you like some?”
“Yeah, I guess,” the girl said. “I don’t usually do tea, but that’s okay.”
“Jack, fix the young lady some tea, please,” his mother said.
The girl was eighteen—maybe twenty, tops. Her dark hair was dirty; she was wearing jeans and a Grateful Dead T-shirt. “Shit, you look kinda like Jack Burns,” she told Jack, “except you look like a normal guy.”
Alice had put some music on—Bob, of course. “Jack is my son,” Alice told the pierced girl. “This is Jack Burns!”
“Oh, wow,” the girl said. “I’ll bet you’ve been with a lot of women, eh?”
“Not too many,” he told her. “Do you take honey in your tea?”
“Yeah, sure,” she said; she kept touching her sore-looking lower lip with the tip of her tongue.
“What sort of tattoo are you interested in, dear?” Alice asked her. (There was a sign in the window of Daughter Alice: NO PIERCING. The girl had to have come for a tattoo.)
The girl unzipped her jeans and hooked her thumbs under the waistband of her panties, exposing a fringe of pubic hair, above which a honeybee hovered. The bee’s body was no bigger than the topmost joint of Jack’s little finger; its translucent wings were a blur of yellow. The little bee’s body was a darker shade of gold.
“Gold is a tricky pigment,” Alice said—perhaps admiringly. Jack couldn’t tell. “I take a bright yellow and mix it with brick red, or you can use what they call English vermilion—same as mercuric sulfide. I mix that with molasses.” Jack was pretty sure this was three quarters fabrication. Alice would never tell just anyone how she made her pigments—especially a nonprofessional.
“Molasses?” the girl said.
“I cut it with a little witch hazel,” Alice told her. “It’s tricky to get a good gold.” Jack believed that the witch-hazel part was true.
The girl was looking at her honeybee with new eyes. “I got the bee in Winnipeg,” she told them.
“At Tattoos for the Individual, I suppose,” Alice said.
“Yeah, do you know those guys?” the girl asked.
“Sure, I know them. You can’t exactly get lost in Winnipeg. So you want a flower for the bee?” she asked the girl.
“Yeah, but I can’t decide what kinda flower,” the girl said.
&n
bsp; Jack was edging toward the door. He thought he’d take his chances out on Queen Street; a fan (or a lunatic) would probably recognize him, but Jack Burns didn’t need to see someone get another tattoo.
“Where are you off to, Jack?” Alice asked, not looking at him. She was laying out her flash of flower choices, to show the honeybee girl.
“You don’t hafta go,” the girl said to Jack. “You can watch—no matter where she puts it.”
“That depends,” Alice told her.
“I’ll see you back at home,” Jack said to his mom. “I’ll take you and Leslie out to dinner.”
Both Alice and the girl looked disappointed that Jack was leaving. Bob Dylan was yowling away. (“Idiot Wind.” Jack would always remember that song.) Jack wasn’t thinking about the girl; he was trying to decipher more exactly the look of disappointment on his mother’s face. What is it about me that bothers you? Jack wanted to ask her, but not with the honeybee girl there.
“Someone’s got it in for me,” Bob complained. Every time Jack came to Toronto, he felt that way. “They say I shot a man named Gray and took his wife to Italy,” Bob sang away. “She inherited a million bucks and when she died it came to me.”
Jack sang the next line out loud, with Bob—never taking his eyes off his mother. “I can’t help it if I’m lucky,” he sang—because that was the principal ingredient in the look his mom was giving him. She thought he’d been lucky!
“So far, Jack—so far!” Alice called after him, as he stepped out on Queen Street and closed the door to Daughter Alice.
IV
Sleeping in the Needles
23
Billy Rainbow
Jack was on a press junket in New York. (“Following Miramax’s marching orders,” as Emma put it.) The only thing memorable about this particular interview was not the opening question itself, which he’d been asked a hundred times before, but the sheer clumsiness of how the journalist worded the question—that and the fact that Emma called in the middle of his oft-repeated answer, and it was the last time Jack would hear her voice.
His interviewer, a matronly woman with a baffling accent, was the same journalist, from the Hollywood Foreign Press, who, in a previous press junket, had asked Jack if he was modeling his appearance on that of a young Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now. She was drinking a Diet Coke and smoking a mentholated cigarette, her artificially sweetened breath wafting over him like smoke from a fire in a mint factory.
“Captain Willard has short hair,” Jack had answered her that previous time.
“Cap-ee-tan who?”
“The Martin Sheen character in Apocalypse Now—Captain Willard,” he’d said. “I’m not a hundred percent sure about his rank.”
“I didn’t mean-a hees hair,” the journalist had said.
“I’m not consciously modeling myself on a young Martin Sheen,” Jack had told her. “I’m not trying to kill Marlon Brando, either.”
“You mean-a young Marlon Brando?” the lady from the Hollywood Foreign Press had asked him.
“In the movie you mentioned,” he had explained to her, slowly, “the young Martin Sheen character is sent to kill Marlon Brando—remember? Not a young Marlon Brando, either.”
“Forget eet,” she’d said. “Let’s-a move on.”
This time her question was breathtaking in its awkwardness, but she had at last moved on from Martin Sheen. “Are you a person who-wa, though not a homosexual, psychologically identifies weeth the opposite sex-sa? I mean-a weeth wee-men.”
“Am I a transvestite, do you mean?”
“Yes!”
“No.”
“But-a you are always dressing as a woo-man—or you seem to be theenking about eet, I mean-a dressing as a woo-man, even when-a you are dressed as a man.”
“I’m not thinking about dressing as a woman right now,” Jack told her. “It’s just something I occasionally do in a movie—you know, when I’m acting.”
“Are you writing about eet?”
“About dressing as a woman?”
“Yes!”
“No.”
His cell phone rang. Ordinarily he didn’t answer his phone in the middle of an interview, but Jack could see that the call was from Emma and she’d been depressed lately. Emma was losing the fight with her weight; every morning since he’d been away, Emma called to tell him what she weighed. It was almost lunchtime in New York, but Jack knew that Emma was just getting up in L.A.
He’d told her that he was being interviewed around the clock—Emma knew very well what press junkets were for. In mild exasperation, Jack handed his cell phone to the lady from the Hollywood Foreign Press. “This woman won’t leave me alone,” he said to his interviewer. “Try telling her I’m in the middle of an interview. See how far you get.”
If nothing else, Jack hoped this might interrupt the chain of thought that the journalist from the Hollywood Foreign Press was pursuing. He already knew that his interviewer would have no luck interrupting Emma from her train of thought.
“Hello-a?” the woman who thought he looked like a young Martin Sheen said.
It suddenly sounded like Emma was speaking Italian—of course Jack recognized her spiel. “Pleeze tell-a Jack Burns—eet’s Maria Antonietta Beluzzi on da fon-a!”
“I’m-a sorry. Jack Burns ees in the meedle of an interview,” the lady from the Hollywood Foreign Press said.
“Tell heem I mees-a holding hees pee-nis!” Emma said.
“Eet’s a Ms. Beluzzi,” his interviewer said, handing him back his cell phone. “Eet sounds urgent.”
“So what do you weigh this morning?” Jack asked Emma.
“Two hundred and fucking five!” Emma wailed—loudly enough for the journalist to hear her.
“You have to go on a diet, Emma,” he told her, for what had to be the hundredth time.
Jack Burns was thirty-two in 1997—Emma was thirty-nine. He had a better metabolism than she had, and he’d always watched what he ate. But now that Jack was in his thirties, even he had to be more strict with his diet.
Emma didn’t understand dieting. Her one bottle of red wine a night had become two; she had pasta for lunch. Here she was, pushing forty, and her favorite food was still gorgonzola mashed potatoes. Jack kept telling her: she could spend all day on the ab machine at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills—she could be bench-pressing her own weight—and not work off those kinds of carbs.
Jack could see that the journalist from the Hollywood Foreign Press was writing everything down—including, as he would later read in her interview, the “two hundred and fucking five.” She even spelled Maria Antonietta Beluzzi correctly; naturally, it turned out that the journalist was Italian.
“Emma—” Jack started to say.
“He calls her Emma and brutally tells her to go on a diet,” the lady from the Hollywood Foreign Press would write.
“Fuck you and your diet, Jack,” Emma said sharply on the phone. “I want you to know I’ve taken good care of you in my will.” Then she hung up.
“Your-a girlfriend?” his interviewer asked. “I mean-a one of them.”
“Kind of,” Jack replied.
“Ees Ms. Beluzzi an actress?”
“She’s a voluptuous tobacconist,” he said. Although the journalist didn’t write this down, voluptuous would somehow make it into her interview—but in reference to Emma.
“I suppose-za you have, or have-a had, many girlfriends,” Jack’s interviewer said.
“Nobody serious,” he said, for what had to be the hundredth time—with apologies to Michele Maher.
Jack was tired. He’d had too many interviews, with too many prying and insinuating journalists. But that was no excuse. He shouldn’t have lost control of this interview. He shouldn’t have so recklessly, even deliberately, allowed this lady from the Hollywood Foreign Press to imagine anything she might want to imagine—but he did.
Of course it wasn’t the interview that would bother him; such things aren’t truly damaging, not for long
. But that Emma’s last words to Jack were about her will—well, that would hurt him forever.
By the time the interview was published, Emma would be dead—and the Italian journalist from the Hollywood Foreign Press had figured out that he couldn’t have been having a relationship with Maria Antonietta Beluzzi, the big-breasted tobacconist in Fellini’s Amarcord. (Ms. Beluzzi would be old enough to be Jack’s grandmother!)
It had to have been Emma Oastler Jack was talking to, the journalist wrote—he and Emma, who were “just roommates,” were known to be living together—and anyone who’d seen the famous author recently knew at a glance she was overweight, if not that she weighed as much as two hundred and five pounds. (In this context, Jack’s use of the word voluptuous appeared to mock Emma for becoming so fat.)
Besides, the Italian lady concluded, Emma was said to have been depressed that her third novel—after many years, it was still only a work-in-progress—was growing too long.
“How long is it?” all the journalists would ask Jack, after Emma’s death. But by then he had learned, the hard way, to be more careful with the press.
That trip to New York, Jack was staying at The Mark. He had registered in the name of Billy Rainbow—the character he played in the soon-to-be-released film he was promoting at the press junket. He usually registered in hotels in the name of the character he was playing in his most recent, not-yet-released movie. That way, the Jack Burns fans couldn’t find him.
They weren’t all exactly fans. Some of the “chicks with dicks” had taken offense that Jack repeatedly denied he was a transsexual or a transvestite. In almost every interview, Jack said he was a cross-dresser only occasionally—and only in the movies. Real transsexuals and transvestites were offended; they said that Jack was “merely acting.” Well—of course he was!
So Jack was registered at The Mark as Billy Rainbow; the front desk screened all his calls. Jack always told his mom where he was staying—and who he was, this time—and of course Emma knew, and his agent, Bob Bookman, and his lawyer, Alan Hergott. And the publicist for whichever studio was making his most recent movie, in this case Erica Steinberg from Miramax. Naturally, Harvey Weinstein knew, too. If you were making a Miramax movie, Harvey knew where you were staying and under what name.
