by John Irving
At the time, Jack was sleeping with the well-known cellist Mimi Lederer, so she knew where he was staying, too. In fact, he was in bed with her—asleep at The Mark—when Emma died.
That night, after dinner, Mimi had brought her cello back to his hotel room; she’d played two solos naked for him. It had been awkward at dinner, because Mimi wouldn’t check her cello. The big instrument, in its case, occupied a third chair at their table; Mimi would look at it from time to time, as if she expected the cello to say something.
Jack didn’t tell Mimi that he’d met another cellist when he was a little boy—Hannele, a music student at Sibelius Academy and one (of two) of his father’s girlfriends in Helsinki. Hannele had shared a tattoo with her friend Ritva. Hannele got the vertical left side of a heart torn in two; it was tattooed on her heart-side breast. And Hannele’s armpits were unshaven—Jack would always remember that.
When Mimi Lederer was playing for Jack in his hotel room at The Mark, it made him shudder to remember how Hannele had sat for her tattoo—like Mimi, maybe like all female cellists, with her legs spread apart. That was when Jack wondered if Hannele had ever played naked for his dad, which again caused him to wonder if he was like William. (The way William was with women, especially.)
Jack would remember what Mimi Lederer played for him that night at The Mark, when Emma was still alive—a cello solo, part of something from a Mozart trio. (Jack had made a point of learning as little as he could about classical music because it reminded him of organ music, or church music, which reminded him of his derelict dad.)
“Divertimento—E Flat Major,” Mimi Lederer whispered to him, before she began to play. Like Hannele, maybe like all female cellists, Mimi was tall with long arms and small breasts. Naturally, Jack wondered if your breasts got in the way when you were playing a cello.
The second piece Mimi played naked for him was part of something from a Beethoven string quartet. “Razumovsky Opus Fifty-Nine,” Mimi murmured to him, “Number One.” Just the names of pieces of classical music made Jack’s teeth ache. Why couldn’t composers think of better titles? But it was wonderful to witness Mimi Lederer’s control of that big instrument she so confidently straddled.
They were still asleep when the phone rang. It was way too early in the morning for it to be Emma—that was Jack’s first thought. Toronto, like New York, was on Eastern time; that was the second idea to pop into his head. He saw it was a little after six in the morning—too early for it to be his mother, either, or so Jack thought.
Erica Steinberg was both too nice and too tactful to call him this early in the morning, and Erica knew that Jack was sleeping with Mimi Lederer—Erica knew everything. Jack thought maybe it was Harvey Weinstein on the phone. He would call you when he wanted to; he’d called Jack early in the morning before. Maybe Jack had said something in one of his interviews that he shouldn’t have said.
Mimi Lederer and Jack had to get up early, anyway—although not quite this early. Jack had another day to go on the press junket, and Mimi was teaching a class at Juilliard; then she had to catch a plane. Mimi was a member of some trio or quartet; they had a concert in Minneapolis, or maybe it was Cleveland. Jack didn’t remember.
“It must be room service,” Mimi said. “It’s probably about your breakfast order. I told you last night, Jack—you should order a normal breakfast.”
Mimi had made an issue of Jack’s breakfast order—his “breakfast manifesto,” she’d called it. The room-service staff at The Mark (as in most New York hotels) was struggling with English as a second language. Jack should have just checked what he wanted for breakfast, Mimi had said; he should not have written a “thesis” on the little card they hung on the door.
But you have to be specific about a soft-boiled egg, Jack had argued—and how complicated is it to understand “nonfat yogurt or no yogurt”?
“It’s Harvey Weinstein,” Jack told Mimi, finally picking up the telephone. “Yes?” he said into the mouthpiece.
“It’s your mother, Mr. Rainbow,” the young man at the front desk said.
In the movie, Billy Rainbow doesn’t have a mother, but Jack said, “Please put her through.” Where is she? he was wondering. (According to Mimi Lederer, he was still half asleep.)
There’d been a tattoo convention in Santa Rosa. Had his mom come to see him in Los Angeles on her way to it, or on her way home from it? She’d been on her way home, Jack dimly recalled—she’d told him all about the convention.
It had been at the Flamingo Hotel, or maybe it was the Pink Flamingo. She’d said something about a blues band—possibly the Wine Drinkin’ Roosters. She’d told Jack everything about everyone who was there.
By his mother’s own admission, it had been a three-day party; tattoo artists party like underage drinkers. Alice was a wreck on her way back from Santa Rosa. How could Jack have forgotten her telling him about Captain Don’s sword-swallowing act? Or Suzy Ming, the contortionist, writhing her way into indelible memory—if not exactly art. (So his mom wasn’t calling from Santa Rosa.)
Paris, perhaps—that would explain the earliness of her call. It was the middle of the day in Paris; maybe Alice had miscalculated the time difference. But hadn’t she come home from Paris, too?
Yes, Jack remembered—she had. She told him she’d met up with Uncle Pauly and Little Vinnie Myers, among other tattoo artists. It hadn’t been a convention, not exactly; it had been about planning a Mondial du Tatouage in Paris. The whole thing had probably been Tin-Tin’s idea; he was the best tattoo artist in Paris, in Alice’s view. Stéphane Chaudesaigues from Avignon would surely have been there, and Filip Leu from Lausanne—maybe even Roonui from Mooréa, French Polynesia.
They’d all stayed at some hotel in the red-light district. “Just down the street from the Moulin Rouge,” Alice had told Jack. Le Tribal Act, a body-piercing group, had provided one memorable evening’s entertainment: they’d hoisted some fairly remarkable household items with their nipples and penises, and other pierced parts.
But this was weeks (maybe months) ago! Jack’s mother was calling from Toronto, where it was as early in the morning as it was in New York. Jack really must have been out of it.
“Oh, Jackie, I’m sorry—I’m so sorry!” his mother cried into the phone.
“Mom, are you in Toronto?”
“Of course I’m in Toronto, dear,” she said, with sudden indignation. “Oh, Jackie—it’s so awful!”
Maybe she’d passed out, drunk or stoned at Daughter Alice. She’d just woken up—after a night of sleeping in the needles, Jack imagined. Or one of her colleagues in the tattoo world had died, one of the old-timers; maybe a maritime man was eternally sleeping in the needles. Her old pal Sailor Jerry, possibly—her friend from Halifax and fellow apprentice to Charlie Snow.
“It makes me sick to have to tell you, dear,” Alice said.
It crossed Jack’s mind that Leslie Oastler had left her—for another woman! “Mom—just tell me what it is, for Christ’s sake.”
“It’s Emma—Emma’s gone, Jack. She’s gone.”
“Gone where, Mom?”
But he knew the second he said it—the telephone suddenly cold against his ear. Jack saw that dazzling-blue glint of the Pacific, the way you see it for the first time—turning off Sunset Boulevard, barreling down Chautauqua. Below you, depending on the time of day, the dead-slow or lightning-fast lanes of the Pacific Coast Highway, sometimes a sea of cars, always a tongue of concrete—the last barrier between you and the fabulous West Coast ocean.
“Gone how?” Jack asked his mother.
He didn’t realize he was sitting up in bed and shivering—not until Mimi Lederer held him from behind, the way she held her cello. She wrapped her long arms around him; her long legs, wide apart, gripped his hips.
“Leslie’s already left for the airport,” Alice went on, as if she hadn’t heard him. “I should have gone with her, but you know Leslie—she wasn’t even crying!”
“Mom—what happened to Emma?�
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“Oh, no—not Emma!” Mimi Lederer cried. She was draped over Jack like a shroud; he felt her lips brush the back of his neck.
“Jack—you’re not alone!” his mother said.
“Of course I’m not alone! What happened to Emma, Mom?”
“It looks like you should have been with her, Jack.”
“Mom—”
“Emma was dancing,” Alice began. “She met a boy dancing. Leslie told me the name of the place. Oh, it’s awful! Something like Coconut Squeezer.”
“Teaszer, not Squeezer, Mom—Coconut Teaszer.”
“Emma took the boy home with her,” Alice said.
Jack knew that if Emma had brought some kid from Coconut Teaszer back to their dump on Entrada Drive, she hadn’t died dancing. “What did Emma die of, Mom?”
“Oh, it’s awful!” Alice said again. “They said it was a heart attack, but she was a young woman.”
“Who said? Who’s they?” Jack asked.
“The police—they called here. But how could she have had a heart attack, Jack?”
In Emma’s case, he could imagine it—even at thirty-nine—considering the food, the wine, the weightlifting, and the occasional kid from Coconut Teaszer. But Emma didn’t do drugs. There’d been more kids from Coconut Teaszer lately. (Both Emma and Jack had thought the kids were safer than the bodybuilders.)
“There will probably be an autopsy,” Jack told his mother.
“An autopsy—if it was just a heart attack?” Alice asked.
“You’re not supposed to have a heart attack at thirty-nine, Mom.”
“The boy was . . . underage,” Alice whispered. “The police won’t release his name.”
“Who cares about his name?” Jack said. There’d been more and more kids who looked underage to him. Poor Emma had died fucking a minor from Coconut Teaszer!
As for the kid himself, Jack could only imagine that it must have been a traumatizing experience. He knew that Emma liked the top position, and that she would have told the boy not to move. (Maybe he’d moved.) If the boy had been a virgin—and Emma would have picked him only if he looked small—what would it have been like to have a two-hundred-and-five-pound woman die on you, your first time?
“The boy called the police,” his mother went on; she was still whispering. “Oh, Jack, was Emma in the habit of—”
“Sometimes,” was all he said.
“You must meet Leslie in Los Angeles, Jack. She shouldn’t have to go through this alone. I know Leslie. She’ll break down, eventually.”
Jack couldn’t imagine it, but he was uncomfortable with the idea of Mrs. Oastler alone in the Entrada Drive house. What kind of stuff would Emma have left lying around? The notion of Leslie discovering Emma’s collection of porn films wasn’t as disturbing as the thought of her reading Emma’s writing—whatever Emma hadn’t finished, or what she didn’t want published. Jack had not seen a word of Emma’s work-in-progress—her third novel, which was reportedly growing too long.
“I’ll leave New York as soon as I can, Mom. If Leslie calls, tell her I’ll be in L.A. before dark.”
He knew that Erica Steinberg was a good soul; Jack assumed she would release him from his interviews at the press junket.
Everyone who knew Jack knew that Emma had been part of his family. As it turned out, Miramax arranged everything for him—including the car to the airport. Erica got him his ticket; she even offered to fly with him. It wasn’t necessary for her to come with him, Jack told her, but he appreciated the offer.
There was another call to Jack’s room at The Mark that morning. Mimi Lederer had been right—room service was confused by his breakfast order. Although he’d stopped shivering, Mimi had gone on holding him as if he were her cello, until the phone rang that second time.
“I don’t give a rat’s ass about the yogurt,” Mimi heard Jack say into the phone. “Any kind of yogurt will do.”
“Are you okay, Jack?” Mimi asked.
“Emma’s dead,” he snapped at her. “I guess I can worry about the fucking yogurt another day.”
“Are you acting?” she asked him. “I mean even now. Are you still acting?”
Jack didn’t know what she meant, but she was covering herself with the bedsheet as if he were a total stranger to her. “What’s wrong?” he asked.
“What’s wrong with you, Jack?”
They were both sitting up in bed, and Jack could see himself in the mirror above the dresser. There was nothing wrong with him, but that was the problem. Jack didn’t look as if his best friend had died; on the contrary, he looked as if nothing had happened to him. His face was a clean slate—“more noir than noir,” The New York Times might have said.
Jack couldn’t stop staring at himself—that was a problem, too. Mimi Lederer said later that she couldn’t stand the sight of him, not at that moment. “You’re not in a movie, Jack,” Mimi started to say, but Jack looked at her as if he really were Billy Rainbow. “Why aren’t you crying?” Mimi Lederer asked him.
Jack couldn’t answer her, and he was good at tears. When his part called for crying, he would usually start when he heard the A.D. say, “Quiet, please.”
“Rolling,” the cameraman would say; Jack’s eyes were already watering away.
“Speed,” said the sound guy—Jack’s face would be bathed in tears.
When the director (even Wild Bill Vanvleck) said, “Action!”—well, Jack could cry on-camera like nobody’s business. His eyes would well with tears just reading a script!
But that morning at The Mark, Jack was as tough-guy noir as he’d ever been—on film or off. He was as deadpan as Emma when she wrote, “Life is a call sheet. You’re supposed to show up when they tell you, but that’s the only rule.”
That was what Jack Burns was doing—he was going to L.A., just to show up. He would probably hold Mrs. Oastler’s hand, because he was supposed to—those were just the rules.
“Jesus, Jack—” Mimi Lederer started to say; then she stopped. Jack realized, as if he’d missed something she’d said, that she was getting dressed. “If you didn’t love Emma, you never loved anyone,” Mimi was saying. “She was the person closest to you, Jack. Can you love anyone? If you didn’t love her, I think not.”
That was the last Jack saw of Mimi Lederer, and he liked Mimi—he really did. But she didn’t like him anymore after that morning at The Mark. Mimi said when she left that she didn’t know who he was. But the scary thing was that Jack didn’t know who he was.
As an actor, he could be anybody. On-screen, the world had seen Jack Burns cry—as a man and as a woman. He’d made his mascara run many times—anything for a movie! Yet Jack couldn’t cry for Emma; he didn’t shed a single tear that morning at The Mark.
It was still pretty early when he left the hotel for the airport. The front-desk clerk was a young man Jack hadn’t seen before—probably the same young man who’d put through Alice’s call. Of course the clerk knew it was the Jack Burns—everyone did. But as Jack was leaving, the clerk called out—his voice full of the utmost sincerity, of the kind that young people express when they genuinely want to please you. “Have a nice day, Mr. Rainbow!”
As it turned out, Jack had been wrong to envision Emma’s death as a heart attack, which typically has some familiar symptoms antecedent to death—like sweating, shortness of breath, light-headedness, and chest pains. But Emma Oastler died of a heart condition called Long QT Syndrome; an inherited disease, it affects the sodium and potassium channels in the heart. (This, in turn, leads to abnormalities in the heart’s electrical system.) Emma died of a sudden arrhythmia—ventricular fi-brillation, her doctor told Jack. Her heart suddenly stopped pumping; Emma died before she was even aware of not feeling well.
With Long QT Syndrome, often sudden death is the first indication of a problem. In sixty percent of patients, a resting EKG would indicate an abnormality, which would alert a doctor to the possibility of the condition. But the other forty percent would have completely normal exami
nations—unless exercise EKG’s were used. (Emma’s doctor told Jack that Emma had never had one.)
Her doctor went on to tell him that a fatal episode could be triggered by a loud noise, extreme emotion, exertion, or an electrolyte imbalance—which, in turn, could be caused by drinking alcohol or having sex.
The boy from Coconut Teaszer—whose name would never be made public—said that Emma had collapsed on him so spontaneously that he’d thought it was simply the way she liked to have sex, which he was having for the first time. He’d done exactly what Emma had told him to do; he hadn’t moved. (He was probably too afraid to move.) After he’d managed to extricate himself from Emma’s last embrace, the kid called the police.
Given the genetic nature of the syndrome, Emma’s surviving family would eventually be screened for it. Leslie Oastler was the sole survivor, and she showed no signs of the abnormality. Her ex-husband, Emma’s father, had died several years earlier—apparently, in his sleep.
“What a pisser,” as Leslie would put it.
Jack arrived home before he had time to prepare himself for Mrs. Oastler. On the plane, he’d been thinking about Emma—not Leslie. (He’d been considering his lack of emotion, if that was the right word for what he lacked.)
Leslie Oastler was all over Jack, like a storm. “I know Leslie,” Alice had said. “She’ll break down, eventually.” But Mrs. Oastler’s grief was not yet evident—only her anger.
Leslie greeted him at the door. “Where the fuck is Emma’s novel, Jack? I mean the new one.”
“I don’t know where Emma’s novel is, Leslie.”
“Where’s your novel, Jack? Or whatever the fuck it is that you’re supposed to be writing—you don’t even have a computer!”
“I don’t work at home,” he answered. This was not exactly a lie—regarding the writing part of his life, Jack didn’t work anywhere.
