by John Irving
Bob and Alan thought that Jack should do the copying into longhand as soon as possible. He could take all the time he needed to “revise.”
“But should I really do this?” Jack asked them. “I mean—is it right?”
“It’s what Emma wanted, Jack, but you don’t have to do it,” Alan said.
“Yeah, it’s entirely your decision,” Bookman told him. “But it’s a pretty good script.”
Jack would read it and concur; if Emma had taken charge of him in life, he saw no reason to resist her efforts to control him from the grave.
That Mrs. Oastler wanted Jack to “say a little something” in remembrance of Emma in the chapel at St. Hilda’s, where Mrs. McQuat had first warned him of the dangers of turning his back on God, seemed appropriate to the kind of writer he’d become.
The public impression—namely, that Emma Oastler had suffered from a writer’s block of several years’ duration and had, as a result, become grossly overweight—was further fueled by the report of that Italian journalist from the Hollywood Foreign Press. According to Jack’s interviewer, Emma’s allegedly platonic but live-in relationship with the actor Jack Burns showed signs of recent strain; yet the bestselling author had been extremely generous to him in her will. It had been known, for years, that Jack was “a closet writer”—as Emma’s obituary notice in Entertainment Weekly would say. Now he was said to be “developing” a screenplay of The Slush-Pile Reader. (Emma, “mysteriously,” had not wanted her novel to be made into a movie while she was alive.)
What guilt Jack might have had—that is, in accepting Emma’s gift to him as rightfully his—was overshadowed by the certainty that, even if he were to tell the truth, the truth was not what Emma had wanted. She had wanted to get The Slush-Pile Reader made as a movie—more or less as she’d written it. But with her name on the script, the film, as she wrote it, would never have been made. Jack Burns, Emma knew, was a movie star; with his name on the screenplay, he could control it.
Thus, at one of the better addresses he knew—in the Beverly Hills offices of Bloom, Hergott, Diemer and Cook, LLP, Attorneys-at-Law—Jack Burns transcribed Emma’s rough draft of The Slush-Pile Reader into his handwriting, and faithfully copied her notes as well. With the first small change he made, which was not even as big an alteration as the choice of a different word—Jack used the contraction “didn’t” where Emma had written “did not”—he discovered how it was possible for a would-be writer to take at least partial possession of a real writer’s work. (And with subsequent changes, deletions, additions, his sense of rightful ownership—though false—only grew.)
This should not have surprised him. After all, Jack was in the movie business; he had seen how scripts were changed, and by how many amateur hands these alterations were wrought. In another draft or two, the screenplay of The Slush-Pile Reader would feel—even to Jack—as if he’d written it. But the structure of the script and its prevailing tone of voice were entirely Emma’s. As an actor, Jack knew how to imitate her voice.
Not all art is imitation, but imitating was what Jack Burns did best. With a little direction—in Emma’s case, she gave him quite a lot—writing (that is, rewriting) the script of The Slush-Pile Reader was just another acting job. Jack did his job well.
The decision to make Michele Maher (the character) the movie’s voice-over was Emma’s. The idea to make the penultimate sentence of the novel the opening line of voice-over in the film was Jack’s. (“There are worse relationships in L.A.”) We see Michele, the script reader, in bed with the porn star—just holding his penis, we presume, under the covers. It’s all very tastefully done. The story of how they meet (when she reads the porn star’s atrocious screenplay) is a flashback. Naturally, we never see his (that is, Jack’s) penis.
Jack took a similar liberty with the novel’s first sentence, which had always been his favorite; he made it the end line of Michele’s voice-over, where he thought it had more weight. (“Either there are no coincidences in this town, or everything in this town is a coincidence.”) It was too good a line to waste on the opening credits.
For the most part, Jack followed Emma’s instructions. The Michele Maher character remains an angel of hope to talentless screenwriters; she is conscience-stricken by the awful scripts she reads, an impossible optimist in the cynical world of screenplay development.
Emma recommended that Jack give the porn star, Miguel Santiago, a more Anglo-sounding name. (“You don’t look Hispanic, honey pie.”) Jack decided on James Stronach. The last name would make his mom happy, and James was a natural for “Jimmy”—the unhappy actor’s porn name in Bored Housewives (one through four), Keep It Up, Inc., and countless other adult films, for which Jimmy is famous.
James (“Jimmy”) Stronach’s homage to James Stewart is an essential aspect of his character; Jack-Burns-as-James-Stronach memorizing Jimmy Stewart’s lines in The Shopworn Angel and It’s a Wonderful Life would be among Jack’s most sympathetic moments in the movie.
Jack didn’t look like a bodybuilder before they filmed The Slush-Pile Reader, but he had time to change his diet and step up the weightlifting. In truth, he would never look like a bodybuilder; he just had to look like he belonged at the male end of the weight rack in the free-weights section of the gym. (His tattoos, in the movie, would be fakes.)
Emma had taken some of her best lines from the novel and given them to Michele Maher as voice-over. “I lived within breathing distance of a sushi Dumpster in Venice”—that kind of thing. She’d left Jack a note about dropping the mutual-masturbation scene. “There’s already too much masturbation, or implied masturbation, for a movie.”
Emma was right to go easy on the masturbation—although The Slush-Pile Reader would release, as a film, in the same year that another masturbation movie, American Beauty, cleaned up at the Academy Awards. (Miss Wurtz, who was dismayed at Anthony Hopkins’s winning an Oscar for Best Actor for eating people, would be silent on the subject of Kevin Spacey’s winning an Academy Award for beating off in a shower.)
And Jack decided to cut Michele Maher’s misadventure with the Swedish power lifter, Per the Destroyer. (Per too closely resembled the bodybuilder at Gold’s who had beaten Emma up.) Instead Jack added a scene with James Stronach scouting the locker room at World Gym for bodybuilders with small schlongs. James makes a mistake. Someone he introduces to Michele isn’t as small as James thinks. Michele gets hurt.
“He was bigger than you thought,” is all Michele says in the movie. (The words schlong and penis are never used.)
“Couldn’t you tell him it hurt? Didn’t you ask him to stop?” Jack-as-James asks her.
“I asked, but he wouldn’t stop,” Michele tells him.
Naturally, Jack-as-James gets the guy back at the gym. (Jack added that scene, too.) The not-so-small schlong asks James to spot for him when he’s bench-pressing three hundred pounds; it’s too good an opportunity to pass up.
“I’ve got it!” James tells him, as if Jack-as-James could possibly hold three hundred pounds; he drops the barbell on the big schlong’s chest, breaking his clavicle.
Emma herself cut the line about Michele’s assessment of the small schlongs she sleeps with as “a muted pleasure”—and there’s no frontal nudity, no actual porn-film parts. For the most part, we see the porn stars between takes or going through the motions of their private lives. (The horny men in motel rooms with the television light flickering on their riveted faces—well, those are the implied masturbation scenes that Emma referred to in her notes.) The film would still pull an R rating.
When James and Michele are holding each other, not talking, at the end of the picture—“just breathing in the sushi perfume of the Dumpster,” as Michele’s voice-over puts it—Jack thought he’d been as true to Emma’s novel and the rough draft of her screenplay as he could have been.
Jack did not incorporate Emma’s feelings that the reason screenwriters lost control of their scripts was that they caved to the money, as he’d heard Emma
say a hundred times. It was Emma’s triumph—in her novel, if not in real life—that the Michele Maher character was a whole lot more sympathetic to screenwriters than Emma was.
The film itself became a kind of tribute to the unread screenplay, the unmade movie. And both Emma and Jack were careful to be kind to porn stars; to that end, Jack would insist that Hank Long have a part. James (“Jimmy”) Stronach needed a buddy, didn’t he? Besides, Jack had used Hank Long’s unnaturally high voice as the model for his stutter in the movie. (The stutter was Emma’s idea—to make it clear why James’s only career choice is in so-called adult films.)
Muffy, that special kind of vampire, had retired by the time they made The Slush-Pile Reader, but Jack was instrumental in casting her as the single-mom porn star—a woman with a couple of uncontainable children, both hyperactive boys. Muffy organizes barbecue lunches on the weekends; the male porn stars, like Hank and Jack-as-James, handle the outdoor grill and play catch with Muffy’s kids.
Emma advised Jack to involve Mildred Ascheim in the picture, too—if only in an advisory role. Not even Bob Bookman or Alan Hergott knew why. Milly (and Hank, and Muffy) had seen Jack’s small schlong. For Jack to be cast as a porn star could have given rise to some ugly rumors, but not if the industry’s only professional witnesses were part of the movie.
What hadn’t Emma Oastler done for Jack Burns? How hard could it be to “say a little something” in memoriam at the St. Hilda’s chapel? Surely he owed Emma that much.
In the front pew, in a side-aisle seat, Miss Wong sat as still as a hard-boiled egg. She’d positioned herself directly beneath the pulpit, where Jack spoke, and had drawn her knees tightly together—as if the alleged weirdness of Jack’s Hollywood reputation might spontaneously force her legs apart.
It must have been Emma who’d first called her Miss Bahamas. Why else would Miss Wong have come? Possibly Emma’s fictional depictions of extreme yet acceptable dysfunction had eased Miss Wong’s disappointment with her life. To have been born in a hurricane, only to find herself becalmed at an all-girls’ school—well, one can imagine how this might have left her feeling let down.
Was an Old Girl’s death always commemorated by the attendance of the existing faculty at St. Hilda’s? Jack didn’t remember such a turnout in remembrance of Mrs. Wicksteed, but she had been old. And Miss Wong was not the only front-pew attendant among the faculty. Mr. Malcolm, who’d also ensconced himself there, had planted the unseeing Mrs. Malcolm in the center aisle. Mr. Malcolm sat beside his deranged wife with his hand on the armrest of her wheelchair, lest she be moved by Jack’s words to charge the altar or go after his mother and Mrs. Oastler, who were seated directly across the aisle from the Malcolms.
In a side-aisle seat, at some distance from the pulpit, Miss Caroline Wurtz appraised Jack’s performance from her audience-of-one perspective.
The chapel was not quite full. There were a few bare spots in the side-aisle pews, and plenty of standing room in the vicinity of the rear entrance, where Mr. Ramsey paced and bounced on the balls of his feet—as if his grief for Emma, whom he’d barely known, had left him too agitated to sit down.
Had Emma been a more popular girl than Jack had first supposed? Of course Wendy Fists-of-Stone Holton had a center-aisle seat in a pew near the front. A gaunt woman with a washed-out complexion and fly-away, silver-blond hair, Wendy had been recently divorced from an ear, nose, and throat doctor who’d declared himself gay upon the accusation that he’d impregnated his nurse. (Wendy had spoken to Jack before Emma’s service; she said it would be nice to have a coffee, “or something,” if he had the time.)
In the pew behind Miss Wong sat the very personification of a hurricane preparing to consume the Bahamas—all two-hundred-plus pounds of Charlotte Breasts-with-Bones-in-Them Barford, Emma’s Canadian publisher. Charlotte had offered Jack her editorial assistance, purely for the privilege of reading whatever it was he was alleged to be writing—a novel or a memoir, perhaps titled A Penis at St. Hilda’s. (Or so Charlotte might have dreamed.) Before the service, she’d hinted to Jack that it must have been “a bitch” to interrupt his other writing to write an adaptation of The Slush-Pile Reader.
“Indeed,” he’d managed to say—his voice, like Hank Long’s, unnaturally high. In the company of grown women among whom Jack remembered being a little boy, he was again a child.
The Hamilton sisters were there; notably, they were not sitting together. Penny, between whose eyes he had once ejaculated, watched him with the innocent eagerness of a soccer mom—sperm the farthest thing from her mind, not to mention her forehead. She’d brought her children, two terribly well-behaved and well-dressed little girls; her husband, Penny told Jack, was having “an all-boys’ weekend away.” (Golf, Jack imagined. He didn’t ask.)
As for Penny’s sister, Bonnie, who was in grade twelve when Jack was in grade four, she’d managed to enter the chapel without his seeing her limp to her pew—assuming that Bonnie still limped. Her proximity to the rear entrance, where Mr. Ramsey continued to make a moving target of himself, suggested to Jack that Bonnie’s pelvis was irreparably twisted; her dead right leg would forever trail behind her while she lurched forward on her leading left foot.
The eight years between them seemed of no consequence now. She’d never married, Jack’s mother had told him. Bonnie Hamilton was the most sought-after real estate agent in Toronto, Mrs. Oastler had said. “With that limp,” Leslie had added, “it must hold things up to have her show you a property with lots of stairs.”
Ever the prompter, Bonnie sat in the back and moved her lips before Jack spoke—as if she already knew what he was supposed to say about Emma, as if he’d actually written something and Bonnie had miraculously read and memorized it before he began to speak. She was forty, but the fatalistic tug Jack had felt when he was nine (and Bonnie seventeen) was pulling them together still. As he’d tried to tell Emma, but had managed to tell only Mrs. McQuat, Bonnie Hamilton was an older woman who, when she looked at him, couldn’t look away.
For a moment, Jack thought that all the older women of his childhood were there.
Connie Turnbull, who’d run up to Mrs. Oastler and Alice and Jack—this was immediately after Connie had parked her car, with a big dog in it—had clearly been practicing her lines from Miss Wurtz’s long-ago dramatization of Jane Eyre. “ ‘It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity,’ ” Connie said, breathlessly—holding Jack’s shoulders and assessing him, as if she were measuring him for a coffin or a suit.
“ ‘Dread remorse when you are tempted to err,’ ” Jack began; then, sensing how deeply Connie Turnbull was dissatisfied with tranquillity, he stopped.
Jack had come up to her breasts when they’d last engaged in this dialogue—when he’d played a grade-three Rochester to her grade-six Jane. Now, in her two-inch heels, Connie was only a forehead taller than Jack was. “ ‘You think me, I daresay, an irreligious dog,’ ” he started to say.
On cue, Connie took his hand and kissed it. Her lips were parted, and she made the usual contact with her teeth and tongue—only this time there was no applause. Alice and Mrs. Oastler looked on, aghast; they clearly didn’t know their Jane Eyre. What must they have thought? That Jack had arranged an assignation with Connie Turnbull after Emma’s memorial service; possibly that he’d slept with Connie the night before?
“Nice job, Jack,” Connie whispered in his ear—her hair faintly redolent of dog-breath, which at a glance he could see was fogging up the windows of her parked car.
Thank goodness Ginny Jarvis wasn’t there. It was as if the gun he’d shot her with—onstage, in A Mail-Order Bride in the Northwest Territories—hadn’t been firing blanks. But Jack was unprepared for those other Old Girls who’d come to honor Emma. Or had they? Many of them were unknown to him.
“It’s you, baby cakes,” he could imagine Emma saying in her husky whisper. “The old broads are here to get a look at you.” Maybe so. How else to explain the presence of Jac
k’s classmates? There were four of them, all girls.
The Booth twins, Heather and Patsy, whose identical blanket-sucking sounds had been born in the terrors of Emma Oastler’s sleepy-time stories, when they were in kindergarten together and Emma was in grade six—they couldn’t have come out of respect for their old tormentor. Likewise Maureen Yap, whose married name would forever elude Jack; Maureen must have remembered how Emma had abused her.
As alert as an endangered squirrel, Maureen had chosen a center-aisle seat in the back of the chapel, lest she should feel the sudden need to flee—from some reference Jack might make to the bat-cave exhibit in the Royal Ontario Museum, perchance, not to mention his reminding her of Emma’s divorced-dad story. (“He has just passed out from too much sex.”)
It was Maureen Yap who’d asked Emma: “What is too much sex?”
“Nothing you’ll ever have,” Emma had answered her dismissively.
After Emma’s service, at what Mrs. Oastler would describe as “a kind of wake,” which was held in the Great Hall, Maureen Yap approached Jack. A strand of her hair had strayed to a corner of her mouth, where there also lingered a remnant of cheese. Little cubes of cheddar, skewered on toothpicks, were the only food served—and these were washed down by white wine, which Alice said was warm, or by sparkling water, which Jack would have described as “room temperature at best.”
Whether it was the speck of cheese or the strand of hair—or her miserable conviction that Emma’s prophecy, which denied Maureen Yap the possibility of ever having too much sex, was incontrovertibly true—Maureen was difficult to understand.
