by John Irving
“But what about her?” he cried. (Jack meant Michele Maher.) “What’s she mean that she has a boyfriend, sort of? Is that normal?”
“You’re not ready to make contact with Michele Maher, Jack,” Dr. García said. “You have heaped so many unrealistic expectations upon a relationship that, as I understand it, never developed in the first place—well, I don’t want to hear another word about this now! To me, you’re still a four-year-old in the North Sea. Speaking strictly professionally, you’ve not recovered from your sea of girls—and I need to know much more about Emma and your older-woman thing. Keep it in chronological order. Is that understood?”
It was. He had a bitch psychiatrist, or so it seemed to Jack, but he had to admit that her therapy had noticeably cut down his tendency to shout and burst into tears—and his inclination to wake up weeping in the middle of the night, which became habitual after he came back from the North Sea the second time. So Jack stuck with her, and the unfinished telling of his life story went on and on. Jack had become what Emma said he could be—a writer, albeit one given to melancholic logorrhea. A storyteller, if only out loud. (Jack’s actual writing was limited to those unmailed letters to Michele Maher.)
Dr. García was a heavyset but attractive Mexican-American. She appeared to be in her late forties. From the photographs in her office, she either came from a large family or had a large family of her own. Jack didn’t ask her, and—from the photos—he couldn’t tell.
Of the children in the many pictures, he couldn’t recognize Dr. García as a child—so perhaps they were her children. Yet the older-looking man in the photographs seemed more like a father to her than a husband; he was always well dressed, to the point of fastidiousness, and his pencil-thin mustache and perfectly trimmed sideburns suggested a character actor of a bygone era. (A cross between Clifton Webb and Gilbert Roland, Jack thought.)
Dr. García didn’t wear any rings; she wore no jewelry to speak of. Either she was married with more children than Jack could count in her office photos, or she’d come from such an overlarge family that this had persuaded her to never marry and have children of her own.
In a doomed effort to solve this mystery, Jack cleverly said: “Maybe you should be my date for the Academy Awards, Dr. García. At a stressful event like that, a psychiatrist would probably come in handier than a dermatologist—don’t you think?”
“You don’t date your psychiatrist,” Dr. García said.
“Oh.”
“That’s a word you overuse,” Jack’s psychiatrist said.
The distinguished-looking older man in Dr. García’s family photographs had an air of detachment about him, as if he were withdrawing from a recurrent argument before it started. He seemed far removed from the clamor of the ever-present children in the photos; it was almost as if he couldn’t hear them. Maybe Dr. García had married a much older man, or a deaf one. Jack’s psychiatrist was such a strong woman, she was probably contemptuous of the convention of wedding rings.
Richard Gladstein had recommended Dr. García to Jack. “She knows actors,” Richard had told him. “You wouldn’t be her first movie star.”
At the time, this had been a comforting thought. Yet Jack hadn’t seen anyone famous in Dr. García’s waiting room; it made him wonder if she made house calls to the more famous movie stars among her patients. But to judge Dr. García by the waiting room outside her office was confusing. There were many young married women, and some of them came with their small children; there were toys and children’s books in a corner of the waiting room, which gave you the disquieting impression that you were seeing a pediatrician. The young married women who showed up with their children always brought friends or nannies with them; these other women looked after the kids when the young mothers went into Dr. García’s office for their therapy sessions.
“Are you here to see the doctor or to watch someone’s kid?” Jack asked one of the young women once; like Dr. García, she wasn’t wearing a wedding ring.
“Are you trying to pick me up or something?” the young woman said.
Jack almost asked her if she would be his date at the Academy Awards, but he stopped himself when he considered what Dr. García might have to say about that.
“Who should I take to the Academy Awards?” he’d asked his psychiatrist.
“Please don’t mistake me for a dating service, Jack.”
Thus Jack was on his own for the Academy Awards. In addition to his two nominations, Lucia Delvecchio had a nomination for Best Actress, Wild Bill Vanvleck had one for Best Director, and Richard Gladstein got a Best Picture nomination, too.
No one thought Lucia had a shot. She was up against some very big guns—Meryl Streep and Julianne Moore and Annette Bening—and besides, it was Hilary Swank’s year. (As an occasional cross-dresser, Jack was a big fan of Hilary in Boys Don’t Cry.) And Richard Gladstein knew, going in, that The Slush-Pile Reader was a long shot for Best Picture. (It would go to American Beauty.)
William Vanvleck was just happy to be there. Not one review of The Slush-Pile Reader referred to Wild Bill as The Remake Monster; The Mad Dutchman had become almost acceptable. Not acceptable enough to win Best Director; there were some heavy hitters in the lineup that year. (Sam Mendes would win—American Beauty again.)
Nor did Jack realistically have a chance to win Best Supporting Actor—Michael Caine won. (Jack’s role as a nice-guy porn star was sympathetic, but not that sympathetic.)
Jack knew long before the night of the awards that the film’s best chance for an Oscar was in the Best Adapted Screenplay category—Emma’s screenplay, as he thought of it. How could he not look at it as Emma’s Oscar? It was her movie!
Yes, Jack had learned a little bit about screenwriting in the course of fine-tuning the script Emma had given him. But as a storyteller, he was learning more from his therapy with Dr. García. (Go easy on the foreshadowing; watch the interjections; keep it in chronological order.)
Miramax’s promotion of The Slush-Pile Reader was exhausting, and the lion’s share of it had fallen to Jack in February and March of 2000. Wild Bill Vanvleck was back in Amsterdam; his much younger girlfriend was an anchorwoman on Dutch television, and Wild Bill was completely taken with her. Besides, Vanvleck was a disaster at promoting his own picture—in this case. That pornography was such an issue in the United States offended The Mad Dutchman; nobody had a problem with pornography in the Netherlands. “It is only a problem in Puritan America, which is ruled by the Christian Right!” Vanvleck declared. (It was probably wise of Miramax to keep Wild Bill in Amsterdam, except for the film festivals.)
Following her tragic one-night error in Venice, Lucia Delvecchio had shunned Jack. She’d virtually turned her back on the film, too. Jack’s old friend Erica Steinberg was the Miramax publicist. Jack had been on the road with Erica—in print and on television—for The Slush-Pile Reader almost nonstop.
It was the night after Jack did Larry King Live that he called Leslie Oastler and asked her if she would be his date at the Academy Awards. (Fuck the blonde, he thought.)
“I’m flattered you would think of me, Jack,” Mrs. Oastler began. “But how would that make Dolores feel? And I don’t know what I would wear.”
“It’s Emma’s night, Leslie,” Jack said.
“No, it’s gonna be your night, Jack. Emma’s dead. Why don’t you go with Miss Wurtz?” Mrs. Oastler asked him.
“The Wurtz! Are you kidding?”
“An Oscar would be wasted on me, Jack. What would I want with a gold, bald, naked man holding what is alleged to be his sword?” Leslie Oastler had always had a particularly pointed way of seeing things.
The next morning Jack called Caroline Wurtz and popped the question. Would she consider coming to Los Angeles to attend the Academy Awards with him?
“I’ve heard so many terrible things about the drive-by shootings,” Miss Wurtz said. “But they don’t shoot people at the Oscars, do they?”
“No,” he told her. “They only wound y
ou internally.”
“Well, I suppose I should go see the movie, shouldn’t I?” Caroline asked. “I’ve heard both wonderful and awful things from people who’ve seen it. As you know, your friend Emma was never one of my favorite writers.”
“I think it’s a pretty good film,” Jack said. There was a lengthy pause, as if Caroline was considering the invitation—or perhaps The Wurtz had forgotten that he’d invited her to anything. Jack was a little miffed that she hadn’t seen The Slush-Pile Reader. (The movie had five Oscar nominations! Everyone Jack knew had seen it.)
“Don’t you have anyone else to ask, Jack? I can’t be the best you can do,” Caroline said.
“For a couple of years, I’ve been seeing a psychiatrist,” he admitted to her. “I haven’t been in the best shape.”
“Goodness!” Miss Wurtz cried. “In that case, of course I’ll go with you! I’m sure if Mrs. McQuat were alive, she’d want to go with us, too!”
Well, there was a concept! At Mrs. McQuat’s urging, Jack had taken Miss Wurtz to that most memorable Toronto film festival—the one he went to with Claudia, when The Wurtz was convinced that the morons protesting the Godard film were outraged by the ritualistic suicide in the Mishima movie. Jack wondered what confusions awaited Miss Wurtz at the Shrine Civic Auditorium on the night of the Academy Awards. Whom might she mistake Billy Crystal for?
Jack explained to Caroline that he would arrange her air travel and all the rest of it. That Jack Burns was taking his third-grade teacher to the Oscars was a bonus bit of publicity; nor did it hurt that Emma Oastler had died and put him in charge of bringing her first and best novel to the screen. “The death connection,” Jack had called it; that turned out to be a bonus bit of publicity for both Miramax and Jack Burns.
The issue of what Miss Wurtz would wear provided a down-to-earth return to the heart of the matter. Jack told her that Armani was dressing him for the Academy Awards. (They had called; he’d said okay. This was how it usually happened.)
“Who is dressing you?” The Wurtz asked.
“Armani—the designer, Caroline. Different fashion designers dress the nominees and their guests for the Oscars. If there’s a particular designer you like, I’m sure I could arrange it. Or you could just wear something by Armani, too.”
“I think I’ll dress myself, if it’s all the same to you,” Miss Wurtz replied. “I have some perfectly lovely clothes your father bought for me. Naturally, William will be watching. He’ll be so proud of you! I wouldn’t want William to see me wearing a dress he didn’t choose for me, Jack.”
Well, there was a concept, too—namely, that Jack’s father would be watching. The Wurtz would be dressing for him!
“You’ll have to tell me who’s nominated for what,” Caroline was saying. “Then I’ll go see all the movies.”
Jack wondered how many Academy voters had the diligence of a third-grade teacher, but—when Jack would finally get to the Oscar-winning part of his life story—Dr. García would call the “diligence” detail an example of his interjecting too much.
Jack doubted that every film nominated for an Oscar was still playing in a theater in Toronto; quite possibly, not every film had ever played there. But he knew this wouldn’t deter Miss Wurtz from trying to see them all.
Jack almost called Leslie Oastler to thank her for suggesting The Wurtz as his date for the Academy Awards, but he didn’t want to risk getting Leslie’s blonde on the phone.
“Dolores,” he would be tempted to say to the bitch, “I wanted to alert you to a large package that’s coming your way—more of my clothes. If you or Leslie wouldn’t mind hanging them in my closet as soon as they arrive, I’d appreciate it. I wouldn’t want them to be wrinkled for my next visit.” Or words to that effect; naturally, Jack didn’t make the call. (Had she known, Dr. García would have been proud of him for exercising such restraint.)
The two-bedroom suite at the Beverly Hills Four Seasons, where Miramax put them up for the long Oscar weekend, was larger than Miss Wurtz’s apartment—or so she told Jack. There was even a piano, which Miss Wurtz liked to play in her Four Seasons white terry-cloth bathrobe. She claimed to know only hymns and the St. Hilda’s school songs, but her voice was pretty and she played well.
“Oh, I don’t play well—nothing like your father, who used to tease me,” she said. “William would say, ‘If you want to be even a bit more tentative, Caroline, you might try breathing on the keys instead of using your fingers.’ He could be funny, your father. I wish you’d tell me more about your trip, Jack. Why don’t you begin with Copenhagen? I’ve never been there.”
There were always a lot of parties prior to the Academy Awards. As a nondrinker escorting his third-grade teacher, a woman in her sixties, Jack didn’t think that he and Caroline were in step with the bacchanalian behavior of many of his colleagues in the industry. But they went to those parties where Jack’s absence would have been resented, even if they spent much of the time talking quietly to each other.
Having calmly described so many of the painful passages in his life to Dr. García, Jack found that he was in better control of himself while recounting to Miss Wurtz those discoveries he made in his return trip to the North Sea—beginning with the Ringhof family tragedy that Alice had engendered in Copenhagen, which Jack was able to relate in a deadpan narrative more closely resembling the written word than conversation. Not once did he raise his voice, nor did he shed a tear; Jack didn’t even blink.
“Goodness!” was all Miss Wurtz had to say in reply.
They were at an outdoor luncheon at Bob Bookman’s home. The screenwriters who were Jack’s (or Emma’s) principal competition in the Best Adapted Screenplay category that year were there—in addition to Jack, Bookman represented three of his fellow nominees. But there Jack was, in Bob Bookman’s garden, with his third-grade teacher—his father’s former lover—and Jack was back in those North Sea ports of call, telling Miss Wurtz what he had learned.
“Don’t downplay what happened in Stockholm, Jack—I mean just because it wasn’t as bad as what happened in Copenhagen,” Miss Wurtz would tell him later that same weekend. “And even if you had sex with someone in Oslo, please don’t spare me any details.”
He didn’t. (Dr. García had taught him not to spare her any details.) Jack found that he could actually talk his way through it—at least to as sympathetic a soul as Caroline Wurtz. Jack doubted that he would have been able to tell the North Sea story to Leslie Oastler and her unfriendly blonde—not without shedding a tear or two, or indulging in a little shouting. But he told Miss Wurtz everything about Copenhagen and Stockholm without batting an eye. He didn’t even hesitate when he got to Oslo. He didn’t want to be over-optimistic, but Jack thought that Dr. García’s therapy was working.
32
Straining to See
The Weinstein brothers were backing more than one Oscar-nominated film that year. The night before the Academy Awards, Miramax had a party at the Regent Beverly Wilshire. The anti-pornography people were protesting The Slush-Pile Reader outside the hotel. The film had an R rating; it wasn’t pornographic, but it was offensive to the anti-pornography people that Jack’s character (Jimmy Stronach, the porn star) was sympathetically portrayed. Those other characters in the film who were part of the porn industry were also sympathetic—chiefly Hank Long and Muffy; and Mildred “Milly” Ascheim made a cameo appearance as herself. Worse, from the point of view of the anti-pornography people, all the porn stars were portrayed as having normal lives—to the degree that so-called L.A. dysfunctional is normal, and Emma believed it was.
There were fewer than a dozen protesters outside the hotel, but the media gave them undue attention. There were usually the same small number of zealots every year—some of them protesting what Jack’s mother would have called “the deterioration of language” in movies in general. The anti-profanity people, the anti-pornography people—there would always be complainers with too much time on their hands. Jack thought that the best thing
was to pay them no attention, but the media tended to inflate their importance and their numbers.
Miss Wurtz hadn’t noticed the protesters. When Wild Bill Vanvleck was ranting at the Miramax party about the anti-pornography people, Caroline clutched Jack’s arm and said anxiously: “There are protesters? What are they protesting?”
“Pornography,” Jack said.
Miss Wurtz looked all around the room, as if there might be pornographic acts under way in their very midst and she had somehow mistaken them for more innocent forms of entertainment. Jack explained: “You know, Caroline—my character, Jimmy Stronach, is a porn star. I think that’s what they’re protesting.”
“Nonsense!” Miss Wurtz shouted. “I did not see a single reproductive organ in the film—not one penis or one female thingamajig!”
“A what?” Wild Bill said, looking shocked.
“A vagina,” Jack whispered to him.
“You shouldn’t say that word at a party,” Caroline said.
It soon became clear that The Wurtz had seen too many films in too short a period of time—as many as three a day for the past several weeks, or so she’d told Jack. Miss Wurtz had never seen so many movies in her life; they were all a blur. And this year’s films were mingled with movies she’d not seen since she was a child. To her, the recognizable celebrities at the party were not movie stars but the actual characters they’d played. Unfortunately, these movies had overlapped in her mind—to the extent that she’d merged the plots of several different films into one incomprehensible epic, in which virtually everyone she “recognized” at the Regent Beverly Wilshire had played a pivotal role.
“Oh, look—there’s that envious young man who killed those people. One with an oar, I think,” she said, indicating Matt Damon, who was Tom Ripley in The Talented Mr. Ripley. Not that The Wurtz made any distinction between Tom Ripley and the character Tom Cruise played in Magnolia that year. And she had convinced herself that Kevin Spacey was trapped in a bad marriage, which he periodically escaped by lusting after young girls. “Someone should be assigned to watch him,” Miss Wurtz told Jack, who understood that by watch, she meant control him.
