by John Irving
It had been Mrs. Machado’s fondest hope, or so she’d said, that Mister Penis would never be taken advantage of. But by whom? By willful girls and venal women? Dr. García told Jack that many women who sexually molest children believe that they are protecting them—that what the rest of us might call abuse is for these women a form of mothering.
Dr. García further speculated that Mrs. Machado must have observed a certain absence of the mothering instinct in Alice. “Women like Mrs. Machado know which boys are vulnerable,” Jack’s psychiatrist said. “It helps, of course, if you know the boy’s mother—if you see what’s missing.”
“Principiis obsta!” Mr. Ramsey had once warned him. “Beware the beginnings!”
If Jack had mother and father issues, one wonders what to make of Lucy. She was four, almost five, that early fall evening in 1987, when Jack discovered her in the backseat of her parents’ silver Audi—his first and last night as a parking valet at Stan’s in Venice.
When he saw Lucy again, in the waiting room of Dr. García’s office in Santa Monica, it was more than a year after he’d won the Oscar—April or May 2001. Lucy would have been eighteen. Jack didn’t recognize her, but she recognized him; everyone did. (A pretty girl—someone’s nanny, Jack had assumed.)
He’d long ago learned to expect and tolerate the stares of girls Lucy’s age, but Lucy’s eyes were riveted to his face, his hands, his every glance and movement. Her keen interest in him went far beyond overt flirtation or the groupie thing. Jack almost asked the receptionist if he could wait in another room. He didn’t know if there were other rooms—that is, other than a bathroom and a closet—but Lucy’s wanton obsession with him was distressing.
Then the problem appeared to go away; they overlapped only that one time in Dr. García’s waiting room. Jack completely forgot about the girl.
The reason Jack would remember the year and the season of his first reunion with Lucy, which (at the time) he didn’t know was a reunion, is that he was getting ready for a trip to Halifax—his first trip there since he’d crossed the Atlantic and landed in Nova Scotia in his mother’s womb. Dr. García had warned him against returning to his birthplace, which she viewed as a possible setback to his therapy. But Jack had other business in Halifax.
A not-very-good Canadian novelist and screenwriter, Doug McSwiney, and a venerable French director, Cornelia Lebrun, wanted him to play the lead in a movie about the Halifax Explosion in 1917. They probably couldn’t get adequate financing for the film without a movie star attached, and—given the off-center nature of McSwiney’s screenplay—not just any movie star would do. Because of the cross-dressing inclination of the main character, the movie star had to be Jack Burns.
The character Jack would play, a transvestite prostitute, loses his (or her) memory in the explosion, when all his clothes are blown off and he suffers second-degree burns over his entire body; then he falls in love with his nurse. At first, Jack’s character doesn’t remember that he’s a transvestite prostitute, but it wouldn’t be a movie if his memory didn’t return.
Jack had some issues with the screenplay, but he’d always been interested in the Halifax Explosion—and in seeing the city of his birth. It appealed to him to work with Cornelia Lebrun as a director, too. She was by far the more accomplished element in this collaboration, and when she proposed a meeting in Halifax—where she was working with McSwiney, urging him to improve his tortured script—Jack seized the opportunity to see his birthplace. He would also have a chance to put in his two cents regarding Doug McSwiney’s trivialization of the Halifax disaster.
After Jack had won the Oscar, he’d said no to an uncountable number of offers. Many of these were suggested adaptations. He’d read a lot of novels, looking for a possible adaptation that appealed to him. But ever since Jack had been telling the story of his life to Dr. García, the idea of writing any screenplay paled.
Jack Burns was back in the acting business, at least for the time being—or so he told Bob Bookman. But after the Oscar, Jack had been inclined to be picky about the acting opportunities, too. The thought of making a movie in Halifax, however, intrigued him. Who knows what so-called recovered memories he might unlock there? (Infant dreams and premonitions mainly, Jack imagined.)
That was his state of mind in June 2001, when he drove to Santa Monica for his appointment with Dr. García. It was a warm day; when he parked the Audi, he left all the windows open.
Jack had a number of reasons to be feeling positive. Three years after the fact, he had described his return trip to all but one of the North Sea ports of call—and Jack had discovered that he could tell Dr. García what had happened while managing to hold himself together. (In a few instances, Dr. García had looked in danger of losing it.)
Furthermore, Jack was looking forward to his trip to Halifax—no small part of the reason being that his going there was against Dr. García’s wishes. And last but not least, Jack had just heard from Michele Maher. This was all the more remarkable because he had not heard from her for well over a year—not even so much as a postcard congratulating him for the Academy Award.
Jack had concluded, of course, that the sort-of boyfriend had taken stronger possession of her; that the boyfriend had forbidden her to communicate with Jack Burns had also crossed Jack’s mind. Now came her long, most informative—if not overaffectionate—letter. Naturally, Jack showed Michele’s letter to Dr. García, but the doctor wasn’t pleased.
In Jack’s acceptance speech at the Academy Awards, his thanking Michele Maher for staying up late to watch him had backfired. It had prompted a heated discussion with her sort-of boyfriend—apparently on the subject of Michele’s commitment to him, or lack thereof. Michele had never lived with anyone. To her old-fashioned thinking, cohabitation meant marriage and children; living with someone wasn’t supposed to be an experiment. But because Jack mentioned her name—to an audience of millions—Michele’s sort-of boyfriend insisted that they live together. Michele gave in, though she stopped short of marriage and children.
He was a fellow doctor, an internist—a friend of a friend she’d known in medical school. They were very much (perhaps too much) alike, she wrote.
“Everything in Dr. Maher’s letter,” Dr. García said, when she’d finished reading it, “suggests a pragmatism unlike your approach to anything in this world, Jack.”
But Jack had come away with something a little different from Michele’s letter—for starters, it hadn’t worked out with the live-in boyfriend. (“A year of commitment, in which I’ve never felt so uncommitted,” as Michele put it.) She was living alone again; she had no boyfriend. She was finally free to congratulate Jack for winning the Oscar, and to suggest that—were he ever to find himself in the Boston area—they should meet for lunch.
“I realize that you don’t get nominated for an Oscar every year,” Michele wrote. “Moreover, should you ever go back to the Academy Awards, I wouldn’t expect you to consider asking me to go with you again. But, in retrospect, I might have spared myself an unhappy year by saying yes to you the first time.”
“There’s more than a hint of a come-on in the ‘in retrospect’ part, isn’t there?” Dr. García commented. (This was not phrased as a question she expected Jack to answer; this was simply Dr. García’s way of presuming his agreement.)
“Später—vielleicht,” Michele’s letter concluded.
“You’ll have to help me with the German,” Dr. García said, almost as an afterthought.
“ ‘Later—perhaps,’ ” Jack translated.
“Hmm.” (This was Dr. García’s way of downplaying the importance of something.)
“I could come back from Halifax via Boston,” he suggested.
“How old is Michele—thirty-five, thirty-six?” Dr. García asked, as if she didn’t know.
“Yes, she’s my age,” Jack replied.
“Most doctors are workaholics,” Dr. García said, “but, like any woman her age, Michele’s clock is ticking.”
He should have told Dr. G
arcía about Michele’s letter in chronological order, Jack was thinking, but he didn’t say anything.
“On the other hand, she doesn’t exactly sound like a star-fucker, does she?” Dr. García said.
“She was just suggesting lunch,” Jack said.
“Hmm.”
There were no new photographs in Dr. García’s office; there hadn’t been any new photos in the three years he’d been her patient. But there wasn’t any room for new ones, not unless she threw some of the old ones away.
“Call me from Halifax if you get in trouble, Jack.”
“I won’t get in any trouble,” he told her.
Dr. García took a good look at the sky-blue, businesslike letterhead on Michele’s stationery before handing the letter back to him. “Call me from Cambridge, Massachusetts, then,” she said. “I can almost guarantee you, Jack—you’re going to get in trouble there.”
At the time, in the chronological-order part of his life story as told to Dr. García, he was up to what Miss Wurtz called “the second time in Amsterdam.” Understandably, he was in no hurry to relate that part of his life story to the doctor. Jack thought that a little trip to Halifax, with a stopover in Boston on the way back, might do him a world of good.
When he came out into the waiting room, Jack was distracted by a woman—one of the young mothers who was a regular patient of Dr. García’s. She commenced to scream the second she saw him. (Jack hated it when that happened.)
The receptionist quickly led him to the Montana Avenue exit. Jack saw that another young mother, or the screaming woman’s friend or nanny, was trying to comfort the screamer, whose wailing had frightened the children; some of the kids were crying.
He got into his Audi and tucked Michele Maher’s letter under the sun visor on the driver’s side. He was approaching the intersection of Montana Avenue and Fourth Street when Lucy’s face appeared in his rearview mirror. Jack almost had an accident when she said, “I’m not well enough behaved to eat in a grown-up restaurant.”
He still didn’t get it. Jack knew only that he’d last seen her in Dr. García’s waiting room, but he didn’t know who she was. (The nanny with groupie potential, as he’d thought of her.)
“I usually sleep on the floor, if I think anyone can see me sleeping on the backseat,” the strange girl said. “I can’t believe you keep buying Audis, and they’re always silver!”
“Lucy?” Jack said.
“It took you long enough,” she told him, “but I didn’t have any tits when you met me. I guess it’s understandable that you didn’t recognize me.”
An unfortunate coincidence, he realized. Lucy wasn’t anyone’s nanny; like Jack, she was one of Dr. García’s patients. (One of the less stable ones, he would soon discover.)
It was hard to see what faint resemblance she still bore to the worried but courageous little four-year-old Jack had picked up in his arms at Stan’s. Some of her courage had remained, or it had hardened into something else. Now in her late teens, Lucy wasn’t worried about anything—not anymore.
She had dead-calm, unblinking eyes—suggesting the steely recklessness of a car thief. If you dared her to do it—or bet her five bucks that she couldn’t—she would drive foot-to-the-floor through every red light on Wilshire Boulevard, all the way from Santa Monica into Beverly Hills. Unless she got broadsided in Brentwood, or shot by a cop in Westwood Village, there’d be no stopping her—her bare left arm would be lolling out the window, giving everyone the finger the whole way.
Jack turned right on Ocean Avenue and pulled the Audi to the curb. “I think you better get out of the car, Lucy,” he said.
“I’ll take off all my clothes before you can get me out of the backseat,” the girl told him.
Jack held the steering wheel in both hands, looking at Lucy in his rearview mirror. She was wearing a pink tank top—barely more than a sports bra—and black Puma running shorts, like a jogger. Jack knew she could take off everything she was wearing in the time it would take him to get out of the driver’s seat and open the back door.
“What do you want, Lucy?” he asked her.
“Let’s go to your house,” she said. “I know where you live, and I got a helluva story to tell you.”
“You know where I live?” he asked the girl.
“My mom and I drive by your house all the time,” she told him. “But we never see you. I guess you’re not there much or something.”
“Let’s just talk in the car,” Jack suggested.
“It’s kind of a long story,” the girl explained. In the rearview mirror, he could see that she was wriggling her running shorts down over her hips. Her thong was pink; it didn’t look as if it would be comfortable to run in.
“Please pull your shorts up,” he said. “We’ll go to my house.”
She was wearing dirty running shoes with those short socks that all the kids seemed to like—the kind that didn’t even cover your ankles. She walked all over Jack’s house on the balls of her feet, as if she were imitating Mr. Ramsey—or else she was too restless to sit down. Jack followed her around like a dog; it was as if they were in Lucy’s house and she was in charge.
“When you head-butted my dad, that was a life-changing moment,” Lucy told him. “That was when my mom decided she’d had enough of him. I remember she screamed at him all the way home. They would’ve been divorced before breakfast the next morning, if my mom could’ve arranged it.”
“In my experience, you don’t remember things with much accuracy when you’re four years old,” he cautioned her.
“You were my mother’s fucking hero,” Lucy said. “You think I wouldn’t remember that? When you got famous, we went to all your movies and my mom said, ‘There’s the guy who got me out of my miserable marriage.’ Of course my dad hated you. When they were divorced, I had to listen to him talk about you, too. ‘If I ever run into Jack Burns, he won’t know what hit him!’ my dad was always shouting.”
“Your dad didn’t handle himself too well the first time,” Jack pointed out to her.
“Let me tell you—if my mom ever ran into you, she’d fuck your brains out and then tell my dad all about it,” Lucy said. “All my life, you’ve been such a big fucking deal in my family.”
“I was just appalled that your mom and dad would leave a four-year-old in the back of their car—in Venice,” he said.
Lucy was fingering the tattoo magnets Alice had given Jack for his fridge. Japanese flash—irezumi, Henk Schiffmacher had called them. There were half a dozen magnets the size of quarters. Jack had used them to hold the four photographs of his mom’s naked torso against the refrigerator door—four slightly different views of her Until I find you tattoo, which he saw Lucy looking at very closely.
But Lucy wouldn’t settle down. She went off to have a look at the stuff on Jack’s desk. The flat glass paperweight, which slightly magnified the photo of Emma naked at seventeen, was an eye-catcher. (He’d always thought that one day he would regret keeping one of those photographs, which Claudia had asked him to get rid of.)
“I gotta use your bathroom,” Lucy said. There were two other bathrooms in the house, but she waltzed right through Jack’s bedroom and went into his bathroom and closed the door.
Jack had converted Emma’s former bedroom into a small gym—two kinds of stationary bikes, a treadmill, an ab machine, some benches, and a lot of free weights. There were no mirrors on the walls—just some of his favorite movie posters, including a couple from films he’d been in. There was a mat on the floor for stretching and rolling around—a long rectangle, about a third of a regulation-size wrestling mat.
Jack sat down on the mat and hugged his knees to his chest, wondering what he should do about Lucy. He heard the toilet flush and the water running in the sink; he heard the girl come out of the bathroom and pick up the telephone on the night table next to his bed. Jack could tell by her automatic tone of voice that she was talking to an answering machine.
“Hi, Mom—it’s me,” he heard Lu
cy say. “I’m in Jack Burns’s house, I’m naked, I’m in his bed. Isn’t this what you always wanted? Sorry I beat you to it, but what’s it matter? The thought of you or me with Jack Burns is gonna drive Dad crazy. Love ya!”
Jack went into his bedroom and saw that Lucy hadn’t been kidding. She’d pulled back the covers and was lying naked on his bed. “Now we’re going to get in trouble,” Lucy said.
“Maybe you are, Lucy, but I’m not,” he told her.
He walked past her into the bathroom; he was intending to bring her clothes to her, but he couldn’t see her clothes or imagine what she’d done with them. She’d put her dirty running shoes with the little socks on his bathroom scale, but the rest of her clothes were gone. (How could they just disappear? he was thinking.)
Jack went back into the bedroom. “You’re leaving now, Lucy. Where are your clothes?”
She shrugged. Yes, she was a pretty eighteen-year-old. Even Jack could count the years from 1987, when he first came to L.A., and add them to four. (And after all, he’d been doing a lot of thinking about four-year-olds lately.) But Jack wasn’t even considering having sex with Lucy, not even if it was legal—that wasn’t the issue.
She was one of those willfully grimy girls with flecks of gold glitter in her hair; every toenail was painted a different color. The finger-shaped citron known as Buddha’s Hand was tattooed on the inside of one thigh—high up, where her running shorts had covered it. Some young women were more arousing before they took their clothes off; besides, Jack had never liked being bullied.
“I’ll give you a T-shirt and some running shorts of mine,” he said. “I’ll dress you myself, Lucy, if you don’t get yourself dressed and get out of here.”
“My mom’s already called the cops,” she told him. “She’s home all day with nothing to do. She just screens all her calls, in case it’s my dad. I’m telling you, she’s already played my message twice—she’s already given the cops your address, and everything.”
Jack went into the kitchen and picked up the phone there. He called 911 and said he had an unwelcome eighteen-year-old girl in his house—she had hidden herself in his car. Now she’d undressed herself and called her mother. He hadn’t touched her, Jack said—he didn’t want to touch her. “If the girl won’t dress herself, maybe one of the officers you send should be female,” he said.
