by John Irving
“I’m surprised you haven’t called me,” he heard Dr. García’s voice say on his answering machine. “I trust you’ve changed your mind about the stopover in Boston, or that Michele has changed her mind about it. And I wouldn’t recommend any further contact with Lucy, Jack. We might want to reconsider how much time you spend in the waiting room. You might run into Lucy’s mother.”
Jack wondered how the sleazy movie magazine had missed that little tidbit—namely, that Lucy’s mom was also Dr. García’s patient. (It made perfect sense that she would be somebody’s patient.)
Once, in the waiting room, one of the young mothers had explained to Jack that Dr. García was unique among all the psychiatrists she’d ever seen. You didn’t have to make an appointment. Apparently, this young mother tended to feel the need to see her psychiatrist on the spur of the moment. Many of the young mothers in Dr. García’s waiting room said that they found the presence of other young mothers comforting. It was such a loose arrangement, no therapist in New York or Vienna would have allowed it. (No psychiatrist’s patient in New York or Vienna would have accepted the situation, either.) But loose arrangements were what Jack appreciated about living in Santa Monica.
He gave his plane tickets to the concierge at The Prince George and asked her to do what she could to change his flights. “Just get me back to Los Angeles tomorrow—the most direct way you can,” he told her. “No stopover in Boston, please.”
Then Jack went off to the Press Gang, where he had made another dinner reservation; he hadn’t eaten all day and was hungry.
Jack sat alone at his small table and ordered one of the appetizers. Except for his table for one, the restaurant was crowded and noisy. Maybe the Press Gang seemed noisier than it was because Jack was alone and had a concussion. He sat facing a window, with his back to the other tables. He’d brought a book with him—something Charles had recommended—but when he tried to read, his headache came back and the noise in the restaurant was amplified. The table nearest him was the loudest, but Jack couldn’t see the people at that table; if they were looking at him, all they could see was his back.
One loudmouth in particular was the dominant storyteller. He was braying about an altercation in a hotel bar—according to him, it had been a fair fight. “Fucking wrestlers!” he shouted. “They can’t take a punch.” That certainly got Jack’s attention, concussion and all. “Jack Burns landed like a dead fish,” the man was telling his friends.
As someone engaged in telling the story of his life in chronological order, Jack had discovered that what many people lazily referred to as coincidences weren’t necessarily coincidental. One might think, for example, that it was coincidental for Jack to find himself in the same restaurant with Doug McSwiney—only one night after the fat, fur-faced author had coldcocked Jack with a sucker punch. But Halifax was not a big city, and the Press Gang was a popular place.
Jack tried to get a look at him, but McSwiney’s broad back was all there was to see. The way one of the writer’s friends suddenly recognized Jack, Jack could tell that none of them had known he was there—McSwiney hadn’t been telling his tale for Jack’s benefit. Jack got up from his table and walked over to McSwiney. The big man’s friends let McSwiney know that Jack was there, but the bastard didn’t stop his story. “The little lightweight just lay there,” McSwiney was saying.
Jack stood beside McSwiney but a little behind him. There were three couples at the table; Jack couldn’t tell which of the women was with McSwiney. The two men were smiling at Jack—they were almost smirking—but the women were expressionless as they observed the unfolding drama.
“I want to apologize,” Jack said to Doug McSwiney. “Those notes I wrote about your screenplay weren’t meant for you. I would never have expressed myself that frankly, that personally—not to you directly. It was only because Cornelia couldn’t read my handwriting that she showed those notes to you. She can’t read English if it’s in longhand. I hope you know it was an accident. I wouldn’t have said anything to intentionally hurt your feelings.”
Now McSwiney’s two male friends were definitely smirking, but the women were smarter; women had always known how to read Jack Burns.
Jack wasn’t really apologizing—he was just being nice twice, as Mrs. Wicksteed had taught him. (Back in the bar at The Prince George, when he’d offered to shake Doug McSwiney’s hand, that had been being nice the first time.) Of course Jack knew that McSwiney was too drunk and too belligerent to understand this. The author just went on with his story.
“That little Frenchwoman called the bellman and together they loaded Jack Burns on a luggage cart—they wheeled him off to his room like a baby in a stroller!” McSwiney was saying. The two men laughed but the women didn’t; the women were tense and watchful.
When Jack put his hand on the back of McSwiney’s neck and gently pushed the big, shaggy head in the direction of the fat man’s dinner plate, he already knew that McSwiney was the stronger of the two. Jack was prepared for the big man to place both hands on the table and push himself to his feet. Jack never expected to hold McSwiney down with one hand; Jack just wanted McSwiney to spread his arms and brace himself against the table, because that made it easier for Jack to slap the full nelson on him before McSwiney could stand up.
Jack overlapped one hand with the other on the back of McSwiney’s neck and drove the writer’s face into his paella, up to his ears; Jack could feel the warm food on his wrists. An errant shrimp, coated with saffron-colored rice, flew off the plate—also a sausage. McSwiney rooted around in the paella, trying to clear some space to breathe.
In wrestling, there’s more than one reason why a full nelson is illegal. Yes, you can break someone’s neck with the hold, but—from a wrestling point of view—that’s not the only thing wrong with it. It’s nearly impossible to pin someone with a full nelson—unless you break your opponent’s neck in the process. And the hold is very hard to get out of; in addition to a full nelson being dangerous, it’s also a stalling tactic.
McSwiney wasn’t going anywhere; he had no leverage, especially sitting in a chair. Jack kept pushing McSwiney into the paella. The fur-faced writer’s forehead was pressed against the bottom of the plate; from the sound of him, he must have gotten some rice up his nose. McSwiney’s two male friends weren’t smirking now; Jack never took his eyes off them. If one of them had stood up, Jack would have changed the full nelson to a chicken-wing, with which he would have driven McSwiney’s right elbow past his right ear—in all likelihood breaking the collarbone but almost certainly separating McSwiney’s right shoulder. Then Jack would have gone after one of the other two guys, starting with the tougher-looking one.
But Jack could see that there wasn’t going to be any trouble; the two men just sat there. McSwiney was bigger than both of them together, and they could observe for themselves that their friend wasn’t doing too well. The women were more fidgety than the men. They exchanged glances with one another, and they kept looking at Jack’s face—not at McSwiney’s head in the paella.
McSwiney sounded as if he were still eating, but there was something more nasal than eating involved. If the big man had started to choke, Jack would have tipped him out of his chair and put a gut-wrench on him until McSwiney threw up on the floor. But that wasn’t necessary; the writer was breathing okay, just noisily. A fat man doesn’t breathe too comfortably with his chin on his chest, even without the paella factor.
“Writers!” Jack said, more to McSwiney’s friends than to McSwiney. “They can’t even eat without saying too much.”
One of the women smiled, which may or may not have eliminated her as the woman who was with McSwiney.
Jack ground his chin into the top of McSwiney’s head; he wanted to be sure that McSwiney could hear him. “There’s another thing about your screenplay,” Jack told him. “Just what do you think would have happened to a transvestite prostitute in a town full of sailors in 1917? Some sailor would have killed him—long before the Halifax Explo
sion could have done the job. The story isn’t only prurient and banal—it’s also unbelievable.”
Jack could tell that McSwiney was trying to say something, but Jack wasn’t about to let the overweight author wriggle out of his paella. The woman who’d smiled at Jack spoke for McSwiney.
“I think Dougie is trying to say that we’re all dying to hear about Lucy,” the woman said. Jack guessed that she probably was the woman with McSwiney, if not his wife. She was about the writer’s age, which Jack estimated to be late forties—maybe early fifties.
“Well, Lucy is a lot younger than anyone at this table—better tits, and everything,” Jack told them—the way Billy Rainbow would have said it. No one was smiling now.
“Please don’t hurt him,” the woman said.
“That’s all anyone ever had to say,” Jack told them. He lightened up on the full nelson. “I hope you know that I could have hurt you,” Jack said to McSwiney, who tried to nod.
Jack let him go and stepped away from their table. He half expected McSwiney to stagger to his feet and come at him, swinging. But the fat man just sat there, looking more subdued than combative.
The woman who’d spoken to Jack wet her napkin in her water glass and began to fuss over McSwiney. She picked the rice out of his hair and beard, finding a shrimp or two and some sausage—also a piece of chicken. She cleaned him up as best she could, but there was nothing she could do about the saffron; the writer’s beard and forehead were stained a pumpkin-orange color.
A waiter who’d been watching the whole time kept his eye on Jack, who returned to his table but sat with his back to the window, facing McSwiney’s party. Jack didn’t look at any of them directly, but he wanted to see McSwiney coming if the big man came at him. The woman who’d asked him not to hurt McSwiney looked at Jack from time to time, with no discernible expression.
Jack waved the waiter over and told him: “If they’re staying, please offer Mr. McSwiney another paella. I’ll pay for it.”
“They’re not staying,” the waiter said. “Mr. McSwiney is experiencing chest pains—that’s why they’re leaving.”
It would be bad luck to have contributed to the death of the drunken lout—the overweight writer was a blustering god of Canadian letters. The autopsy might reveal that McSwiney had rice in his lungs. He’d been murdered with food; the murder weapon had been the paella! Eulogies would abound, nationwide; a voice blowing over the Canadian landscape like a gale-force wind had been silenced. Worst of all would be the lengthy quotations from McSwiney’s prose, gargantuan descriptions of rocks and trees and seagulls in Quill & Quire.
“Would you know if Mr. McSwiney has experienced chest pains before?” Jack asked the troubled-looking waiter.
“Oh, all the time,” the waiter said. “He has terrible heartburn.”
Jack ordered a beer. He hadn’t had one since the Heineken he’d had at that party in the Polo Lounge after the Academy Awards. He noticed that a large gob of McSwiney’s paella had landed on his pants; he’d been busy and had somehow missed seeing it. The shrimp coated with saffron-colored rice, the sticky sausage—Jack wiped off the mess with a napkin, but (like McSwiney) there was nothing he could do about the saffron stain.
Whenever he saw the troubled-looking waiter, Jack was distracted by his thoughts of McSwiney’s chest pains. He sincerely hoped it was just heartburn. McSwiney was an asshole, but he was too young to die. Jack had restrained himself from hurting the bastard; it would have been too cruel for it to turn out that Jack had had even an inadvertent hand in killing Doug McSwiney!
And that was Halifax. Jack would beg Dr. García to allow him to tell her a little bit about what happened there. (After all, it might be a year or more before Jack got around to that part of his life story in chronological order.) Because his psychiatrist could see that Jack was agitated, and because she’d already talked to Lucy and Lucy’s mother about the Lucy business, Dr. García indulged him. She at least let him tell her the part about Doug McSwiney.
Jack was fortunate, he admitted to Dr. García, that McSwiney’s chest pains hadn’t amounted to anything. Mrs. Oastler found a small account in the newspaper of a “drunken brawl” in the Press Gang restaurant in Halifax—a case of “two feuding writers who’d earlier come to blows in the bar of The Prince George Hotel,” one Canadian journalist had reported. Because Leslie knew that Jack didn’t drink, she was all the more perplexed by the reporter noting that Jack had calmly sipped a beer while McSwiney was attended to by his friends.
“Jack,” Dr. García said, “it seems to me that you should hire a bodyguard.”
“I don’t need a bodyguard,” he told her. “I just need to watch out for a left hook.”
“I meant that you need a bodyguard to keep you from hurting someone else,” she said.
“Oh.”
“Well, we’ve got our work cut out for us—let’s leave it at that,” his psychiatrist said.
“What should I do?” Jack asked her sincerely.
“You better find a movie to be in soon,” Dr. García told him. “I think you should take a break from being Jack Burns, don’t you?”
35
Forgettable
The following year, Jack was in three movies; the year after that, he did two more. His handicapped math notwithstanding, even Jack could count that he’d been in five films in two years. He’d taken a big break from being Jack Burns.
In two years’ time, he’d not heard from Michele Maher; she made no response to his letter of explanation about the Lucy episode. Dr. García had urged Jack to recognize that the Michele Maher chapter of his life was behind him, or should be. It was a good thing that he hadn’t heard from Michele, the doctor said.
In those two years, Jack made a lot of money and spent very little. About the only expensive thing he bought was a new Audi; naturally, it was another silver one. He could not motivate himself to sell the place on Entrada Drive and buy something more suitable. This was because what he really wanted was to get out of L.A.—although no other city beckoned, and Jack held fast to Emma’s idea that it was somehow good to be an outsider. Besides, as long as his life story was a work-in-progress, he couldn’t imagine cutting his ties to Dr. García. She was the closest Jack had come to a good marriage, or even a possible one. He saw her twice a week. Putting his life in chronological order for Dr. García had become a more regular and restorative activity in Jack’s life than having sex.
As for sex, in the last two years—since adamantly not having sex with Lucy—Jack had briefly comforted Lucia Delvecchio, who was in the throes of a nasty divorce. Lucia’s divorce was obdurately ongoing—one of those drawn-out battles involving children and credit cards and summer homes and motor vehicles and dogs—and because her irate husband viewed Jack as the root cause of their marital difficulties, Jack’s presence in Lucia’s unmarried life was of little comfort to her and not long-lasting.
He was romantically linked with three of his co-stars—in three out of his last five films—but these rumors were false in two out of three cases. The one co-star Jack did sleep with, Margaret Becker, was a single mom in her forties. She had a twelve-year-old son named Julian and a house on the ocean in Malibu. Both Margaret and Julian were very sweet, but fragile. The boy had no relationship with his father, and he’d had unrealistic expectations of every boyfriend his mother had had—they’d all left her.
As a result, Julian’s expectations of Jack were aimed a little lower. The boy kept anxiously looking for signs that Jack was preparing to leave him and his mom. Jack liked the boy—he loved having a kid in his life—but Julian was very needy. Margaret, Julian’s mom, was a full-fledged clinger.
Whenever Jack had to go away, she stuffed his suitcase with photographs of herself; in the photos, which were pointedly taken for the occasion of Jack’s trip, Margaret looked stricken with the fear that he would never come back to her. And Jack would often wake up at night and find Margaret staring at him; it was as if she were attempting to penetrate his con
sciousness, in his sleep, and brainwash him into never leaving.
Julian’s sorrowful eyes followed Jack as if the boy were a dog Jack had neglected to feed. And Margaret said to Jack, at least once a day: “I know you’re going to leave me, Jack. Just try not to walk away when I’m feeling too vulnerable to handle it, or when it would be especially harmful to poor Julian.”
Jack was with her six months; it felt like six years, and leaving Julian hurt Jack more than leaving Margaret. The boy watched him go as if Jack were his absconding father.
“We take terrible risks with the natural affection of children,” Jack would one day say to Dr. García, but she complained that he had told her about these relationships in a sketchy fashion. Or was it that he’d had nothing but sketchy relationships?
Months later, although the dominant sound in Jack’s house on Entrada Drive was the traffic on the Pacific Coast Highway, he would lie in bed hearing the ocean—the way he had listened to it in Margaret’s house in Malibu, while waiting for Julian to come into the bedroom and wake him and Margaret. Jack sincerely missed them, but they had driven him away—almost from the first moment Jack entered their lives. It was Dr. García’s assessment that they were “even needier” than Jack was.
“I’m not needy!” Jack replied indignantly.
“Hmm,” Dr. García said. “Have you considered, Jack, that what you crave most of all is a real relationship and a normal life, but you don’t know anyone who’s normal or real?”
“Yes, I have considered that,” he answered.
“I’ve been seeing you for five years, yet I can’t recall hearing you express a political opinion—not one,” Dr. García said. “What are your politics, Jack?”
