by John Irving
“Generally more liberal than conservative,” he said.
“You’re a Democrat?”
“I don’t vote,” Jack admitted. “I’ve never voted.”
“Well, there’s a statement!” Dr. García said.
“Maybe it’s because I started my life as a Canadian, and then I became an American—but I’m really not either,” he said.
“Hmm.”
“I just like my work,” Jack told her.
“You take no vacations?” she asked. “The last vacation I remember hearing about was a school vacation.”
“When an actor isn’t making a movie, he’s on vacation,” Jack said.
“But that’s not exactly true, is it?” Dr. García asked. “You’re always reading scripts, aren’t you? You must spend a lot of time considering new roles, even if you eventually turn them down. And you’ve been reading a lot of novels lately. Since you’ve been credited with writing a screenplay, aren’t you at least thinking about another adaptation? Or an original screenplay, perhaps?”
Jack didn’t say anything; it seemed to him that he was always working, even when he wasn’t.
“You go to the gym, you watch what you eat, you don’t drink,” Dr. García was saying. “But what do you do when you’re just relaxing? Or are you never relaxed?”
“I have sex,” he said.
“The kind of sex you have is not relaxing,” Dr. García told him.
“I hang out with my friends,” Jack said.
“What friends? Emma’s dead, Jack.”
“I have other friends!” he protested.
“You have no friends,” Dr. García said. “You have professional acquaintances; you’re on friendly terms with some of them. But who are your friends?”
Jack pathetically mentioned Herman Castro—the Exeter heavyweight, now a doctor in El Paso. Herman always wrote, “Hey, amigo,” on his Christmas cards.
“The word amigo doesn’t make him your friend,” Dr. García pointed out. “Do you remember his wife’s name, or the names of his children? Have you ever visited him in El Paso?”
“You’re depressing me,” Jack told her.
“I ask my patients to tell me about their life’s most emotional moments—the ups and downs, Jack,” Dr. García said. “In your case, this means what has made you laugh, what has made you cry, and what has made you feel angry.”
“I’m doing it, aren’t I?” he asked her.
“But the purpose for doing this, Jack, is that when you tell me your life story, you reveal yourself—at least that’s what usually happens, that’s what’s supposed to happen,” Dr. García said. “I regret that, in your case, you’ve been a very faithful storyteller—and a very thorough one, I believe—yet I don’t feel that I know you. I know what’s happened to you. Do I ever know it—ad nauseam! But you haven’t revealed yourself, Jack. I still don’t know who you are. Please tell me who you are.”
“According to my mother,” Jack began in a small voice, which both he and Dr. García recognized as Jack’s voice as a child, “I was an actor before I was an actor, but my most vivid memories of childhood are those moments when I felt compelled to hold my mother’s hand. I wasn’t acting then.”
“Then I guess you better find a way to forgive her,” Dr. García told him gently. “You might learn a lesson from your father. I’m just guessing, but when he forgave your mom, maybe it enabled him to move on with his life. You’re thirty-eight, Jack—you’re rich, you’re famous, but you don’t have a life.”
“My dad shouldn’t have moved on with his life without me!” Jack cried. “He shouldn’t have left me!”
“You better find a way to forgive him, too, Jack.” Dr. García sighed. (Jack hated it when she sighed.) “Now you’re crying again,” she observed. “It doesn’t do you any good to cry. You have to stop crying.”
What a bitch Dr. García could be! That’s why Jack didn’t tell her when he heard from Michele Maher. He went to the national convention of dermatologists without letting Dr. García know that he was going, because he knew that she would do everything in her power to persuade him not to go; because Jack was afraid of what the doctor would say; because he knew she was always right.
As for Michele—as if there’d been no hard feelings between them, as if the twenty years they’d not been in each other’s company were shorter than those fleeting summer vacations when they’d been at Exeter—Michele Maher wrote Jack that she was coming to Los Angeles, where she very much looked forward to seeing him.
She didn’t attend the dermatology convention every year, she wanted him to know—usually only when it was in the Northeast. But she’d never been to L.A. (“Can you imagine?” she wrote.) And because the convention this year provided Michele with an opportunity to see Jack—well, she made it sound as if he were the reason she’d decided to blow a long weekend in a glitzy Hollywood hotel with a bunch of skin doctors.
The dermatologists had chosen one of those annoying Universal City hotels. Rising out of a landscape of soundstages that resembled bomb shelters, the Sheraton Universal overlooked the Hollywood Hills and was across the street from Universal Studios—the theme park. The hotel had the feeling of a resort, the look of a place where conventioneers not infrequently brought their families.
While the dermatologists talked about skin, their children could go on the rides at the theme park. In the southern California climate, Jack imagined that the children of dermatologists would be sticky with sunscreen and wrapped up to their eyes; in fact, he was surprised that dermatologists would hold a convention in such a sunny place.
Michele Maher’s letter was positively perky; she wrote to Jack with the flippancy of a prep-school girl, her former self. Her letter caused him to remember her old Richard III joke. “Where’s your hump, Dick?” she had asked him.
“It’s in the costume closet, and it’s just a football,” Jack had answered, for maybe the hundredth time.
But she’d been a good sport when he’d beaten her out for the part of Lady Macbeth, and of course Jack also remembered that Michele was over five-ten—a slim honey-blonde with a model’s glowing skin, and (in Ed McCarthy’s vulgar estimation) “a couple of high, hard ones.”
“Why don’t you have a girlfriend, Jack?” Michele had asked him—when they were seventeen. She was just kidding around, or so he’d thought.
But he had to go and give her a line—Jack was just acting. “Because I get the feeling you’re not available,” he’d said.
“I had no idea you were interested in me, Jack. I didn’t think you were interested in anyone,” she’d told him.
“How can anyone not be interested in you, Michele?” he’d asked her, thus setting in motion a disaster.
What had drawn them together in the first place was acting. The one honest thing Jack had done was not sleep with her—only because he thought he’d caught the clap from Mrs. Stackpole, the dishwasher, and he didn’t want Michele to catch it. But this was hardly honest, as Dr. García had already pointed out to him. Jack didn’t tell Michele why he wouldn’t sleep with her, did he?
Of course he’d thought at the time that almost no one would have believed he was banging Mrs. Stackpole—especially not Michele, who was so beautiful, while Mrs. Stackpole was so unfortunate-looking. (Even in the world of much older women.)
Why, then, didn’t the flirtatious chirpiness of Michele’s letter warn Jack away from her? How desperate was he to connect with someone, to have a so-called real or normal relationship outside the world of acting, that he failed to see the crystal-clear indications? Michele and Jack had never had a real relationship; they hadn’t even almost had a relationship. If he had slept with her—and not given her the clap, which Jack hadn’t caught from Mrs. Stackpole—how soon after that would they have broken up? When Michele went off to Columbia, in New York City, and Jack went off to the University of New Hampshire? Probably. When he met Claudia? Definitely!
In short, Michele Maher had always been Jack’s illusion
. The concept of the two of them together had been more the fantasy of other students at Exeter than it had ever been a reality between them. They were the most beautiful girl and the most handsome boy in the school; maybe that’s all they ever were.
“I have meetings all day, and there are lectures every night,” Michele wrote to him about the dermatologists’ convention at the Sheraton Universal. “But I can skip a lecture or two. Just tell me which night, or nights, you’re free. I’m dying to see where you hang out. What I mean, Jack, is that you must own that town!”
But Hollywood wasn’t that kind of town. It was a perpetual, glittering, ongoing award; for the most part, Hollywood kept escaping you. There was one night when you owned the town—the night you won the Oscar. But then there came the night (and the next night) after that. How quickly it happened that Hollywood was not your town anymore, and it wouldn’t be—not unless or until you won another Academy Award, and then another one.
The studios once owned Hollywood, but they didn’t own it anymore. There were agents who behaved as if they owned it; there were actors and actresses who thought they owned it, but they were wrong. The only people who truly owned Hollywood had more than one Oscar; they just kept winning Oscars, one after the other, and Jack Burns was not one of those people and never would be. But to Michele Maher, he was a movie star. She believed that was all that mattered.
According to Dr. García, Jack had come closest to having a real or normal relationship with Claudia—it was, at least, an actual relationship, before they went their separate ways. But Michele Maher was both more dangerous and more unforgettable to Jack, because she’d only ever existed as a possible relationship. “They’re the most damaging kind, aren’t they?” Dr. García had asked him. (Of course she also meant the relationship that Jack could only imagine having with his father.)
Thus warned, Jack drove out to Universal City to pick up Michele Maher—Dr. Maher, a thirty-eight-year-old unmarried dermatologist. What was he thinking? He already suspected that he might have a better time with an amnesiac transvestite prostitute. That was Jack’s state of mind when he walked into the lobby of the Sheraton Universal, which was overrun with hyperactive-looking children returning from their day of theme-park rides. Michele had said she would meet him in the bar, where he found her drinking margaritas with three or four of her fellow dermatologists. They were all sloshed, but Jack was heartened to see that Michele could manage to stand; at least she was the only one who stood to greet him.
She must have forgotten how short Jack was, because she was wearing very high heels; at five-ten, even barefoot she towered over him. “You see?” she said to the other doctors. “Aren’t movie stars always smaller than you expect them to be?” (The unkind thought occurred to Jack that, if Penis McCarthy had been there, he would have observed that Jack came up to her high, hard ones.)
He took Michele out to dinner at Jones—a trendy Hollywood hangout. It was not Jack’s favorite place—crowded, irritatingly thriving—but he figured that Michele would be disappointed if he didn’t provide her with an opportunity for a little sightseeing. (The food wasn’t all that interesting, but the clientele was hip—models, starlets, lots of fake boobs with the pizzas and pasta.)
Of course Jack saw Lawrence with one of the models; Jack and Lawrence automatically gave each other the finger. Michele was instantly impressed, if a little unsteady on her feet. “I haven’t eaten all day,” she confessed. “I should have skipped that second margarita.”
“Have some pasta,” Jack said. “That’ll help.” But she downed a glass of white wine while he was still squeezing the lemon into his iced tea.
He kept looking all around for Lawrence, who probably wanted to pay Jack back for the bottle of Taittinger Jack had poured on him in Cannes.
“My Gawd,” Michele was saying—a conflation of the worst of Boston and New York in her accent. “This place is cool.”
Alas, she wasn’t. Her skin, which he’d remembered as glowing, was dry and a trifle raw-looking—as if she’d just emerged from a hot bath and had stood outside for too long on a New England winter day. Her honey-blond hair was dull and lank. She was too thin and sinewy, in the manner of women who work out to excess or diet too rigorously—or both. She hadn’t had all that much to drink, but her stomach was empty—Michele was one of those people who looked like her stomach was empty most of the time—and even a moderate amount of alcohol would have looped her.
She was wearing a streamlined gray pantsuit with a slinky silver camisole showing under the jacket. New York clothes—Jack was pretty sure you couldn’t buy a suit like that in Boston or Cambridge, and she probably didn’t get those very high heels anywhere but New York, either. Even so, she looked like a doctor. She held her shoulders in an overerect way, the way someone with a neck injury does—or as if she’d been born in a starched lab coat.
“I don’t know how you do what you do,” she was telling Jack. “I mean how you’re so natural doing such unnatural things—a cross-dressing ski bum, for example. A dead rock star—a female one! A limo driver who’s married to a hooker.”
“I’ve known a lot of limo drivers,” he told her.
“How many homophobic veterinarians have you known, Jack?” Michele asked him. (She had even seen that unfortunate film.)
“I’m weird, you mean,” he said to her.
“But you bring it off. You’re a natural at being weird,” Michele told him.
Jack didn’t say anything. She was fishing for something that had fallen to the bottom of her second glass of white wine, which was half empty. It was a ring that had slipped off her finger.
“I’ve lost so much weight for this date,” she said. “I’m two sizes smaller than I was a month ago. I keep moving my rings to bigger fingers.”
Jack used a spoon to scoop her ring out of her wineglass. The ring had slipped off the middle finger of her right hand; the middle finger of her left hand was even smaller, Michele explained, but the ring was too small to fit either index finger.
It was a somewhat old-fashioned-looking ring for a woman her age to wear. A little clunky—a big sapphire, wreathed by diamonds. “It has some sentimental value, this ring?” Jack asked her.
Michele Maher knocked over her wineglass and burst into tears. Against Jack’s advice, she’d ordered a pizza—not pasta. The pizza at Jones had a pretty thin crust; Jack didn’t think the pizza had a rat’s ass of a chance of absorbing the alcohol in her.
It had been her mother’s ring—hence the bursting into tears. Her mother had died of skin cancer when Michele was still in medical school. Michele had instantly developed a skin ailment of her own; she called it stress-related eczema. She’d specialized in dermatology for personal reasons.
Her father was remarried, to a much younger woman. “The gold digger is my age,” Michele said. She’d ordered a third glass of white wine, and she hadn’t touched her pizza.
“You remember my parents’ apartment in New York, don’t you, Jack?” she asked. She had placed her dead mother’s unwearable ring on the edge of her plate, where it seemed poised to eat the pizza. (The ring honestly looked more interested in eating the pizza than Michele did.)
“Of course,” Jack answered. How could he forget that Park Avenue apartment? The beautiful rooms, the beautiful parents, the beautiful dog! And the Picasso, toilet-seat-high in the guest-room bathroom, where it virtually dared you to pee on it.
“That apartment was supposed to be my inheritance,” Michele said. “Now the gold digger is going to get it.”
“Oh.”
“Why didn’t you sleep with me, Jack?” she asked. “How could you have proposed that we masturbate together? Mutual masturbation is much more intimate than having conventional sex, isn’t it?”
“I thought I had the clap,” he admitted. “I didn’t want you to get it.”
“The clap from whom? You weren’t seeing anyone else, were you?”
“I was sleeping with Mrs. Stackpole, the dishwasher. You prob
ably don’t remember her, Michele.”
“Those women who worked in the kitchen were all old and fat!” she cried.
“Yes, they were,” Jack said. “Well—Mrs. Stackpole was, anyway.”
“You could have slept with me, but you slept with an old, fat dishwasher?” she asked, in a ringing voice. (She said dishwasher the way she’d said gold digger.)
“I was sleeping with Mrs. Stackpole before I knew I could sleep with you,” Jack reminded her.
“And your relationship with Emma Oastler—what was that, exactly?” Michele asked.
Here we go, Jack thought; here comes “too weird,” and all the rest of it. “Emma and I were just roommates—we lived together, but we never had sex.”
“That’s so hard to imagine,” Michele said, toying with the ring on the edge of her plate. “You mean you just masturbated together?”
“Not even that,” he told her.
“What did you do? You must have done something,” Michele said.
“We kissed, I touched her breasts, she held my penis.”
In reaching for her wineglass, Michele’s elbow came down on the edge of her plate; her mother’s ring went flying. The ring landed on an adjacent table, startling two models who were on a red-wine diet.
One of the models picked up the ring and looked at Jack. “Oh, you shouldn’t have,” she said, slipping the ring onto one of her pretty fingers.
“I’m sorry—it’s her mother’s ring,” Jack told the model; she pouted at him while Michele looked mortified.
“You don’t remember me, do you, Jack?” the other model asked.
Jack got up and went over to their table, holding his hand out to the model who was still wearing Michele’s ring. He was trying to buy a little time, struggling to remember who the other model was.
“I was afraid you’d forgotten me,” he told her. (It was one of Billy Rainbow’s lines—Jack had always liked it.)
It was not the answer the model had been expecting. Jack still couldn’t place her, or else he’d never met her before in his life and she was just playing a game with him.
