Until I Find You

16. Frost Heaves

In those hectic last days before Jack left for Maine, his mother devoted herself to sewing name tags on his new clothes. Mrs. Oastler had taken him shopping. There were no school uniforms at Redding, no special colors, but the boys wore jackets and ties, and either khakis or wool-flannel trousers—not jeans. With Leslie Oastler choosing his clothes, Jack would be one of the best-dressed boys at the school.

Alice should have talked to him; she should have told Jack everything. But in lieu of conversation, she sewed.

It made no sense to Jack: when he was four, they’d spent the better part of a year searching those North Sea ports for his runaway dad; yet in Jack’s five years at St. Hilda’s, Alice rarely spoke of William. At ten, Jack was increasingly curious about his father; that William had been demonized made the boy afraid of himself and who he might become. But his mom would not indulge Jack’s questions about his dad. Alice was rarely cruel to Jack, but she could be cold, and nothing drew the coldness out of her as predictably as Jack asking her about his father.

Alice must have closed the door on that conversation a hundred times. “When you’re old enough,” she would usually say—a door-closing line if the boy had ever heard one.

He’d once spoken to Mrs. McQuat about it. “Don’t complain about a woman who knows how to keep a secret,” The Gray Ghost replied.

Since Emma had a list of grievances against her mother, Jack felt comfortable complaining to Emma about his. “I just want to know what kind of guy he was, for Christ’s sake!”

“Watch your language, baby cakes.”

Emma and Jack had both read the School Philosophy Handbook that Redding sent to new students and their families. So-called proper language was a big deal in the student code. Mr. Ramsey, who’d agreed to take Jack to Maine, had eagerly read the School Philosophy Handbook, too; he’d found the student code “very challenging.”

The day before Jack and Mr. Ramsey left for Maine, Emma and Jack got matching haircuts at a barbershop in Forest Hill Village. Jack’s wasn’t so bad, although it was shorter than the floppy mops most boys had for haircuts in 1975. But short hair on Emma was arguably a mistake. It wasn’t a buzz cut, but it was very much a boy’s haircut, which left her neck exposed. While she’d continued to lose weight, Emma’s neck had gotten noticeably bigger—all those neck-bridges, three or four times a week, with a flat twenty-five-pound weight on her chest. She had a neck like a linebacker, and her short haircut served to exaggerate one’s unfortunate first impression of her, which was that Emma Oastler had no neck at all. From behind, she looked like a man.

Jack got the first haircut and then stood beside Emma’s chair while the barber was cutting her hair. “Your mom’s going to kill you for this,” Jack told her.

“How?” Emma asked.

She had a point—Emma could have snapped Mrs. Oastler like a Popsicle stick. Not even Chenko was tough enough for her, as the Ukrainian would soon discover. After Jack went to Maine, Chenko stepped in as Emma’s workout partner. He was in good shape for a man his age, and he had twenty-five or thirty pounds on her—this in addition to his considerable experience as a wrestler. But Jack knew you could get hurt when you were trying too hard not to hurt your opponent; in wrestling, it was not natural to hold back.

Chenko caught Emma leaning on him; he was in position to hit her with a lateral drop, but he hesitated, afraid he might hurt her. While he was waiting, Emma executed a perfect lateral drop on him. Emma separated Chenko’s sternum when she landed on his chest. That was a slow-healing injury, especially for someone in his sixties.

Emma’s only recourse was to work out with Boris and Pavel; at least they were young enough to risk getting hurt.

In the barbershop mirror, examining their matching haircuts, Jack could see in advance that St. Hilda’s had been crazy to admit Emma as a boarder. She had the wrong attitude for it, not to mention her hulking shoulders and her seventeen-inch neck.

“An inch for every year of your age,” Chenko had told her.

It would come as no surprise to Jack that Emma lasted only a year as a boarder at St. Hilda’s. He was a little surprised she lasted that long. To the school’s great relief, and with Mrs. Oastler’s reluctant consent, Emma moved back home and finished grades twelve and thirteen as a day student. She would take over what had been the guest wing, moving into Alice’s old bedroom, which was across the hall from Jack’s room—not that he would get to use his room to any significant degree in the upcoming years.

Alice, of course, abandoned all pretense and moved into Leslie Oastler’s bedroom. (According to Emma, this happened within a week of Jack’s departure for Maine.) Emma’s choice to occupy the guest wing was motivated less by her desire to sleep as far away from them as she could than by her irritation that neither her mom nor Jack’s ever talked about their relationship. But talking about things was not Alice’s style, and Mrs. Oastler had closed the door on too many conversations with Emma to realistically expect her daughter to allow her to open that door again. Alice had closed the door on too many conversations with Jack, too. When she was ready to talk, whenever that might be, Jack had already decided he wouldn’t listen.

In Maine, he heard more from Emma than from his mother—including the news about Mrs. Machado. She’d been arrested in Sir Winston Churchill Park for sexually soliciting a minor, a ten-year-old boy. It turned out that her own children had not grown up and moved “away”; at ages eleven and fifteen, they lived in another part of Toronto with their father, who’d happily remarried. There was a restraining order against Mrs. Machado, who’d molested her fifteen-year-old son when he was ten.

Of course there’d been no assaults against Mrs. Machado by her ex-husband, no need for her to change the locks on her apartment door. Quite possibly, the M. in M. Machado didn’t mean Mrs.—at least not anymore. And whoever she was, her reasons for wanting to learn how to kickbox and wrestle would forever remain unclear.

Alice made no mention to Jack of this news, although she probably knew about it. Emma said it was in all the newspapers, “with pictures and everything.” Maybe Alice never imagined that Mrs. Machado might have molested Jack. More likely, she didn’t want to think about it—or she felt secure in the fiction that, had anything been wrong, Jack would have told her.

As Emma said, sarcastically: “Yeah, like if anything had been wrong with her, she would have told you!”

Jack was not as faithful a correspondent to The Gray Ghost as she was to him. Mrs. McQuat was a wise woman, but Emma was Jack’s principal advice-giver now. How strange that the boy’s earlier misunderstanding of prostitutes as advice-givers was not that far off the mark. Emma was no prostitute, but sex and advice-giving were seemingly interchangeable to her.

Jack would also be intermittent in his correspondence with Miss Wurtz. It was more than his mail-order-bride role that linked him to Mr. Ramsey. The boy’s first trip to Maine, in Mr. Ramsey’s company, was so formative an experience that Mr. Ramsey replaced The Wurtz as Jack’s mentor in that all-important area of the dramatic arts.

Jack didn’t stop dreaming of Miss Wurtz, underwear and all, but he had come to a crossroads in his life, where listening to Mr. Ramsey took center stage and made more sense—this despite the fact that there was often more theatricality than meaning in what Mr. Ramsey had to say. (As an actor, Jack would be a hypocrite to love Mr. Ramsey any the less for that.)

As their plane touched down in Portland, Mr. Ramsey clasped Jack’s hands in his. “Jack Burns!” he cried, so loudly and suddenly that the boy thought the plane was crashing. “For better or worse, you are in Maine!” Jack looked anxiously at the swiftly passing tarmac. “Just remember, Jack—no school with a motto like Redding’s can be all bad. Let me hear you say it!”

“Say what?”

“Your school motto!”

Jack had already forgotten it. Unlike Mr. Ramsey, the boy had spotted a militant heartiness in Redding’s School Philosophy Handbook. The word character was repeated in every imaginable context. “Decency is the norm,” the handbook had declared. Maybe that was the motto.

“ ‘Decency is the norm’?” Jack asked Mr. Ramsey.

“Well, of course it is!” he replied impatiently. “But that’s not the motto. Jack Burns, with your remarkable capacity for memory, I’m surprised at you!”

Jack could recall the bit in the handbook about “interacting” with his fellow students. “Eschew the d-words!” the handbook had advised. While he remembered this unusual command, he had enough sense to know it wasn’t the school motto—though it might have sufficed. They were instructed not to treat their schoolmates in a dismissive or derogatory manner. And at the heart of the student code was a “character contract” signed by every student, saying that self-respect was impossible without an abiding respect for others. Jack had signed his name, but this didn’t sound like motto material to him.

“A hint, Jack. It’s in Latin.” As if that helped!

The air was clear, but still summery, in Portland—not as bracing as Jack had expected Maine to be, though it soon would be. The airport was as rudimentary as the tarmac.

“Labor omnia vincit!” Mr. Ramsey called to a couple of passing pilots. They clearly thought he was insane. “You haven’t heard a motto until you’ve heard Jack Burns say it,” he told a surprised stewardess, an attractive woman in her thirties.

“Labor omnia vincit,” Jack said, with authority—putting more emphasis on the vincit.

“Tell her what it means, Jack,” Mr. Ramsey said, but the stewardess ignored him; she had eyes only for Jack. Here he was in a foreign country—in Maine, of all places—and while he couldn’t remember his new school’s motto or what it meant, he could read the mind of a flight attendant. She was recognizably older-woman material to Jack. All the boy did was smile at her, but he knew everything she was thinking.

“It’s a good thing he’s not traveling as an unaccompanied minor,” the stewardess told Mr. Ramsey, never taking her eyes off Jack.

“This is Jack Burns,” Mr. Ramsey said to her. “He’s got the memory of an elephant, but not today.”

“Labor omnia vincit,” Jack repeated, trying to remember the correct translation.

“Work—” Mr. Ramsey started to say, but Jack cut him off. The translation had come back to him.

“Work conquers all things,” the ten-year-old told the flight attendant.

“Silly me—I thought it was love that conquered everything,” she said.

“No, it’s work,” Jack told her firmly.

The stewardess sighed, ruffling the boy’s hair. She kept looking at Jack, but she spoke to Mr. Ramsey. “I’ll bet you can’t count the hearts he’s going to break,” she said.

It was still light as they drove north-northwest to Redding in the rental car; they’d left the ocean behind them in Portland. After Lewiston, there wasn’t a lot to see. West Minot was not memorable, nor were East Sumner and West Sumner—although the absence of a Sumner proper got Mr. Ramsey’s attention. “Maine is not a state at the forefront of intelligently naming towns—or so it would seem, Jack.”

The surrounding wilderness in the approaching sunset was more than a little tinged with desolation. Earlier Mr. Ramsey had led Jack into a rousing conversation on the possible application of Mrs. Wicksteed’s be-nice-twice philosophy to those hostile students the boy might encounter at Redding, but not now. The forlorn landscape prompted even as ebullient a fellow as Mr. Ramsey to speak of the unmentionable. “Jack, I am tempted to say this looks like mail-order-bride territory.” Jack’s heart sank. Mr. Ramsey tried to change the subject. “I would guess—wouldn’t you, Jack—that most of the students at Redding are boarders?”

“I guess so,” the boy said.

Redding was a private (or so-called independent) school, grades five through eight. While Mrs. Oastler could afford Jack’s tuition—“without batting an eye,” as Alice had said—the towns and no-towns, the less-than-villages they drove through, suggested to Mr. Ramsey and Jack that few local families could afford to send their boys to Redding. The school did offer scholarships, though not more than fifteen or twenty percent of the students received any kind of financial aid. Redding was not generously endowed.

Mr. Ramsey also shared with Jack his between-the-lines interpretation of Redding’s School Philosophy Handbook; he shrewdly noted the defensiveness or oversensitivity of the handbook’s opening sentence: “First of all, not all students who attend Redding have problems.”

Naturally, this suggested to Mr. Ramsey that most or many of the students attending Redding did have problems, and he speculated out loud to Jack about what these problems might be. “They come from troubled families, I suppose, or they’ve been thrown out of other schools.”

“For what?” Jack asked.

“Let’s just say there aren’t a lot of boarding schools, even in New England, that admit students as young as fifth graders as boarders. But I suspect that a boy like Jack Burns will flourish at such a place!” Mr. Ramsey declared.

“Flourish at what?”

“Let’s just say that this is a school that values attitude over aptitude, Jack. I believe it will be to your advantage that you have both.” Jack Burns had more attitude than aptitude, and Mr. Ramsey knew it—but the good man pressed ahead. His enthusiasm on Jack’s behalf knew only one speed and direction: fast-forward. “And it strikes me that so-called character-based education might be pursued with fewer distractions at a single-sex institution—I mean fewer distractions for a handsome lad like Jack Burns!”

“You mean no girls.”

“Precisely, Jack. Don’t even think about girls. Your objective is to be a hero among your fellow young men—or, failing that, at least look like a hero.”

“Why be a hero?” Jack asked.

“At an all-boys’ school, Jack, there are heroes and there are foot soldiers. It’s happier to be one of the heroes.”

Emma had been right: Mr. Ramsey had some difficulty seeing over the steering wheel. He was as short as Mrs. Machado, and twenty pounds lighter. That he’d made himself a hero at an all-girls’ school did not hide from Jack the likelihood that Mr. Ramsey had played the role of foot soldier in an earlier life. His neatly trimmed, spade-shaped beard was the size of a child’s sandbox shovel; his little feet, in what Jack guessed were size-six loafers, could barely reach the brake and accelerator pedals. “Where will you spend the night?” Jack asked. The thought of Mr. Ramsey driving back to Portland—alone, in the dark—made the boy afraid for him. But Mr. Ramsey was a brave soul; his only fears were for Jack.

“If there’s trouble, Jack, gather a crowd. If there’s more than one bully, go after the toughest one first. Just be sure you do it publicly.”

“Why publicly?”

“If he’s killing you, maybe someone in the crowd will stop him.”

“Oh.”

“Never be afraid to take a beating, Jack. At the very least, it’s an acting opportunity.”

“I see.”

Thus they drove through southwestern Maine. The loneliness of the place was heart-stopping. When they were almost at the school, Mr. Ramsey pulled into a gas station. Jack was relieved to imagine him driving back to Portland with a full tank. It was the sort of rural gas station that sold groceries—mostly chips and soda, cigarettes and beer. A blind dog was panting near the cash register, behind which a hefty woman sat on a stool. Even sitting down, she was taller than Mr. Ramsey. Being a wrestler had made Jack an expert at guessing people’s weight. This woman weighed over two hundred pounds.

“For better or worse, we’re on our way to Redding,” Mr. Ramsey informed her.

“I could have told you that,” the big woman said.

“We don’t look like we’re from Maine, eh?” Mr. Ramsey guessed. The woman didn’t smile.

“Seems a shame to send a boy away to school before he’s even shaving,” she said, nodding in Jack’s direction.

“Well,” Mr. Ramsey replied, “there are many difficult circumstances that families find themselves in these days. There’s not always a choice.”

“There’s always a choice,” the woman said stubbornly. She reached under the cash register and brought out a handgun, which she placed on the counter. “For example,” she continued, “I could blow my brains out, hoping someone would find the dog in the morning—not that anyone would take care of a blind dog. It might be better to shoot the dog first, then blow my brains out. What I’m saying is, it’s never not complicated—but there’s always a choice.”

“I see,” Mr. Ramsey said.

The big woman saw Jack looking at the gun; she put it away under the cash register. “It’s kind of early tonight to shoot anyone,” she said, winking at the boy.

“Thank you for the gas,” Mr. Ramsey said. Back in the car, he remarked: “I forgot that everyone is armed in this country. It would be cheaper and safer if they all took sleeping pills, but I suppose you need a prescription for sleeping pills.”

“You don’t need a prescription for a gun?” Jack asked.

“Apparently not, Jack, but what seems worse to me is that owning a gun must to some degree encourage you to use it—even if only to shoot a blind dog!”

“The poor dog,” Jack pointed out.

“Listen to me,” Mr. Ramsey said, just as the Redding campus rose out of the river mist—the red-brick buildings suggesting the austerity and correctional purpose of a prison, which Jack thought it might have been before it became a school. Redding actually had once been Maine’s largest mental asylum, a state facility that had lost its funding to the war effort in the forties. (That there were still bars on the dormitory windows was what gave the place the appearance of a penitentiary.)

“Jack Burns,” Mr. Ramsey intoned, “if you ever feel like running away from this place, think twice. The environment into which you escape might be more hostile than the school itself, and quite clearly the citizens have weapons.”

“I would be shot down like a blind dog. Is that what you mean?” the boy asked.

“Well said, Jack Burns!” Mr. Ramsey cried. “A most prescient view of the situation, and spoken like a leading man!”

Jack bore scant resemblance to a leading man when he said a tearful good-bye to Mr. Ramsey in the corridor of his dormitory. Mr. Ramsey wept as he bid the boy adieu.

Jack’s roommate was a pale, long-haired Jewish kid from the Boston area, Noah Rosen, who was kind enough to distract Jack from the urge to weep by expressing his considerable indignation that their room had no door. Only a curtain gave them some measure of privacy from passersby in the hall. Jack instantly shook Noah’s hand and expressed his indignation about the curtain, too. They were engaged in the overpolite exercise of offering each other the choice of the desk with a window view, or the best bed, which was obviously the one farther from the curtain and the traffic in the corridor, when the curtain was flung open (without warning) and into their room stepped an aggressive-looking older boy—a seventh or eighth grader, Jack assumed—and this rude fellow asked, in a loud voice, a question of such offensiveness and hostility that Jack almost abandoned Mrs. Wicksteed’s be-nice-twice philosophy. “Which of you faggots has the little fag for a father?”

“His name is Tom Abbott,” Noah told Jack. “I met him in the washroom half an hour ago, and he called me a ‘kike.’ ”

“Hi, Tom,” Jack said, holding out his hand. “My name’s Jack Burns. I’m from Toronto.” That was being nice once, Jack was thinking, but he foresaw that the math could get confusing in a hurry. (Even when he was an adult, numbers would be his undoing.)

“Was that little fag with the blond beard your father?” Tom Abbott asked Jack.

“Actually, no. He’s a friend of the family,” Jack replied. “He’s a former teacher of mine, my drama coach—a great guy.” Jack turned to Noah and said: “Please help me keep count. I’ve been nice twice. That’s it for nice.” He walked past Tom Abbott, pushing open the curtain on his way into the hall.

“What did you say, faggot?” Abbott asked; he followed Jack into the corridor. “You think someone out here is going to help you?”

“I don’t want any help,” Jack told him. “Just an audience.”

There was a kid who looked like another fifth grader; he was sitting on a steamer trunk in the hall. His roommate stood in the doorway to their room, holding the curtain open. “Hi, I’m Jack Burns—from Toronto,” he told them. “There’s probably going to be a fight, if you’re interested.” Jack kept his back turned to Tom Abbott, calling to a couple of boys down the hall. “Talk about derogatory! How about calling someone a ‘kike’? How about ‘faggot’? Doesn’t that sound derogatory to you?”

Jack felt a hand on his shoulder; he knew it wasn’t Noah’s. When someone touched you from behind, there was usually a way they expected you to turn. Chenko had told Jack to turn the opposite way—it caught your opponent a little flat-footed. Jack turned the opposite way and stepped chest-to-chest with Tom Abbott, the top of Jack’s head not quite touching Abbott’s chin. Tom Abbott had four or five inches and about thirty or forty pounds on Jack, but Abbott was no wrestler; he leaned into Jack with all his weight.

Jack caught him with an arm-drag and Abbott dropped down on all fours; Jack drove Abbott’s head to his knee and locked up the cross-face cradle. Tom Abbott wasn’t a third as strong as Emma Oastler; at best, he was only two thirds as strong as Mrs. Machado. It was as tight a cradle as Jack had ever had on anyone before. Tom Abbott’s nose was flat against his knee; he was breathing like he had a sinus problem. That was when Jack heard someone say, “That’s a halfway decent cross-face cradle.”

“What’s wrong with it?” Jack asked. He couldn’t see who’d spoken, but it had been an older boy’s voice.

“I could show you how to make it tighter,” the older boy told Jack. The surrounding faces of the kids seemed like fifth-grade faces. Jack had the feeling that the older boy was standing directly behind his head. Jack knew that Tom Abbott couldn’t talk—Abbott could barely breathe. Jack just kept cranking the cradle as hard as he could; he waited. “You can let him up now,” the boy with the older-sounding voice said.

“You shouldn’t call people faggots or kikes,” Jack said. “It’s derogatory.”

“Let him up,” the older boy said. Jack let Tom Abbott go and got to his feet. “What are you doing in a fifth-grade dorm, Tom?”

Jack had a look at the older boy who was talking. Jack didn’t yet know that the boy was the proctor on their floor, but it was evident he was a wrestler. He was no taller than five-eight or five-nine; by his build, he was in Emma’s weight class or a little heavier. And while his cauliflower ears were mere trifles in comparison to Chenko’s—they weren’t even as bad as Pavel’s or Boris’s—you could tell he was proud of them.

Tom Abbott still wasn’t talking. He seemed resigned to his fate—namely, that the proctor was going to show Jack how he might improve his cross-face cradle. “You want to see tighter?” the proctor asked Jack.

“Yes, please,” Jack said.

The proctor put Tom Abbott in another cross-face cradle. He stuck one of his knees in Abbott’s ribs, which had the effect of driving Tom’s hips in a diagonally opposed direction from his head and neck. “Not only tighter but more uncomfortable,” the proctor explained.

His name was Loomis—everyone called him by his last name. He was an eighth grader from Pennsylvania, and he’d been wrestling for ten years. Loomis had some kind of learning disability; he’d repeated both second and fourth grade. He was only a couple of years younger than Emma.

Jack didn’t know that Redding had a wrestling team, but it made perfect sense at a school where character counted—where effort was regarded as more reliable than talent.

In Redding’s point system, you lost a point for every derogatory or dismissive thing you said to another boy, and, like a profane word, every act of unkindness cost you as well. For example, Tom Abbott had three points against him—one for calling Noah a kike, another for calling Jack and Noah faggots, and a third for picking a fight with Jack. (“He touched me first,” Jack told Loomis, who seemed unsurprised.)

Tom Abbott had another point against him for being an upperclassman in a fifth-grade dorm. You needed permission from the proctor on the floor to visit with a younger kid. You had a limit of four points against you per month. More than four and you were expelled—this was nonnegotiable. Tom Abbott had four points against him on the first day of school; he wouldn’t last at Redding past the second week.

It was hard to come to Redding as an older boy. Abbott was a transfer student from another school. Kids admitted in grade five had a better chance of making it through grade eight. Loomis was a four-year boy, like most of the surviving eighth graders.

If you did the work—both your homework and your work-job, because everyone had a work-job at Redding—you were okay. And you had to treat the other kids respectfully; you had to be nice from the start, a tougher philosophy than being nice twice. Mrs. Wicksteed would have respected Redding.

Swearing was a half-point against you, a half-point for every word. For example, it was better to say “Fuck!” or “Shit!” than “Fucking shit!” (Emma would not have done well at Redding.)

They were not all boys with “problems,” but they were all boys who were not welcome to live at home. Loomis’s parents and older sister had been killed in an automobile accident; his grandparents had wanted him out of their house before the puberty business started.

“Fair enough,” Loomis always said. That could have been a motto at Redding, too, though it wasn’t as resonant as Labor omnia vincit.

In the wrestling room, Jack discovered another motto; it was printed on the ceiling, where you could read it only if you were being pinned.

NO WHINING

The academic expectations of the school were fairly modest; the homework was less demanding than it was repetitious. A lot of memorization, which was okay with Jack. A duck-under, an arm-drag, an ankle-pick, an outside single-leg—as Chenko had taught the boy, these things were essentially undemanding, but they required repetition. Jack felt right at home at Redding.

And neither Miss Wurtz nor Mr. Ramsey would have questioned the value of memorization. At Redding, nothing was inspired—everything was a drill. Smart boys, not that there were many, lay low; hard work was all that mattered. The more you had to overcome, the better your efforts were appreciated.

The headmaster, whose main role at the school was fund-raising, was away a lot. His wife reported his whereabouts to the boys at Morning Meeting. “Mr. Adkins, bless his heart, is in Cleveland,” she would say. “We have a few successful alumni there, and Mr. Adkins has already met a needy boy or two.”

So they were “needy”—they didn’t mind. “Redding’s first purpose,” Mr. Adkins told them, on one of the rare occasions when he was home, “is to prepare you for a better school than Redding.”

Once Redding showed the boys how to work hard, the thinking was, another school, a better one, would educate them. Jack learned that the least utilitarian thing about Redding was those bars on the dormitory windows. No one wanted to run away from the school—they just longed to be in a better one.

The wrestling coach, Mr. Clum, had come to Maine from Colorado. He’d wrestled somewhere in the Big Ten, but he made a point of telling the team that he’d never been a starter. “For four years, I was a backup to someone better,” Coach Clum said. “Every year it was a different guy, but he was always better.”

Inferiority was their advantage; that they believed they were inferior, in combination with their zeal for hard work, made them formidably tenacious boys.

Coach Clum designed a wrestling schedule that purposely overmatched them. Redding’s wrestling team never had a winning season, but the boys were unafraid to lose—and when they won an occasional match, they were elated. Jack found out only later, when he was at a better school, that everyone hated to wrestle Redding. Redding boys relished taking a pounding—they were often beaten but rarely pinned—and, boy, were they nice.

“When you lose, tell your opponent how good he is,” Loomis instructed the younger boys on the team. “When you win, tell him you’re sorry—say you’ve been in his situation, even if you haven’t.”

They were competing against a school in Bath, Maine, when Jack won his first match. He was wrestling a strong but clumsy kid who’d never seen a cross-face cradle before. Jack was making the cradle tighter, the way Loomis had shown him, when the kid from Bath bit him. He sank his teeth into Jack’s forearm, drawing blood. Jack could see the boy’s face; there was no malevolence or awareness of wrongful conduct in the Bath wrestler’s eyes, only fear. Possibly the kid from Bath was afraid of losing, especially of being pinned—more likely, he was terrified of being hurt. He was fighting for his life, the way a captured animal would fight.

Jack let him go. The bite-wound was obvious—wrestlers from both teams solemnly had a look at it—and the kid from Bath was disqualified for unsportsmanlike behavior, which amounted to the same number of points for Redding that Jack would have won for a fall.

“I’m sorry,” Jack told the biter. “I’ve been in your situation.” The kid from Bath looked humiliated, inconsolable.

Loomis was shaking his head. “What?” Jack asked him.

“You don’t say you’ve been in his situation to a biter, Jack.”

So there were rules to be learned at Redding; learning the rules was what made Jack feel at home there.

Mrs. Adkins, a virtual widow to her husband’s fund-raising trips on behalf of the school, taught English and served as casting director for the school’s weekly Drama Night. She was a severely depressed woman in her fifties—an unhappy-looking, washed-out blonde. Her pallor was gold-going-gray, a fair-turning-to-slate complexion. Her clothes seemed a size too large for her, as if she suffered from a disease that was shrinking her.

Her gift for casting was a profoundly restless or roving one—causing her to visit, unannounced, classes in all manner of subjects. Mrs. Adkins would just walk into the classroom and pace among the students, while the class continued in as undistracted a fashion as possible.

“Pretend I’m not here,” she would say to the fifth graders. (Mrs. Adkins assumed that the older boys already knew to ignore her.)

There might be a note in your school mailbox after her appearance in your class:

See me.—Mrs. A.

In Jack’s fifth- and sixth-grade years, he was usually cast as a woman. He was by far the prettiest of the boys at Redding, and—from the glowing recommendations of Miss Wurtz and Mr. Ramsey—Mrs. Adkins knew he had female acting credentials.

By the time Jack was in seventh and eighth grade, and he was more than occasionally picked for a male role, Mrs. Adkins had dispensed with leaving notes in his mailbox. Her touch on his shoulder was, he knew, a see-me touch.

Yes, Jack slept with her—but not until his eighth-grade year, when he was thirteen going on fourteen and the deprivations of a single-sex school had made him nostalgic for his earlier life as a sexually molested child. By then, Mrs. Adkins had given him three-plus years of the best speaking parts, and he was old enough to be attracted to her permanent air of sadness.

“There will be no points against you for this,” she told Jack the first time. But he foresaw that, after Redding, the world might hold him accountable to another system for keeping score. Jack Burns would hold Mrs. Adkins as a point against him.

The Nezinscot River ran through Redding, and most of the year one would have to make a considerable (even a ludicrous) effort to drown in it. But some years after Jack left Redding, Mrs. Adkins managed to drown herself in the Nezinscot. It would have happened in the spring—in such measure as there was a spring in Maine.

There was a glimmer of Miss Wurtz’s perishable beauty about Mrs. Adkins; in her capacity as casting director for Drama Night, there was also something of The Wurtz’s eccentricity for dramatization about her. The boys did not do entire plays or dramatizations of novels at Redding; the rehearsals would have taken too much time away from the nuts-and-bolts business of what was at heart a no-nonsense school. But almost as an echo of the school’s mantra to memorization, Mrs. Adkins desired to make thespians of them all.

They were costumed in character, and Mrs. Adkins supervised their makeup. The women’s clothes, Jack gradually discovered, were Mrs. Adkins’s castaways—or the unexciting donations of the almost uniformly dowdy faculty wives. (Mrs. Adkins was one of only two female teachers at the school.)

The weekly Drama Night at Redding consisted of speeches and skits, excerpts from short stories or plays, recitations of poems—often only parts of poems—and such challenging feats of memorization as could be found in the monologues of inspired statesmen.

In fifth grade, Jack recited Anne Bradstreet’s “To My Dear and Loving Husband.” Dressed in Mrs. Adkins’s prim but faded clothes, he managed to convey the hardships of early colonial life and the duties of a Puritan housewife, which Mrs. Bradstreet had so stoically endured.

Jack was also the ravishingly beautiful ghost (the guillotined young woman) in Washington Irving’s gothic story “Adventure of the German Student.” His black dress had been Mrs. Adkins’s nightgown once—possibly at a time when Mr. Adkins had traveled less.

He was the poisoned Beatrice in Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter”; befitting his death in a garden, Jack wore something summery, which Mrs. Adkins remembered wearing to an old friend’s wedding. He was in sixth grade when he did “Sigh No More, Ladies”—that little ditty from Much Ado About Nothing. Shakespeare was a favorite of Mrs. Adkins. Jack wore one of her pleated skirts when he sang “Under the Greenwood Tree” from As You Like It.

He would remember her saying: “Why, that skirt looks so nice on you, Jack. I just might wear it again!”

On his first Drama Night as a boy, it was a mild surprise that—even then—Mrs. Adkins dressed him in her clothes. (Black slacks, a long-sleeved white blouse with a ruffled collar.) Jack did “O Mistress Mine” from Twelfth Night, and Mrs. Adkins scolded him for saying his end line to her—not to the audience:

Youth’s a stuff will not endure.

Indeed not; Mrs. Adkins seemed to sense that this was so. She made Jack sing “Take, Oh, Take Those Lips Away” from Measure for Measure. (His voice had not yet changed, but it was changing.)

By the seventh grade, Jack was getting a little too muscular for Mrs. Adkins’s clothes. But even when Jack was in the eighth grade, no boy at Redding was a better girl. He had pubic hair early, but his facial hair came late and his beard would never be heavy. He missed Emma, and faithfully thought of her when he masturbated. He couldn’t get used to taking showers with boys; Jack didn’t like looking at the other boys’ penises. When he admitted this to Mrs. Adkins, she told him to memorize a poem and say it to himself in the shower.

On those weekends when Mr. Adkins was away, Jack visited Mrs. Adkins in the headmaster’s house, where she would dress him in her clothes—the ones she was not yet ready to donate to Drama Night. An ivory camisole with a built-in shelf bra; a bouclé lace turtleneck; a velour cardigan; a crinkled silk shirt; a satin-trimmed wrap sweater. For a small woman, Mrs. Adkins had big feet—Jack could wear her beaded jade mules.

She never touched him first, nor did she once need to tell him to touch her. While she dressed him—often in the clothes she was wearing at the time, which meant that Mrs. Adkins undressed herself first—she stood so close to him, and she smelled so nice, that he could not resist touching her. The first time he did so, she closed her eyes and held her breath—compelling him to touch her more. It was a seduction quite the opposite of Mrs. Machado’s assertive kind; yet Jack was aware that he had the confidence to touch Mrs. Adkins because Mrs. Machado had shown him how. Mrs. Adkins never asked him how, at thirteen, he knew where to touch her.

Maybe she should have had a daughter, Jack found himself thinking once—when Mrs. Adkins was dressing him in her favorite velvet top. (For fun, she put lemons in the underwire bra—being a small-breasted woman herself.) Jack would learn, much later, that Mrs. Adkins and her husband had had a son and lost him. The boy’s death was an underlying reason for the permanent air of sadness that had first attracted Jack to Mrs. Adkins, although Jack didn’t know this at the time.

“I love you in my clothes,” was all she told him.

Having cast Jack in his seventh-grade year as Mildred Douglas in Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape, Mrs. Adkins loved him so much as Mildred that she perversely cast him the following year as Mildred’s cantankerous aunt. In that, his final year at Redding, when Jack was lying in her arms, Mrs. Adkins liked to test his memory of cue lines in the dark. In the husky voice of the Second Engineer in The Hairy Ape, she said: “ ‘You’ll likely rub against oil and dirt. It can’t be helped.’ ”

Rubbing against her, Jack-as-Mildred replied: “ ‘It doesn’t matter. I have lots of white dresses.’ ” All hers; every dress he wore on Drama Night had once been worn by Mrs. Adkins. How at home he felt in her clothes.

Except when he was wrestling, Jack took few trips away from Redding. Since Toronto was so far, he would generally spend American Thanksgiving in Boston—actually in nearby Cambridge—with his roommate, Noah. Jack went back to Toronto for Christmas, and for the misnomered spring break, which was in March or April—when it was barely more springlike in Toronto than it was in Maine. (It was never spring in Maine.)

But as a wrestler, he got to see a lot of New England. Coach Clum once took the team as far as New York State, to a tournament where even Loomis lost. It was the only time Jack saw Loomis lose, although Loomis—in addition to losing his parents and older sister—had other losses ahead. He would be expelled from Blair Academy for getting a referee’s underage daughter pregnant. Loomis gave up an opportunity for a college wrestling scholarship because of it. He became a Navy SEAL instead. He was stabbed to death somewhere in the Philippines, while on a perilous undercover mission, perhaps, or drunk and rowdy in a bar—in either case, his killer was reputed to be a transvestite prostitute.

But Loomis was the model Jack aspired to on the Redding wrestling team. Jack was never as good a wrestler as Loomis was, although in Jack’s last two years at Redding, he managed to win more matches than he lost.

If someone had been taking his picture on Drama Night, Jack would have known it, but he wouldn’t have known if someone was watching or taking pictures when he was wrestling—he wouldn’t have heard the click of the camera shutter or the noise of the crowd. When Jack was wrestling, he even lost sight of his audience of one. In a wrestling match, either you take command of your opponent or you lose; you wrestle in an empty space, to an audience of none. And after Loomis left Redding, Jack was the team leader—for the first time, he had responsibilities.

He was the leader on the team bus, too. His teammates were either asleep and farting—or doing their homework with flashlights and farting. (They were instructed to create a minimum of distractions for the bus driver.)

Sometimes Jack would tell stories on the way back to Redding. He told the one about the littlest soldier saving him from the Kastelsgraven, and the one about putting the bandage on Ingrid Moe’s breast after his mom tattooed her there. He told the one about Saskia’s bracelets, including how horribly one of her customers had burned her—but not the one about his mom breaking her pearl necklace in her efforts to be an advice-giver to that young boy in Amsterdam. And nothing about Mrs. Machado, of course.

Jack bragged that his “stepsister,” Emma, could beat anyone on the Redding wrestling team, with the exception of Loomis, who at that time hadn’t yet been kicked out of Blair. (Everyone at Redding, except Noah and Mrs. Adkins, thought that Jack’s mother was a famous tattoo artist who lived with a guy named Mr. Oastler, who was Emma’s dad.)

Possibly Jack told these stories because he missed not only Emma but also his mother and Mrs. Oastler—even Mrs. Machado, or at least her roughness, which was nowhere to be found in the gentler persuasions of Mrs. Adkins. Maybe he missed Mrs. Machado’s crudeness, too.

Jack also told the story of his greatest onstage triumph to date, which was his role in A Mail-Order Bride in the Northwest Territories. This was a dangerous story to tell on the team bus. Coach Clum objected to the word menstruation; once when Jack used it, the coach put down a half-point against the boy.

In his eighth-grade year, when Jack was co-captain of the wrestling team, they had a lightweight named Lambrecht—a new sixth grader from Arizona. He had grown up in the desert and had never seen snow before, let alone a road sign saying FROST HEAVES.

He must have had some difficulty reading in the dark, and the road signs out the window of the moving bus went by very fast at night, because Lambrecht asked, of no one in particular: “What’s a frost heavy?” His question hung there in the semidark bus; the sleepers and nonstop farters never stirred. Jack was memorizing Matthew Arnold at that moment. He turned off his flashlight and waited to see if anyone would answer Lambrecht. “We don’t have frost heavies in Arizona,” Lambrecht continued.

“Frost heavies are hard to see at night,” Jack told Lambrecht. “They’re so low to the ground that the headlights don’t reflect in their eyes, and they’re the color of the road.”

“But what are they?” Lambrecht asked.

Those bus rides were pure improv! “Look, just don’t go out of your dorm at night, Lambrecht—not at this time of year. Frost heavies are nocturnal.”

“But what do frost heavies do?” Lambrecht asked. He was getting agitated, in the peculiar way that lightweights express their agitation—his voice was pretty shrill under normal circumstances. That must have been what prompted Mike Heller, the team’s heavyweight, to put an end to Jack’s game. Heller was a humorless soul. He was a grumpy guy with too much baby fat to be a legitimate heavyweight; he never won a match, at least not one Jack saw.

“For Christ’s sake, Lambrecht, can’t you read?” Heller asked. “The sign says frost heaves, not frost heavies. You know heaves, like heaves in the road? Fucking potholes, you moron!”

“That’s one and a half points against you, Mike—correction, make that two,” Coach Clum said. (He was never really asleep.) “A half-point for Christ, a half-point for fucking, and one full point for moron, which you truly are, Lambrecht—but moron is a derogatory word, if I ever heard one.”

“Damn!” Heller said.

“Make that two and a half,” Coach Clum said.

“So frost heaves are just bumps in the road?” Lambrecht asked.

“I’m surprised you don’t have frost in Arizona,” Jack said.

“In parts of Arizona, we do,” Lambrecht replied. “We just don’t have the road signs—or the heaves, I guess.”

“Jesus, Lambrecht!” Heller cried.

“That’s three, Heller,” Coach Clum said. “You’re not having a very good road trip.”

“When does Heller ever have a good road trip?” Jack asked. He had no points against him for the month. He knew he could afford one.

To Jack’s surprise, Coach Clum said: “That’s two against you, Burns. It is derogatory of you to call our attention to Heller’s losing record, but it’s also dismissive of Lambrecht’s intelligence to encourage him to imagine that frost heavies exist, that they have eyes and are low to the ground—”

“—and they’re the color of the fucking road!” Lambrecht interrupted him.

“That’s a half-point against you, Lambrecht,” Coach Clum said.

They were somewhere in Rhode Island, or maybe it was Massachusetts. They were a long way from Maine, Jack knew. How he loved those nights! He turned his flashlight back on and redirected his thoughts to the task of memorizing “Dover Beach”—not a short poem, and one with an overlong first stanza.

“ ‘The sea is calm tonight,’ ” Jack read aloud, thinking it magnanimous of him to change the subject.

“Save it for Drama Night, Burns,” Coach Clum said. “Just memorize it to yourself, if you don’t mind.”

He wasn’t a bad guy, Coach Clum, but he never accepted what he presumed was the vanity of Jack having his cauliflower ears drained. When Mike Heller called Jack a “sissy” for not wanting to go through the rest of his life with cauliflower ears, Coach Clum not only awarded a point against Heller for sissy, which was clearly derogatory—the coach made Heller get his next cauliflower ear drained. “Does it hurt, Mike?” Coach Clum asked the heavyweight, standing over him while the fluid from the damaged ear was being extracted in the training room.

“Yeah,” Heller answered. “It hurts.”

“Well, then, the right word for Burns wouldn’t be sissy, would it?” the coach asked. “Vain, maybe,” Coach Clum said, “but not sissy.”

“Okay, Burns is vain, then,” Heller said, wincing.

“Right you are, Mike,” Coach Clum said. “But vain is a point against you, too.”

One night on the team bus, when Coach Clum and Jack were the only ones awake, Jack had a somewhat philosophical conversation with him. “I want to be an actor,” he told his coach. “I wouldn’t say it was vain for an actor not to want cauliflower ears. I would say it was practical.”

“Hmm,” Coach Clum said. Maybe he wasn’t really awake, Jack thought. But Coach Clum was just thinking it over. “Let me put it to you this way, Jack,” he said. “If it turns out that you’re a movie star, I’ll tell everyone that you were one of the most practical wrestlers I ever had the privilege to coach.”

“I see,” Jack said. “And if I don’t make it as an actor—”

“Well, making it is the point, isn’t it, Jack? If you don’t turn out to be a movie star, I’ll tell everyone that I never coached a wrestler as vain about his ears as Jack Burns.”

“I’ll bet you it turns out being a practical decision,” Jack told him.

“What’s that, Jack?”

“I’ll bet you a whole dollar that I make it as an actor,” the boy said.

“Since we’re the only ones awake,” Coach Clum whispered, “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that, Jack.” It was the school philosophy again. As Mr. Ramsey (who had read the handbook more carefully than Jack) could have told him, there was no gambling at Redding. Jack shut his eyes and prayed for sleep, but Coach Clum went on whispering in the dark bus. “Memorize this, Jack,” the coach whispered. “If I had to guess—guess, I say, not bet—you’re going to end up being a starter somewhere.”

“You can count on it,” Jack told him.

That was Redding. To Jack’s surprise, and Emma’s—not to mention how shocked Alice and Mrs. Oastler were—he loved the place. It was what such schools are, or can be, to some boys. You travel to what seems, or is, a foreign country; your troubles may travel with you, but nonetheless you fit in. Jack Burns had never fit in before.

17. Michele Maher, and Others

Jack did not fit in at Exeter, where he was admitted on the strength of Redding’s reputation for building character—with the additional support, in the admissions office, of Exeter’s wrestling coach, who knew that Coach Clum’s boys were “grinders.” Jack was a grinder—a hard-nosed kid, if little more—and while he was good enough to wrestle on the Exeter team, he was not at all prepared for how difficult a school Phillips Exeter Academy was.

That Noah Rosen was also admitted to Exeter (Noah deserved to be) was Jack’s salvation. Coach Hudson, the Exeter wrestling coach, further intervened on Jack’s behalf: the coach arranged for Noah to be Jack’s roommate, and Noah helped Jack with his homework. Jack’s memorization skills notwithstanding, Exeter was so academically demanding, so intellectually rigorous, that his abilities at mere mimicry just couldn’t keep up. The memorization helped him, both as a wrestler and as an actor-to-be, but Noah Rosen kept him in school.

Jack rewarded Noah by sleeping with his older sister, who was a college student at Radcliffe at the time. Jack had met Leah Rosen at one of the Thanksgivings he spent with Noah and his family in Cambridge. Leah was four years older than Noah and Jack; she was at Andover while they were at Redding, and she entered Radcliffe when they began at Exeter. She was not especially pretty, but she had wonderful hair and a Gibson girl’s bosom—and she was attractive to Jack in what was becoming a familiar, older-woman way.

Noah was his best friend; a nonathlete, he was nevertheless closer to Jack than any of Jack’s wrestler friends. When Leah dropped out of Radcliffe for a semester—not just to have an abortion but to worry obsessively about it—Noah didn’t know Jack was the father.

After he’d stopped sleeping with Leah and was having an affair with a married woman who worked as a dishwasher in the academy kitchen—Mrs. Stackpole was a short, stout woman with several mercifully faded tattoos—Jack learned from Noah that Leah was depressed and seeing a psychiatrist. Jack still didn’t tell him.

Unlike at Redding, where everyone had a work-job, the only work-jobs at Exeter were done by the scholarship students. Noah was a scholarship kid at Exeter. Once, when Noah was sick, Jack took his work-job in the school dining hall; he collected the used trays from the cafeteria and carried them into the kitchen, which is how and when he came to know Mrs. Stackpole.

He visited Mrs. Stackpole midmornings, between classes, in her small, shabby house near the gasworks. Jack came and went in a hurry, because Mrs. Stackpole’s husband worked in the gasworks and always ate his lunch at home. The lunch, a leftover from the previous evening’s supper, was warming in the oven while Mrs. Stackpole spread a towel on the living-room couch and she and Jack engaged in a combative kind of lovemaking—reminiscent of the boy’s initiation to sex with Mrs. Machado. The dishwasher’s heavy breathing was accompanied by a whistling sound, which Jack first thought was coming from the husband’s mystery lunch; perhaps it was about to explode in the oven. But Mrs. Stackpole suffered from a deviated nasal septum, the result of a broken nose her husband had given her. (Possibly because of an unsavory lunchtime experience—Mrs. Stackpole never explained the circumstances to Jack.)

He couldn’t imagine that she’d ever been attractive, nor could he have articulated why he was attracted to her (in part) for that reason—her glum, expressionless face, the downturned corners of her sullen mouth, her oily skin, the bad tattoos, and what she referred to as the “love handles” girdling her thick waist—but the dishwasher was passionate about certain sexual positions, wherein Mrs. Adkins had merely sighed or taken some evident pains to endure. Among these was Mrs. Stackpole’s preference for the top position, which allowed her to look down on Jack while she mounted and rode him.

“You’re too good-lookin’ for a guy,” she told him once, during one such rough ride.

The husband’s lunch sent forth an odor of cauliflower, caraway seeds, and smoked sausage—maybe kielbasa. Something too powerful to be contained in the oven, anyway. Strong stuff—like Mrs. Stackpole herself, Jack was thinking.

“I wonder,” Jack said to Noah once, in their senior year at Exeter, “if older women can look at younger boys and know the ones who are attracted to them—even if no one else is.”

“Why would you wonder about that?” Noah asked.

Jack then told him almost everything—about Mrs. Machado, too. But somewhere, maybe from his mother, he’d learned to be selective about telling the truth. He didn’t tell Noah that he’d slept with Leah, or even about Mrs. Adkins. (Jack knew that Noah loved his sister, and Noah had been awfully fond of Mrs. Adkins.)

Jack’s mistake was that Noah simply told the truth; he wasn’t at all selective about it. Noah told Leah that Jack had an unusual older-woman thing; he told his sister about the dishwasher and about Mrs. Machado, too.

At Exeter, where his fellow students were absorbing all manner of requisite information—at the highest level of learning—Jack chiefly learned how one can fuck up a friendship by telling the truth selectively, which of course amounts to not telling it. It was Leah, not Jack, who told Noah that she’d been pregnant with Jack’s child; she told her brother about the abortion, too. So when Leah dropped out of Radcliffe again—this time, for good—Jack knew he thoroughly deserved to lose Noah Rosen as a friend.

Jack had spent what felt like a lifetime in childhood, but his adolescence passed as quickly and unclearly as those road signs out the window of his wrestling team’s bus. Jack Burns had no better understanding of women, or what might constitute correct behavior with them, than poor Lambrecht did of frost heaves—or that it was sorrow and boredom that drove Mrs. Adkins and Mrs. Stackpole and Leah Rosen to sleep with Jack, when they knew he was nothing but a horny boy.

When Jack graduated from Exeter in the spring of 1983, Noah Rosen wouldn’t shake his hand. For years, Jack couldn’t bear to think of him. In essence, Jack had obliterated Noah from his life—at a time when Noah was the warmest presence in it.

Both of Noah’s parents were academics, theorists in early-childhood education. From their appearance, and that of their Cambridge household—not to mention Noah’s scholarship to Exeter, and Leah had gone to Andover and Radcliffe on scholarships—Jack guessed that there was little money to be made in early-childhood education. (A pity, because it was inarguably very formative to Jack.)

The Rosens had a high regard for education at every level; it must have devastated them that Leah left Radcliffe. She went to Madison, Wisconsin, and got into some trouble there. It wasn’t drug trouble; it was something political—the wrong bunch of friends, Noah implied. “There was a succession of bad boyfriends,” Noah told Jack, “beginning with you.”

Leah Rosen ended up dead, in Chile. That’s all Jack knew. At least there wasn’t any water involved—not the absurd Nezinscot, the so-called river that claimed Mrs. Adkins.

Jack hadn’t meant these people any harm! Not Mrs. Stackpole, either; her body was found in the Exeter River, below the falls. Above the falls, the river was freshwater and not very deep. Below the falls, the water was brackish—the lower river was tidal—and Mrs. Stackpole was discovered in the salt water, in the mudflats at low tide. The water had receded enough for a golfer to spot the body, or maybe it was a rower on the Exeter crew. Distracted by his impending graduation, Jack couldn’t remember. In either case, the academy’s former dishwasher was unrecognizable; she’d been underwater too long.

She’d been strangled, the town newspaper said, and then dumped in the river—she hadn’t drowned. Had Mrs. Stackpole told her husband about Jack? Had her husband somehow found out? Was there someone else she was seeing, in addition to Jack? As so often happened in New Hampshire, everyone suspected the husband who worked in the gasworks and came home for lunch. But he was never charged.

Nor was Jack charged, except by Noah Rosen—and not even Noah accused Jack of the actual murder. “Let’s just say you probably contributed to it,” Noah said.

He might have said worse, had Leah died in Chile before Mrs. Stackpole was found in the Exeter River. But Leah was still in Madison, Wisconsin, though no doubt she was already in a Chile frame of mind.

In those years away at school, Jack extended the distance between his mother and himself—a process Alice had initiated when Jack was still at St. Hilda’s. But what little he saw of Emma was always elevating, and their fondness for each other grew. He was too young—and too inclined to think of women as novelties—to acknowledge that he adored Emma.

Only Emma understood why, for four years at Exeter, which was a coed school, Jack never really had a girlfriend. Emma knew he liked older women; the Exeter girls were just girls. When Jack was in grade nine, when he was fourteen going on fifteen, some of the Exeter seniors, who were seventeen or eighteen, attracted him, but he was no longer a pretty little boy. He was a gawky young teenager; in his first two years at Exeter, the older teenage girls ignored him.

Naturally, Jack saw something of Emma in those years—and not only over school vacations or for parts of every summer. Upon her graduation from St. Hilda’s, Emma had gone to McGill in Montreal, which Mrs. Oastler, who was a fiercely loyal Torontonian, considered an un-Toronto (or an anti-Toronto) thing to do.

Emma was quickly bored, not by McGill but with the Quebecois. She was always an excellent student, although French wasn’t her favorite subject; she discovered that she liked French movies better with subtitles. It was movies themselves that Emma decided she liked.

She got into NYU, where she declared herself a film major. Her grades had been good at McGill; she was able to transfer all her credits, and she loved living in New York. When Jack began at Exeter, in the fall of 1979, Emma was starting her second year of university but her first at NYU. On her invitation, Jack traveled to New York to see her for a weekend that fall. It wasn’t much of a weekend. Exeter had a half-day of classes on Saturday; getting from New Hampshire to New York City took the rest of the day, and Jack was required to be back at the academy by eight o’clock Sunday night.

Nevertheless he had a thrilling Saturday night and Sunday morning with Emma and her film-major friends. They went to an all-night cinema that was playing Billy Wilder movies. Jack wasn’t that familiar with Wilder, although he’d seen Some Like It Hot in Toronto with his mother; he must have been nine or ten. When Marilyn Monroe sang “I Wanna Be Loved by You” in that sequined dress, Jack got a boner and made the mistake of showing it to his mom. (Alice’s sarcasm toward her son’s penis could be brutal. She didn’t say, “Just like your father,” but the look she gave Jack said it for her.)

In New York, the first film Emma and her friends and Jack saw was Five Graves to Cairo, but Jack would remember only the beginning: that ghost tank transporting dead soldiers through the desert. After the tank, he forgot everything that happened to Franchot Tone—largely because Emma put her hand in his lap and held his penis for the rest of the movie. It was not until years later that Jack realized Erich von Stroheim had been Rommel.

There was more penis-holding through The Lost Weekend, during which Jack got the idea that Ray Milland looked like his father—or like what he imagined his dad might look like if William were drunk.

Jack had fallen asleep on Emma’s shoulder for the whole of Sunset Blvd.; then he woke up and although he had to pee, he watched every minute of Ace in the Hole. On Sunday morning, over breakfast, Emma’s film-major friends said Jack should have slept through Ace in the Hole and stayed awake for Sunset Blvd.

“That’s what I love about you, honey pie—don’t listen to them,” Emma said. Jack didn’t like her friends very much, but being with Emma was worth every minute of that long trip.

He would never be a Billy Wilder fan, although Wilder was born in Vienna and Jack could see what was European about even the most American of his films. It was the European filmmakers who first interested Jack, and it was Emma Oastler who introduced him to them. Whether with Emma on weekends in New York, or with Noah on weekends in Cambridge—when they would see all the foreign films in Harvard Square—Jack became a fan of films with subtitles. With the exception of Westerns, he didn’t like American movies at all.

On the subject of not being like his father, it would occur to Jack that if William had met Emma when he was a young man, he probably would have had sex with her—and from everything she’d heard about Jack’s father, Emma agreed that she would have submitted to his charms.

“That’s one reason you can be happy that we haven’t had sex,” Emma told Jack. As to how she felt about not having sex with Jack, Emma didn’t say.

Every winter term at Exeter, Jack’s weekends were taken up by wrestling. Emma would often rent a car and come to see his matches; she herself had stopped wrestling and was once again struggling with her weight. Emma was a binge eater, but she was a binge weightlifter, too. She would take up smoking, quit smoking, start overeating, stop, and then go kill herself in the gym. When the cycle began again, Emma seemed powerless to interrupt its predictable course.

What she needed was Chenko, her favorite workout partner, but Chenko was not only far away in Toronto—he was waiting for a hip replacement. Boris had gone back to Belarus. “A family matter,” was all Pavel, who had moved to Vancouver, would say. He’d married a woman from British Columbia—someone he met in his cab.

Jack’s second year at Exeter, when he was fifteen going on sixteen, Emma was twenty-two. After the wrestling matches, most Saturdays, Emma took Jack to the movie theater in Durham, New Hampshire. Durham was an easy drive from Exeter, and it was a university town; they had an art-house kind of cinema, where they showed both old and current foreign films. At Exeter, they showed only the old ones.

Jack loved Fellini’s La Strada, which he saw (more than once) with Emma holding his penis. They both believed that Chenko could have kicked the crap out of the Anthony Quinn character, but only in those days before Chenko needed a new hip. Jack wasn’t as crazy about La Dolce Vita. The Marcello Mastroianni character was the playboy Jack imagined his father to be—the sex-seeker Jack feared he would become. And he didn’t like 81⁄2 at all—Mastroianni again.

Fellini won Jack Burns back with Amarcord. Emma had already seen the film in New York, but she made a point of taking Jack to Durham to see it. She wanted to witness his response to the tobacconist with the huge hooters. With her hand in Jack’s lap, Emma knew the little guy’s reaction almost before Jack knew it. “How’s that for an older woman, baby cakes?”

They committed to memory the little-known name of the actress who played the big-breasted tobacconist from Rimini. When Emma called Jack in his dorm at Exeter, she would occasionally adopt an Italian accent and say to whoever answered the phone: “Pleeze tell-a Jack Burns—eet’s Maria Antonietta Beluzzi on da fon-a!”

More often, when Emma phoned, she just said she was Jack’s sister. Jack had stopped calling Emma his stepsister; he referred to her as his older sister instead.

No one at Exeter was insensitive enough to comment on the lack of a family resemblance—with the exception of Ed McCarthy, Jack’s wrestling teammate, who was hit-and-miss in his attention to details. At wrestling practice, McCarthy once forgot to wear a jock; his penis slipped out of his shorts and lay like a slug on the mat, where his workout partner, a fellow one-hundred-and-seventy-seven-pounder, stepped on it.

Jack felt like stepping on McCarthy’s penis the day he made an unkind remark about Emma. “It’s too bad you got all the good looks in your family, Burns. Your sister looks more like a wrestler than you do.”

They were in the locker room—wooden benches, metal lockers, cement floors—getting dressed for practice. Jack underhooked one of McCarthy’s arms and collared the bigger boy’s neck with his right hand, snapping him forward. When McCarthy pulled away, his weight shifting to the heel of his right foot, Jack caught him with a foot-sweep and McCarthy fell on his bare ass on the cement floor—hitting his back on an open locker door and giving his elbow a whack on the bench on his way down.

Jack assumed that McCarthy would get to his feet and beat the shit out of him, but McCarthy just sat there. “I could kick the crap out of you, Burns,” he said.

“Do it then,” Jack told him.

Even in his senior year, Jack never once wrestled above one-forty-five. After he stopped growing, he was five-eight, but only if he stood on his toes—and he competed better at one-thirty-five than he did at one-forty.

Jack was one of Exeter’s better wrestlers in his final two years at the academy. Ed McCarthy would never be better than unexceptional as a wrestler. Jack might have beaten McCarthy in a wrestling match, but not in a fight. Even a mediocre one-seventy-seven-pounder can take a halfway decent one-thirty-five-pounder, and McCarthy knew it. He got to his feet, rubbing his back and his sore elbow.

As Mr. Ramsey had advised Jack, although this time it was unintentional, he had an audience. “You shouldn’t call anyone’s sister ugly, Ed,” one of the lightweights said.

“Jack’s sister is ugly,” McCarthy replied.

That’s what saved Jack—not McCarthy’s belligerence but his insistence on the word ugly. While there were no rules regarding niceness at Exeter, no points off for saying something derogatory or dismissive—in fact, the intellectual fashion at the school favored everything negative and derisive—it was true that, for a few sentimental souls, sisters were sacred, especially if they weren’t good-looking. And with Emma, who had just missed being pretty, there was also the problem with her weight.

“Who got all the good looks in your family, McCarthy?” the team’s heavyweight asked. His name was Herman Castro; he was a scholarship kid from El Paso, Texas, and while he was a halfway decent wrestler, he might have stolen a few matches by frightening his opponents. He was so scary-looking that one was ill advised to use the word ugly within his hearing.

“I wasn’t speaking to you, Herman,” Ed McCarthy said.

“You are now,” Herman Castro told him, and that was the end of it. Or it would have been, if Jack had let it be the end of it. His loyalty to Emma was fierce.

Ed McCarthy wasn’t ugly—although his penis was, especially after that guy had stepped on it—but he wasn’t at all handsome, either. He didn’t have a girlfriend till his senior year, and the best he could do was a startled-looking girl with red hair and freckles who was only in grade ten. The redhead had just turned sixteen; McCarthy was eighteen. It was almost certainly not a sexual relationship, but it was probably the first relationship of any kind for both of them.

Jack toyed with the idea of seducing her—certainly not to have sex with her, because she was far too young and startled-looking for him, but simply to turn her against McCarthy, who’d said such cruel things about Emma.

Jack found Ed McCarthy’s girlfriend in the cafeteria—she was at the salad bar. During wrestling season, Jack lived on salad; he could not weigh in at one hundred and thirty-four and a half pounds and eat much else. (He had a bowl of oatmeal for breakfast, sometimes with a banana; salad for lunch; salad for supper, occasionally with another banana.)

The redhead with the freckles became even more startled-looking than usual when Jack spoke to her. “Is he treating you okay?” Jack asked.

Her name was Molly—he didn’t know her last name—and she was staring at him as if she expected some unknown and uncontrollable reaction from her body, as if he’d just injected one of her veins with a hallucinogenic drug.

He touched her hand, which, unbeknownst to her, had slipped into the stainless-steel bin of raw mushrooms, where it lay like something severed. “I mean McCarthy,” Jack said. “He can be cruel to women, and superficial. I hope he’s not like that with you.”

“Did he hurt someone you know?” Molly asked; she seemed truly frightened of McCarthy.

“I suppose he only hurt my feelings—about my older sister,” Jack said.

As he had taught himself to do, his eyes welled up with tears. All those movies, with Emma holding his penis, had conditioned him to imagine the close-up. By then Jack had seen Anthony Quinn in tears maybe half a dozen times. If Zampanò, the strongman, could cry, so could he.

Jack had not done much acting at Exeter. He had too much schoolwork to take part in most of the productions chosen by the school’s dramatic association, the Dramat.

He was neutral to Death of a Salesman, which was the fall play in his ninth-grade year. Jack knew he was too boyish-looking to play Willy Loman, and too small to be either of Willy’s sons, Happy or Biff. He bravely auditioned for the part of Linda, beating out a bunch of girls in the process—two seniors who were fourth-year members of the Dramat among them. But in Jack’s first experience with dramatic criticism, The PEAN, the school yearbook, described Jack’s performance as “overly distraught,” and The Exonian, the school newspaper, stated that Linda was miscast—“resulting in the kind of sexual parody audiences must have been forced to endure in those dark ages when Exeter was an all-boys’ school.” What do they know? Jack thought. Try telling Linda that she’s “overly distraught”!

After that, when Jack realized how hard the academic workload was for him, he pretended to be disdainful of what the Dramat chose for its plays. For the most part, this wasn’t hard; many of the choices reflected the taste of the dated hippie who was the dramatic association’s faculty adviser. More to the point, Jack was saving himself for the occasional Shakespeare, which not even amateurs could seriously harm.

His fellow thespians in the Dramat had resented his female impersonation of Linda in Death of a Salesman. They tried to force male roles on him, urging him to audition for Mister Roberts—as if the movie hadn’t been bad enough. Talk about dated! Jack evoked Wendy Holton. “I’d rather die,” he said.

This was excellent for his reputation as an actor—playing hard-to-get worked. (And what was the risk?)

He decided to surprise everyone by volunteering for a small role in The Teahouse of the August Moon. Jack knew that the part of Lotus Blossom, a geisha girl, would cement his hold on any future female role he wanted. The part he really desired was in the spring play his penultimate year at the academy. Jack was Lady Macbeth, of course—and just who was going to give him shit about it? Another wrestler? (One senior girl in the Dramat rationalized that the part called for a “domineering” woman—hence a more “masculine” choice might work.)

When the Dramat at last thought they had him figured out—Burns likes Shakespeare, Burns wants to do everything in drag—he surprised them one more time. Jack auditioned for Richard III, but only if he could be Richard. Let them fart around with Our Town till the cows come home, Jack thought. He wanted that football, his choice for a humpback, behind his neck.

It was the winter of Jack’s senior year—wrestling season, when he was especially gaunt. He would show them a “winter of discontent” like they’d never seen; he would offer his “kingdom for a horse” and make them believe it, which he did.

Jack’s tears now fell on Molly’s hand, in the mushrooms; his tears fell on the broccoli and on the sliced cucumbers, too. A radish rolled off his plate. He didn’t even try to catch it.

Molly led him to one of the cafeteria tables. Other students made room for them. “Tell me everything,” Molly said, clutching his hand. Her eyes were a diluted, washed-out blue; one of the freckles on her throat looked infected.

“I didn’t ask to be born good-looking,” Jack told her. “My sister wasn’t so lucky—my older sister,” he added, as if Emma’s advanced age were a telltale indication that she would never have a boyfriend. (In truth, Emma fooled around a lot—mostly with boys who were Jack’s age, or younger. She claimed that she didn’t have sex with them—“not exactly.”)

“Your sister doesn’t look like you?” Molly asked Jack.

“McCarthy says my sister is ugly,” he told her. “Naturally, I don’t see her that way—I love her!”

“Of course you do!” Molly cried, clutching his hand harder.

She was not only not pretty; at sixteen, Molly was probably as appealing as she would ever be. She’d never liked looking in a mirror—and she would like it less and less as she grew older, Jack imagined. That her boyfriend had called another girl ugly must have hit too close to home.

Jack had cried enough; the overacting had left his salad a little wet. Another close-up came to mind, that of the slightly quivering but stiff upper lip. “I’m sorry I brought this up,” he said. “There’s nothing anyone can do about it. I won’t bother you again.”

“No!” she said, grabbing his wrist as he tried to take his tray and go. A raw carrot fell off his plate; a little iced tea spilled from his glass. Jack drank so much iced tea in the wrestling season, he was bouncing off the walls. His fingers always trembled, as if he were riding on a speeding train.

“I better go, Molly,” Jack said; he left her without looking back. He knew that she and Ed McCarthy were finished. (He also knew that Ed would be having his lunch soon.)

Jack wandered back over to the salad bar; he was basically starving. The prettiest girl in the school was there—Michele Maher, a fellow senior. She was a slim honey-blonde with a model’s glowing skin and—in McCarthy’s crude appraisal—“a couple of high, hard ones.”

Michele was over five-ten—she had two inches on Jack. She was in the Dramat. Jack had beaten her out for Lady Macbeth, but she’d been a good sport about it—one of the few who had. Despite her good looks, everyone liked her; she was smart, but she was also nice to people. She’d done the early-acceptance thing at Columbia, because she was from New York and wanted to be back in the city; so, unlike most of the seniors, she wasn’t thinking about where she might end up in college—she already knew.

“Jack Burns, looking lean and mean,” Michele said.

“That’s me,” he told her. “I’m a starving heart of darkness.”

“Where’s your hump, Dick?” she asked. It was a Richard III joke—everyone in the Dramat kept asking him.

“It’s in the costume closet, and it’s just a football,” Jack said, for maybe the hundredth time.

“Why don’t you have a girlfriend, Jack?” Michele asked. She was just kidding around, or so he thought.

“Because I get the feeling you’re not available,” Jack told her.

It was just a line. Jack was still acting—he didn’t mean it. He saw at once he’d made a mistake, but he couldn’t think fast enough to correct it. All that iced tea on an empty stomach was giving him a buzz.

Michele Maher lowered her eyes, as if the salad bar had consumed her interest. Her posture, which was generally excellent, crumpled; for a moment, Jack was almost as tall as she was.

Hey, it was just a line, he almost said—he should have said. But Michele was faster. “I had no idea you were interested in me, Jack. I didn’t think you were interested in anyone.”

The problem was, Jack liked her; he didn’t want to hurt her feelings. And the truth is, if he’d told Michele Maher he was banging Mrs. Stackpole, Michele wouldn’t have believed him. Mrs. Stackpole was so ugly, to use McCarthy’s word—so unfortunate-looking in the world of women, even in the world of much older women—that the dishwasher herself had expressed disbelief that Jack Burns was banging her.

“Why me?” Mrs. Stackpole had asked him once, with all her weight crushing the breath out of him. He couldn’t speak, not that he knew the answer. There was an urgency about Mrs. Stackpole’s need to be with him; boys like Jack Burns had never even looked at her. How could Jack have been forthcoming about that to a beauty like Michele Maher?

“How can anyone not be interested in you, Michele?” Jack asked.

Maybe if he’d made that his end line, and walked away, it would have been all right. But he was too hungry to take a step away from the salad bar. When someone grabbed him, Jack first thought it was Michele. He hoped it was Michele.

“What the fuck did you say to Molly, asshole?” McCarthy asked him.

“Just the truth,” Jack replied. “You said my sister is ugly—isn’t that what you said?”

Jack hadn’t meant to make Michele Maher fall for him, but she was standing next to him. And what could Ed McCarthy do? Jack was a Redding boy. McCarthy knew that Jack could take a beating. And what would Coach Hudson do to McCarthy if he hurt Jack, and one of the Exeter wrestling team’s best lightweights missed several matches at the end of the season?

Also, Herman Castro would have kicked the crap out of Ed McCarthy if McCarthy had laid a hand on Jack. Jack had made a friend for life of Herman Castro, just by standing up for ugliness.

“Ed thinks my older sister, Emma, is ugly,” Jack explained to Michele Maher. He saw that it was hopeless to bring her back; she was too far gone already. “Naturally, I don’t see Emma that way, because I love her.”

Ed McCarthy’s best move—under the circumstances, perhaps his only move—was to walk away; even so, Jack was a little surprised when McCarthy did so. McCarthy had just lost his pathetic girlfriend—and the only way, for the rest of his life, he would ever breathe the same air as the Michele Mahers of this world was if he were standing beside the likes of Jack Burns. It was the Jack Burnses of this world who got the Michele Mahers—in Jack’s case, without half trying.

One weekend, in the spring of their senior year, Michele took Jack home with her to New York. It was the first time Jack felt he was being unfaithful to Emma, not because he was with Michele but because he didn’t tell Emma he was going to be in the city. Michele was so pretty, Jack was afraid it would hurt Emma’s feelings to meet her—or that Emma would treat Michele badly. (The whole Maher family was beautiful, even the dog.)

Besides, Jack rationalized, would it really matter to Emma if he was in town and didn’t tell her? Emma had graduated from NYU and was a fledgling comedy writer for a late-night New York TV show. She hated it. She’d come to the conclusion that, at least in her case, the hallway to making movies did not pass through television; she wasn’t even sure she still wanted to make movies.

“I’m going to be a writer, honey pie—I mean novels, not screenplays. I mean literature, not journalism.”

“When are you going to write?” he’d asked her.

“On the weekends.”

Thus Jack gave himself the impression that he might disturb Emma’s writing if he bothered her on a weekend.

Michele’s parents had an apartment on Park Avenue; it took up half a building and was bigger than Jack’s fifth-grade dorm at Redding. He’d not known that people had apartments with “fine art” that they actually owned. He didn’t even know that people could privately own fine art. Maybe that was a particularly Canadian underestimation of the power of the private sector, or else he’d been in Maine and New Hampshire long enough to have been deprived of his city sensibilities.

There was a small Picasso in the guest-room bathroom; it was low on the wall, beside the toilet, where you could see it best when you were sitting down. Jack was so impressed by it, he almost peed on it when he was standing up. For some reason, his penis produced an errant stream.

He thought there was something wrong with his penis—a little gonorrhea, maybe. Jack knew it was entirely possible that he’d caught the clap from Mrs. Stackpole. (Who knew who else she was fucking, or who else her husband was fucking?) Now, after almost pissing on the knee-high Picasso, Jack convinced himself that he had a venereal disease—something he might pass on to Michele Maher. Not that he imagined Michele would have sex with him. It was their first time away from Exeter together. Yes, he had kissed her—but he hadn’t once felt what Ed McCarthy crudely called her “high, hard ones.”

Just Jack’s luck—Michele’s beautiful parents went off to some black-tie event, leaving Jack and Michele in the vast Park Avenue apartment with the beautiful dog. They began by watching the TV in Michele’s bedroom, after her mom and dad had left. “They’ll be gone all evening,” Michele said.

Jack was prepared to make out, but he’d never imagined that Michele Maher was the kind of girl who would “go all the way”—to use one of Alice’s prehippie expressions. “I just hope you don’t know any girls who go all the way, Jack,” was what his mom had said when he was back in Toronto, in the snow, for his last so-called spring break.

Michele Maher wasn’t the kind of girl who went all the way, but she wanted to talk about it. Perhaps she’d been wrong not to do it.

“No, I think you’ve been right,” Jack quickly told her.

Short of telling her that he might have caught the clap from an Exeter dishwasher, he didn’t know what else to do but claim to be an advocate of not going all the way himself.

It was a John Wayne night on one of the TV channels, beginning with The Fighting Kentuckian. Leading a regiment of Kentucky riflemen, John Wayne wears what looks like an entire raccoon on his head. Jack liked John Wayne, but Emma had undermined Jack’s enthusiasm for Wayne’s kind of heroics; she’d been feeding him a strict diet of Truffaut and Bergman films. Jack liked Truffaut, but he loved Bergman.

It was true that he’d been bored by The Four Hundred Blows, and had said so. Emma was so disappointed in him that she stopped holding his penis; she picked it up again for Shoot the Piano Player, a film Jack adored, and held it without once letting go through Jules and Jim, while Jack imagined that Jeanne Moreau, not Emma, was holding his penis.

As for Ingmar Bergman, there was never enough. The Seventh Seal, The Virgin Spring, Winter Light, The Silence—those were the films that sold Jack Burns on the movies and made him want to act in films rather than the theater. Scenes from a Marriage, Face to Face, Autumn Sonata—those were the movies that inspired him. He couldn’t stop imagining his expression in close-up with those Bergman women. With every line he spoke, not neglecting the slightest gesture, Jack imagined that the camera was so tight on him that his whole face filled the giant screen—or just the fingers of his hand, making a fist, or even the tip of his index finger coming into frame alongside a doorbell.

Not to mention the sex in Bergman’s films—oh, those older women! And to think that Jack met all of them while Emma Oastler held his penis in her hand! (Bibi Andersson, Gunnel Lindblom, Ingrid Thulin, Liv Ullmann.) Meanwhile, Alice hoped that Jack didn’t know any girls who went all the way! What was she thinking?

“What’s wrong, Dick? Lost your hump?” Michele Maher asked. It was another Richard III joke.

Jack usually answered, “No, it’s just deflated.”

He couldn’t claim he was distracted by The Fighting Kentuckian, not for a moment. Michele and Jack made out through Rio Grande, too. John Wayne is at war again, this time with the Apaches. He is also at war with his estranged, tempestuous wife—Maureen O’Hara with her hooters. But Jack had eyes only for Michele Maher. God, she was beautiful! And nice, and smart, and funny. How he wanted her.

Michele Maher wanted him that night, too, but he refused to have sex with her—notwithstanding that he couldn’t take his eyes off her. He couldn’t stop himself from kissing her, touching her, holding her. He kept repeating her name. For years he would wake up saying it: “Michele Maher, Michele Maher, Michele Maher.”

“Jack Burns,” she said, half-mocking in her tone. “Richard the Humpback, also known as Third,” she said. “Lady Macbeth,” she teased him. She was the best kisser he would ever encounter, hands down—not forgetting that Emma Oastler could kiss up a storm. No one could hold a candle to Michele Maher in the kissing department.

Why, then, didn’t Jack simply tell her the truth? That he was afraid he had a dose of gonorrhea; that he might have caught the clap from an adulterous dishwasher, a woman old enough to be his mother! (It sounded like the subject of a play the Dramat might have chosen—or, more likely, a sequel to A Mail-Order Bride in the Northwest Territories.)

Why didn’t Jack tell Michele that he loved her, and that he wanted most of all to protect her from everything he imagined or knew to be bad about himself? He should have made up a story—God knows, he could act. He could have told Michele Maher that his workout partner had stepped on his penis in the wrestling room, a surprisingly common but little-discussed injury among wrestlers. Under the circumstances, he was simply too sore to have sex with her—or so he could have claimed.

But, no, Jack was such a fool, he proposed masturbating with Michele Maher—this instead of having sex with her! “It’s the safest sex there is,” Jack told her, while a bloody Indian war raged around them—the Apaches were whooping and dying. John Wayne was fighting for his life while Jack was committing suicide with Michele Maher. “You know, we take our clothes off, but I just touch myself, and you touch yourself,” he went on, digging his grave. “We keep looking at each other, we kiss—we just imagine it, the way actors do.”

The tears in Michele Maher’s eyes would have broken hearts on the big screen; she was a girl who could withstand the tightest close-up. “Oh, Jack,” she said. “All this time, I’ve defended you. When people say, ‘Jack Burns is just too weird,’ I always say, ‘No, he isn’t!’ ”

“Michele—” Jack started to say, but he could see it in her eyes. He had watched her fall for him; now he saw how irreversibly he’d lost her. The John Wayne Western on the TV was wreathed with a funereal dust—fallen horses, dead Apaches.

Jack left Michele Maher alone in her bedroom; he was sensitive enough to know that she wanted to be alone. The beautiful dog stayed with her. In his guest bedroom, with its fine-art bathroom, Jack was alone with the knee-high Picasso and his own TV. He watched The Quiet Man by himself.

John Wayne is an Irish-American prizefighter who gives up boxing when he unintentionally kills an opponent in the ring. He goes to Ireland and falls in love with Maureen O’Hara and her hooters (again). But Maureen’s brother (Victor McLaglen) is an asshole; in what is arguably the longest and least believable fistfight in Ireland’s history, Wayne has to put up his dukes again.

In the throes of Jack’s self-pity, he concluded that Victor McLaglen would have kicked the crap out of John Wayne. (McLaglen was a pro; he fought Jack Johnson, and gave Johnson all he could handle. Wayne wouldn’t have lasted a round with McLaglen.)

It was a long, largely silent trip back to Exeter with Michele Maher. Jack made matters worse between them by professing that he loved her; he declared that he’d only suggested mutual masturbation as an indication of his respect for her.

“I’ll tell you what’s weird about you, Jack—” Michele started to say, but she burst into tears and didn’t tell him. He was left to finish her thought in his imagination. For almost twenty years, Jack Burns would wish he could have that weekend back.

“If I had to guess,” Noah Rosen ventured, “it didn’t work out between you and Michele because you couldn’t stop looking at each other.”

Jack was only a week or two away from telling Noah about Mrs. Stackpole, which led Noah to tell his sister—and that would be the end of Jack’s friendship with Noah. A painful loss—at the time, more devastating to Jack than losing Michele Maher. But Noah would fade; Michele would persist.

Michele did nothing wrong. She was Jack’s age, seventeen going on eighteen, but she had the self-restraint and dignity not to tell her closest friends that Jack was a creep—or even that he was as weird as some of them thought he was. In truth, she went on defending him from the weirdness charge. Herman Castro later told Jack that Michele always spoke well of him, even after they’d “broken up.” Herman said: “When I think of the two of you together—well, I just can’t imagine it. You both must have felt you were models in a magazine or something.”

Herman Castro would go on to Harvard and Harvard Medical School. He became a doctor of infectious diseases and went back to El Paso, where he treated mostly AIDS patients. He married a very attractive Mexican-American woman, and they had a bunch of kids. From Herman’s Christmas cards, Jack would be relieved to see that the children took after her. Herman, as much as Jack loved him, was always hard to look at. He was slope-shouldered and jug-shaped, with a flattened nose and a protruding forehead; above his small, black, close-together eyes, his forehead bulged like a baked potato.

Herman Castro was the wrestling team’s photographer. In those days, heavyweights always wrestled last; Herman took pictures of his teammates wrestling even when he was warming up. Jack used to think that Herman liked to hide his face from view. Maybe the camera was his shield.

“Hey, amigo,” the note on Herman Castro’s Christmas card traditionally said, “when I think of your love life—well, I just can’t imagine it.”

Little did Herman know. Over time, Jack Burns would believe that he lost the love of his life on the night he lost Michele Maher. It would be small consolation to him to imagine that his father, at Jack’s age, would have fucked her—clap or no clap.

And he didn’t have the clap! Jack had himself checked at the infirmary when he got back from New York. The doctor said it was just some irritation, possibly caused by the change in his diet since the end of the wrestling season.

“It’s not gonorrhea?” Jack asked in disbelief.

“It’s nothing, Jack.”

After all, he’d been screwing a one-hundred-seventy-pound dishwasher for months on end—sometimes as often as four or five times a week. No doubt there was sufficient irritation to make Jack piss sideways at a knee-high Picasso—not to mention ruin his chances with “la belle Michele,” as Noah Rosen called Michele Maher.

Michele and Jack were in only one class together—fourth-year German. Many of the students who took German at the academy imagined that they might become doctors. German was said to be a good second language for the study of medicine. Jack had no such hope—he wasn’t strong in the sciences. What he liked about German was the word order—the verbs all lay in wait till the end of the sentence. Talk about end lines! In a German sentence, all the action happened at the end. German was an actor’s language.

Jack liked Goethe, but he loved Rilke, and in German IV, he loved most of all Shakespeare in German, particularly the love sonnets, which the teacher, Herr Richter, claimed were better auf Deutsch than they were in English.

Michele Maher, bless her heart, disagreed. “Surely, Herr Richter, you would not argue that ‘Lascivious grace, in whom all ill well shows,’ is improved by ‘Mutwillige Anmut, reizend noch im Schlimmen’!”

“Ah, but Michele,” Herr Richter intoned, “surely you would agree that ‘Sonst prüft die kluge Welt der Tränen Sinn, Und höhnt dich um mich, wenn ich nicht mehr bin’ is a considerable improvement on the original. Would you say it for us in English, Jack? You say it so well.”

“ ‘Lest the wise world should look into your moan,’ ” Jack recited to Michele Maher, “ ‘And mock you with me after I am gone.’ ”

“You see?” Herr Richter asked the class. “It’s a sizable stretch to make gone rhyme with moan, isn’t it? Whereas bin with Sinn—well, I rest my case.”

Jack could not look at Michele, nor she at him. To imagine that his last words to her might be the sizable stretch of trying to make gone rhyme with moan—it was too cruel.

In their last class together, Michele handed Jack a note. “Read it later, please,” was all she said.

It was something by Goethe. Michele liked Goethe better than Jack did. “Behandelt die Frauen mit Nachsicht.” He knew the line. “Be lenient when handling womankind.”

If he’d had the courage to give Michele a note, Jack would have chosen Rilke. “Sie lächelte einmal. Es tat fast weh.” But Michele Maher would have said it was too prosaic. “She smiled once. It was almost painful.”

One small measure of pride Jack took in his academic efforts at Exeter was that he managed to pass four years of German without Noah Rosen’s assistance. German was the only subject Noah couldn’t and didn’t help him with. (Quite understandably, as a Jew, Noah felt that German was the language of his people’s executioners and he refused to learn a word of it.)

Noah couldn’t help Jack with the SATs, either. There Jack was on his own; there aptitude was a far superior tool to attitude. Jack’s effort notwithstanding, his talent lagged behind that of his Exeter classmates. He had the lowest SAT scores in the Class of ’83.

“Actors don’t do multiple choice,” was the way Jack put it to Herman Castro.

“Why not?” Herman asked.

“Actors don’t guess,” Jack replied. “Actors do have choices, but they know what they are. If you don’t know the answer, you don’t guess.”

“If you don’t mind my saying so, Jack, that’s a pretty stupid approach to a multiple-choice examination.”

Because of his miserable SAT scores, Jack wouldn’t be joining Herman Castro and Noah Rosen at Harvard. He wouldn’t be attending any of the so-called better colleges or universities. His mother begged him to return to Toronto and go to university there. But he didn’t want to go back to Toronto.

Having initiated the distance between them, Alice suddenly wanted Jack to be close to her again. He wanted nothing to do with her. Jack was way over “the lesbian thing,” as Emma called it—Emma was way over it, too. They no longer cared that Alice and Mrs. Oastler were an item; in fact, both Emma and Jack were pleased, even proud, that their mothers were still together. So many couples weren’t still together, both the couples they’d known among their friends and the parents of so many of their friends.

But Jack couldn’t forget that he’d been sent away from Toronto—and from Canada, his country. For eight years, he’d been living in the United States; his fellow students, for the most part, were Americans, and the films that made him want to be an actor in the movies were European.

Jack applied to, and was accepted at, the University of New Hampshire. Emma was all over him. “For Christ’s sake, baby cakes, you shouldn’t choose UNH because of how much you like the local movie theater!” But he’d made his decision. He liked Durham and that movie theater, which was never the same, Jack would admit, when Emma Oastler wasn’t sitting beside him holding his penis.

That trip to the North Sea with his mother had formed Jack Burns. St. Hilda’s had established what Emma would correctly call his older-woman thing, and the school had given him some pretty basic acting techniques—also a belief in himself that he could be convincing, even as a girl. Redding had taught him how to work hard. Mrs. Adkins had drawn him to her sadness. And at Exeter he’d discovered that he was not an intellectual, but he had learned how to read and write. (At the time, Jack didn’t know how rare and useful this knowledge was—no more than he could have defined the vulnerability Mrs. Stackpole had exposed in him.)

The female faculty at Exeter struck Jack as sexually unapproachable, in that older-woman way. Whether Jack was right or wrong in that assumption, they were certainly not as approachable as Mrs. Stackpole—her crude, suggestive urgency had captivated him. Redding was a wilderness where women went and became weary, or at least weary-looking. At Exeter, on the other hand, there were some attractive faculty wives who captured the boys’ attention—if only at the fantasy level. (Jack wouldn’t have dreamed of approaching a single one of them; they all looked too happy.)

Least approachable of them all was Madame Delacorte, a French fox who worked in the library and whose husband taught in the Department of Romance Languages. Romance was not what Madame Delacorte brought to mind. There wasn’t a boy at Exeter who could look her in the eye—nor was there a boy who ever visited the library without searching longingly for her.

Madame Delacorte looked as if she’d just been laid but wanted more, much more. (Yet, somehow, the first sweaty encounter had not mussed her hair.) Madame Delacorte was as commanding a presence as Jeanne Moreau in Jules and Jim; not even her husband could approach her without stuttering, and he was from Paris.

Jack was cramming for his history final in the library one spring night; he had a favorite carrel on the second floor of the stacks. He’d burned his bridges with Noah Rosen and Michele Maher, and he was feeling resigned about his next four years in Durham, New Hampshire.

Emma Oastler was moving to Iowa City. She’d sent some of her writing to Iowa and had been admitted to the Writers’ Workshop there. Jack had never heard of the place. He knew only that Iowa was in the Midwest, and that he would miss Emma.

“You can come visit me, honey pie. I’m sure they have movie theaters there, despite all the writers. They probably have the movie theaters to purposely drive the writers crazy.”

In this context, Jack wasn’t worried about his history final—he was just a little depressed. When Madame Delacorte came to his carrel, he’d been plowing through a bunch of books he was supposed to have read already. He’d made a pile of the ones he was finished with; among them was a dusty tome about Roman law, which Madame Delacorte said someone had been looking for. She wanted him to return the book to the stacks on the third floor. The classics were kept there—all the Greek and Latin.

“Okay,” Jack said to Madame Delacorte. He could never look at her above her slender waist; her waist alone was enough to undo him. He went off to the third floor with the book about Roman law.

“Come right back, Jack,” Madame Delacorte called after him. “I don’t want to be responsible for distracting you.” As if she, or Jack, had any control of that!

It seemed that, as usual, there was no one in the stacks on the third floor. Jack quickly found where the book belonged, but—above the moldy bindings, in the next aisle—a pair of disembodied eyes regarded him. “Michele Maher isn’t the girl for you,” the voice that went with the eyes said. “You’re already good-looking. What do you need a good-looking girl for? You need something else, something real.”

Another dishwasher? Jack wondered. But he recognized the voice and the diluted, washed-out blue of the eyes. It was Molly whatever-her-name-was, Ed McCarthy’s ex-girlfriend. (Penis McCarthy, as Herman Castro less-than-lovingly called him.)

“Hi, Molly,” Jack said; he came around into her aisle and stood next to her.

“I should be your girlfriend,” Molly told him. “I know you love your sister, and she’s ugly. Well, I’m ugly, too.”

“You’re not ugly, Molly.”

“Yes, I am,” she said. She was demented, clearly. She also had a cold; the rims of her nostrils were red and her nose was running. Molly whatever-her-name-was leaned back against the stacks and closed her eyes. “Take me,” she whispered.

Jack didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. He did neither. On an impulse largely meant to do her minimal harm, he fell to his knees and lifted her skirt. He pushed his face into her panties; with both his hands on her buttocks, he pulled the waistband of her panties down.

Jack Burns actually licked a tenth-grade girl, a sixteen-year-old, in the stacks on the third floor of the Exeter library! From Mrs. Machado and Mrs. Stackpole, he knew exactly how to do it; the difference was, this time he initiated it. He could feel Molly’s fingers in his hair; she was pulling his head into her. He could feel her slumping against the stacks as she came on his face—not one’s usual library experience. And the worst of it was that he didn’t know her last name; he couldn’t even write her a letter of explanation.

Jack left her standing in the stacks, or barely standing. Unlike Michele Maher, Molly was short enough that he could kiss her on her forehead—as if she were a little girl. When he left her, with nothing to say for himself except that he had to cram for a history final, it seemed to him that her knees were buckling.

Jack found a drinking fountain, in which he washed his face. When he returned to his carrel on the second floor, he was aware he’d been away for what may have struck Madame Delacorte as a long time—not to mention that he’d suffered a major distraction. Maybe he was a little wild-eyed, or there was something in the aftermath of impromptu cunnilingus that caught Madame Delacorte’s eye.

“My word, Jack Burns,” she said. “What on earth have you been reading? Not Roman law, clearly.”

The lilt in her voice was more mischievous than scientific. Was Madame Delacorte flirting with him? He finally got up the nerve to look at her, but Madame Delacorte was as unreadable as Jack’s future. He knew only that the rest of his life had begun, and that he would begin it without Michele Maher—his first, maybe his last, true love.

18. Enter Claudia; Exit Mrs. McQuat

Jack Burns saw his college years through a telescope, the way you do when the object of your desire is not of the moment—the way you do when you’re biding your time. The University of New Hampshire was like a layover in an airport—a stop on Jack’s journey elsewhere. He got good grades, the kind he never could have gotten at Exeter—he even graduated cum laude—but he was detached the whole time.

In the student theater, Jack got every part he auditioned for, but there weren’t many he wanted. And he saw all the foreign films that came to Durham in those years, sometimes but not usually by himself; if he took a girl with him, she had to be someone who would hold his penis. There were only a couple of girls like that.

It was most often Claudia, who was a theater major. There was also a Japanese girl named Midori; she was in one of Jack’s life-drawing classes. He was the only male model for all of the life-drawing classes. As Mr. Ramsey would have said, it was an acting opportunity—and Jack got paid for it. Modeling for life drawing was not an occasion when he thought so fixedly of his audience of one, as Miss Wurtz had instructed him; rather it was an exercise in imagining the close-ups he was preparing for. He hoped there would be many.

Modeling for life drawing was an exercise in mind-over-matter, too, because Jack willed himself not to get an erection; what was more tricky, but he got pretty good at it, was allowing a hard-on to start and then stopping it. (It might have been that exercise that made a moviegoer out of Midori.)

“Set us free, O God, from the bondage of our sins,” Lottie used to pray. But Jack had stopped hearing from Lottie, even by postcard. He never learned what happened to her on Prince Edward Island—maybe nothing.

Emma had taught Jack how to drive—illegally, in keeping with her nature, but at least Jack got his driver’s license at the earliest opportunity. He didn’t own a car; hence he developed a possessive fondness for Claudia’s Volvo. He liked Claudia, but he loved her car.

Claudia was an aspiring actress—she and Jack were in several student plays together—and her willingness as a penis-holder was for the most part unshakable. Yes, he had sex with her, too, which made the penis-holding less strange (albeit arguably less exciting) than with Emma. Claudia also drove Jack where he wanted to go, and once he had his license, she was generous about lending him her Volvo.

Jack drove to Exeter a few times a week, just to work out with the wrestling team and run on the sloped, wooden track in the indoor cage. He had no interest in wrestling in college; it had never been the competition that mattered to him. He’d wanted to stay in halfway decent shape and to be able to protect himself, and he owed the sport a debt he didn’t mind repaying. He made himself an extra coach in the Exeter wrestling room, mostly demonstrating moves and holds for the wrestlers who were beginners—much as Chenko, Pavel, and Boris had done for him as a child, and Coach Clum and Coach Hudson later on.

Unlike Coach Clum, Coach Hudson hadn’t looked down on Jack’s habit of having his cauliflower ears drained in the training room. Unlike Coach Clum, Coach Hudson was a good-looking guy; he understood why Jack might not want to look like a wrestler for the rest of his life, especially if he wanted to be an actor.

“Given what I hope will be my career, wouldn’t you say it is practical of me to have my cauliflower ears drained?” Jack asked him.

“Very practical,” Coach Hudson replied.

There was another wrestling coach at Exeter in those years. Coach Shapiro taught Russian at the academy; later he would be made dean of students.

Once, when Jack brought Claudia with him to the wrestling room, she sat sullenly on the mat with her back against the padded wall—just watching the wrestlers with hostile, womanly suspicion, as if she might any second pull out a gun and shoot one of them. There was something vaguely dangerous about Claudia—a secret she kept to herself, perhaps, or her plans for a future she wouldn’t disclose. Or was she, like Jack, always acting?

Coach Shapiro remarked that Jack’s friend was both “arrestingly beautiful” and “Slavic-looking.” Jack knew that Claudia was attractive, although every woman’s claim to beauty was diminished, in his mind’s eye, by the incomparable Michele Maher. But he hadn’t thought of Claudia as particularly Slavic-looking. On the other hand, Coach Shapiro was a Russian scholar; he obviously knew what he was talking about. He knew his wrestling, too. Coach Shapiro and Jack had a few of Chenko’s old tricks in common.

This amounted to Jack’s male company in his years in Durham—those wrestling coaches at his old school, and the younger of those Exeter wrestlers who were just learning how.

Jack was in his second year at UNH before he was forced to choose between his Slavic-looking beauty, Claudia, and his conquest from life drawing—his personal jewel of the Orient, Midori, with whom he had first seen Kurosawa’s Yojimbo. (An exciting film to see with a Japanese girl holding your penis in her hand!) Jack must have been in the United States long enough to have succumbed to American materialism, because he chose Claudia—not only because she had a car; she also had her own apartment. It was off-campus, in Newmarket—more or less between Durham and Exeter. And because Claudia was an actress, she and Jack were interested in the same kind of summer jobs. Summer stock, everyone called it. (Claudia used to say that the phrase reminded her of cows.)

New England had uncounted summer-stock theaters, some better than others, and while graduate students were more often hired for the paying jobs—these were people in MFA theater programs, for the most part—some gifted undergraduates could find internships, and some, including Claudia and Jack, were even paid.

Claudia liked the theater better than Jack did. She knew Jack wanted to be a movie actor, but films failed to impress her. She once told Jack that she would have walked out of most of the movies she saw with him, except that she was holding his penis in her hand.

Claudia was heavy-breasted and self-conscious about her hips, but her creamy-smooth skin, and her prominent jaw and cheekbones, gave her a face made for close-ups. She should have liked movies better than she did, because the camera would have loved her—not least her eyes, which were a yellowish brown, like polished wood. But Claudia believed she would be “hopelessly fat” before she was thirty. “Then only the theater will have me, and only because I can act.”

In March of their sophomore year, Claudia and Jack drove halfway across the country in her Volvo to spend their spring vacation with Emma. Jack had decided to take Claudia to Toronto the following fall, and Emma thought she and Jack should prepare “poor Claudia” for the eventual meeting with Alice and Mrs. Oastler. Jack wasn’t taking Claudia to Toronto solely for the purpose of meeting his mother, although such a meeting was to be expected. His mom knew they lived together; naturally, both Alice and Leslie Oastler were eager to meet Claudia.

Jack’s principal reason for going to Toronto was to take Claudia to the film festival and attempt to pass her off as a Russian actress who didn’t speak a word of English; he was looking at the trip as what Mr. Ramsey would have called an “acting opportunity” for both of them. Also Claudia and Jack were a little desperate for some city time, which is what living in New Hampshire did to people.

To Jack’s surprise, Emma liked Claudia, maybe because Claudia also struggled with her weight. Though Claudia was beautiful, her self-deprecating view of herself won Emma over completely. (Quite possibly, Emma also knew that Claudia and Jack wouldn’t last.)

Jack was less certain than Emma that Claudia’s view of herself was self-deprecating. Her criticism of her body may also have been an acting opportunity, because Claudia had no lack of confidence in her attractiveness to men—nor could she have failed to notice Jack’s appreciation of her full figure. And Claudia had overheard Jack saying to Emma, on the phone, that the road trip to Iowa in the spring was first and foremost a “motel opportunity.”

“Just what did you mean by that?” Claudia had asked him, when he hung up the phone.

“You’re the kind of girl who makes me think about finding a motel,” he’d told her; he wasn’t acting.

But Claudia may have been acting when she replied—that was what was a little dangerous or unknowable about her. “With you, I wouldn’t need a motel, Jack. With you, I could do it standing up.”

They had tried it that way—both of them conscious, at first, of how they might have looked to an audience, but in the end they gave themselves over to the moment. At least Jack did; with Claudia, he could never be sure.

There were indeed motel opportunities on their trip to the Midwest and back, and Jack was also pleased that, unlike New England, Iowa had a real spring; the surrounding farmlands were lush. Emma and three other graduate students in the Writers’ Workshop were renting a farmhouse a few miles from Iowa City; the other students had gone home for the holiday, so Emma and Claudia and Jack had the farm to themselves. They drove into town to eat almost every night—Emma was no cook.

Emma wanted Claudia to understand “the lesbian thing” between Jack’s mom and hers, which Emma said was actually not a lesbian thing.

“It’s not?” Jack asked, surprised.

“They’re not normal lesbians, baby cakes—they’re nothing at all like lesbians, except that they sleep together and live together.”

“They sound a little like lesbians,” Claudia ventured.

“You gotta understand their relationship in context,” Emma explained. “Jack’s mom feels that her life with men began and ended with Jack’s dad. My mom simply hates my dad—and other men, by association. Before my mom and Jack’s mom met each other, they had any number of bad boyfriends—the kind of boyfriends who are in the self-fulfilling-prophecy category, if you know what I mean.”

“Yes, I know,” Claudia said. “You think men are assholes, so you pick an asshole for a boyfriend. I know the type.”

“That way,” Emma went on, “when your boyfriend dumps you, or you dump him, you don’t have to change your mind about what assholes men are.”

“Yes, exactly,” Claudia agreed.

Jack didn’t say anything. It was news to him that his mother had “had any number of bad boyfriends” before she met Mrs. Oastler, and it struck him that Emma and Claudia might have been describing Emma’s love life—what little he knew of it. There’d been a lot of boyfriends, most of them one-night stands—all of them bad, in Emma’s estimation, yet she’d never experienced the slightest difficulty in getting over any of them. (Most of them young, in Jack’s opinion—at least the ones he’d met.)

In an effort to change the subject, albeit slightly, Jack asked Emma a question about his mother that had been on his mind for years. It was easier to ask the question with a third party present; out of respect for Claudia, Jack hoped that Emma might hold back a little something in her answer.

“I don’t know about your mom, Emma,” he began, “but I would be surprised if my mother wasn’t still interested in men—in young men, anyway. If only occasionally.”

“I wouldn’t absolutely trust my mom around young men, either, honey pie, but I know your mom is still interested in men—in young men especially.”

Jack wasn’t surprised, but this was the first confirmation he’d had. And, recalling one of Emma’s sleepy-time tales, Jack wondered if the bad boyfriend in the squeezed-child saga might have been an ex-boyfriend of Mrs. Oastler’s—someone who’d turned Emma off older men, or even men her own age.

As for Alice, she had left the Chinaman and moved into her own tattoo shop on Queen Street. When Alice opened her shop, which was called Daughter Alice, she got in on the ground floor of a trend. (No doubt Leslie Oastler had helped her buy the building, Jack thought.)

In later years, Queen Street would be too trendy to stand, with stores with cute names and an overabundance of bistros. Daughter Alice was located west of that, where Queen Street began to get a little seedy—and, in Emma’s opinion, “a lot Chinese.”

From the moment Alice moved in, her clientele was “way young”—to use Emma’s description. But Jack never knew if the young people came because of his mom or because Queen Street was full of young people most of the time. Emma said it was chiefly young men who went to Daughter Alice. Occasionally they went with their girlfriends, who got tattooed, too, but Jack already knew that young men liked his mother, and that she was attracted to them.

Emma also said that Leslie Oastler was “not a Queen Street person.” Mrs. Oastler didn’t much care for the atmosphere or the clientele in Daughter Alice. But after all her years as someone’s apprentice, Alice loved working for herself. The tattoo parlor was always full; people were happy to wait their turn, or just watch Alice work. She had her flash on the walls, nobody else’s; she had her notebooks full of her stencils, which her customers could look through while they waited. She made tea and coffee, and always had music playing. She had tropical fish in brightly lit aquariums; she’d even arranged some of her flash underwater, with the fish, so that the fish appeared to be swimming in a tattoo world.

“That shop is a happening,” Emma told Claudia.

Jack knew that, but the emphasis on the young men had escaped him—or he just hadn’t wanted to think about it. The thought of his mother with boys his age, or younger, was disturbing. Jack was much happier imagining his mom in Leslie Oastler’s arms, where she’d looked safe to him—if not exactly happy.

“And what do you suppose your mom thinks of my mom’s young men, if there are any?” Jack asked Emma.

“For the most part—” Emma said; she stopped herself and then resumed, speaking more to Claudia than to Jack. “For the most part, I think my mom is glad Jack’s mom isn’t a man.”

It was always hard for Jack to dispute Emma’s authority, especially on the subject of his mother and Mrs. Oastler. Since ’75, when he’d gone off to Redding, Emma had spent more time with their moms than Jack had. Toronto wasn’t his city, not anymore.

All he’d really known of Toronto was Mrs. Wicksteed’s old house on Spadina and Lowther, and the St. Hilda’s area of Forest Hill. Well, okay—there was the Bathurst Street gym, and what little he could see of the ravine near Sir Winston Churchill Park from Mrs. Machado’s apartment on St. Clair. But Jack had never known downtown Toronto very well, especially not that area of Jarvis and Dundas, where the Chinaman’s tattoo parlor was—and he was a virtual stranger to Queen Street West and his mom’s happening, as Emma called it, at Daughter Alice.

Between Emma and Jack, Emma was the true Torontonian—even when she was in Iowa City, and later, when she was living in Los Angeles.

Alice had finally tattooed Emma. Jack couldn’t imagine the negotiations this had entailed, not only with his mother but with Mrs. Oastler. The butterfly Emma had once wanted was replaced by her latest heart’s desire, a smaller version of Alice’s famous Rose of Jericho.

“Don’t give me any shit about it,” Emma told Jack she had said to her mom. “If you’d let me get a stupid butterfly on my ankle when I wanted one, you wouldn’t be faced with a vagina today.”

The problem was that Emma didn’t want to conceal the vagina. This was no flower hidden in a rose—this was just the petals of that most recognizable flower. Granted it was small, but it was clearly a vagina. (Oh, Jack thought—to have been a fly on the wall for these mother-daughter discussions!)

Alice had smoothed the way for the tattoo to happen. “It’s a question of where it is, Emma,” Alice said. “I refuse to tattoo a vagina on your ankle.”

Naturally, Emma was “way beyond” (as she put it) wanting a tattoo on her ankle—and Alice would no longer put a tattoo on a woman’s coccyx. She’d read in a tattoo magazine that an anesthesiologist wouldn’t give you an epidural if you were tattooed there. (Possibly this had something to do with the ink getting into the spinal column, although the danger of that happening sounded unlikely.)

“What if you have a child and you need an epidural?” Alice asked Emma.

“I’m not ever going to have children, Alice,” Emma told her.

“You don’t know that,” Alice replied.

“Yeah, I know that, Alice.”

“I’m not giving you a vagina on your coccyx, Emma.”

Even Emma had to admit that her coccyx would have been a confusing place for a vagina. Alice finally agreed to put the tattoo on Emma’s hip, just below the panty line; that way, Emma could see it without looking in a mirror and she could see it in a mirror as well. “Which hip?” Alice asked her.

Emma considered this, but not for long. “My right one,” she replied.

According to Emma, the tattoo was already a vagina-in-progress when Alice asked her: “Why the right hip?”

“I generally sleep on my left side,” Emma told her. “If I’m sleeping with a guy, I want to be sure he can see the vagina—the tattoo, I mean.”

Emma said she appreciated Alice’s thoughtful reply, although she had to wait for it. Jack could imagine this exactly: his mother never taking her foot off the foot-switch, the needles in the tattoo machine going nonstop, the flow of ink and pain as steady as hard rain. At first, Emma was vague about the music that was playing at the time. “It might have been ‘Mr. Tambourine Man,’ ” she said.

Though I know that evenin’s empire has returned into sand,

Vanished from my hand,

Left me blindly here to stand but still not sleeping.

My weariness amazes me, I’m branded on my feet,

I have no one to meet

And the ancient empty street’s too dead for dreaming.

“There were the usual creepy guys hanging around the tattoo parlor,” as Emma remembered her experience. Jack felt certain these guys would have had more than a passing interest in the expanse of Emma’s hip that was exposed, not to mention her tattoo-in-progress.

“Come to think of it, it was Dylan, but it was ‘Just Like a Woman,’ ” Emma suddenly recalled. Jack could imagine this, too.

Ah, you fake just like a woman, yes, you do

You make love just like a woman, yes, you do

Then you ache just like a woman

But you break just like a little girl.

“Let me be sure I understand you, Emma,” Alice said, after a lengthy pause. “If you’re sleeping with a guy, you want him to be able to see this tattoo—even when you’re asleep?”

“He may forget me, but he’ll remember my tattoo,” Emma said.

“Lucky fella,” Alice said. It seemed to Emma that Alice was keeping time to Bob Dylan with the foot-switch as she tattooed on.

“My mom’s a bitch, but you’re gonna love Alice,” Emma told Claudia. “Everyone loves Alice.”

“I used to,” Jack said.

He walked outside to have a look at the Iowa farmland. It was stretched out flat, as far as he could see—nothing like the tree-dense hills of Maine and New Hampshire. Emma followed him outside.

“Okay, so I lied—not quite everyone loves your mother,” Emma said.

“I used to,” Jack said again.

“Let’s go see a movie, baby cakes. Let’s take Claudia to the picture show.”

“Sure,” Jack said.

If he’d had half a brain, he might have anticipated the problem inherent in watching a movie with Emma and Claudia. It was most unlike him not to remember the movie; he even remembered bad movies. But from the moment Jack sat down in the theater, with Claudia seated to his left and Emma to his right, the problem—namely, which of them would hold his penis—presented itself. Any thoughts he might have had about the film vanished.

Emma, who was left-handed, put her hand in Jack’s lap first; she had no sooner unzipped his fly than Claudia, who was right-handed, made contact with his penis, which Emma already held in her hand. No heads turned; the three of them stared unblinkingly at the screen. Claudia politely withdrew her hand, but no farther than the inside of Jack’s left thigh. Emma, in a conciliatory gesture, prodded his penis in Claudia’s direction until the tip touched the back of Claudia’s hand. Claudia put her hand back in his lap, holding both his penis and Emma’s hand. Watching the film in this fashion gave Jack a two-hour erection.

After the movie, they went out and drank some beer. Jack didn’t really like to drink. Emma bought the beer, but either Claudia or Jack could have. No one ever carded Claudia; although she was only nineteen, she looked like an older woman, not a college student. And ever since Jack had seen Yojimbo, no one had carded him. He was nineteen, almost twenty, but he’d adopted Toshiro Mifune’s disapproving scowl, and he used a fair amount of gel in his hair. Emma approved of the look, the scowl especially, but Claudia occasionally complained about his shaving only every third day.

It was Toshiro Mifune’s indignation that Jack chose to imitate—particularly in the beginning of Yojimbo, when the samurai comes to town and sees the dog trot by with a human hand in its mouth. Jack loved that outraged look Mifune gives the dog.

Emma had too much to drink, and Jack drove her car back to the farmhouse, with Emma and Claudia holding hands and making out in the backseat. “If you were back here, honey pie, we’d make out with you, too,” Emma said.

Jack was used to Emma’s lawlessness, her willingness to bend the rules, but Claudia’s seeming complicity unnerved him. Though Emma was complicated—and she could be difficult—it was Claudia Jack couldn’t figure out. Like him, she seemed to be biding her time; she held herself back, she seemed detached, she was always a little hard to read. Or was Claudia merely holding a mirror up to Jack, stymieing him in the same ways he stymied her?

Back at the farmhouse, after Emma had passed out, Claudia helped Jack carry Emma to her bedroom, where they undressed her and put her to bed. Emma was already snoring, but this failed to distract Claudia and Jack; they couldn’t help noticing the perfect vagina tattooed on Emma’s right hip.

“Exactly what is your relationship with Emma?” Claudia asked.

“I don’t really know,” Jack replied honestly.

“Boy, I’ll say you don’t!” Claudia said, laughing.

When they were in bed, Claudia asked him: “When did the penis-holding start? I mean with Emma. I know when it started with me.”

Jack pretended not to remember exactly. “When I was eight or nine,” he said. “Emma would have been fifteen or sixteen. Or maybe it was a little earlier. I might have been seven. Emma was maybe fourteen.”

Claudia went on holding his penis, not saying anything. When he was almost asleep, she asked him: “Do you have any idea how weird that is, Jack?”

Michele Maher had made him sensitive to his alleged weirdness—as in too weird. Jack harbored no illusion that Claudia had mistaken him for the love of her life; surely Claudia was too smart to imagine for a moment that Jack thought she was the love of his life. But it hurt him that Claudia thought he was weird.

“Too weird?” Jack asked her.

“That depends, Jack.”

He didn’t like this game. Depends on what? he knew she wanted him to ask her. But he wouldn’t ask—he already knew the answer. He held her breasts, he nuzzled her neck, but just as his penis was coming to life in her hand, Claudia let it go. “Why doesn’t Emma want to have children?” she asked.

Well, Jack Burns was an actor—he knew a loaded question when he heard one. “Maybe she doesn’t think she’ll be a good mother,” Jack ventured, still holding Claudia’s breasts. The question was really about him, of course. Why didn’t he want children? Because, if he turned out to be like his father, he would leave, he had told Claudia once. He didn’t want to be the kind of father who left.

But this answer hadn’t satisfied Claudia. Jack was well aware she wanted to have children. As an actress, Claudia hated her body; that she had “a body designed to have children” was the only positive thing she ever said about herself. She said this as if she meant it, too. To Jack, it didn’t sound like an act. Clearly, in her mind, the kind of father Jack would turn out to be was Jack’s problem.

“It depends on whether or not you want children, Jack,” Claudia said.

Jack let go of her breasts and rolled over, turning his back to her in the bed. Claudia rolled toward him, wrapping her arm around his waist and once more holding his penis.

“We don’t graduate from college for another two years,” Jack pointed out to her.

“I don’t mean I want children now, Jack.”

He’d already told Claudia that he never wanted children. “Not till the day I discover that my dad has been a loving father to a child, or children, he didn’t leave.” That was how Jack had put it to her.

Was it any wonder Claudia held herself back from him?

Yet they had fun together—in summer stock, especially. The previous summer, they’d done Romeo and Juliet in a playhouse in the Berkshires. The older, veteran actors got all the main parts. Claudia was Juliet’s understudy. The dull, flat-chested robot they cast as Juliet never missed a night’s performance—not even a matinee. Jack had wanted to be Romeo—or, failing that, Mercutio—but because he’d been a wrestler and looked confrontational, they made him Tybalt, that cocky asshole.

Claudia was always taking their picture; maybe she thought that if there were sufficient photographic evidence of them as a couple, they might stay together. She had a camera with a delayed-shutter mechanism; she would set the timer and then run to get in the photo. (The obsessive picture-taking sometimes made Jack wonder if Claudia just might have mistaken him for the love of her life.)

After their visit to Emma, Claudia and Jack did a García Lorca play—The House of Bernarda Alba—at a summer playhouse in Connecticut. The setting was Spain, 1936. Claudia and Jack both played women. Jack had eaten some bad clams and was food-poisoned for one evening performance. There was no intermission. The director, who was also a woman, told him to “suck it up and wear a longer skirt.” His understudy had a yeast infection, and the director was more sympathetic to her ailment than she was to Jack’s. (There were nine women in the cast, plus Jack.)

He had terrible stomach cramps and diarrhea. In the grip of an alarmingly explosive episode, he flinched so violently that one of his falsies slipped out of his bra; he managed to trap it against his ribs with his elbow. Claudia later told him that he looked as if he were mocking the moment of the playwright’s assassination in the Spanish Civil War; Jack was thankful García Lorca was not alive to suffer through his performance.

“What a learning experience!” Mr. Ramsey responded, when Jack wrote him about the long night of the bad clams.

Miss Wurtz would have been proud of him; never had he concentrated with such pinpoint accuracy on his audience of one. He could almost see his father in the audience. (It was the perfect play for William, Jack was thinking—all women!)

Claudia and Jack were both understudies that summer in Cabaret, their first musical. He was the understudy to the Emcee, a Brit who told Jack pointedly on opening night not to get his hopes up; he’d never been sick a day in his life. Jack’s heart wasn’t in the Emcee role, anyway. He would have been a better Sally Bowles than the woman who was cast as Sally—even better than Claudia, who was her understudy.

But it would have been too aggressive a moment in their relationship—had Jack auditioned for the Sally Bowles character and beaten out Claudia for the part. They spent a month singing “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” and “Maybe This Time” to each other—in the privacy of their boudoir, where all understudies shine.

But he and Claudia were cast as Kit Kat Girls in Cabaret, so they got to strut their stuff to an audience. Given the scant costume, not to mention the period—Berlin, 1929–30—Jack was a somewhat transparent transvestite, but the audience loved him. Claudia said she was jealous because he looked hotter than she did.

“You better be careful, Jack,” Claudia warned him. It was the summer they were both twenty. “If you get any better in drag, no one’s going to cast you as a guy anymore.” (Under the circumstances, Jack thought it was better not to tell her how badly he had wanted the Sally Bowles part.)

How well he would remember that summer in Connecticut. When Sally Bowles and the Kit Kat Girls sang “Don’t Tell Mama” and “Mein Herr,” Jack was looking right at the audience; he saw their faces. They were staring at him, the transvestite Kit Kat Girl—not at Sally. They couldn’t take their eyes off him. Every man in that audience made his skin crawl.

Both Claudia and Jack were good enough students to skip a few classes in order to attend the film festival in Toronto that September. Their teachers permitted them to write about the movies they saw, in place of the work they would miss—Jack’s first and last adventure in film criticism, except at small dinner parties.

When he took Claudia to Daughter Alice to meet his mother for the first time, Jack was questioning Claudia’s claim that she had seen Raul Julia coming out of a men’s room at the Park Plaza. Alice immediately took Claudia’s side. Jack knew that film festivals were full of such real or imagined sightings, but he wanted his mom and Claudia to like each other; he held his tongue.

Alice was tattooing a small scorpion on a young woman’s abdomen. The scorpion’s narrow, segmented tail was curled up over its back. The venomous stinger, at the tip of the tail, was directly under the girl’s navel; the arachnid’s pincers were poised above her pubic hair. The young woman was obviously disturbed—she would be a handful under the best of circumstances, Jack thought, although he held his tongue about that, too. He could see that Claudia was enthralled with the atmosphere of the tattoo parlor; he didn’t want to be the voice of disbelief, about either the Raul Julia sighting or the forbidding location of the scorpion tattoo.

The film festival was good for Daughter Alice’s business. Alice told them she’d been tattooing a guy who was a die-hard moviegoer when she saw Glenn Close walk by on the Queen Street sidewalk. Jack seriously doubted it. He didn’t think Queen and Palmerston was a Glenn Close part of town, but all he said was: “I’m surprised Glenn didn’t stop in for a Rose of Jericho.”

Claudia, who was instantly fond of Alice—as Emma had said she would be—was angry at Jack for what she called his disrespectful tone of voice. This created some tension between Claudia and Jack, and they had different reactions to My Beautiful Laundrette, which Alice and Mrs. Oastler and Claudia loved. Jack didn’t hate the film. All he said was: “I was expecting the laundrette to be a beautiful woman.”

“That would be a laundress, dear,” his mom said.

“I thought the word for the place was a launderette, not a laundrette,” Jack said.

“God, you’re picky,” Claudia told him.

“Talk about a ‘disrespectful tone of voice’!” he said.

And Jack was less than thrilled to see Desert Hearts, which even Leslie Oastler described as a lesbian love story—she’d been dying to see it. (Alice visibly less so.) The film drew a crowd of women holding hands. Claudia, who wouldn’t hold Jack’s penis at any film they attended with Alice and Mrs. Oastler, wouldn’t even hold his hand at Desert Hearts. It was as if Claudia were contemplating her own trip to Reno, without him; maybe Claudia imagined discovering herself with Helen Shaver, or something.

All Jack said was: “The characters are a little sketchy.” This was enough to turn all three women against him: he was homophobic; he was threatened by lesbians. “I like Helen Shaver,” he kept saying, but this didn’t save him.

The festival marked the beginning of an Asian boom, some guy hitting on Claudia told her at a screening party. Jack thought it was cool to say nothing; he just kept his hand on Claudia’s ass, in a clearly nonplatonic way. When Claudia went to the women’s room, Jack gave the Asian-boom asshole his Toshiro Mifune scowl. The guy slunk away.

Alice and Leslie lit into Jack about being “too possessive.” They loved Claudia, they told him. No woman likes to be touched in public—not to the degree that Jack touched Claudia, they said. (This advice from the couple who’d held hands and played footsie during Jack’s ground-breaking performance in A Mail-Order Bride in the Northwest Territories!)

Jack had had it with going to the movies and the parties with his mother and Mrs. Oastler. That night, in bed, he complained to Claudia about it. They were staying in Emma’s room. (“The bed’s bigger—as you know, dear,” his mom had reminded him.)

Claudia thought that Alice and Leslie were a cute couple. “It’s obvious that they adore you,” Claudia said. Perhaps Jack lacked the perspective to see this.

He decided to take Claudia to St. Hilda’s—not only so she could see his old school, which had been so formative of his older-woman thing, but also to meet his favorite teachers. What a mistake! All the girls looked preternaturally young. (Of course they did—Claudia and Jack were twenty-year-olds!)

Jack took Claudia first to meet Mr. Malcolm, who always left school in a hurry—wheeling Mrs. Malcolm in her wheelchair ahead of him. Wheelchair Jane, who couldn’t see Claudia, reached out and touched Claudia’s hips, her waist, even her breasts. (A blind woman’s audacity is like no other’s, maybe.) “Following in his father’s footsteps, isn’t he?” she asked her husband.

Jack was still trying to explain this reference to Claudia when they encountered Mr. Ramsey emerging from the boys’ washroom. “Jack Burns!” he cried, zipping up his fly. “Patron saint of mail-order brides!” This reference, Jack realized, would take somewhat longer to explain. Claudia seemed unnerved by her close proximity to a man so small who never stopped bouncing on the balls of his feet.

Mr. Ramsey insisted on bringing them to his after-school drama rehearsal of the day; the senior-school girls were doing The Diary of Anne Frank, which Jack knew brought bitter memories to Claudia. In junior high school, she had auditioned for the part of the doomed girl, but she had already looked too old. (Her boobs were too big—even then.)

Mr. Ramsey presented Jack to the girls as the best male St. Hilda’s actor in memory—despite the fact that his reputation rested on his female roles. Claudia was introduced as Jack’s actress friend. “They’re here for the film festival!” Mr. Ramsey exclaimed, which led the star-struck girls to imagine that Claudia and Jack were promoting a new movie. Mr. Ramsey made it seem as if they were up-and-coming names in the industry.

Jack was reminded of his irritation with Claudia for refusing to let him pass her off as a famous Russian film star of the not-English-speaking variety. Her courage was not of the improvisational kind—without lines, she was lost. And not only did she always seem older than she was; she was also inclined to lie about her age. “I’m in my early thirties, and that’s all I want to say about it,” she would say. It was a good line, but it was bullshit—by ten years, and counting.

The St. Hilda’s girls looked forlorn. Jack Burns was very much an object of their keenest desire, but he was with this voluptuous woman who made them feel sexually retarded. To make matters worse, Mr. Ramsey wanted Claudia and Jack to perform something. (Jack had written him that he and Claudia had been in plays together.)

Against Jack’s better judgment, he let Claudia persuade him to sing a Kit Kat Girl number. “Mein Herr” was Claudia’s choice, not Jack’s; it was a little raunchy for St. Hilda’s, he told her later. (In retrospect, in the context of the play the girls were rehearsing, the insensitivity of Claudia and Jack singing a song from that sleazy Nazi nightclub in Berlin took Jack’s breath away.) And to make “Mein Herr” more confounding, they both sang it as if they were Sally Bowles, causing Claudia finally to realize how much Jack had wanted her part.

When they finished the lascivious song, Mr. Ramsey was a virtual pogo stick of enthusiasm. The poor girls swooned, or died of envy and embarrassment. Claudia said that she and Jack should let them all get back to The Diary of Anne Frank.

But Mr. Ramsey was pained to let them go. He wanted to know what they thought of the festival and the films they had seen. “Have you seen the Godard? Hail Mary or something,” Mr. Ramsey said. “The Pope has condemned it!”

“Jack has condemned it without seeing it,” Claudia said. “He hates Godard.” Jack tried to look friendlier than Toshiro Mifune, if only for the sake of the mortified girls.

The young girl cast as Anne Frank was pushed forward to meet them. Claudia seemed fixated on her flat chest. Jack observed that the poor girl was terrified of them, as if they represented a blatant contradiction of Anne Frank’s most memorable observation, which Claudia knew by heart and recited (without a hint of sarcasm) on the spot. “ ‘It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.’ ”

“Marvelous!” Mr. Ramsey cried. “A trifle deadpan for Anne, perhaps, but marvelous!”

“We have to go,” Claudia told him, mercifully.

The girls were all looking at Jack as if Claudia had been holding his penis in front of them. Claudia was looking at Jack as if not even Godard’s Hail Mary could be as excruciatingly boring as this journey through time on his old stomping grounds.

Jack was actually tempted to see the Godard film, because the Catholics were up in arms about it and had threatened to protest the Toronto screening. But Claudia didn’t like Godard any better than he did. (Hail Mary was an update of Christ’s birth, this time to a virgin gas-station attendant and her cabdriver boyfriend.)

It was in this disturbed frame of mind—Claudia hating Jack for bringing her to his old school, Jack wishing that he had not come (or that he’d come alone)—that the sudden appearance of The Gray Ghost startled Claudia and Jack, just as Jack was about to show Claudia the chapel. Claudia made such an immediate impression on Mrs. McQuat that Jack’s former fourth-grade teacher ushered them both up the center aisle and into the foremost pew, where she insisted they sit down; at least she didn’t make them kneel.

Claudia was not religious and later told Jack she was offended by the stained-glass images of “those servile women attending to Jesus.” Mrs. McQuat held Claudia’s hand and Jack’s; she asked them in a low whisper when they were going to be married. That Claudia and Jack were still students was a point lost on The Gray Ghost, who’d heard a rumor spreading like a forest fire through the girls at St. Hilda’s—namely, that Jack Burns had been seen at the film festival in the company of an American movie star, apparently Claudia. He’d brought her to St. Hilda’s to show her the chapel. The rumor was that Jack wanted to be married in the chapel of his old school, where he’d had such a formative experience.

“We haven’t really made any plans,” Jack said, not knowing how else to answer Mrs. McQuat’s question.

“I’m never going to marry Jack,” Claudia told The Gray Ghost. “I’m not marrying anybody who doesn’t want to have children.”

“Mercy!” Mrs. McQuat exclaimed. “Why … wouldn’t you want to have … children … Jack?”

“You know,” he answered.

“He says it’s all about his father,” Claudia told her.

“You’re not … still worrying … you’ll turn out like him … are you, Jack?” The Gray Ghost asked.

“It’s a reasonable suspicion,” he said.

“Nonsense!” Mrs. McQuat cried. “Do you know … what I think?” she asked Claudia, patting her hand. “I think it’s just an excuse … not to marry anybody!”

“That’s what I think, too,” Claudia said.

Jack felt like Jesus in the stained glass; everywhere he went in Toronto, women were ganging up on him. He must have looked like he wanted to leave, because The Gray Ghost took hold of his wrist in that not-uncertain way of hers.

“You aren’t leaving without seeing … Miss Wurtz … are you?” she asked him. “Mercy, she’ll be … crushed if she learns you were here … and you didn’t see her!”

“Oh.”

“You should take Caroline … to the film festival, Jack,” Mrs. McQuat went on. “She’s too timid to go to the movies … by herself.”

The Gray Ghost was always the voice of Jack’s conscience. Later he would be ashamed that he never told her how much she meant to him, or even what a good teacher she was.

Mrs. McQuat would die in the St. Hilda’s chapel—after having disciplined one of Miss Wurtz’s misbehaving third graders, whom she’d faced away from the altar with his back turned to God. Mrs. McQuat dropped dead in the center aisle, a passageway she had made her own, with her back turned to God and with only God’s eyes and those of the third grader who was being punished to see her fall. (That poor kid—talk about a formative experience!)

Miss Wurtz must have come running as soon as she heard—crying all the way.

Jack didn’t go to The Gray Ghost’s funeral. He learned she had died only after the funeral, when his mother told him something about Mrs. McQuat that he was surprised he hadn’t guessed. She was no Mrs. anybody; no one had ever married her. Like Miss Wurtz, she was a Miss McQuat—for life. But something in her combat-nurse nature refused to acknowledge that she was unmarried, which in those days obdurately implied you were unloved.

Jack used to wonder why The Gray Ghost had trusted his mom with this secret. They weren’t friends. Then he remembered Mrs. McQuat telling him not to complain about a woman who knew how to keep a secret—meaning Alice. (Meaning herself as well.)

It was only a mild shock to discover that The Gray Ghost had been a Miss instead of a Mrs. In retrospect, Jack wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that Mrs. McQuat—as she preferred to be called—had been a man.

Alice and Mrs. Oastler attended The Gray Ghost’s funeral, which was in the St. Hilda’s chapel. Being a St. Hilda’s Old Girl, Leslie was informed of all the school news. As for Alice, she told Jack she went out of “nostalgia,” which he would remember thinking at the time was an uncharacteristic word for her to use—not to mention an uncharacteristic feeling for her to have.

Alice was vague about who else was in attendance. “Caroline, of course.” She didn’t mean Caroline French—she meant Miss Wurtz. The other Caroline didn’t attend, and Jack knew that her twin, Gordon, was absent. (Gordon was dead—the aforementioned boating accident had precluded his attendance.)

Jack asked his mother if she’d been aware of blanket-sucking sounds, or moaning, during the funeral; by his mom’s puzzled response, he knew that the Booth twins and Jimmy Bacon had skipped the event, or they’d been out of town.

Lucinda Fleming, with or without her mysterious rage, made no reference to The Gray Ghost’s passing in her annual Christmas letter; if Lucinda had gone to the funeral, Jack was sure she would have told everyone about it. And he knew Roland Simpson wasn’t there—Roland was already in jail.

The faculty who were in attendance are easily imagined. Miss Wong, mourning in broken bits and pieces, as if the hurricane she was born in showed itself only in squalls—or only at funerals. Mr. Malcolm, guiding his wife in her wheelchair; the poor man was forever trying to steer Wheelchair Jane around the looming obstacles of her madness. Mr. Ramsey, too restless to sit in a pew, would have been bouncing on the balls of his feet at the back of the chapel. And Miss Wurtz—my goodness, how she must have cried!

“Caroline was overcome,” Alice told Jack.

He could see Miss Wurtz overcome as clearly as if she were still leaning over his incorrect math and he were still breathing her in. (In Jack’s dreams, The Wurtz’s mail-order bra and panties were always properly in place—no matter how overcome she was.)

Yet how could Miss Wurtz have gone on being the St. Hilda’s grade-three teacher? How could she have managed her classroom without The Gray Ghost there to bail her out?

It was Leslie Oastler who told Jack that, upon Mrs. McQuat’s death, Miss Wurtz became a better teacher; finally, Miss Wurtz had to learn how. But at The Gray Ghost’s funeral, there was no stopping The Wurtz. She cried and cried without hope of rescue. Miss Wurtz must have cried until all her tears were gone, and then—one breakthrough day in her grade-three classroom—she never cried again.

Jack thought Caroline Wurtz must still be saying in her nightly prayers, “God bless you, Mrs. McQuat.”

As Jack occasionally remembered to say in his, although not as often—and never as fervently—as he used to say, without cease, “Michele Maher, Michele Maher, Michele Maher.”

19. Claudia, Who Would Haunt Him

Jack would never entirely forgive The Gray Ghost for suggesting that he and Claudia take Miss Wurtz to the film festival in Toronto in the fall of 1985. The Wurtz was in her forties at the time—not that much older than Alice in years, but noticeably older in appearance and stamina. Possibly she had always been too thin, too fragile, but now what was most Wurtz-like about her was a gauntness Jack associated with illness. Miss Wurtz was still beautiful in her damaged way, but she not only looked a little unhealthy; she seemed ashamed of something, although Jack couldn’t imagine what she had ever done to be ashamed of. Perhaps there’d been a long-ago scandal—something so fleeting that it was barely remembered by others, although the memory of it was alive and throbbing in The Wurtz.

Her appearance seemed contrary to her restrained, even abstemious character, because what Caroline Wurtz most resembled was an actress of a bygone era—a once-famous woman who’d become overlooked. At least this was the impression Caroline made at the film festival, where Claudia and Jack took her to the premiere of Paul Schrader’s Mishima. “Remind me who Mishima is,” Miss Wurtz said as they approached the theater.

The ever-persistent photographers, who often snapped pictures of Claudia—because Claudia was such a babe and the photographers had convinced themselves that she must be someone—turned their attention to Miss Wurtz instead. She was overdressed for the film-festival crowd, like a woman who found herself at a rock concert when she’d thought she was going to an opera. Jack was wearing black jeans and a black linen jacket with a white T-shirt. (“An L.A. look,” in Claudia’s estimation, though she’d never been to Los Angeles.)

The younger photographers, especially, assumed that Caroline Wurtz was someone—possibly someone who’d made her last movie before any of them had been born. “You’d have thought she was Joan Crawford,” Claudia said later. Claudia was poured into a shimmery dress with spaghetti straps, but she was a good sport about the photographers being all over The Wurtz.

“Goodness,” Miss Wurtz whispered, “they must think you’re already famous, Jack.” It was sweet how she believed the fuss was about him. “I’m completely convinced you soon will be,” The Wurtz added, squeezing his hand. “And you, too, dear,” she said to Claudia, who squeezed her hand back.

“I thought she was dead!” an older man said. Jack didn’t catch the name of the actress from yesteryear for whom Miss Wurtz had been mistaken.

“Is Mishima a dancer?” Caroline asked.

“No, a writer—” Jack started to say, but Claudia cut him off.

“He was a writer,” Claudia corrected him.

And an actor, a director, and a militarist nutcase, which Jack didn’t have time to say. They were swept inside the theater, where they were ushered to the reserved seats—all because of the prevailing conviction that Caroline Wurtz was not a third-grade teacher but a movie star.

Jack heard the word “European,” probably in reference to Miss Wurtz’s dress, which was a pale-peach color and might have fit her once—perhaps in Edmonton. Now it appeared that The Wurtz was diminished by the dress, which would have been more suitable for a prom than a premiere. The dress was something Mrs. Adkins might have donated for Drama Night at Redding, yet it had a gauzy quality, like underwear, which reminded Jack of the mail-order lingerie he had dressed Miss Wurtz in—if only in his imagination.

“Mishima is Japanese,” Jack was trying to explain.

“He was—” Claudia interjected.

“He’s no longer Japanese?” Caroline asked.

They couldn’t answer her before the movie began—a stylish piece of work, wherein the scenes from Mishima’s life (shot in black and white) were intercut with color dramatizations of his fictional work. Jack had never cared much about Mishima as a writer, but he liked him as a lunatic; his ritualistic suicide, in 1970, was the film’s dramatic conclusion.

Throughout the movie, Miss Wurtz held Jack’s hand; this gave him a hard-on, which Claudia noticed. Claudia would not hold his penis, or venture anywhere near his lap; she sat with her arms folded on her considerable bosom, and never flinched at Mishima’s self-disemboweling, which caused Caroline to dig her nails into Jack’s wrist. In the flickering light from the movie screen, he regarded the small, fishhook-shaped scar on her throat, above her fetching birthmark. In her preternatural thinness, Miss Wurtz had a visible pulse in her throat—an actual heartbeat in close proximity to her scar. This was a pounding that could only be quieted by a kiss, Jack thought—not that he would have dared to kiss The Wurtz, not even if Claudia hadn’t been there.

“Goodness!” Caroline exclaimed as they were leaving the theater. (She was as breathless as Mrs. McQuat, as desirable as Mrs. Adkins.) “That was certainly … ambitious!”

It was about four o’clock in the afternoon when they exited into the mob of Catholic protesters who’d come to the wrong theater. The protesters were there on their knees, chanting to an endless “Hail Mary” that repeated itself over a ghetto blaster. Jack knew in an instant that the kneeling Catholics thought they were emerging from a screening of Godard’s Hail Mary; the Catholics had come to protest Mishima by mistake.

Not only was Miss Wurtz unprepared for the spectacle; she didn’t understand that the protests were in error. “Naturally, the suicide has upset them—I’m not surprised,” she told Claudia and Jack. “I once knew why Catholics make such a fuss about suicide, but I’ve forgotten. They were all in a knot about Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter, as I remember. But I think they got themselves all worked up over The Power and the Glory and The End of the Affair, too.”

Claudia and Jack just looked at each other. What was the point of even mentioning the Godard film to Caroline?

A TV journalist wanted to interview her, which Miss Wurtz seemed to think was perfectly normal. “What do you think of all this?” the journalist asked Jack’s former grade-three teacher. “The film, the controversy—”

“I thought the film was quite a … drama,” The Wurtz declared. “It was overlong and at times hard to grasp, and not always as satisfying as it was engaging. The cinematography was beautiful, and the music—well, whether one likes it or not, it was sweeping.”

This was more than the journalist had bargained for; he was clearly more interested in the kneeling Catholics and the ceaseless “Hail Mary” on the ghetto blaster than he was in the Mishima movie. “But the controversy—” he started to say, trying to steer Miss Wurtz to the fracas of the moment (as journalists do).

“Oh, who cares about that?” Caroline said dismissively. “If the Catholics want to flagellate themselves over a suicide, let them! I remember when they had a hissy fit about fish on Fridays!”

It would be on the six o’clock news. Alice and Leslie Oastler were watching television, and there was Miss Wurtz holding forth in her pale-peach dress—Claudia and Jack on either side of her. It was almost as much fun as passing Claudia off as a Russian film star, and Caroline was thoroughly enjoying herself, though she wasn’t in on the joke.

The moviegoers, meaning the Mishima crowd, were in no mood to be greeted by kneeling Catholics and “Hail Mary”—not with Mishima’s disembowelment fresh on their minds. (Nor would Mishima have been amused, Jack thought; at least when he was disemboweling himself, he looked like a pretty serious guy.)

Claudia and Jack took Miss Wurtz to a party. They had no trouble crashing parties; the bouncers wouldn’t have kept Claudia out of a men’s room, if she’d wanted to go into one. Claudia said they got into parties because Jack looked like a movie star, but Claudia was the reason. With Miss Wurtz in tow, it was clear they got in because of her. In fact, they were leaving one such party when a young man approached Caroline in a fawning fashion; he’d snatched a flower from a vase on the bar and pressed it into her hand. “I love your work!” he told her, disappearing into the crowd.

“I freely admit I don’t remember him at all,” Miss Wurtz told Jack. “I can’t be expected to recognize every grade-three boy I ever taught,” she said to Claudia. “They were not all as memorable as Jack!”

Claudia and Jack were quite certain that the young man had not been referring to Caroline’s teaching career. But how to explain all this to The Wurtz—well, why would Claudia or Jack have bothered?

In the lineup of limos outside a restaurant, Jack recognized an old friend among the drivers. “Peewee!” he cried.

The big Jamaican got out of his limo and embraced Jack on the sidewalk, lifting him off his feet. That was when the Hail Mary protesters must have assumed that Jack was the cabdriver boyfriend in the Godard film—the Joseph character—which made Claudia, in their demented eyes, the pregnant gas-station attendant who was an updated version of the Virgin Mary. (God knows who they thought Miss Wurtz was.)

“Jack Burns, you are already a star, mon!” Peewee exclaimed, hugging him so hard that he couldn’t breathe.

The Catholics, crawling around on their knees, were an unsettling experience for Claudia, and Caroline was fed up with their zealotry. “Oh, why don’t you go home and read his books!” Miss Wurtz told one of the kneelers. She was a young woman whose face was streaked with grime and tears. Jack could see her thinking: Christ was a writer?

The other Catholics kept repeating the infuriating “Hail Mary.”

“Quick, get in the car, Jack!” Peewee said. He was already holding the door open for Claudia and Caroline.

“It’s Mrs. Wicksteed’s driver, dear—don’t be alarmed,” Miss Wurtz told Claudia. (As if Mrs. Wicksteed were still in need of a driver!) But Claudia was having her legs held, at the thighs, by a kneeling Catholic. “Let her go, you craven imbecile,” Caroline told the Catholic. “Don’t you get it? He killed himself because he wanted his life to merge with his art.”

Miss Wurtz meant Mishima, of course, but the Catholic who reluctantly released Claudia thought that Caroline was talking about Christ. He was an indignant-looking man—bald, middle-aged—in a long-sleeved white dress shirt of a thin see-through material, with a pen that had leaked in his breast pocket. He looked like a deranged income-tax auditor.

Peewee managed to get Claudia into the car, but Miss Wurtz was facing down the mob of kneelers. “The man was Japanese and he wanted to off himself,” she told them in a huff. “Just get over it!”

To a one, the Catholics looked as if no number of repetitions of “Hail Mary” could redeem such a slur on the unfortunate Christ as this. Jesus was Japanese?

Jack put an arm around Caroline’s slender waist as if she were his dance partner. “Miss Wurtz, they’re all insane,” he whispered in her ear. “Get in the car.”

“My goodness—you’ve become so worldly, Jack,” she told him, stooping to get into the backseat of the limo. Claudia caught her by the hand and pulled her inside; Peewee shoved Jack inside after her, closing the door.

One of the protesters had wrapped her arms around Peewee’s knees, but when he began to walk with her, dragging her to the driver’s-side door of the limo, she thought better of it and let him go. Jack had no idea which actual movie star had Peewee for a limo driver that evening—Peewee claimed that he couldn’t remember—but Peewee drove Miss Wurtz home first, then Claudia and Jack.

Jack had never known where The Wurtz lived, but he was unsurprised when Peewee stopped the limo at a large house on Russell Hill Road, which was within walking distance of St. Hilda’s. Jack was somewhat surprised when Miss Wurtz asked Peewee to drive around to the back entrance, where an outside staircase led to her small, rented apartment.

Where had the money for Caroline’s once-fashionable clothes come from? If it had been family money from Edmonton, it must have been spent. Had she ever had a suitor, or a secret lover with good taste? If there’d ever been a well-to-do ex-boyfriend—or more improbably, an ex-husband—he was long gone, clearly.

Miss Wurtz would not let Jack accompany her up the stairs to her modest rooms. Possibly she did not think it proper to bring a young man to her apartment; yet she allowed Claudia to go with her. Jack sat in the limo with Peewee and watched them turn on some lights.

Later, when Jack pressed Claudia to describe The Wurtz’s apartment, Claudia became irritated. “I didn’t snoop around,” she said. “She’s an older woman—she has too much stuff, things she should have thrown away. Out-of-date magazines, junk like that.”

“A TV?”

“I didn’t see one, but I wasn’t looking.”

“Photographs? Any pictures of men?”

“Jesus, Jack! Have you got the hots for her, or something?” Claudia asked.

They lay in Emma’s bed—bereft of the stuffed animals, which either Emma or Mrs. Oastler had disposed of. Jack couldn’t remember a single one of them—nor could he dispel from his memory that Emma had taught him how to masturbate as he lay in her arms in the very same bed.

Given Claudia’s bitchy mood, Jack decided to spare her that detail.

The parties and intrigues of the film festival notwithstanding, Claudia and Jack spent the lion’s share of their time in Toronto at Daughter Alice—at least Claudia did. Jack frequently escaped the tattoo parlor, preferring the clientele in the nearby Salvation Army store to many of his mother’s devotees.

Aberdeen Bill had been a maritime man—like Charlie Snow and Sailor Jerry, like Tattoo Ole and Tattoo Peter and Doc Forest. They were Alice’s mentors. But the tattoo world had changed; while Daughter Alice still did the occasional Man’s Ruin, or the broken heart that sustains a sailor for long months at sea, a new vulgarity exhibited itself on the skin of young men seeking to be marked for life.

Gone was the romance of those North Sea ports—and the steady sound of his mom’s tattoo machine, which had lulled Jack to sleep as a child. Gone were those brave girls in the Hotel Torni: Ritva, whose breasts he never saw, and Hannele’s unshaven armpits and her striking birthmark—that crumpled top hat over her navel, the color of a wine stain, the shape of Florida.

Jack had once been so bold as to march up to anyone and ask: “Do you have a tattoo?” In the restaurant of the Hotel Bristol, he’d told that beautiful girl: “I have the room and the equipment, if you have the time.” (And to think it was his idea for his mom to offer the littlest soldier a free tattoo!)

In his sleep, Jack heard the vast organ in the Oude Kerk playing to the prostitutes at night; even awake, if he shut his eyes, he could feel the thick, waxed rope and the smooth, wooden handrail on the other side of the old church’s twisting stairs.

But (especially in Claudia’s company) the tattoo culture on display at Daughter Alice made Jack ashamed of his mother’s “art”; and many of her customers, the seeming lowlifes of Queen Street, filled him with foreboding. The old maritime tattoos, the sentiments of sailors collecting souvenirs on their bodies, had been replaced by tasteless displays of hostility and violence and evil. The skinheads with their biker insignia—skulls spurting blood, flames licking the corners of the skeletons’ eye sockets.

There were naked, writhing women who would have made Tattoo Ole blush; even Ladies’ Man Madsen might have looked away. (More than an inverted eyebrow indicated their pubic hair.) And there was all the tribal memorabilia. Claudia was fascinated by some pimply kid from Kitchener, Ontario, getting a full moko—the Maori facial tattoo. On her hip, which she proudly bared for Claudia, the kid’s emaciated girlfriend had a koru—those spirals like the head of a fern.

Jack took Claudia aside and said to her: “Generally speaking, attractive people don’t get tattooed.” But this wasn’t strictly true; Jack was speaking too generally. His dislike of the scene at Daughter Alice caused him to overstate his case.

No sooner had he spoken than a gay bodybuilder appeared; he must have been a fashion model. He gave Claudia the most cursory once-over and flirted shamelessly with Jack. “I just stopped in for a little alteration, Alice,” the bodybuilder said, smiling at Jack. “But if I knew in advance when your handsome son was going to be here, I would come by and be altered every day.”

His name was Edgar; Alice and Claudia thought he was charming and amusing, but Jack made a point of looking away. Tattooed on one of the bodybuilder’s shoulder blades was the photographic likeness of the cowboy Clint Eastwood with his signature thin cigar. On Edgar’s other shoulder blade was the tattoo in need of altering—an evidently Satanic rendition of Christ’s crucifixion, in which Jesus is chained in figure-four fashion to a motorcycle wheel. The alteration Edgar required was some indication that Christ had been “roughed up”—a scratch and a drop of blood on one cheek, perhaps, or a wound in the area of the rib cage.

“Maybe both,” Alice said.

“You don’t think that would be too vulgar?” Edgar asked.

“It’s your tattoo, Edgar,” Alice replied.

Possibly it was Claudia’s love of all things theatrical that enamored her to Daughter Alice’s world. To Jack, if Edgar wasn’t ugly, his tattoos were—and Edgar himself was certainly vulgar. To Jack, almost everything at Daughter Alice was uglier than ugly, and the ugliness was intentional—your skin not merely marked for life but maimed.

“You’re just a snob,” Claudia told him.

Well, yes and no. The tattoo world, which had not once frightened Jack when he was four, terrified him at twenty. Here was Jack Burns, affecting Toshiro Mifune’s scowl—the samurai’s condemning look at a dog trotting past with a human hand in its mouth—while the tattoo scene at Daughter Alice reflected far worse behavior than that dog’s.

Once upon a time, the maritime world had been the gateway to all that was foreign and new; but this was no longer true. Now tattoos were drug-induced—psychedelic gibberish and hallucinogenic horror. The new tattoos radiated sexual anarchy; they worshiped death.

“May you stay forever young,” Bob Dylan sang, and Alice had more than sung along with Bob; she’d embraced this philosophy without realizing that the young people around her were not the hippies and flower children of her day.

Of course there were the collectors, the sad ink addicts with their bodies-in-progress—the old crazies, like William Burns, on the road to discovering the full-body chill—but Jack chiefly detested his generation, now in their late teens or early twenties. He hated the pierced-lip guys—sometimes with pierced eyelids and tongues. He loathed the girls with their pierced nipples and navels—even their labia! The people Jack’s age who hung out at Daughter Alice were certifiable freaks and losers.

But Alice made them tea and coffee, and she played her favorite music for them; some of them brought their own music, which was harsher than hers. Daughter Alice was a hangout. Not everyone was there to get a tattoo, but you had to have been tattooed to feel comfortable hanging around there.

Jack saw Krung once—he stopped in for a cup of tea. The Bathurst Street gym was gone; it had become a health-food store.

“Gym rats always gotta find a new ship, Jackie,” Krung said. He sized up Claudia with a lingering glance; he told Jack that he thought she had the hips to be a formidable kickboxer.

Another day, Chenko came by; he walked with a cane, but Jack was happy to see him and wished he’d stayed longer. Even with the cane, Chenko was more protection to Alice than she had most of the time.

Chenko was courteous to Claudia, but he made no mention to Jack of her potential as a wrestler. He would never get over Emma, Chenko said sadly—meaning more than the fact that his separated sternum had not entirely recovered from her lateral drop.

The lost kids with no money came to Daughter Alice and watched Alice work; they were trying to find the cash and making up their minds about which tattoo they would get next. The old ink addicts dropped in to show themselves off; some of them appeared to be rationing what remained of their bodies, because they had little skin left for another tattoo. (It drove Jack crazy that Claudia called them “romantics.”)

“The saddest cases,” Alice said, “are the almost full-bodies.”

But were they almost cold? Jack wondered. He couldn’t look at them without imagining his dad. Did William Burns have any skin left for that one last note?

Jack could have predicted that Claudia would get a tattoo, but he pretended to be surprised when she announced her decision. “Just don’t get one where it will show onstage,” he said.

There was a movable curtain Alice rolled around on casters; like those enclosures for hospital beds in recovery rooms, this curtain sealed off the customer who was being intimately tattooed. Claudia wanted her tattoo high up—on the inside of her right thigh, where she chose the Chinaman’s signature scepter. It was Jack’s personal favorite, Claudia knew, symbolizing “everything as you wish.”

“Forget about it,” his mom had told him, when he’d said it was the best of the tattoos she’d learned from the Chinaman. But Alice raised no objection to giving one to Claudia.

When Jack was at Redding, he’d briefly benefited from the exotic impression he gave his fellow schoolboys of his mother—the famous tattoo artist. (As if, if she weren’t famous, there could be little that was exotic about her profession.) Now his mom was famous—in her small, Queen Street way—and Jack was embarrassed by Daughter Alice and the general seediness, the depraved fringe, that tattooing represented to him.

But what else could his mother have done? She had tried to protect Jack from the tattoo world. She’d made it clear that he wasn’t welcome at the Chinaman’s, and it hadn’t been Alice’s fault that Jack became her virtual apprentice when she tattooed her way through those North Sea ports in search of William—excepting those nights when Ladies’ Man Lars tucked the boy into bed in Copenhagen.

Now, ironically, at the same time Alice seemed to be proud of her work—and of being her own boss in her own shop—Jack was growing ashamed of her. Claudia was right to criticize Jack for this, but Claudia hadn’t been there in those years when his mother was turning her back on him.

Jack made matters worse by objecting to his mom’s apprentice observing Claudia’s tattoo-in-progress. What was the curtain for, if this guy was permitted to see the scepter? The tattoo almost touched Claudia’s pubes!

He was a young guy from New Zealand. “Alice’s kiwi boy,” Mrs. Oastler called him. Leslie didn’t like him, nor did he appeal to Jack. He was from Wellington, and he taught Alice some Maori stuff. Like her other young apprentices, he wouldn’t stay long—a couple of months, at most. Then another apprentice would come; he was always someone who could teach her one or two things, while she had much more to teach him. (That was how the tattoo business worked; that part hadn’t changed.)

Well before the end of the 1980s, because of AIDS, every knowledgeable tattoo artist in Canada and the United States was wearing rubber gloves. Jack could never get used to his mom in those gloves. Her shop was not an especially sanitary-looking place, yet here she was with her hands resembling a doctor’s or a nurse’s. When everything went right, tattooing wasn’t exactly blood work.

But at Daughter Alice, some things stayed the same: the pigment in those little paper cups, the many uses of Vaseline, the strangely dental sound the needles made in the electric machine, the smell of penetrated skin—and the coffee, and the tea, and the honey in that sticky jar. And over it all, Bob, still howling—still complaining about this or that, prophesying doom or the next new thing.

“Like the pigment of a tattoo,” Alice said, “Bob Dylan gets under your skin.”

While Claudia was getting her scepter, Alice was playing “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.” Gritting her teeth, Claudia probably didn’t notice; to Jack, a part of her mystery was that Claudia had not let Bob (or anyone else) get under her skin.

Some pothead was putting honey in his coffee; maybe he thought it was tea. His head was bobbing up and down like one of those distracting dashboard toys. He was from “somewhere in the Maritimes,” he told Jack—as if the exact city or town had disowned him, or he’d banished it from what was left of his drugged memory. He had a tattoo of a green-and-red lobster on one forearm. The creature looked half cooked—therefore inadvisable to eat.

Bob wailed away.

Yonder stands your orphan with his gun,

Crying like a fire in the sun.

The sign in the Queen Street window that advertised Daughter Alice was painted wood. “As cheerful as sunny Leith, where the sun never shines,” Alice said of the colorful sign. It had a seaside feeling to it, as if Daughter Alice were the name of a ship or a port of call. “Daughter Alice is a maritime name,” Alice always said—coming, as it did, from Copenhagen and Tattoo Ole.

“All your seasick sailors, they are rowing home,” Bob Dylan sang.

Or they’re rowing here, Jack thought. He went to have a look at Claudia behind the curtain; she smiled at him, clenching her fists to her sides. “The scepter is a Buddhist symbol,” Alice was saying softly, while the tattoo needles danced on Claudia’s thigh and she winced in pain. (Jack knew that the inner side of limbs hurt more than the outer.) “The shape of the scepter is modeled on the magic fungus of immortality,” Alice went on.

A mushroom of immortality! What next? Jack turned away. The rubber gloves really bothered him. He preferred to watch the pothead from the Maritimes; the guy looked as if he were getting high on the honey in his coffee. This was the trip to Toronto that would convince Jack Burns it would never be his true home.

“Forget the dead you’ve left, they will not follow you,” Bob sang—as always, with the utmost authority. Bob got a lot right, but he was wrong about that. As Jack would discover, everything followed you.

The scepter high on her inner thigh made lovemaking uncomfortable for Claudia during their remaining days in Toronto, but Jack was increasingly aware of Claudia holding him in disfavor; even without the new tattoo, Claudia might have been disinclined to make love to him. (That they were sleeping in Emma’s bed didn’t help.) They left Toronto before the film festival’s closing night.

Jack could tell that Claudia was disheartened; the pettiness of their bickering had worn them both down. And her new tattoo chafed when she walked. With Mrs. Oastler’s permission, Claudia had borrowed one of Emma’s skirts; it was way too big for her, but she could walk in it with her legs wide apart, as if she were wearing a diaper.

Looking back, Jack found the retrospective material at the film festival more interesting than most of the featured competition. The one movie that Claudia and Jack had seen alone was Fassbinder’s The Marriage of Maria Braun. Jack loved that film.

Hanna Schygulla is the soldier’s wife who makes such a success of herself in postwar Germany. There are worse things than watching Hanna Schygulla while a woman holds your penis. The problem was, although this was the first and only occasion at the film festival when Claudia held his penis, Jack had seen The Marriage of Maria Braun with Emma when he was fourteen. (They were in the cinema in Durham; it was his first year at Exeter.)

The comparison was disconcerting, and it was a premonition of a life-changing experience: Jack realized that he liked the way Emma held his penis better than he liked the way anyone else held it. (Of course he still had hopes for Michele Maher one day.)

“Is it me or Hanna?” Claudia had whispered in his ear, noting the little guy’s enthusiastic response. But Jack knew it was neither Claudia nor Fräulein Schygulla who provoked such an uplifting of the little guy’s spirits. It was his memory of Emma holding his penis when he was all of fourteen.

Jack knew from that moment in The Marriage of Maria Braun that he and Claudia were merely marking time; they were just going through the paces, like a married couple who knew the divorce was pending.

His parting of the ways with Claudia had been set in motion by that trip to Iowa to visit Emma the previous spring. “The children conversation,” as Claudia called it. They had continued on a downward path at the Toronto film festival. And when they drove back from Toronto, things got even worse.

They went home a different route than they’d come; it wasn’t the best way to go, but it was a boring drive no matter how you did it. They drove to Kingston, Ontario, and crossed the St. Lawrence at Gananoque; the bridge took them into New York State at Alexandria Bay. At U.S. Customs, Jack presented his student visa and his Canadian passport. Claudia handed the customs guy her American passport. Jack was driving the Volvo. Claudia’s new tattoo was bothering her; she didn’t want to drive.

She was still wearing Emma’s overlarge skirt, which Mrs. Oastler had insisted she take with her. “Emma will be several sizes too big for it the next time she’s home, anyway,” Leslie had said pessimistically. “You look better in it than Emma does, Claudia—even though it’s enormous on you.”

For most of the ride, Claudia sat with the skirt pulled up to her waist—airing the Chinese scepter, which she kept rubbing with moisturizer. Her skin was a little red around the edges of the tattoo, and she was tired of hearing that the inner skin of limbs is tender.

When Jack stopped the car at the border crossing, Claudia properly lowered Emma’s skirt. The customs agent looked them over. “We were visiting my mother, who lives in Toronto,” Jack told him, unasked. “We saw some movies at the film festival.”

“Are you bringing anything back from Canada?” the customs agent inquired.

“Nope,” Claudia said.

“Not even some Canadian beer?” the guy asked Claudia; he smiled at her. She was fantastic-looking, really.

“I don’t usually drink beer, and Jack is always watching his weight,” Claudia told him.

“So you’ve got nothing to declare?” the customs agent asked Jack, more sternly.

Jack didn’t know what got into him. (“I just felt like fooling around,” he would tell Claudia later, but there was more to it than that.)

It was a close-up opportunity—Jack gave the guy his furtive look. He did furtive pretty well; it was a look he’d acquired from observing certain kinds of dogs, especially craven and sneaky dogs. “Well—” Jack started to say, interrupting himself by looking furtively at Claudia. “We don’t have to declare the Chinese scepter, do we?” he asked her. Oh, what a look she gave him!

“The what?” the customs agent said.

“A royal mace, or sometimes it’s a staff—in this case, a short sword,” Jack went on. “It’s a ceremonial emblem of authority.”

“It’s Chinese?” the guy asked. “Is it very old?”

“Yes, very—it’s Buddhist, actually,” Jack told him.

“I better have a look at it,” the customs agent said.

“It’s a tattoo,” Claudia told him. “I don’t have to declare a tattoo, do I?”

Why had Jack done this to her? He loved Claudia—well, he liked her, anyway. Jack had not seen Claudia look so disappointed in him since she discovered the photographs of Emma naked; these were the old photos Emma sent to him when he was regularly beating off at Redding. They were photos of Emma at seventeen. Charlotte Barford had taken them. Claudia made Jack throw them away, but he kept one.

“Let me be sure it’s just a tattoo,” the customs guy said to Claudia. “I’ve never seen a Chinese scepter.”

“Do you have a female colleague?” Claudia asked the guy. “She can see it.”

“It’s in a rather intimate location,” Jack pointed out.

“Just a minute,” the customs agent said. He left them sitting in the car and went off to find a female colleague; there was a building with what looked like offices, where the agent momentarily disappeared.

“You are so immature, Jack,” Claudia said. He remembered that evening in the Oastler mansion when his mom had made a similar point.

“Penis, penis, penis—” Jack started to say, but he stopped. The customs guy was returning with a stout black woman. Claudia got out of the car and went into the office building with the female customs agent while Jack waited in the car.

“What did you do that for?” the customs guy asked him.

“We haven’t been getting along lately,” Jack admitted.

“Well, this’ll really help,” the guy said.

When Claudia came back to the car, she gave Jack her violated look and they drove on. For those first few miles, when they were back in the United States, Jack felt exhilarated without knowing why.

Canada was Jack’s homeland, his country of origin, yet he was elated to be back in America, where he felt more at home. Why was that? he wondered. Wasn’t he Canadian? Was it Jack’s rejection of his mother and her tattoo world that made him turn his back on his native land?

Claudia wouldn’t speak to him for about three hundred miles. She had once again hiked Emma’s skirt to her waist, exposing the tattoo of the Chinese scepter on her right inner thigh, where Jack could see it with a downcast, sideways glance at her lap. It was one of very few tattoos he ever saw that he was tempted to get himself, but not on his inner thigh. He was thinking about where on his body he might one day get a tattoo of that very same Chinese scepter, when Claudia, finally, spoke.

By that time, they were in Vermont—about a hundred miles from where they were going, in New Hampshire. When Claudia saw Jack glance at her crotch—at her brand-new Chinese scepter, specifically—she said: “I got the damn tattoo for you, you know.”

“I know,” Jack said. “I like it. I really do.” Claudia knew that he liked the tattoo and the special place she put it. “I’m sorry about what I did at the border,” Jack told her. “I really am.”

“I’m over it, Jack. It took a while, but I’m over it. I’m sorrier about other things,” she said.

“Oh.”

“Is that all you can say?”

“I’m sorry,” he repeated.

“It’s not just that you’ll never have children,” she told him. “You’ll go on blaming your father’s genes for the fact that you’ll never stay with the same woman—not for long, anyway.”

It was Jack’s turn to say nothing for the next hundred miles. And to make a point of not responding to someone is another acting opportunity.

Jack soon would make a point of not responding to The Gray Ghost, too. A letter came from her not long after he and Claudia were back in New Hampshire. The Gray Ghost made merely a passing reference to Claudia’s “extraordinary beauty”—Mrs. McQuat also referred to Claudia as his “reluctant bride.” But neither Claudia herself nor Jack’s reluctance to have children was the true subject of The Gray Ghost’s letter. Mrs. McQuat was writing to remind him that he must pay closer attention to his mother, whom she felt certain he was neglecting.

“Don’t neglect her, Jack,” The Gray Ghost said.

Well, hadn’t she told him before? Jack threw her letter away without answering it. Later, when he learned that Mrs. McQuat had died, he wondered if he’d had a premonition of her death. Not only would he not pay closer attention to his mother; by not answering The Gray Ghost’s letter, it was as if he’d sensed that Mrs. McQuat was already dying—a death-in-progress, so to speak—and that when she was gone, the voice of Jack’s conscience would leave him, too.

They were just a few miles outside Durham, not far from Claudia’s apartment in Newmarket, before Claudia broke the silence. “God damn you, Jack,” she said. “After I die, I’m going to haunt you—I promise you I will—I might even haunt you before I die.”

Well, Jack Burns was an actor—he should have known an end line when he heard one. He should have committed Claudia’s warning to memory more deeply than he did.

20. Two Canadians in the City of Angels

Despite their growing estrangement, Jack and Claudia would live together their final two years at UNH. It was more than inertia that bound them; they were actors-in-training, learning the tricks of concealment. By what they managed to hide of themselves, they instructed each other. They became keen but sullen observers of their innermost secrets, their hidden characters.

The summer following their Toronto trip, they again did summer stock, this time at a playhouse on Cape Cod. The artistic director was a gay guy whom Jack liked a lot. Bruno Litkins was a tall, graceful man who swooped onstage; waving his long arms, he looked like a heron making an exaggerated if misguided effort to teach other, smaller birds to fly.

To Bruno Litkins, a musical based on a play or a novel was something to be tampered with—to be reinvented in a shockingly different way with each new production. The original text might be sacred to Bruno, but once someone had made a musical out of the material, there were no limits regarding how the story and the characters could be altered further.

Announcing auditions for The Hunchback of Notre Dame—in which Claudia had her heart set on the role of the beautiful Gypsy girl, Esmeralda—Bruno Litkins said that his Esmeralda was a beautiful transvestite who would liberate the reluctant homosexuality that flickered in the heart of Captain Phoebus like a flame in need of air. Esmeralda, the Gypsy drag queen of Paris, would wrestle the gay captain out of his closet. She was the oxygen Captain Phoebus needed in order to awaken his homosexual self!

The wicked Father Frollo, who first imagines he is in love with Esmeralda, ultimately wants her to be put to death—not only because Esmeralda doesn’t love him but because Esmeralda is a guy. (Father Frollo is a French homophobe.) Quasimodo, who also falls in love with Esmeralda, is in the end relieved that Esmeralda is in love with Captain Phoebus.

“It’s a better story,” Bruno Litkins told the shocked ensemble, “because Quasimodo isn’t sad to give up Esmeralda to the soldier.” (His hunchback notwithstanding, Quasimodo is straight.)

“What would Victor Hugo say?” Claudia asked. Poor Claudia saw that her cherished role was gone; at least onstage, Jack Burns was born to be a transvestite Esmeralda.

“Keep the audience guessing!” Bruno Litkins, flapping his long arms, liked to say. “Is Esmeralda a woman? Is she a man? Make them guess!”

There was, of course, another beautiful Gypsy girl in the play—Quasimodo’s murdered mother, who has a brief but moving part. And there were other plays in that Cape Cod summer season—not all of them musicals that opened themselves to new, gay interpretations. Claudia would have bigger and better roles. She was the eponymous Salomé in Bruno Litkins’s production of the Oscar Wilde play—Bruno revered Wilde and wouldn’t change a purple word he’d written. Claudia was one hot Salomé. Her absurd dance of the seven veils was Wilde’s fault, not Claudia’s—although the Chinese scepter on her inner right thigh required a lot of makeup to conceal. (Without the makeup, the scepter might have been confusing to the audience—possibly mistaken for a birthmark, or a wound.)

Jack had the smaller part in Salomé—the prophet Jokanaan, good old John the Baptist, whose decapitated head Salomé kisses. That was some kiss. (Jack was kneeling under a table with a hole cut in the top for his head; the tablecloth hid not only his hard-on, but all the rest of him.) Yet the damage to his relationship with Claudia had already been done; not even that kiss could undo their drifting apart.

The gay version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame merely served to further the distance between them. In retrospect, Jack didn’t blame Claudia for her one-night stand with the handsome actor who played the gay Captain Phoebus, but he blamed her at the time. (Jack knew that Claudia had every right to repay him for cheating on her with a tango teacher that previous spring.)

Claudia’s luck was bad. The actor who played Captain Phoebus gave her and Jack the clap. Jack would never have found out about the affair otherwise, unless Claudia eventually told him—and given her unrepentant lies about her age, Jack had no reason to think that she ever would have let him in on her little secret. It was the captain’s gonorrhea that gave her away.

Naturally, Jack pretended it was much more painful than it was, dropping to his knees and screaming upon every act of urination—while Claudia called from the bedroom, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!”

In Bruno’s brilliantly choreographed scene where Jack-as-the-transvestite-Esmeralda reveals to Captain Phoebus that he is, below the waist, a man, Jack is singing his heart out to the captain while Phoebus both acquiesces and retreats. (The captain is attracted to Jack, but the idiot still thinks Jack is a girl—hence his reluctance.)

Jack seizes one of the captain’s hands and holds it to one of his falsies; Phoebus looks underwhelmed. Jack seizes the captain’s other hand and holds it to his crotch; Phoebus gives the audience an astonished look while Jack whispers in his ear. Then they both sing the song Bruno Litkins wrote for his gay version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame—“Same As Me, Babe,” to the tune of Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me, Babe.” (Jack knew his Bob; he sang it well.)

But the night of the performance after Jack learned he had gonorrhea—and Claudia confessed where it came from—Jack had something real to whisper in Captain Phoebus’s ear while he held the captain’s hand against his pecker. “Thanks for the clap, babe,” Jack whispered.

It was quite a good look Phoebus gave the audience every night—it usually brought the house down. Such a look of recognition—Esmeralda has a penis! Of course the audience already knows. Jack-as-Esmeralda had earlier shown Father Frollo, thinking it would make Frollo stop hitting on him—never realizing that Frollo is such an overreactor that he’ll insist on having Esmeralda hanged!

But that memorable night Captain Phoebus held Esmeralda’s penis and Jack-as-Esmeralda thanked Phoebus for giving him the clap was a showstopper for the handsome soldier. The look he gave the audience that night interrupted the performance for a full minute or more; the audience spontaneously rose as one and gave Captain Phoebus a standing ovation.

“Maybe take a little something off the look, Phoebus,” Bruno Litkins told the actor after that performance.

Jack just gave the captain his best Esmeralda-as-a-transvestite smile. Phoebus knew Jack could kick the crap out of him if he wanted to.

In truth, Jack was grateful to Captain Phoebus for making Claudia feel guilty; Phoebus had made Jack feel a little less guilty about the fact that he and Claudia were drifting apart.

The summer following their graduation from the University of New Hampshire, Claudia and Jack finally went their separate ways. She was going the graduate-student route—an MFA theater program at one of the Big Ten universities. (Jack would make a point of forgetting which one.) It seemed sensible for them to apply to different summer-stock playhouses that summer. Claudia was at a Shakespeare festival in New Jersey. Jack did a Beauty and the Beast and a Peter Pan and Wendy at a children’s theater workshop in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

He might have been feeling nostalgic about his lost friend Noah Rosen—or Noah’s more irrevocably lost sister, Leah—but Jack fondly recalled those foreign films in the movie theaters around Harvard Square. A summer of subtitles—and audiences of children, and their young mothers—somehow suited him.

Claudia said—and if these weren’t truly her last spoken words to him, they were the last words he would remember—“What do you want to perform for children for? You don’t want any.”

Jack played the Beast to an older-woman Belle; she was also one of the founders of the children’s theater workshop, and she’d hired him. Yes, he slept with her—they had a summer-long affair, not a day longer. She was way too old to play Wendy to Jack’s Peter Pan, but she was a reasonably youthful-looking Mrs. Darling—Wendy’s mom. (Imagine Peter Pan screwing Wendy’s mother, if only for a summer.)

Jack needed to go to graduate school, to continue to be a student, or else get a real job—hence a green card—if he didn’t want to go back to Canada, and he didn’t. Emma, once again, would save him. She’d been out of Iowa for two years, living in Los Angeles and writing her first novel, which sounded like a contradiction in terms. Who went to L.A. to write a novel? But being an outsider had always suited Emma.

She’d found a job reading scripts at one of the studios; like Jack, she was still a Canadian citizen and had only a Canadian passport, but Emma also had a green card. The script-reading job was more the result of her year as a comedy writer for New York television than it was anything she’d prepared herself to do at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She was writing her novel, which Emma said was to be her revenge on the time she’d wasted as a film major—and all the while she was, as she put it, “working for the enemy and getting paid for it.”

Why didn’t he come live with her? Emma asked Jack. She’d find him a job in the movie business. “There are some good-looking guys out here, baby cakes—it’s tougher competition than you’d have in Toronto. But there aren’t that many good-looking guys who can act as well as you.”

So that was Jack’s plan, to the extent that he had one. He’d had it with the theater—and no wonder, when you consider the preponderance of musicals. It was fine with him if his last onstage performance was as Peter Pan, taking Wendy Darling and her brothers off to Neverland—while in the wee hours of the morning, long after the curtain fell, he was banging Wendy’s mom, Mrs. Darling.

“What would J. M. Barrie say?” Claudia might have asked, had she known. It made Jack sad to think about her.

The thing about Los Angeles, Jack would learn, is that it’s unimpressed by you—no matter who you are. Eventually, the city tells you, your comeuppance will come; exclusivity fades. But Jack Burns wasn’t moving in exclusive circles when he first went to L.A.—he wasn’t famous yet. In the fall of 1987, when he moved in with Emma, the nearest landmark representing the sundry entertainments that the future held in store was that garish playground of possibilities, the Santa Monica Pier.

All that Jack and Emma really cared about was that they were bathed in the warm Pacific air; it didn’t matter that they were breathing in an ocean spiked with smog. They were living together again—not in Toronto, and not with their mothers.

Emma, who was twenty-nine, looked considerably older. Her struggles with her weight were apparent to anyone who knew her, but a different, interior battle had been more costly to her; her shifting ambitions were at war with her obdurate determination. That Emma was a restless soul was obvious, but not even Jack (not even Emma) was aware that something was seriously wrong with her.

Numbers were never Jack’s strong suit. Living with Emma in L.A., he couldn’t remember how much their rent was, or what day of the month they were supposed to pay it.

“Your math sucks, honey pie, but what do you need to know math for? You’re gonna be an actor!”

At St. Hilda’s, Jack had needed Miss Wurtz bending over him—as if breathing her in were a substitute for learning his numbers. And while it’s true that Mrs. McQuat had helped him, even more than Miss Wurtz, he had never mastered math.

Mrs. Adkins had assisted him with his algebra at Redding—she who’d dressed him in her old clothes, she who’d made love to him with such a morbid air of resignation. (It was as if Mrs. Adkins were undressing to drown herself in the Nezinscot, or at least practicing for that loneliest of moments in her future.)

“You shouldn’t trust yourself to count past ten,” Noah Rosen had once cautioned Jack.

Mr. Warren, Jack’s faculty adviser at Exeter, had been more kind but no less pessimistic. “I would advise you, Jack, never to rely on your numerical evaluation of a situation.”

Jack Burns would live in Los Angeles for sixteen years. He liked all the driving. He and Emma first shared one half of a rat-eaten duplex in Venice. It was on Windward Avenue, downwind of a sushi place on the corner of Windward and Main—more to the point, downwind of the restaurant’s Dumpster. Hama Sushi was good. Emma and Jack ate there a lot. The fish was really fresh—less fresh, alas, was whatever ended up in the Dumpster.

Jack’s first girlfriend in L.A. was a waitress he met at Hama Sushi. She shared an overused house with some other girls on one of those small streets off Ocean Front Walk—Eighteenth, Nineteenth, or Twentieth Avenue. He could never remember the number. He went one night to the wrong house, possibly on the wrong avenue. There were a bunch of girls who welcomed him inside when he pushed the buzzer, but his waitress friend was not among them. By the time Jack realized it was the wrong bunch of girls, he’d met someone who interested him more than the sushi waitress. Numbers, once again, had misled him.

“You oughta carry a calculator,” Emma told him, “or at least write everything down.”

He liked Venice—the beach, the gyms, the underlying grubbiness of it. After Emma had a bad experience at Gold’s Gym—she’d met a bodybuilder there who had beaten her up—she got Jack and herself a membership at World Gym; she said she liked the gorilla on the World Gym T-shirts and tank tops. A big gorilla standing on the planet Earth, the size of a beach ball, with a barbell in his hairy hands—the barbell had to weigh three or four hundred pounds, not that this was a credible explanation for why the bar was bending.

The World Gym tank tops were cut low; they had a scoop neck and a lot of space under the arms. They weren’t made for women to wear—at least not the ones Emma bought, which were all in workout-gray with Day-Glo orange lettering. The tank tops showed a lot of cleavage, and Emma’s breasts would occasionally fall out at the sides, but she only got the World Gym tank tops to wear as nightshirts or when she was writing.

Emma and Jack had their own bedrooms in the duplex, but most nights, when they didn’t have “dates,” they slept in the same bed—not really doing anything. Emma would hold Jack’s penis until one of them fell asleep—that is, if they even went to bed at the same time, which they didn’t often. Jack would occasionally hold her breasts, nothing more. He never once masturbated in the bed when she was there.

Emma and Jack had had their one time; they seemed to know this without discussing it. She had taught him how to beat off; she’d even invited him to imagine her when he did it. But this was entirely for Jack’s self-preservation in prep school, especially at Redding, and although she’d sent him photographs of herself naked—and, unbeknownst to Emma, Jack still had one of them—it was their mutual understanding in Los Angeles that they were more than friends, and certainly a little different from other brothers and sisters, but they were not lovers. (The penis-holding notwithstanding—and no matter how many times they were undressed in each other’s company, without seeming to think twice about it.)

Emma met another bodybuilder—this one at World Gym—and he didn’t beat her up. He worked as a waiter at Stan’s, which was on the corner of Rose and Main.

Stan’s was one of those places that wouldn’t last long in Venice. The waiters weren’t as brash as they were in a New York steakhouse, like Smith & Wollensky, and for steaks and chops and Maine lobsters, which was all they served, the white tablecloths seemed out of place; yet the waiters wore white dress shirts with their sleeves rolled up, and no ties, and those starched white aprons that made them look like butchers who’d not yet made contact with any meat. It’s hard to feel superior in a steakhouse, but the waiters at Stan’s (there were no waitresses) took naturally to superiority. It was as if they’d been born in those starched white aprons—remarkably, without a drop of blood being shed in the process.

The waiter Emma knew who worked at Stan’s had a name like Giorgio or Guido; he could bench-press three hundred pounds. Emma managed to persuade him that Jack was an experienced waiter, and Giorgio or Guido reluctantly introduced Jack to Donald, the maître d’ at Stan’s—a headwaiter of intimidating snottiness.

Admittedly, Jack had had no experience as a waiter, but Emma had skillfully revised Mr. Ramsey’s written recommendation of Jack’s training as an actor, which repeatedly cited his “vast potential.” The studio in West Hollywood where, every morning, Emma turned in her notes and picked up an armload of new screenplays—she read and critiqued three or four scripts a day—had lots of fancy copying equipment, with which Emma slickly executed Mr. Ramsey’s edited recommendation of Jack.

The word actor was replaced with waiter, and the names of certain plays or dramatizations (even the musicals) were presented to the clueless American reader as the names of trendy Toronto restaurants, in which Mr. Ramsey extolled the virtue of Jack’s “performance”—an oft-repeated word, which Emma left unaltered, except she sometimes changed it to a verb.

Hence Jack had “performed” superbly at an alleged bistro called Mail-Order Bride (there was another restaurant called Northwest Territories) and at what was probably a French place, d’Urbervilles, and at several restaurants of note in the northeastern United States, among them The Restaurant of Notre Dame and Peter and Wendy’s—not to mention what must have been a Spanish eatery, Bernarda Alba.

Mr. Ramsey’s letterhead—namely, that of St. Hilda’s—which stated he was Chairman of English and Drama, had been tweaked to identify him as Chairman of the Hotel and Restaurant of that oddly religious-sounding name. Mr. Ramsey’s opening sentence described St. Hilda’s (he meant, of course, the school) as “one of Toronto’s best.”

But Donald was an imperious prick—a headwaiter from Hell. “When I’m recommending a hotel with a good restaurant in Toronto, I always recommend the Four Seasons,” he told Jack. He then challenged Jack to take a minute or two to memorize the specials.

“If you give me ten minutes, I can memorize the whole menu,” Jack told him.

But Donald didn’t give him the chance. The maître d’ later told Giorgio or Guido that Jack’s attitude had offended him. He had sized up Jack as “a hick from Toronto via New Hampshire”—or so he said to Giorgio or Guido. Jack had already decided he didn’t want the waiter job—not in such a self-important steakhouse. But when Donald offered him an opportunity in the restaurant’s valet-parking department, Jack accepted. He was a good driver.

It wasn’t that Emma thought the job was beneath him; her objection was political. “You can’t be a parking valet, baby cakes. English is your first language. You’re taking a job from some unfortunate illegal alien.”

But Giorgio or Guido looked relieved. He didn’t want Jack to be a fellow waiter at Stan’s. He’d had enough difficulty accepting Jack as Emma’s roommate, no matter how many times Emma had told him that she and Jack didn’t have sex together. (Jack wondered what Giorgio or Guido’s problem was. How could you bench-press three hundred pounds and be that insecure?)

Jack didn’t last long as a parking valet; he was fired from the job his first night—in fact, he never got to park his first car.

It was a silver Audi with gunmetal-gray leather seats, and the guy who flipped Jack the keys was a young, arty type who appeared to have been quarreling with his young, arty wife—or his girlfriend, Jack had thought, before he’d driven less than a block and the little girl sat up in the backseat. Her face, which was streaked with tears, was perfectly framed in the rearview mirror. She was maybe four, at the most five, years old, and she wasn’t sitting in a booster seat. Evidently the backseat was her bed for the evening, because she was wearing pajamas and clutching both a blanket and a teddy bear to her chest. Jack saw a pillow propped against the armrest on the passenger side of the backseat; the booster seat was on the floor, kicked out of the way.

“Are you parking in a garage or outdoors?” the little girl asked him, wiping her nose on the sleeve of her pajamas.

“You can’t stay in the car,” Jack told her. He stopped the Audi and put on the hazard blinkers; she had scared the shit out of him and his heart was pounding.

“I’m not well enough behaved to eat in a grown-up restaurant,” the little girl said.

Jack didn’t know what to do. Maybe the young, arty couple had been arguing about leaving the little girl in the backseat, but he thought not. The girl had the look of a valet-parking veteran. “I like the garages better than parking on the street,” she explained. “It will be dark soon,” the little girl observed.

Jack drove down Main to Windward, where a gang of rowdies—noisy singles, though it was early in the evening—were crowding the entrance to Hama Sushi, waiting for tables. He left the Audi running at the curb and rang the buzzer to the half of the ratty duplex he shared with Emma; then he went back to the car and waited beside it. The little girl was never out of his sight.

“Is this where we’re parking?” she asked.

“I’m not leaving you alone, not anywhere,” he told her.

Emma opened the door and came out on the sidewalk; she was wearing one of her World Gym tank tops and nothing else. Because she looked more than usually pissed off, Jack guessed she’d been writing her novel.

“Nice car, honey pie. Does it come with the kid?” Jack explained the situation while the little girl observed them from the backseat. She’d probably never seen anyone quite like Emma in her World Gym tank top. “I told you—you shouldn’t be parking cars,” Emma said. She kept looking at the little girl. “I’m not babysitter material, Jack.”

“I usually sleep on the floor, if I think anyone can see me sleeping on the backseat,” the little girl said.

The “usually” made up Jack’s mind for him—that and what Emma said before she walked back inside to continue what must have been one of the angrier passages in her novel-in-progress. “Nothing good can come of this job, baby cakes.”

Jack put the little girl in the middle of the backseat and fastened a seat belt around her, because he couldn’t figure out how the stupid booster seat worked. “It’s probably hard to understand if you don’t have children,” the little girl told him forgivingly. Her name was Lucy. “I’m almost five,” she said.

When Jack returned to the corner of Rose and Main, he pulled up at the curb in front of Stan’s; his fellow valet parkers looked surprised to see him. “¿Qué pasa?” Roberto asked, when Jack handed him the keys.

“Better not park the Audi just yet,” Jack told him, taking Lucy into the restaurant. She wanted to bring her blanket and her teddy bear, but not the pillow, which was okay with Jack.

The asshole maître d’, Donald, was standing at his desk as if it were a pulpit and the book of reservations a Bible. Lucy, seeing all the people, wanted Jack to pick her up, which he did. “Now we’re going to get in trouble,” the child whispered in his ear.

“You’re going to be fine, Lucy,” Jack told her. “I’m the one who’s going to get in trouble.”

“You’re already in trouble, Burns,” Donald said, but Jack walked past him into the restaurant. Lucy spotted her parents before Jack did. It was still early, a soft light outside; the tables weren’t full yet. (Maybe the tables were never full at Stan’s.)

Lucy’s mother got up from her chair and met them halfway to her table. “Is something wrong?” she asked Jack. What a question. And women (not only Claudia) gave Jack a hard time when he said he wasn’t ready to be a parent!

“You forgot something,” Jack said to the young, arty mom. “You left Lucy in the car.” The woman just stared at him, but Lucy held out her arms and her mother took her from Jack—teddy bear and blanket and all.

Jack hoped that would be the end of it, but Donald, the headwaiter from Hell, wouldn’t let him leave. “There is no St. Hilda’s, hotel or restaurant, in Toronto,” he hissed. “There is no Mail-Order Bride—”

“So you’re from Toronto,” Jack interrupted him. The way Donald had said, “T’ronto,” had given him away. Jack should have known. Donald was another undiscovered Canadian working as a waiter in L.A.

Naturally, the young, arty husband and bad father wouldn’t let Jack leave Stan’s without giving him his two cents’ worth. “I’m gonna get you fired, pretty boy,” the guy said.

“It’s a good job to lose,” Jack told him, making note of the line.

Giorgio or Guido was hovering around, to the extent that a bodybuilder who can bench-press three hundred pounds can hover. “You better get outta here, Jack,” he was saying.

“I’m trying to get out of here,” Jack said.

He was abreast of the reservation desk when he spotted the telephone; it occurred to him to call 911 and report a clear case of child neglect, but he thought better of it. Jack didn’t know the license plate of the silver Audi. He would have to write it down if he wanted to remember it—damn numbers again.

But the bad father was too angry to let Jack go. He stepped in front of Jack and blocked his way; he was a medium-tall young man, and his chin was level to Jack’s eyes. Jack waited for the guy to touch him. When he grabbed Jack’s shoulders, Jack stepped back a little and the young man pulled Jack toward him. Jack let him pull, head-butting him in the lips. Jack didn’t butt him all that hard, but the guy was a big bleeder.

“I’m calling nine-one-one the second I’m home,” Jack said to Giorgio or Guido. “Tell Donald.”

“Donald says you’re fired, Jack,” the bodybuilder said.

“It’s a good job to lose,” Jack repeated. (He knew that line would have legs.)

Out on the sidewalk, Roberto was still holding the keys to the silver Audi. That’s when Jack remembered he had the parking chit in his shirt pocket; he’d already written down the license-plate numbers. “You’ll have to write out a new chit for the Audi,” he told Roberto.

“No problem,” Roberto said.

Jack walked along Main to Windward. It was a nice evening, only now growing dark. (When you’ve grown up in Toronto, Maine, and New Hampshire, when isn’t it a nice evening in L.A.?)

Emma was writing away when Jack got home, but she overheard his 911 call. “What did you do with the kid?” she asked him, after he’d hung up.

“Gave her to her parents.”

“What’s that on your forehead?” Emma asked.

“A little ketchup, maybe—I’ve been in a food fight.”

“It’s blood, baby cakes—I can see the teeth-marks.”

“You should’ve seen the fucker’s lips,” he told her.

“Ha!” Emma said. (Shades of Mrs. Machado—that exclamation always gave Jack the shivers.)

They went out to Hama Sushi. You could talk about anything at Hama Sushi—it was so noisy. Jack really liked the place, but it was partly what Emma called “l’eau de Dumpster” (her Montreal French) that eventually drove them away from their Windward Avenue duplex.

“So what did you learn from your brief experience as a parking valet, honey pie?”

“I got one good line out of it,” Jack said.

What convinced Emma that Jack should be a waiter at American Pacific, a restaurant in Santa Monica not far from the beach, was neither the location nor the menu. She went there on a date one night and liked what the waiters were wearing—blue Oxford cloth button-down shirts with solid burgundy ties, khakis with dark-brown belts, and dark-brown loafers. “It’s very Exeter, baby cakes—you’ll fit right in. I stole a dinner menu for you. Just think of it as an acting opportunity, as Mr. Ramsey would say.”

Emma meant that memorizing the menu was an acting opportunity. It took Jack the better part of a morning. Counting the salads and other starters together with the main courses, there were about twenty items.

Jack then called Mr. Ramsey in Toronto and alerted him to the modifications Emma had made in Mr. Ramsey’s recommendation for Jack; just in case someone phoned Mr. Ramsey to verify Jack’s credentials as a waiter, Jack wanted his beloved mentor to know that Mail-Order Bride was supposed to be a fabulous bistro.

“You have to make reservations a month in advance!” Mr. Ramsey responded, with his usual enthusiasm. “Jack Burns, I know you’ll go far!” (Maybe, Jack thought—if only as a waiter.)

Jack showed up that afternoon at American Pacific; it still sounded more like a railroad than a restaurant to him, but the maître d’, a handsome fellow named Carlos, was a welcome sight. Jack knew at once that Carlos was no Canadian. When Carlos looked at Jack’s letter of recommendation, he nodded as if he’d eaten at Mail-Order Bride many times.

The specials were on a blackboard by the bar. “I’ll bet you can memorize them in a heartbeat,” Carlos said.

“I’ve already memorized the menu,” Jack told him. “You want to hear it?” That got the attention of the other waitstaff. It was only about five-thirty in the afternoon—no customers as yet—but Jack had his audience. He skipped the veal chop with the gorgonzola mashed potatoes, just to make them think he’d forgotten something—only to surprise them by mentioning the veal chop at the end of his recitation. He forgot nothing. He’d already dressed as if he had the job, and he knew he’d nailed the audition. Carlos didn’t ask him to recite the specials.

It was to be the first in a long line of auditions for Jack—not counting the aborted one with Donald—but all of Jack’s other auditions would be as an actor instead of a waiter; he was at American Pacific until he no longer needed a job waiting tables.

Emma had arranged for Jack’s head shots with a photographer she knew; they were ridiculously expensive. Emma carried them around with her. At the studio in West Hollywood, she occasionally met an agent or a casting director. But she was more likely to meet someone important on a date, or in any of several restaurants in West Hollywood and Beverly Hills.

Some young hotshot at Creative Artists wanted to bang Emma in the worst way. There wasn’t an agent at C.A.A. who would represent a nobody like Jack Burns, but the guy told Emma he would negotiate a contract for Jack—if Jack managed to get an acting job. (Just how Jack might do that without an agent wasn’t made clear.)

Emma took advantage of the young agent’s lust and brought him one night to American Pacific. His name was Lawrence. “Not Larry,” he told Jack, with an arched eyebrow.

Not much came of that meeting, but Lawrence made a few calls on Jack’s behalf. These were calls to other agents, not at C.A.A. but on Lawrence’s personal B-list—or more likely his C-list.

Someone whose name Jack confused with Rottweiler (the dog) told him that his recommendations and college acting experiences were basically worthless. “Ditto the summer stock,” Rottweiler said, “except for Bruno Litkins.” Bruno had a Hollywood connection: casting directors occasionally consulted him on roles related to transvestism. “Or transvestitism,” Rottweiler said. “Whatever the fuck you call it.”

Jack’s toe in the door, albeit an odd one, was that he had found favor with Bruno Litkins for his creation of the gay transvestite Esmeralda in Bruno’s transformation of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. “Not what I’d call super-marketable,” Rottweiler informed Jack. (Not that Jack was at all sure he wanted to be marketed exclusively for roles related to transvestism or transvestitism.)

Another of the agents on Lawrence’s B- or C-list sent Jack to an audition for a movie in Van Nuys. The place looked like a private home, but doubled as a film set. When the woman who did hair or makeup told Jack the name of the movie, Muffy the Vampire Hooker 3, Jack thought it was a joke. He didn’t understand the situation until the producer introduced herself and asked to see his penis.

“Small schlongs need not apply,” she said. Her name was Milly. She was wearing a slate-gray pin-striped pantsuit, very businesswoman-banker chic, which stood in seeming contradiction to her old-fashioned pearl necklace—of a kind worn by ladies who belong to bridge clubs. Her hair was huge—a silver-blond bubble, like a motorcycle helmet sans insignia.

Jack said there’d been a misunderstanding and started to leave. “You might as well show me your schlong,” Milly said. “It’s a free opportunity to find out if you measure up.” That got the attention of a bodybuilder-type with a ponytail and a busty young woman who looked like a vampire. They were sitting on a couch, watching a movie on a VCR. It was footage of themselves, probably from Muffy the Vampire Hooker 2—a long, unvarying blow job, in the throes of which the eponymous Muffy occasionally bared her vampiric canines. One would hope that when she was moved to bite the bodybuilder and suck his blood, she would do so in his throat. Jack saw that Muffy did not have the bloodsucking canines inserted while she watched the movie on the couch; she was innocently chewing gum.

The guy with the ponytail paused the blow job on the VCR, and the three of them had a look at Jack’s penis. While this was not specifically the film career Jack sought, most men are curious to know how their penises compare; after all, here was a panel of experts.

“It’s okay, buddy,” the bodybuilder told Jack.

“Cut the crap, Hank,” Milly said.

“Yeah, Hank,” Muffy the vampire hooker said.

Hank went back to the couch and started up the blow job on the VCR again. “His dick looks fine to me,” Hank said.

“It’s cute,” Muffy told Jack, “but in this business, cute doesn’t quite cut it.”

“Forget quite,” Milly said. She was in her fifties, maybe sixty—a former porn star, one of the cameramen had told Jack, but the cameraman must have been kidding. Except for the big hair, Milly reminded Jack of Noah Rosen’s mother.

“It’s cute, and it doesn’t matta how big it is,” Muffy whispered in Jack’s ear. She went back to the couch and plopped down next to Hank.

“It doesn’t cut it, period. And it does matter how big it is,” Milly said. “It doesn’t matter if it’s cute.”

“Thank you,” Jack told them, zipping up.

Hank, the big guy getting the endless blow job from Muffy on the VCR, followed Jack to the car; there was nothing cute about Hank’s schlong, which Jack had noticed was enormous. “Don’t be discouraged,” Hank said. “Just eat healthy. I’d stick to low-fat, low-sodium, low-carb stuff, if I were you.”

“Hank, are you ready?” Milly was screaming from inside the house.

“This job isn’t for everyone,” Hank admitted to Jack. “There’s a lotta pressure.” He had a high, nasal voice—a mismatch with his hulking presence.

“Hank!” Muffy called. She was standing in the open doorway of the house, baring her teeth in a broad-mouthed grin. She had inserted the bloodsucking canines; Muffy was ready for the next shot, whatever it was.

“Coming!” Hank called back to her. “It might have worked out differently if I’d met Mildred’s sister,” he said, “but I met Milly first.”

“She has a sister?” Jack asked.

“Myra Ascheim is legit,” Hank said. “Mildred is the porn-producer side of the Ascheim family.”

Jack saw that Mildred Ascheim had joined Muffy the vampire hooker in the doorway. “Stop stalling, Hank!” Milly yelled.

“What is Myra Ascheim legit at?” Jack asked.

“She’s some kind of agent,” Hank told him. “She used to represent Val Kilmer, or maybe it was Michael J. Fox—lots of people like that, anyway. It’s all about who you meet out here,” he added. Hank was walking back to the house like a man about to have nonstop sex with a vampire hooker. He looked less than thrilled.

“Good luck!” Jack called to him.

“I’ll look for you on the big screen,” Hank said, pointing skyward—as if the big screen, in both their minds, lay in a heavenly direction.

“Good luck, little schlong!” Milly called to Jack.

Hank stopped and walked back to Jack for a minute. “If you ever meet Myra, don’t tell her you’ve met Mildred,” he warned Jack. “That would be the kiss of death.”

“It’s not as if I actually auditioned,” Jack said.

“This was an audition, kid. I’ll look for you,” Hank said again.

Jack would look for him, too, although he didn’t tell Hank that at the time. His porn name was Hank Long—a big, handsome guy, no stranger to a weight room, always with minimal dialogue, no doubt because of his high, nasal voice. Jack would see him in fifteen or twenty “adult” movies after their first meeting—for the most part, nothing memorable by title or plot.

Jack could have recognized Hank’s penis all by itself—Emma could have, too. They watched Hank Long movies together, after Jack’s not-exactly-an-audition in Van Nuys.

“Never go to Van Nuys,” he told Emma, when he got home. “There are a lot of guys with huge schlongs out there.”

“Like that would really keep me away,” Emma said somewhat ambiguously.

Jack told her the whole story—how his penis, in Mildred Ascheim’s estimation, didn’t cut it; how he was “cute,” according to Muffy the vampire hooker, but not in a league with Hank Long.

“I wouldn’t say you were tiny, baby cakes, but I’ve seen bigger.” More than Milly’s small-schlong assessment, Emma’s bluntness left Jack a little crestfallen. “For Christ’s sake, you’re not trying to be a porn star!” Emma said, trying to cheer him up.

She called Lawrence at C.A.A. immediately, beginning the conversation by telling him she would never fuck him. “Let’s get that out of the way,” was how Emma put it. “Do you have any other brilliant ideas about which agents Jack should see?” Emma covered the mouthpiece of the telephone and turned to Jack. “He says no,” she reported.

“Ask him if he knows Myra Ascheim,” Jack said.

Emma got a quick answer to her question over the phone. “Lawrence says she’s a has-been, honey pie. She’s been let go by everyone. She doesn’t even have an assistant anymore.”

“She sounds like a good place to start,” Jack said. “Ask Lawrence if he’ll make a call—just one call.”

Emma asked the bastard. “Lawrence says Myra doesn’t even have an office.”

“She sounds perfect for me,” Jack said.

Emma conveyed Jack’s feelings to Lawrence over the phone. “He says not to mention Myra’s sister,” Emma told Jack.

“I know,” Jack said. “It’s Myra, not Mildred. I know, I know.”

That night there were three messages on the answering machine when Jack got back from American Pacific. He was anxious that one of the messages might have been from a housewife he’d been banging in Benedict Canyon. The woman was insane; she claimed that from her bedroom she could see part of the estate on Cielo Drive where Sharon Tate had been murdered, but Jack couldn’t see it. When the Santa Anas were blowing, she said she could hear the screams and moans of Ms. Tate and the other victims—as if the murders were ongoing.

She called Jack frequently, often to reschedule their rendezvous. Usually the postponement had something to do with her husband or one of her children, but the last time the family dog had been to blame. The unfortunate animal had eaten something it shouldn’t have; the complications were so severe that the vet had promised to make a house call.

Emma said that Jack should learn to read between the lines—clearly the housewife was also sleeping with the vet. Emma loved listening to all the reasons the Benedict Canyon woman found not to sleep with Jack, or at least to postpone the illicit act. But Emma had been writing; she’d not answered the phone that night. She and Jack listened to the answering machine together after Jack came home.

Both Lawrence and Rottweiler said they had called Myra Ascheim and told her she should meet Jack; they’d given her his phone number. The third message was from Myra. Her voice was alarmingly like her sister’s. Jack first thought it was Mildred, calling to further abuse his small schlong.

“There’s two people, both assholes, who say I should meet you,” Myra Ascheim’s message began. “So where the fuck are you, Jack Burns?”

That was the message—not very elegant, and she didn’t even leave her name. Jack knew it was Myra only because he’d met Milly and recognized the sisterly voice. (It was a voice with more Brooklyn in it than L.A.)

Emma must have noticed the despondency in Jack’s expression when he replayed the three messages, again and again. That some word from the insane housewife in Benedict Canyon was not among the messages appeared to pain him. Only Emma knew Jack well enough to guess that, although he was relieved to let the relationship slip away, he missed the woman’s madness.

Emma Oastler’s first novel was called The Slush-Pile Reader, which was almost entirely based on Emma’s job—not that “slush-pile reader” was her job’s official title. (With an uncustomary dignity, as if her job were a pinnacle of the profession, the studio called Emma a “first” reader—a part of the process also called “screenplay development.”)

Emma read not only unsolicited manuscripts; she read the scripts submitted by agents who were less than name brands, and the occasional script by a marquee screenwriter whose agent had recently jerked the studio around. Very few screenplays were eventually produced—and most of those had more important first readers than Emma, but Emma would eventually read those scripts, too.

What bothered Emma about her job was not how many screenplays she had to read, or even how badly written most of them were. Emma’s principal gripe was with the studio execs—they read her notes but not the screenplays. Emma discovered that for the majority of scripts she read, she was the only reader. This inclined her to be overgenerous in her notes, even in the case of bad screenplays; she didn’t want to be the sole reason a film wasn’t produced, even though Emma’s foremost complaint about many of the movies she saw was that they should never have been made in the first place.

“But why would a studio hire a script reader, especially for the slush pile, if the studio execs wanted to read a bunch of bad screenplays?” Jack asked her. It seemed perfectly natural to him that, in most cases, a first reader meant an only reader.

Not to Emma; she was both indignant and unreasonable about it. “The execs should still read them, even if they’re bad,” she insisted.

“But they hired you, Emma, so they wouldn’t have to read all the junk!”

“Someone wrote that junk, baby cakes. It took hours and hours.”

Emma surely exaggerated what she called wasting her time as a film major. What was the point of learning to appreciate good films? Emma argued. The way the movie industry worked had nothing to do with film as an art form. Jack thought that Emma’s motive for revenge was misguided; it was the machinations of the movie industry that had wasted her time, not her having been a film major.

Emma insisted that the studio execs were responsible for making many terrible movies that should never have been made; therefore, to make some small measure of atonement for their crimes, they should read their fair share of bad screenplays.

Jack argued that Emma should have been more upset about what happened in that rare case of an unknown screenwriter who wrote a script the studio execs actually read and liked. On only two occasions had Emma loved an unsolicited screenplay; both times, she’d managed to persuade the execs to read it. In each case, they promptly bought the rights and offered the screenwriter a fee to write a second draft; they rejected the second draft, paid off the screenwriter, and hired an established writer to reconstruct the story in all the usual, conventional ways. Whatever quality had been good enough to catch Emma’s attention (in the original script) was lost, but the studio now owned and continued to develop what they called “the property.”

This didn’t upset Emma at all. “It’s the writer’s fault—the writer caved to the money. That’s what the damn writers do. You want to maintain control of your screenplay, you take no money up front—you don’t even let the fuckers buy you lunch, honey pie.”

“But what if the writer needs the money?” Jack asked. “The writer probably needs lunch!”

“Then the writer should get a day job,” Emma said.

Arguing with Emma drove Jack crazy. It also worried him about Emma’s novel—that the writing would descend to a level of autobiographical complaining; that it would be an unimagined story, without an iota of invention, full of rantings and accusatory anecdotes he’d heard before. That the main character of The Slush-Pile Reader was a young Canadian woman—a newcomer to L.A. who’d gone to school “back East” and had Emma’s job—did not, Jack thought, bode well. But it turned out that Emma had invented a character who seemed most unlike herself; she’d actually imagined a story, one that was far more interesting than her own. And, sentence by sentence, she wrote well—she’d taken the necessary pains to revise herself.

Furthermore, Emma had envisioned a heroic character—one capable of touchingly unselfish gestures—notwithstanding that Emma was generally too cynical to be heroic herself. The main character of The Slush-Pile Reader, the eponymous reader, is not a cynic. On the contrary, Michele Maher (of all names!) is a pure-hearted optimist with an indestructibly sunny disposition. Michele Maher—that is, Emma’s character—is such a good girl that her purity survives her most degrading experiences, and she has a few.

Unlike Emma, Michele is a preternaturally thin young woman who has to force herself to eat. She haunts gyms and health-food stores, gagging on protein powder and popping all the dietary supplements that bodybuilders use, but she never manages to put on a pound. Despite all her weightlifting, she looks like a wire. Michele Maher has the body and metabolism of a twelve-year-old boy.

Also unlike Emma, Michele is conscience-stricken by the bad scripts she reads. The worst, most self-deluded screenwriters break her heart. Michele wants to help them be better writers; to that futile end, she writes them encouraging letters on the studio letterhead. These letters are very different in content and tone from the notes Michele submits to the studio execs; in those notes, she is critical in the extreme. In short, Michele does her job well: she tells her bosses all the reasons why they shouldn’t waste their time reading this crap.

But to the rock-bottom writers themselves, Michele Maher is an angel of hope; she always finds something positive to say about their most abhorrent excrescences. In the first chapter of The Slush-Pile Reader, Michele writes a warm, enthusiastic letter to a heavily tattooed bodybuilder and porn star named Miguel Santiago. His porn name is Jimmy.

In his pathetic screenplay, which is the story of his life, Santiago describes himself as a porn star who hates his work. The only way Santiago can have sex on command is to imagine he is a young James Stewart falling in love with Margaret Sullavan in The Shopworn Angel, or submitting to the sentimental bliss of domestic life with Donna Reed in It’s a Wonderful Life. Santiago manages to stay the course through such epics as Bored Housewives 4 and Keep It Up, Inc., by imagining he is the one and only Jimmy Stewart in these black-and-white soap-opera masterpieces.

There’s no story: we see Miguel Santiago lifting weights and getting tattooed, we see him memorizing lines from The Shopworn Angel and It’s a Wonderful Life, and of course we see him performing as the other Jimmy. In her notes to the studio execs, Michele Maher states that such a film is “not makable”—easily a third of it would be a porn movie! But in her letter to Miguel Santiago, Michele calls his screenplay “a bittersweet memoir.” And her letter takes a personal turn: she asks Miguel where he works out.

Santiago, of course, imagines that Michele Maher is a studio exec—not a slush-pile reader. Little does he know that she goes to the video store and rents all four of the Bored Housewives movies. In one of her more self-degrading moments, Michele masturbates to Keep It Up, Inc.; sexually repressed, she goes to the gym where Miguel Santiago (alias Jimmy) trains, just to watch him work out. In this respect, Michele Maher is like Emma: she has a thing for bodybuilder-types. But unlike Emma, Michele doesn’t usually act on her cravings. And what bodybuilder would ever hit on Michele? She’s built like a pencil.

What makes The Slush-Pile Reader moving is that Miguel Santiago is a dim-witted but genuinely nice guy. When Michele Maher gets up the nerve to introduce herself to him, she confesses she’s no exec—she’s just a first reader who felt sorry for him. They begin a relationship that one reviewer of The Slush-Pile Reader would call “L.A. dysfunctional”—this was in praise of the novel, which generally got terrific reviews. “More noir than noir,” said The New York Times.

Miguel and Michele end up living together—“within breathing distance of a sushi Dumpster in Venice.” (Jack knew where that came from.) They don’t have sex. His schlong is too big for Michele—it hurts. She just holds it. (Jack knew where that came from, too—if not the “too big” part.)

Over time, out of his growing and abiding love for her, Miguel introduces Michele to other bodybuilders he knows at the gym; he’s seen them in the shower, so he knows who’s got the small schlongs. Michele sleeps with them. “A muted pleasure,” as she puts it to Miguel. Holding his porn-movie penis with mixed emotions, she tells him she’s happy.

As for Miguel Santiago—a.k.a. Jimmy, the penile phenomenon—he gets all the sex he wants or needs at his day job, which he stoically endures. He accepts his relationship with Michele for what it is. Michele sleeps with the occasional small schlong, but she always goes home to Miguel and they lie in bed together, she holding his huge, unacceptable penis—the two of them not saying anything—while they watch Waterloo Bridge on the VCR, the 1940 remake with Vivien Leigh and Robert Taylor. It’s Miguel’s kind of movie, a real tearjerker.

At the end of Emma’s novel, Michele Maher and Miguel Santiago are still living together. Michele doesn’t write letters of encouragement to bad screenwriters anymore; she restricts her comments to the notes she gives the studio execs, who never read the screenplays she reads. The worst scripts still break her heart, but she doesn’t talk about her day when she comes home to Miguel; naturally, he doesn’t talk about his. They consume some protein powder and dietary supplements, and they go to the gym. He says he likes it when she sleeps in a World Gym tank top—her small, almost nonexistent breasts are easy to touch under the angry gorilla holding the bending barbell.

“There are worse relationships in L.A.,” Emma writes; it was a line quoted in a lot of her reviews, and a pretty good setup to the novel’s last sentence: “If you or your partner is in a bad movie, or in any number of bad movies—even if you’re perpetually in the act of rewriting the same bad movie—there are worse things to be ashamed of.”

Jack liked the novel’s first sentence better: “Either there are no coincidences in this town, or everything in this town is a coincidence.”

Take the message on the answering machine from Myra Ascheim, for example. Jack didn’t know that Emma already knew who Mildred Ascheim was, not to mention that Emma had been watching porn films day and night—“research” for The Slush-Pile Reader, she later called it—and this was before he happened to meet Hank Long on the set of Muffy the Vampire Hooker 3 and Jack and Emma started watching Hank Long movies together.

Jack told Emma that he couldn’t read about Miguel Santiago without seeing Hank Long in the part, but Emma objected to his premature conclusion that her novel would one day be a film. “Spare me the movie talk, baby cakes,” was how she put it. “You’re getting ahead of yourself.”

Jack first read The Slush-Pile Reader while the manuscript was still making the rounds of New York literary agents; Emma had decided she was more American than Canadian and she wanted to sell the U.S. rights before she even showed the novel to a Toronto publisher—notwithstanding that Charlotte Breasts-with-Bones-in-Them Barford, her old pal from St. Hilda’s, was a young up-and-comer in Canadian publishing.

“Did you have to call her Michele Maher?” Jack asked Emma. “I adored Michele Maher, I worshiped her. I will always worship her. You never even met her, Emma.”

“You kept her away from me, Jack. Besides, Michele is a very positive character—in the book, I mean.”

“Michele is a very positive character in real life!” Jack protested. “You’ve given her the body of a twelve-year-old boy! You’ve made her this pathetic creature who’s enslaved to bodybuilders!”

“It’s just a name,” Emma said. “You’re overreacting.”

Naturally, Jack was sensitive about the small-schlong business, too—that part about sleeping with a guy with a small penis being “a muted pleasure.”

“It’s a novel, honey pie—a work of fiction. Don’t you know how to read a novel?”

“You’ve been holding my penis for years, Emma. I didn’t know you were making a size assessment.”

“It’s a novel,” Emma repeated. “You’re taking it too personally. You’ve missed the point about penises, Jack.”

“What point is that?”

“When they’re too big, it hurts, baby cakes. I mean, it hurts if the woman is too small.”

Jack thought about it; he hadn’t known that a woman could be too small. (Too big, maybe, but not too small.) Did Emma mean that “a muted pleasure” was preferable to pain? Was that the point? Then he saw that Emma was crying. “I liked the novel,” he told her. “I didn’t mean that I didn’t like it.”

“You don’t get it,” Emma said.

Jack thought she was talking about The Slush-Pile Reader, which he believed he’d understood fairly well. “I get it, Emma,” he said. “It may not be exactly my cup of tea—I mean it’s hardly an old-fashioned novel with a complicated plot and a complex cast of characters. It may be a little contemporary for my taste—a psychological study of a relationship more than a narrative, and a dysfunctional relationship at that. But I liked it—I really did. I thought the tone of voice was consistent—a kind of sarcastic understatement, I guess you’d call it. There was a deadpan voice in the more emotional scenes, which I particularly liked. And the relationship, imperfect though it is, is better than no relationship. I get that. They don’t have sex, they can’t have sex, but—for different reasons—not having sex is almost a relief for them.”

“Oh, shut the fuck up!” Emma said; she was still crying.

“What don’t I get?” he asked.

“It’s not the novel you don’t get—it’s me!” she cried. “I’m too small, Jack,” Emma said softly. “Even not-very-big guys hurt me.”

Jack was completely surprised. Emma was such a big girl, such a strong young woman, and she was always battling her weight; she was much taller and heavier than Jack. How was it possible that she was too small? “Have you seen a doctor?” he asked.

“A gynecologist—yes, several. They say I’m not too small. It’s all in my mind, apparently.”

“The pain is in your mind?” he asked her.

“No, that’s not where the pain is,” she said.

Emma’s condition had an uncomfortable-sounding name. Vaginismus, Emma explained, was a conditioned response; often a spasm of the perineal muscles occurred if there was any stimulation of the area. In some women, even the anticipation of vaginal insertion could result in muscle spasm.

“You want to avoid penetration?” Jack asked Emma.

“It’s involuntary, honey pie. I can’t help it—it’s chronic.”

“There’s no treatment?”

Emma laughed. She’d tried hypnosis—an attempt to retrain the muscles to relax instead of involuntarily contracting. But even the psychiatrist had forewarned her that this worked with only a small percentage of sufferers, and it hadn’t worked with Emma.

On the advice of a Toronto gynecologist, Emma had experimented with a treatment known as systematic desensitization—or the Q-tip method, as her Los Angeles gynecologist disparagingly called it. By inserting something as narrow as a Q-tip—and when this was accomplished, progressively inserting slightly larger objects—

“Stop,” Jack told her; he didn’t want to know all the treatments she’d tried. “Has anything worked?” he asked Emma.

The only thing that worked (and this didn’t work every time) was the absolute cooperation of a partner. “I have to be on top, baby cakes, and the guy can’t move at all. If he makes even one move, I get a spasm.” Emma had to be in complete control. All the moves were her moves; only that worked. It went without saying that such a willing partner was hard to find.

Jack was thinking many things, most of them unutterable. How Emma’s attraction to bodybuilders wasn’t the best idea; how her longstanding interest in boys much younger than herself made more sense. And he remembered how adamant Emma was about not having children. No doubt the vaginismus was a reason—a more compelling one than fearing she’d be a bad mother, or like her mother.

It would have been insensitive to ask her if she’d inquired about a surgical solution to her problem. Emma felt squeamish in a doctor’s office; she dreaded everything medical, most of all surgery. Besides, it didn’t sound as if there was a surgical solution to vaginismus—not if it was all in her mind.

Jack didn’t have the heart to tell Emma that she should consider revising The Slush-Pile Reader. He thought that the vaginismus would make a better story than all the small-schlong, big-schlong business—not to mention the unlikelihood of the Michele Maher character having a vagina that was too small. But he understood that Emma’s fiction was a purer choice—a fable of acceptance, and as close as Emma could allow herself to approach her problem. A life in the top position; a lifetime looking for the unmoving partner. It seemed too cruel. Or would this method eventually train her perineal muscles to relax?

“What causes vaginismus?” Jack asked, but Emma might not have heard him, or she was distracted. Maybe she didn’t know what caused it—maybe nothing did—or else she didn’t want to discuss it further.

They took off their clothes and went to bed. Emma held his penis. Jack got very hard—unusually hard, it seemed to him—but all Emma said was, “You’re not really all that small, Jack. Smallish, I would say. If I were you, honey pie, I wouldn’t worry about it.”

Emma didn’t exactly say she’d seen smaller—he’d only heard her say she’d seen bigger—but Jack didn’t press her. It was enough that she held his penis. He was awfully fond of the way she held it.

“We should move,” Emma said sleepily.

“Maybe roommates aren’t the best readers,” Jack ventured to say, touching her breasts.

“I didn’t mean we should stop living together, Jack. I meant I’m sick of Venice.”

That struck Jack as too bad, but he didn’t say anything. He would miss Venice—even l’eau de Dumpster from Hama Sushi. He had grown fond of World Gym, and—despite Emma’s bad experience—he occasionally went to Gold’s, though Jack Burns was no bodybuilder; in both gyms, when he wanted to use the free weights, he did his lifting at the women’s end of the weight room.

“You’re going to be a strong boy, Jack—not very big, but strong,” Leslie Oastler had told him.

“Do you think so?” he’d asked her.

“I know so,” Mrs. Oastler had said. “I can tell.”

Jack lay there remembering that, with his smallish penis as hard as a diamond in Emma’s big, strong hand. Jack had small hands, like his mother. He lay there thinking how strange it was that he hadn’t thought of his mom in months. Maybe Jack didn’t like to think of her because he believed he more and more reminded her of his father; and while it wasn’t his physical resemblance to his dad that bothered Jack, surely any resemblance he bore to William would have been upsetting to Alice. Jack just got the feeling that his mother didn’t like him.

Jack was also wondering where he and Emma might move. He’d once mentioned the Palisades to Emma. It was like a village; you could walk everywhere. But Emma said the Palisades was “swarming with children”—it was, in her view, “a place where formerly sane people went to breed.” Jack guessed that they wouldn’t be moving there.

Clearly Beverly Hills was too expensive for them; besides, it was too far away from the beach. Emma said she liked to see the ocean every day—not that she ever set foot on the beach. Malibu maybe, Jack was thinking, or Santa Monica. But given Emma’s revelation that sex hurt her—quite possibly, it hurt her most of the time—it would have been insensitive of Jack to pursue a conversation about where they might move. Save it for another time, he thought.

“Say it in Latin for me,” he said to Emma.

She knew what he meant—it was the epigraph she’d set at the beginning of her novel. She went around saying it like a litany, but until now Jack had not realized she meant them.

“Nihil facimus sed id bene facimus,” Emma whispered, holding his penis like no one before or since.

“We do nothing but we do it well,” Jack said in English, holding her breasts.

It was the fall of 1988. Rain Man would be the year’s top-grossing film and would clean up at the Academy Awards. Jack’s favorite film that year was A Fish Called Wanda. He would have killed to have had Kevin Kline’s part, for which Kline would win an Oscar for Best Actor in a Supporting Role.

Jack Burns was twenty-three. Emma Oastler was thirty. Boy, were their lives about to change!

Jack met Myra Ascheim at a breakfast place on Montana, shortly after he and Emma had moved to a rental in Santa Monica. Emma, who bought all Jack’s clothes, dressed him for his meeting. A coffee-colored, long-sleeved shirt—untucked, with the top two buttons unbuttoned—medium-tan chinos, and the dark-brown loafers he wore as a waiter. His hair was a little long, with more gel in it than usual, and he hadn’t shaved for two days—all of which was entirely Emma’s decision. She said he was “almost feminine” when he was clean-shaven, but three days’ growth made him “too Toshiro Mifune.” The shirt was linen. Emma liked the wrinkles.

Jack was reminded of Mrs. Oastler buying his clothes for Redding—later, for Exeter—and he commented to Emma that he felt remiss for never thanking her mother. Emma was spreading the gel through his hair with her hands, a little roughly. “And she paid my tuition at both schools,” Jack added. “Your mom must think I’m ungrateful.”

“Please don’t thank her, honey pie.”

“Why not?” he asked.

“Just don’t,” Emma said, yanking his hair.

It was evident that no one had dressed Myra Ascheim as attentively as Leslie Oastler and Emma had dressed Jack. He first mistook Myra for a homeless person who’d wandered east on Montana from that narrow strip of park on the Pacific side of Ocean Avenue. She was smoking a cigarette on the sidewalk in front of the Marmalade Café—a woman in her late sixties, maybe seventy, wearing dirty running shoes, baggy gray sweatpants, and a faded-pink, unlaundered sweatshirt. With her lank, dirty-white hair—in a ponytail that protruded from an Anaheim Angels baseball cap, from which the halo had fallen off the letter A—Myra bore no resemblance to her younger and far more stylish sister, Mildred.

She even toted an overstuffed shopping bag, in which she carried an old raincoat. Jack walked right by her. It wasn’t until Myra spoke to him that he recognized her, and then it was only because she had Milly’s porn-producer voice. “You should lose the stubble,” she said, “and go easy on the gel in your hair. You look like you’ve been sleeping under a car.”

“Ms. Ascheim?” he asked.

“What a bright boy you are, Jack Burns. And don’t listen to Lawrence—you’re not too pretty.”

“Lawrence said I was too pretty?” Jack asked, holding the door for her.

“Lawrence is a fink and a liar. You can’t be too pretty in this town,” Myra Ascheim said. “Or too successful.”

The issue of how successful, or not, Myra Ascheim had ever been was never made clear to Jack—or, to his knowledge, to anyone else. No one had either corroborated or repudiated the Hollywood legends attached to Myra, all of them stories about who she used to be. Was she once an agent whom I.C.M. wooed away from William Morris, or did C.A.A. woo her away from I.C.M.? Was she eventually fired from all three agencies, or did she go off on her own of her own volition? Did she once represent Julia Roberts? Was it Sharon Stone she was supposed to have “discovered,” or was that Demi Moore? And was Myra truly the first person to refer to Demi as Gimme Moore?

Jack later ran into Lawrence at the bar of Raffles L’Ermitage—not Jack’s favorite hotel in Beverly Hills, but a watering hole Lawrence loved. Lawrence told Jack that Demi Moore’s nickname of “Gimme” was his idea, not Myra’s. But Myra was right—Lawrence was a fink and a liar. And whether or not Myra Ascheim ever represented Julia Roberts, Myra had maintained her contacts with casting directors—almost all of whom liked her. Even if Myra no longer represented anyone, casting directors still returned her calls.

Bob Bookman, who was Emma’s agent at C.A.A. before he became Jack’s, told Jack a story about Myra’s identifying baseball cap. She wasn’t an Anaheim fan—she didn’t even like baseball. She liked the A on the hat, but she detested the halo. “It’s an A-list hat, but I’m no angel,” she liked to say.

According to Bob Bookman, Myra bought an Angels cap every year and removed the halo with a pair of fingernail clippers. “I saw her do it over lunch,” Bookman said. “Myra snipped off the halo while she was waiting for her Cobb salad.” The Cobb salad made the story ring true; aside from breakfast, a Cobb salad was all Jack ever saw Myra eat.

Alan Hergott—who became Jack’s entertainment lawyer—said that Myra always left the same message on his answering machine. “Call me back or I’ll sue your pants off.” That sounded like Myra.

“In this town, you get tired of hearing something you already know,” Alan told Jack. “You’re supposed to sound or at least look interested, but you know more about the story than the guy who’s telling you the story does. Myra’s different. She always knows something you don’t know. True or not—it doesn’t matter.”

In Hollywood, there were as many Myra Ascheim stories as there were stories about Milton Berle’s penis. And to think that Jack Burns met her because his schlong was small, or smallish—and only because he met her porn-producer sister, Milly, first! In fact, if it hadn’t been for Lawrence, Jack might never have met the Ascheim sisters, and he met Lawrence only because the fink wanted to bang Emma. (Knowing Emma, she probably had an instinct that steered her away from Lawrence—maybe his schlong was all wrong for her, or she knew that Lawrence would never relinquish the top position.)

“Actually, I’m no longer an agent,” Myra told Jack over their breakfast at Marmalade. They were sitting at a kind of picnic table—communal dining in Santa Monica. “My sister and I have created a talent-management company.” This information confused Jack, given his limited (albeit specific) knowledge of the other Ascheim. But he would make a point of never trying to grasp how the industry worked. From the beginning, Jack Burns realized that his job was getting a job. He already knew how to be an actor.

A man had spread a newspaper over one end of the picnic table; he sat on the bench beside Jack, muttering, as if he bore a lifelong grudge against the news. At the other end of the table, nearer to Myra than to Jack, was a family of four—a young, harried couple with two quarreling children.

Like Rottweiler, Myra Ascheim had plucked Bruno Litkins from Jack’s résumé. “The gay heron,” as Jack had called Bruno, was the only marketable name among Jack’s earliest supporters. “I don’t suppose you are a transvestite—you just know how to look like one,” Myra said.

“I just know how to look like one,” Jack concurred.

“I’ll let you know, Jack, when I sense a surfeit of transsexual roles.”

The children at Myra’s end of the table were bothering her. A little boy, maybe six or seven, had ordered the oatmeal with sliced bananas; then he picked all the bananas out. He wanted some of his older sister’s bacon instead, but she wouldn’t give him any. “If you wanted bacon, you should have ordered it,” the children’s mother kept telling him.

“You can have my bananas,” the boy told his sister, but the bacon was not negotiable—not for bananas.

“Look—there’s a lesson here,” Myra said crossly to the little boy. “You want her bacon, but you’ve got nothing she wants. That’s not how you make a deal.”

In the movie business, Jack was learning, meeting people was an audition. You didn’t even have to know which part you were auditioning for; you just picked a part and played it, any part. Jack looked at the little girl who had the bacon. She was nine or ten; she had three strips of bacon. She was his audience of one, for the moment, but Jack was auditioning for Myra Ascheim, and Myra knew it.

In Blade Runner, Rutger Hauer plays the blond android—the last to die. He holds Harrison Ford’s life in his hands, but Rutger is dying; he’d rather have someone to talk to than die alone. “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe,” Rutger Hauer says. That was the moment Jack had in mind.

That was the tone of voice Jack adopted when he spoke to the girl about her bacon. “I have a younger brother,” Jack-as-Rutger-Hauer began. “He was always asking me for my stuff—he wanted my bacon, just like your brother wants yours. Maybe I should have given him the bacon, at least one strip.”

“Why?” the girl asked.

“I was in a motorcycle accident,” Jack said. When he touched his side, he winced; his sudden intake of breath made the little boy squish one of his banana slices. “The handlebars went in here—they went right through me.”

“Not while we’re eating,” Myra Ascheim said, but the children and Jack-as-Rutger-Hauer ignored her.

“I thought I was going to be okay—I lost only one kidney,” Jack explained. “We have two,” he told the little boy. “You have to have at least one.”

“What’s wrong with the one you’ve got?” the little girl asked.

Jack shrugged, then winced again; after the handlebars, apparently it hurt to shrug, too. (He was thinking of the way Rutger Hauer says, “All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.”) Jack said: “My one remaining kidney is failing.”

“ ‘Time to die,’ ” Myra Ascheim said, with a shrug. (Those are Rutger Hauer’s last words in Blade Runner. Myra obviously knew the movie, too.)

“Of course I could ask my brother for one of his kidneys,” Jack went on. “Only a brother’s body-part would work inside me—only a brother’s or a sister’s, and I don’t have a sister.”

“So ask your brother!” the girl said excitedly.

“I suppose I better ask him,” Jack agreed. “But you see the problem. I never gave him my bacon—not even one strip.”

“What’s a kidney?” the boy asked.

His sister carefully placed a strip of bacon beside his bananaless bowl of oatmeal. “Here—take this,” she told him. “You don’t need a kidney.”

“I’ll let you know, Jack, when I sense a surfeit of Rutger Hauer roles,” was all Myra Ascheim said, but Jack knew he’d nailed the audition.

The girl sat watching her brother eat the bacon; Jack could tell she was still thinking about the accident. “Can I see the scar, from the handlebars?” she asked.

“Not while we’re eating,” Myra said again.

Jack had been so focused on his audience of one, he’d not noticed when the man with the newspaper had left. In any performance, even a good one, somebody always walks out. But after breakfast, out on Montana, Myra was critical of Jack’s audition. “You lost the newspaper guy. He didn’t buy the handlebars, not for a minute.”

“The girl was my audience,” Jack said. “The girl and you.”

“The girl was an easy audience,” Myra told him. “You kind of lost me with the handlebars, too.”

“Oh.”

“Lose the ‘Oh’—it’s a meaningless exclamation, Jack.”

Jack realized that he wasn’t sure what a talent-management company did, or how what Myra did was different from what an agent did. “Don’t I need an agent?” he asked her.

“Let me find you a movie first,” Myra said. “A movie and a director. The best time to get an agent is when you don’t really need one.”

Jack would often think how his career, and his life, might have turned out differently if Myra Ascheim had found a different movie from the one she found for him—or at least a different director. But he knew that one thing you were powerless to change was your first break, and you could never calculate the influence of that initial experience on what happened to you next.

Every young actor imagines there is a special part—a groove in which he or she is a perfect fit. Well—Jack’s advice to young actors would be: Hope you never get the perfect part. The groove that Myra Ascheim found for Jack Burns (his first film) became a rut.

“Principiis obsta!” Mr. Ramsey would write to him, quoting Ovid. “Beware the beginnings!”

21. Two Candles, Burning

Ultimately, Jack Burns owed his success to William “Wild Bill” Vanvleck, who was also called The Mad Dutchman and The Remake Monster—the latter for his deplorable habit of stealing his stories from classics of the European cinema and crassly reinventing them for American movie audiences.

Hence the brilliant Knife in the Water, Roman Polanski’s first feature film, which was made in Poland in 1962, was remade by Vanvleck in 1989 as My Last Hitchhiker—about a couple with a troubled relationship who go off for a weekend of skiing, not sailing, and pick up a transvestite hitchhiker. Jack Burns was born to be that cross-dressing hitchhiker.

William Vanvleck was both a screenwriter and a director. Variety once wrote that The Remake Monster never knew a film or a gender he couldn’t change for the worse. But if Wild Bill was a rip-off artist, he had a survivor’s abundance of common sense; he stole only good stuff. And Vanvleck brought a European kinkiness, if not art, to American sex and violence—always with a lavishness of deceit or duplicity that Bill, and many movie audiences, loved.

For example, there was a section of Route 40 between Empire and Winter Park, Colorado—a steep road with lots of S-turns, it climbed over Berthoud Pass. In the winter, they closed the road when they blasted avalanches, and you could see back-country skiers and snowboarders hitching rides to wherever they parked their cars.

In the opening shot of My Last Hitchhiker, we see a pretty female skier wearing a backpack, her skis over her shoulder; she’s hitching a ride on Route 40. As everyone would find out, it’s not a real girl—it’s Jack Burns, and he looks fantastic.

The reason Jack got the part was not only that he had the Bruno Litkins, transvestite-Esmeralda connection; The Mad Dutchman also liked the idea of the hitchhiker being an unknown.

The couple in the car take a good look at Jack-as-a-girl. (Almost anyone would.) “Keep driving,” the woman says.

The man brakes, stopping the car. “My last hitchhiker,” he says. “I promise.”

“You promised before, Ethan,” she tells him. “It was a pretty girl the last time, too.”

As Jack is putting his skis on the roof rack of their car, they take a closer look at him. Ethan stares at the pretty girl’s breasts; the wife or girlfriend is more interested in Jack’s dark, shoulder-length hair. When Jack gets into the backseat, Ethan adjusts the rearview mirror so he can see the hitchhiker better; the woman notices this, with mounting irritation.

“Hi—I’m Jack,” he tells them, taking off the wig and wiping the mauve lip gloss off his lips with the back of his ski glove. “You probably thought I was a girl, right?”

The woman turns to watch Jack put the wig in his backpack. Jack unzips his parka, which fits him like a glove, and removes (to Ethan’s horror) his breasts, putting the falsies in his backpack with the wig. Granted, it’s a B-movie—inspiring a cult of followers—but it’s a great opening.

“Hi—I’m Nicole,” the woman in the front seat says to Jack; she’s suddenly all smiles.

Justine Dunn played Nicole; it was her last movie before her disfiguring, career-ending car crash—that famous five-car smash-up where Wilshire Boulevard tangles with the 405.

In the movie, when Ethan sees that Jack is a guy, he tells him to get out of the car.

“You picked him up, Ethan. Give the guy a ride,” Nicole says.

“I didn’t pick up a guy,” Ethan tells her.

Jack is looking over his shoulder, out the rear window, at the S-turn behind them. “This isn’t a very safe place to stop,” he says.

“Get out of the car!” Ethan shouts.

A quick cut to the inside of a black van navigating the S-turn; some stoned snowboarders are passing a joint around. (Nicole’s line—“If he gets out, Ethan, I’m getting out with him”—plays as voice-over.)

Back on Ethan and Nicole in their stopped car: he prevents her from undoing her seat belt. The hitchhiker has already taken his skis off the roof rack; he taps on the passenger-side window, which Nicole lowers. Suddenly all-guy, Jack says: “I’m sorry for the trouble, but I catch more rides as a girl.” Then he steps back from the car. Here comes the black van!

The van skids past the stopped car in a four-wheel drift—one of the stoned snowboarders frantically giving Ethan and Nicole and Jack the finger. Ethan and Nicole are visibly shaken by the near-collision, but Jack never even flinches.

The movie went downhill from there. When they showed film clips from My Last Hitchhiker, they always showed those first two close-ups of Jack.

When the film was released, Jack was twenty-four. Justine was twelve years older—an attractive older woman to Jack’s transvestite hitchhiker.

They have one really hot scene later in the movie. Jack-as-a-girl is in the women’s room at a ski-resort restaurant, fussing with his makeup in the mirror. Justine-as-Nicole comes out of a stall, straightening her dress. They both look pretty good, but Justine is thirty-six, and it’s no secret who looks better.

“What ride are you trying to catch now?” she asks Jack.

“It’s called dinner,” he replies.

“Do you buy your own lift tickets?” she asks.

“Skiing is an expensive sport,” Jack says, with a shrug. “I try not to buy my own dinner.”

Justine is looking Jack over when she says, “And what do you do after dinner?”

“I talk him out of it,” he tells her. “What do you do after dinner?”

At this point in the film, Justine-as-Nicole is still with Ethan—and she’s not happy about it. “I try to talk him out of it,” she admits, a little sadly.

That’s when Jack kisses her on the lips. It’s disturbingly unclear if he’s kissing her as a woman or as a man. But what does it matter? My Last Hitchhiker would wind up being a favorite of Justine Dunn fans. After she was so tragically disfigured and disappeared from the big screen, Justine gathered an army of fans. Crazies, for the most part—the kind of moviegoers who made heroes out of people killed or maimed in stupid accidents.

As for Jack, it was the start of something he felt powerless to stop. As an ex-wrestler, he knew how to lose weight, and how to keep the pounds off—he had kept himself small. He was a lightweight, a former one-thirty-five-pounder; he had a lean-and-mean look, as Michele Maher (the real one) had observed.

“Androgyny seems to suit you, Jack,” Myra Ascheim would tell him, after Wild Bill Vanvleck had made Jack an aberrant sex symbol—a sexy guy who was, if not to every taste, arguably more sexy as a girl.

Jack’s role as the transvestite hitchhiker was three years before Jaye Davidson’s debut as Dil in The Crying Game—and though Neil Jordan was a first-rate writer and director, and everyone knew Wild Bill Vanvleck was not, Jack Burns did it before Jaye Davidson did.

Granted, it was not a role Jack could count on growing old in. (Hollywood didn’t exactly have a plethora of parts for foxy but graying Mrs. Doubtfires.) Nevertheless, it was a good start. Jack wasn’t as famous as Emma, whose first novel had been a New York Times bestseller for fifteen weeks before My Last Hitchhiker opened in “select theaters.” And Emma was far more famous in Toronto, where there was no one more famous than a natural-born Canadian who made it big in the United States. But to hear Jack’s mother talk, not to mention Mr. Ramsey, you would have thought that Jack Burns had eclipsed Jeff Bridges (as a transvestite, anyway) and was even bigger box office than Harrison Ford.

My Last Hitchhiker was an awful movie, but Jack’s two close-ups caught on—the parody on Saturday Night Live didn’t hurt—and the candlelight vigil outside the UCLA Medical Center, where Justine Dunn lay in a coma from her awesome wreck, made a talk-show celebrity out of Wild Bill Vanvleck, who spoke glowingly of Jack Burns.

Of course he did. Myra Ascheim had committed Jack to making another movie with The Mad Dutchman. By singing Jack’s praises for what had been less than a supporting-actor role, Wild Bill was promoting his next film, which, alas, would not achieve the cult-classic status of My Last Hitchhiker. Although Jack was the male (and female) lead in this one, his second B-movie for The Remake Monster, there was no Justine Dunn counterpart—no celebrity actor or actress who suffered a well-timed car crash and lasting, career-ending disfigurement. (No unmerited publicity, in other words.)

Meanwhile, before his follow-up appearance as a cross-dresser in another Vanvleck remake, Jack was the beneficiary of Emma’s publicity for The Slush-Pile Reader, which was considerable. A People magazine piece, in which Emma referred to Jack as her roommate, included photographs of them looking cozy together—these in addition to that familiar movie still of Jack transforming himself from a woman to a man, the telltale smudge of pale-purple lip gloss lending to that corner of his pretty mouth the wanton look of someone who’s been roughly kissed.

“It’s platonic love,” Emma was quoted as saying. “We’re just roommates.” In another interview, Emma said: “I like taking pictures of Jack. He’s so photogenic.” (This was published with a photograph of Jack, asleep.)

Maybe only Alice and Mrs. Oastler believed that Emma and Jack weren’t lovers, and Jack knew that Leslie had her doubts. Lawrence, that fink, had his doubts, too. Emma told Jack that she ran into Lawrence having lunch at Morton’s. Lawrence had lost his job at C.A.A., but not to hear him tell it; he bullshitted Emma about starting his own talent-management company and wanting to be “unencumbered.” (Like Myra Ascheim, whom he’d so confidently called a has-been.)

Lawrence was “unencumbered” at lunch, Emma observed; he was just a liar who was out of a job. Morton’s—the enduring and expensive celebrity hangout on Melrose, in West Hollywood—was not a place where you wanted to be eating lunch alone. No deals were going down for Lawrence, Emma concluded; maybe that’s why he got a little crude with her. “Do you still claim you’re not banging your boyfriend?” he asked, meaning Jack. “Does Jack go on dates as a girl?”

Emma knew she could kick the crap out of him, but she let it pass. “You’re such a loser, Lawrence,” was all she said. It was sufficiently gratifying to her that Lawrence didn’t seem to know he was in one of the least prestigious booths.

Emma had resigned from her studio job as a script reader a couple of months before The Slush-Pile Reader was published. “Screenplay development just isn’t for me,” she’d told them, but one of the studio execs got hold of a set of her galleys. There was a kind of code in Hollywood, too vague and virulently denied to be a rule: you were not supposed to call an asshole an asshole, not in writing. It was the dim understanding of this studio exec that Emma had violated the code. To punish her, the exec copied Emma’s script notes and distributed them to the rejected writers’ agents. But the punishment backfired: once you start making copies, everyone sees them. The execs at other studios read Emma’s notes; after all, many of the screenplays in question were still making the rounds.

A few of those scripts were now films in production; a couple were in post-production, meaning they’d miraculously been shot, and one had recently been released, to tepid reviews. Naturally, the reviews weren’t as insightful or well-written as Emma’s notes on an earlier draft of the screenplay. Even the rejected writers’ agents liked Emma’s notes—two of them offered her a job.

A celebrity talk-show host at an L.A. radio station asked Emma’s permission to read some of her script notes on the air. “Sure,” Emma said. “Everyone else has read them.” (More publicity for The Slush-Pile Reader—not that Emma needed it.)

This didn’t win Emma many friends among screenwriters, but what really insulted the industry was that Emma said she wasn’t interested in writing a screenplay herself—especially not an adaptation of The Slush-Pile Reader. In the novel, she’d already made the point that the story was one third porn film; no one would attempt to make a serious movie out of that material. To virtually assure herself that no one would, Emma entangled the film rights to her novel with the kind of approvals never granted to writers—not to first novelists, anyway. She again asserted that she had no interest in adapting The Slush-Pile Reader herself, yet she insisted on retaining script approval, should anyone else be enough of a fool to write a screenplay, and she insisted on having cast approval and director approval—even final cut. The Slush-Pile Reader couldn’t be made as a movie under those outrageous terms.

When Emma showed up at all the usual places—she took Jack with her, more and more—it was widely assumed that she was doing research for another Hollywood novel, but Jack didn’t know (at the time) that this was the case. He thought she just liked to eat and drink. But Emma saw herself as a specter sent to remind the studio execs that there was such a thing as a script reader who could write.

In the movie business, they were already speaking admiringly of The Slush-Pile Reader as “not makable,” which could be quite a compliment in the industry—provided you didn’t make a habit of it.

Jack worried about Emma. She had bought the house they’d been renting in Santa Monica, for no good reason. The move from Venice had irritated her; she said she didn’t want to move again. But if the house in Santa Monica was no prize to rent, it was just plain stupid to buy it.

It was a two-story, three-bedroom house on the downhill end of Entrada Drive—near where Entrada ran into the Pacific Coast Highway. You could hear the drone of traffic on the PCH over the air-conditioning. Furthermore, as if Emma and Jack were permanently drawn to the perfume of restaurant Dumpsters, the driveway of the house intersected the alley behind an Italian restaurant. It wasn’t sushi they smelled—it was more like old eggplant parmigiana.

But they were living on Entrada Drive when Emma’s first novel was published, and she became what she called (with no small amount of pride) “a self-supporting novelist.” Her revenge on having wasted her time as a film major was complete; she had made it in the industry’s hometown by writing, of all things, a novel. Staying in the house on Entrada, even buying the stupid place, was another way of thumbing her nose at the industry. Emma had come to L.A. as an outsider; it meant a lot to her to stay an outsider.

“I’m not moving to Beverly Hills, baby cakes.”

“Yeah, well—we sure do a lot of eating there,” Jack reminded her.

It was a lot of late-night eating, for the most part. Jack didn’t drink, so he was always the driver. Emma could drink a bottle of red wine by herself—usually before she finished her dinner. She had a special fondness for Kate Mantilini in Beverly Hills.

“Kate Mantilini is quite a distance to travel for a steak sandwich and mashed potatoes,” Jack complained; he didn’t eat bread, not to mention mashed potatoes. But Emma loved to eat at the long bar that ran the length of the restaurant. The industry crowd all knew her and asked her how the new novel was coming.

“It’s coming,” was all Emma would say. “Have you met my roommate, Jack Burns? He was the chick in My Last Hitchhiker—I mean the hot one.”

“I was the hitchhiker,” Jack would explain. Despite Myra Ascheim telling him to lose the stubble, he was usually growing a little something on his face—anything that might mitigate his androgynous first impression.

Monday nights, Emma and Jack went to Dan Tana’s in West Hollywood. You could watch Monday Night Football on the TV at the bar, yet the waiters wore tuxedos. There was a mostly hip Hollywood crowd—people in the biz, or trying to be, but in the curious company of assorted gangsters and hookers. There were red-vinyl booths and red-and-white-checkered tablecloths, and the items on the menu were named for film-industry celebs.

“You’re gonna have a lamb loin named after you one day, honey pie,” Emma would tell Jack. She usually ordered the Lew Wasserman veal chop. After Wasserman died, Jack felt funny about eating there—as if the veal chop in his name were a piece of Lew himself. Emma also liked the steak à la Diller, but Jack ate light—often just a salad. He was back on iced tea big-time, as during his days cutting weight as a wrestler. With a half-gallon of tea on an empty stomach, Jack could dance all night.

Emma liked late-night music, too. She was crazy about a place in West Hollywood on Sunset Boulevard—Coconut Teaszer. It was a bit sleazy—lots of rock ’n’ roll and fast, sweaty dancing. Very young kids went there. Emma would occasionally pick up a boy and bring him home. Jack made an effort not to watch them making out in the backseat. “Listen,” she would always say to the kid. “You gotta do exactly what I tell you.” Jack tried not to listen.

He also tried not to imagine Emma in the top position. He didn’t like to think about her vaginismus, but he would remember the night he found her in tears in the bathroom—doubled over in pain. “He said he wouldn’t move,” she was crying. “He promised he wouldn’t—the little fucker!”

The mornings after Emma brought home some kid from Coconut Teaszer were the only ones when she wouldn’t get up early to write her next Hollywood novel. (“Number Two,” as she would refer to it—as if that were the title.) Emma was disciplined, even driven, but the pressure was off; she’d published her first novel and seemed confident that someone would publish the second.

To a lesser degree, the pressure was off Jack, too. That he had made his first film with William Vanvleck—and worse, was under contract to make another movie with him—didn’t impress anyone at C.A.A. (Or at I.C.M. or the William Morris Agency.) Perhaps, when Jack was free of any future obligation to Wild Bill, one of those agencies would consider representing him. But for now, Myra Ascheim was looking after him—he was instructed to call Myra his manager.

When Jack quit his job at American Pacific, there were no hard feelings; he’d slept with only two of the waitresses, and one of them had quit before he did. Even working for The Remake Monster beat being a waiter.

Emma wanted Jack to read her fan mail before he showed it to her. She had no tolerance for anything negative; Jack was under orders to throw the criticism away. “And don’t show me the death threats, Jack—just send them to the F.B.I.” There weren’t any death threats; most of Emma’s mail was positive. The worst of it, in Jack’s opinion, was how many of her readers insisted on telling Emma their life stories. It was amazing how many dysfunctional people wanted her to write about them.

Emma read Jack’s fan mail before he saw it, but he read all of his mail eventually—good and bad. He didn’t get a twentieth of the mail Emma received, and most of his was both vaguely and not so vaguely insinuating. Letters, always with photographs, from transsexuals—“chicks with dicks,” according to Emma—and letters from gay men, inquiring if Jack was gay. There was only the occasional letter from a young woman—usually, but not always, stating that she hoped he was straight.

Jack was more interested in Emma’s mail than he was in his, because he kept thinking that Michele Maher would write to her—demanding to know why Emma had used her name. But there was no letter from Michele Maher about The Slush-Pile Reader.

It killed Jack that he knew nothing about Michele; worse, he imagined she had seen My Last Hitchhiker and found his performance as a transvestite to be resounding confirmation that he was “too weird.”

“Just wait till Michele sees the next one, baby cakes—talk about too weird!” They’d both read Vanvleck’s screenplay, which had prompted even Emma to say: “Words fail me.”

It was a magical but unknown movie that Wild Bill had ripped off this time; he’d stolen a little gem from a fellow Dutchman, Peter van Engen, who died of AIDS shortly after his first and only feature film was made. Called Lieve Anne Frank (in English, Dear Anne Frank, as you might begin a letter to the dead girl), it won a prize at some film festival in the Netherlands—and it was dubbed for distribution in Germany, but nowhere else. Outside Holland, almost no one saw it; yet William Vanvleck had seen it, and he’d traduced Lieve Anne Frank to such a degree that poor Peter van Engen couldn’t possibly have recognized his own movie—not even from the all-seeing perspective of his grave.

“Lieve Anne Frank,” the voice-over begins. It is the voice of a young Jewish girl, living in Amsterdam today; she is about the same age Anne Frank was when Anne was caught by the Nazis and taken to the death camp.

Emma and Jack saw the original Dutch film in William Vanvleck’s home screening room. The Remake Monster had an ugly mansion on Loma Vista Drive in Beverly Hills. Wild Bill liked whippets; they ran free in the mansion, slipping and falling on the hardwood floors. Vanvleck had his own chef and his own gardener—a Surinamese couple, a child-size woman with a similarly miniature husband.

“ ‘Dear Anne Frank,’ ” Wild Bill translated for Emma and Jack; he had a smoker’s cough. “ ‘I believe that you live in me, and that I have been born to serve you.’ ”

Rachel is her name. Weekdays after school, and on weekends, she works as a tour guide in the Anne Frank House—Prinsengracht 263. The house is open, as a museum, every day of the year except Yom Kippur.

“The Anne Frank House is beautiful in a sad way,” Rachel says to the camera—as if we (the audience) were tourists and Rachel our guide. We see samples of Anne’s handwriting, facsimiles from her diary, and many photographs. Rachel has cut her hair to look as much like Anne as she can; she despises contemporary fashion and dresses herself, whenever possible, in clothes Anne might have worn.

We see Rachel shopping in flea markets and secondhand clothing stores; we see her at night, hiding from her parents in her bedroom, imitating poses and expressions we recognize from photographs of Anne.

“They could have gotten away,” Rachel keeps repeating. “Her father, Otto, could have stolen a boat. He could have steered a course from the Prinsengracht, the canal, to the Amstel—a river, broader than the canal. Not to the sea, of course, but somewhere safe. I know they could have gotten away.”

By this point in the film, nothing had really happened, but Emma was already in tears. “You see—it’s good, isn’t it?” Vanvleck kept asking. “Isn’t it great?”

Rachel is obsessed with the idea that she is Anne Frank come back to life; she believes she can rewrite history. On Yom Kippur, when the Anne Frank House is closed, Rachel unlocks the door and lets herself inside. She dresses herself as Anne—transforms herself, actually, because the likeness is more than a little creepy—and the next morning, when the tourists are waiting to get in, Rachel-as-Anne simply walks out of the Anne Frank House as if she were Anne Frank. Some of the tourists scream, believing she’s a ghost; others follow her, taking her picture.

She goes to the canal, the Prinsengracht, where her father, Otto, is waiting with a boat. Absurdly, it’s a kind of gondola—more suited to Venice than to Amsterdam—and Otto is a most unlikely, un-Italian-looking gondolier. Anne boards the boat, waving to her admirers.

There’s a beautiful shot from the golden crown of the Westerkerk of the boat passing on the Prinsengracht—crowds of well-wishers run to the bridges, waving. There’s a shot of the little boat entering the broader water of the Amstel; more crowds, more cameras clicking.

How the fantasy dies is almost entirely done with sound—the sound of soldiers’ boots on the cobblestone streets; the sound of the boots on the stairs of the Anne Frank House, which we see is empty. Some furniture has been tipped over; Anne’s writing has been scattered here and there. She hasn’t escaped.

Emma was bawling her eyes out. As Jack sat there in that tasteless mansion on Loma Vista Drive, the sound of The Mad Dutchman’s whippets dashing everywhere was somehow intercut in Jack’s mind with the sound of the storm troopers’ boots. He couldn’t imagine what a mess Wild Bill Vanvleck was going to make of Dear Anne Frank.

As it turned out, The Remake Monster’s screenplay would leave Emma and Jack depressed for days.

“I think I’ll go to the gym,” Jack told Emma when he first read it.

After she said, “Words fail me,” Emma took a deep breath and announced she was going back to work. “I should have known when we saw the movie,” Emma told Jack later. “There was no way you were gonna be Anne Frank.”

But that day they read the remake, which was their first understanding of what would become of Dear Anne Frank, all Jack could do was go to the gym and punish his body; all Emma could do was go back to work on her next Hollywood novel. The Mad Dutchman’s screenplay was god-awful.

Being successful had made Emma even more of a workaholic. She usually got up with the rush-hour traffic on the PCH and drank several cups of strong coffee, sometimes with her eyes closed but always with the music playing—something too loud and metallic for Jack’s taste, although it was a welcome change from the generally uninspired music out on the highway.

Emma wrote all morning—the coffee was what she called her “appetite suppressant of choice.” When she was famished, she drove herself out to lunch. She didn’t drink at lunch, although she was a big eater—both at lunch and at her late-night dinners.

She liked Le Dome on Sunset Strip. It had a stodgy, Old Hollywood feeling, but it was still a happening place for executives and agents and entertainment lawyers. Emma also liked Spago in West Hollywood—the original Spago, up the hill on Sunset Boulevard. And while it was too expensive even for the most successful of first novelists, Emma needed a weekly fix of The Palm on Santa Monica Boulevard, where she said there were more agents than steaks and lobsters.

She was burning the candle at both ends, because she’d go to the gym after lunch and lift weights most of the afternoon. After the weightlifting, when she said she had “digested,” she would do a hundred or more crunches for her abs. Nothing aerobic. (Dancing and whatever sex she could manage in the top position were Emma’s aerobics.)

It was a lot for a big girl to put her body through, and Jack didn’t like to think of her driving—not even in the daytime, when she hadn’t been drinking. Emma was a fast driver, but the speed was only a small part of what bothered Jack.

Emma loved Sunset Boulevard. Even in Toronto, as a schoolgirl at St. Hilda’s, she used to dream of driving on Sunset Boulevard. Emma tried to drive everywhere on Sunset—out to Beverly Hills and West Hollywood and Hollywood, all on Sunset.

It was when she was driving back to Santa Monica that Jack worried about her. He knew she’d had a big lunch and had crazily worked it off, or not, in the gym. He worried about the curves on Sunset. And when Emma took that left on Chautauqua, just before the Palisades, it was a steep, twisting downhill to the PCH. You had to get into the far-left lane and make what amounted to a U-turn on West Channel.

It would be late afternoon, rush-hour traffic, and Emma was drained from her workout in the gym—two or three liter-size bottles of Evian later. With the traffic barreling down Chautauqua, into that last long curve, Emma would be three quarters of the way through the turn before she could see the ocean. Jack knew Emma, even her driving. She wouldn’t be watching the cars—not when she could see that first, dazzling-blue glint of the Pacific. She was, after all, a Toronto girl. L.A. affected you in direct proportion to where you came from; there were no views of the Pacific in Toronto.

Jack would wait in the Entrada house for Emma to come home. Then she would write. That was when Jack went to the gym. (He never told her he occasionally went to Gold’s.)

It was a good time to work out; mostly the nondrinkers, and a few noneaters, were there. Jack met some pretty pumped women doing free weights, but the ones on the cardiovascular machines were the ultra-skinny girls, and at dinnertime, many of the skinny girls were anorexics. One girl—she spent an hour every night on the stair-climber—told Jack she was on “an all-smoothie diet.”

“How’s your energy?” he asked her.

“Berries, teaspoon of honey, nonfat yogurt—every third day, a banana. Just put everything in the blender,” she told him. “Your body doesn’t need anything else.”

She fell off the treadmill one night and just lay there. One of the yoga instructors speculated that her colon had collapsed on itself. Jack would remember a bunch of bodybuilders standing outside the gym; when they saw the ambulance, they waved it down with their towels.

Jack was on his usual diet—mostly proteins, maybe a little light on the carbs for all the time he spent on the cardiovascular machines. He was taking it easy with the free weights: nothing heavy, just lots of reps. He wasn’t trying to bulk up. His job, meaning getting one—the next role, and the role after that—depended on his staying lean and mean.

Jack was lightheaded with hunger by the time he left the gym every night, when he went back to get Emma and they drove out again to eat—and his stomach was falling in on itself every morning. You could say that Jack was burning the candle at both ends, too—but not like Emma.

One night, when she was wolfing down her mashed potatoes at Kate Mantilini, Emma noticed that Jack hadn’t finished his salad. He’d stopped eating and was watching her eat; his expression was one of concern, not disgust, but Jack should have known that Emma would have found his disgust more acceptable.

“Are you thinking I’m gonna die young?” she asked him.

“No!” he said, too quickly.

“Well, I am,” she told him. “If my appetite doesn’t kill me, the vaginismus will.”

“The vaginismus can’t kill you, can it?” Jack asked her, but Emma’s mouth was full; she just shrugged and went on eating.

22. Money Shots

Batman and Lethal Weapon 2 were among the top-grossing movies of 1989, but the Oscar for Best Picture would go to Driving Miss Daisy. Jack’s second film with William Vanvleck was called The Tour Guide; it wouldn’t win any awards.

The Anne Frank House has been reinvented in Las Vegas. A tacky shrine to a dead rock-’n’-roll star clearly modeled on a prettier Janis Joplin—that would be Jack—draws morbid fans of the late sexpot, who, earlier in the movie, chokes to death on her own vomit following a drunken binge. The dead singer’s name is Melody; her group, Pure Innocence, gets its start in the beatnik haunts of Venice and North Beach in the early 1960s. They abandon their folk-jazz-blues roots for psychedelic rock, finding an audience and a home for themselves among the flower children in San Francisco in 1966.

Everything in a William Vanvleck remake was stolen from something else; Pure Innocence and Melody’s leap to fame coincides with when Janis Joplin started singing with Big Brother and the Holding Company. Melody’s first hit single, “You Can’t Handle My Heart Like It Was Somethin’ Else,” sounds suspiciously like Big Mama Thornton’s “Ball and Chain.” Jack didn’t sing it half badly.

Jack-as-Melody promptly dumps Pure Innocence and goes solo. By ’69, Melody’s albums have gone gold and platinum and triple-platinum. She returns to being a blues singer with her last hit single, “Bad Bill Is Gone,” an ode to an abusive ex-boyfriend—the former lead guitarist in Pure Innocence, whom the tabloids allege Melody once tried to kill by lacing his favorite marijuana lasagna with rat poison. (That “Bad Bill Is Gone” sounded like “Me and Bobby McGee” couldn’t be a coincidence.)

Jack-as-Melody dies passed-out drunk and choking on his-as-her puke in a Las Vegas hotel room, following a concert there—hence the shrine to Melody’s short life and intense fame opens as yet another rock-’n’-roll museum, this one at the Mandalay Bay end of the strip. The crass display of Melody’s less-than-innocent underwear is out of place and easy to overlook among those casinos and hotels on the strip, but The Mad Dutchman had always wanted to make a movie in Las Vegas, and The Tour Guide was it.

Certainly Wild Bill could have found a better singer for Melody, but maybe not a hotter girl. (“You were hot, baby cakes,” Emma told Jack. “Your singing lacked a little something, but you were hot—I’ll give you that.”) Jack wasn’t bad as the guy, either—the eponymous tour guide himself.

“Let’s keep it simple,” Wild Bill Vanvleck told Jack. “Let’s call the tour guide Jack.”

Jack-as-Jack is a devoted fan of Pure Innocence, in the group’s short-lived Melody years. Jack is still in college when Melody splits from the group; he has only recently graduated when the singer dies. His adoration of Melody is deeper than the after-her-death kind. (In the film, Jack appears to be dancing when he walks—“Bad Bill Is Gone” or “You Can’t Handle My Heart Like It Was Somethin’ Else” is pounding in his head.)

The sleazy manager of the Melody Museum, as the shameless shrine is called, hires Jack-as-Jack as a tour guide, but Jack is disapproving of some of the displays, which he sees as exploiting Melody—not that the slut singer didn’t do plenty to exploit herself. Her collected musical instruments are innocent, as are the photos of her tours and the music itself. But there are “compromising” photographs—of Melody consorting with the lead guitarist who beat her, of Melody drunk and passed out on various motel-room beds. And there are her clothes, especially her “intimate apparel”; no one should see or paw over her underwear, Jack believes. Jack also disapproves of the collection of empty wine bottles; some of the dates on the labels indicate that Melody died before the wines were bottled.

The manager, a precursor of the Harvey Keitel character in Holy Smoke, tells Jack that the wine bottles are for “atmosphere”; as for the displayed underwear, a pink thong, among others—these items are “essential.”

Just as Rachel imagines that Anne Frank could have gotten away, Jack convinces himself that Melody didn’t have to die. If only he’d been around and had known her, he could have saved her. Jack believes that the shrine to Melody is a betrayal of her; the seedier of her collected things are mocking her.

One night, when the Melody Museum is closed, Jack lets himself in—he has a key. He brings a couple of empty suitcases and packs up the items he considers too intimate, or too damaging to Melody’s reputation; the latter, apparently, is sacred only to him. Two cops in a patrol car see lights in the closed building and investigate. But Jack-as-Jack has transformed himself into Jack-as-Melody. Dressed as the dead singer, he carries the suitcases past the stunned policemen—out onto the Vegas strip. (Not every guy can get away with emerald-green spangles on black spandex.) It is The Mad Dutchman’s sole directorial touch of genius: until the scene when Jack-as-Melody walks out of the Melody Museum, toting the suitcases, the audience has never seen the strip at night in its garish neon splendor.

Inexplicably, the cops let Jack-as-Melody go. Do they think he’s Melody’s ghost? (They don’t look frightened.) Do they know he’s a guy in drag? (They don’t look as if they care.) Or do the cops—like Jack, like the audience—recognize that the Melody Museum is a twisted place? Do they think the shrine ought to be robbed?

Wild Bill Vanvleck doesn’t explain. It’s the image The Remake Monster cares about—Jack-as-Melody walking up the strip in emerald-green heels and that hot dress, lugging those obviously heavy bags. As Jack is leaving, disappearing into the night—reborn as Melody, maybe, or just looking for an affordable hotel—the sleazy manager sees him-as-her walking away. Jack looks so perfect that the manager doesn’t try to intervene. He merely shouts: “You’re fired, Jack—you bitch!”

In Melody’s voice, Jack says: “It’s a good job to lose.” (Jack Burns’s contribution to Vanvleck’s god-awful script—he was right about that line having legs.)

The Tour Guide was by no means the worst movie of the year. (Or of the following year, which produced Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Die Hard 2.) And the shot of Jack Burns in drag, when he’s saying, “It’s a good job to lose”—well, everyone would remember that. The film may have been forgettable, but not that shot—not that line.

At the 1991 Academy Awards, Billy Crystal was the host. He was good, but he may have been a bit too fast with one of his jokes. It was a pretty knowing audience at the Shrine Civic Auditorium, but most of them missed the joke. Not Jack, who was watching the show on TV; he got it, but that’s because it was his line.

Billy Crystal was talking about the possibility of being replaced as the host of the Academy Awards. The audience groaned in protest at the very idea; most of them then missed Billy saying, in a pointedly feminine way, “It’s a good job to lose.”

That was when Emma and Jack knew he had made it. “Shit, did you hear that, baby cakes?” They were in Mrs. Oastler’s house—Emma and Jack were back in Toronto, visiting their mothers—but Alice and Leslie were whispering to each other in the kitchen; they missed Billy Crystal’s homage to Jack’s famous end line in The Tour Guide, and they would go to bed before Dances with Wolves won the Oscar for Best Picture.

Jack had not only heard Billy Crystal’s joke; he was genuinely impressed by Billy’s imitation of Jack-as-Melody. “Christ,” he said.

“No more Mad Dutchman, honey pie,” Emma said. “I can’t wait for your next movie.” Jack and Emma were on the couch in the grand living room of what he used to think of as the Oastler mansion. (That was before he’d seen some of those real mansions in Beverly Hills.) If Jack looked over Emma’s shoulder, he could see the foyer at the foot of the main staircase, where Mrs. Machado had landed her high-groin kick with such devastating results.

Emma had sold her second novel for big bucks. She’d taken the manuscript to Bob Bookman at C.A.A. before she submitted it to her publisher. She had no intention of making the film rights unsalable this time. Bookman got her a movie deal before the novel was published, which was just the way Emma wanted it.

Called Normal and Nice, Emma’s second Hollywood novel was about what happens to a young couple from Iowa who go to Hollywood to fulfill their dreams of becoming movie stars. The husband, Johnny, gives up his dream before his wife, Carol, gives up hers. Johnny is too thin-skinned to make it as an actor; a couple of rough auditions and he packs it in. Besides, he’s a real clean liver—a nondrinker, an overall straight arrow. With boyish charm and a spotless driving record, Johnny gets a job as a limo driver; soon he’s driving a stretch.

Given Emma’s knack for irony, Johnny ends up driving movie stars. His lingering desire for the actor’s imagined life is reflected by his ponytail, Johnny’s sole emblem of rebellion among limo drivers. His ponytail is neat and clean, and not very long. (Emma describes Johnny as “attractive in a delicate, almost feminine way.”) Long hair suits him; Johnny feels fortunate that the limousine company lets him keep the ponytail.

His wife, Carol, isn’t so lucky. She goes to work for an escort service—much to Johnny’s shame but with his reluctant approval. Carol tries one service after another, in alphabetical order—Absolutely Gorgeous, Beautiful Beyond Belief, and so on.

Johnny draws the line at Have You Been a Bad Boy? But it doesn’t matter; as Carol discovers, they’re all alike. Whether at Instant Escorts or Irresistible Temptations, what’s expected of her is the same—namely, everything.

At one escort service, Carol might last a week or a month or less than a day. It all depends on how long it takes for her to meet what Emma calls an “irregular” customer. Once Carol starts refusing to do what a client wants, her days at that particular escort service are numbered.

Not unlike The Slush-Pile Reader, Normal and Nice reveals Emma’s sympathy for damaged, deeply compromised relationships that somehow work. Carol and Johnny never stop loving each other; what holds them together is their absolute, unshakable agreement concerning what constitutes normal and nice behavior.

Carol does outcalls only. She always phones Johnny and tells him where she’s going—not just the hotel but the customer’s name and room number—and she calls Johnny again when she gets to the room, and when she’s safely out. But irregular requests are commonplace; Carol loses her job at one service after another.

Finally, Johnny has a suggestion: Carol should have her own listing in the Yellow Pages. The best thing Carol ever has to say about a client is that he was “nice.” Nice means “normal”—hence Carol calls her escort service Normal and Nice.

Emma writes: “She might have attracted more customers with a service called Maternity Leave. Who calls an escort service for normal and nice?”

Johnny starts pimping for Carol. He has some regular limo clients, people Johnny feels he knows—movie stars among them. “You’re probably not interested,” Johnny says to the outwardly nicer of the gentlemen he drives around in his stretch, “but if you’re ever tempted to call an escort service, I know one particularly nice woman—normal and nice, if that’s what you like. Nothing irregular, if you know what I mean.”

The first time Johnny says this to a famous actor, it is heartbreaking. The reader already knows that, instead of becoming a movie star, Johnny is driving them. Now Carol is fucking them!

It seems that only older men are interested; most of them aren’t movie stars, either. They’re character actors—villains in the great Westerns, now with ravaged faces and unsteady on their feet, old cowboys with chronic lower-back pain. As children, Carol and Johnny had seen these classic Westerns; they were the movies that made them want to leave Iowa and go to Hollywood in the first place.

At home, in their half of a tacky duplex in Marina del Rey—close enough to hear and smell the L.A. airport—Carol and Johnny play dress-up games, their roles reversed. She puts her blond hair in a ponytail and dresses in his white shirt and black tie; this prompts Johnny to buy Carol a man’s black suit, one that fits her. She dresses as a limo driver, then undresses for him.

Johnny lets Carol dress him in her clothes; she later buys him his own bra, with falsies, and a dress that fits him. She brushes out his shoulder-length hair and makes him up—lipstick, eye shadow, the works. He rings the doorbell and she lets him-as-her in; he pretends to be the escort, arriving in a stranger’s hotel room. “This is their only opportunity to act—together, in the same movie,” Emma writes.

A veteran cowboy actor is in town to promote his new film—what Emma calls a “nouvelle Western.” Lester Billings was born Lester Magruder in Billings, Montana; he’s an actual cowboy, and nouvelle Westerns offend him. It’s a sore point with Lester that Westerns have become so rare that young actors don’t know how to ride and shoot anymore. In the so-called Western that Lester is promoting, there are no good guys, no bad guys; everyone is an anti-hero. “A French Western,” Lester calls it.

Johnny sends Carol to Lester’s hotel room—after Lester confesses to a hankering for a nice, normal woman. But Lester really is a cowboy; he climbs on Carol. (“There was nothing too irregular—at first,” she assures Johnny.) Then, while they’re proceeding in the regular way, Lester puts a gun to his head. It’s a Colt .45—only one chamber of the revolver is loaded. Lester calls this cowboy roulette.

“Either I die in the saddle or I live to ride another day!” he hollers. As Lester pulls the trigger, Carol wonders how many girls in L.A. escort services have heard the click of that hammer striking an empty chamber, while Lester lived to ride another day. Not this time. It’s Lester’s day to die in the saddle.

In the midafternoon, there aren’t many guests in The Peninsula Beverly Hills to hear the gunshot. Besides, the hotel doesn’t cater to an especially youthful crowd; maybe the guests in nearby rooms are napping or hard of hearing. Emma describes The Peninsula as being “sort of like the Four Seasons, but with a few more hookers and businessmen.”

Because the hotel is adjacent to C.A.A., possibly an agent hears Lester Billings blow his brains out, but nobody else. And what would an agent care about a gunshot?

Carol calls Johnny. She knows that no one noticed her crossing the lobby and getting on the elevator, but what if someone sees her leave? She is understandably distraught; she believes that she looks like a hooker. She doesn’t, really. Carol has always dressed like a studio exec having lunch; in keeping with normal and nice, she doesn’t look like a call girl.

Johnny saves her. He comes to Lester’s hotel room with the requisite changes of clothes, for Carol and himself. The limo driver’s suit for Carol, together with the dress and bra and falsies Carol bought for him; by the time Carol has applied his makeup and brushed out his shoulder-length hair, Johnny looks a lot more like a prostitute than Carol ever has.

He tells her where the limo is parked. It’s not far—nor is it parked within sight of the entrance to The Peninsula. He says he’ll come find her.

When Johnny-as-a-hooker leaves The Peninsula, he makes sure he’s noticed. Johnny has used a little bottle of bourbon from the minibar in Lester’s hotel room as a mouthwash. He struts up to the front desk, where he-as-she seizes a young clerk by his coat lapels and breathes in his face. “There’s something you should know,” Johnny-as-a-hooker says in a husky voice. “Lester Billings has checked out. I’m afraid he’s really left his room a mess.” Then Johnny-as-a-hooker releases the young man and sways through the lobby, leaving the hotel. He and Carol drive home to Marina del Rey, where they change into their regular clothes.

At the end of the novel, they’ve stopped for the night in a motel room off Interstate 80 somewhere in the Midwest. They’re on their way back to Iowa to find normal jobs and live a nice life. Carol is pregnant. (Maternity Leave, as an escort service, might have been wildly successful, but Carol wants no part of the business—not anymore—and Johnny is through with driving movie stars.)

In the motel room off the interstate, there’s an old Lester Billings movie on the TV—an authentic Western. Lester is a cattle rustler; he dies in the saddle, shot dead on his horse.

Normal and Nice turned out to be a better movie than a novel, and Emma knew it would be. The film was already in production while the novel was still on the New York Times bestseller list. Many book reviewers complained that the novel was written with the future screenplay in mind. Naturally, Emma wrote the screenplay, too; among film critics, there was some speculation that she might have written it before she wrote the novel. Emma wouldn’t say.

Jack didn’t know the details of the deal she made with Bob Bookman at C.A.A., but while Bookman didn’t normally represent actors, he agreed to represent Jack. Whether it was in writing—or something that was said over lunch, or in a phone call—it was understood that Emma and Jack were attached to the movie that would be made from Normal and Nice. Emma would write the script and Jack would be Johnny. Of course Emma had Jack in mind for the part from the beginning—a sympathetic cross-dresser. And this time his shoulder-length hair would be real, not a wig.

Mary Kendall played Carol—as innocent an escort as you’d ever see. Jake “Prairie Dog” Rawlings played Lester Billings—his first role in a long time, and his only screen appearance not in a Western.

When Mary Kendall and Jack are holding hands in that Interstate 80 motel room, just watching TV, they have no dialogue. In the same scene in the novel, watching Lester Billings get shot, Carol says, “I wonder how many times he got killed in his career.”

“Enough so he wasn’t afraid of it,” Johnny says.

But Emma thought it was better if they didn’t say anything in the film. It’s more of a movie moment—to just see them watching the old cowboy die. Their dreams, to be movie stars, have died, too; something of that is visible in Carol’s and Johnny’s resigned expressions. That green or blue-gray light from the television screen flickers on their faces.

But Jack would have liked to say the line. (“Enough so he wasn’t afraid of it.”)

“Maybe you’ll get to use it later,” Emma told him, “but not this time. This time, I’m the writer.”

Emma was more than that. She was the architect of Jack’s future in film, the reason he would make the leap from Wild Bill Vanvleck to more-or-less mainstream. Of course Jack Burns was still best known in drag, but suddenly he was serious.

It was quite a surprise when Jack was nominated for an Academy Award; he hadn’t thought of the cross-dressing limo driver as being that sympathetic a part. It was no surprise that Jack wouldn’t win that year. It was Mary Kendall’s first Oscar nomination, too, and she wouldn’t win, either. But they were both nominated, which was more than they’d ever imagined.

The Silence of the Lambs would win Best Picture, and Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins Best Actress and Best Actor, respectively—it was their year.

Emma wasn’t nominated. Screenwriters were nominated by screenwriters; Emma’s famous script notes still rankled. Emma went to the Oscars as Jack’s date, which made it fun. They generally agreed who the assholes were; identifying the assholes was an important activity at an event like that.

Billy Crystal, again the host, made a joke about the evening being delayed—“because Jack Burns is still changing his bra.”

Emma had a very noticeable hickey on her throat. Jack had given it to her, at her request. She hadn’t gone out with anyone in a long time, she thought she was ugly, and she hated her Oscar dress. “At least make it look like someone’s kissing me, honey pie.”

Mrs. Oastler spotted Emma’s hickey on TV in Toronto. “Couldn’t you have put a little concealer on it?” Leslie asked Emma.

It was March 30, 1992—the first time Mrs. Oastler and Alice stayed up to watch the entire Academy Awards show, although Jack told them not to bother. He knew Anthony Hopkins was going to win Best Actor, but Leslie and Alice stayed up to watch Jack not win, anyway.

They always showed a film clip of the nominated actors. Jack knew the shot he wanted them to use for him. It’s his face at the wheel of the limo—Jack-as-Johnny glances once in the rearview mirror at his wife, Carol, who’s all alone in the long backseat of the stretch. Carol is trying to put her hair and lipstick in order; she’s looking a little messy from a hotel-room groping by an overeager tourist at the Beverly Wilshire. Jack’s eyes go briefly to the rearview mirror, then back to the road. It’s a look between stoic and noir; he was proud of that close-up.

But with marketing, there’s no such thing as too obvious. The film clip they showed instead was the call-girl shot: Jack-as-a-hooker is breathing bourbon into the face of the front-desk clerk at The Peninsula Beverly Hills. “There’s something you should know,” Jack-as-a-hooker tells the clerk in that husky voice. “Lester Billings has checked out. I’m afraid he’s really left his room a mess.”

“The money shot,” Myra Ascheim called it, when Emma and Jack ran into her at the Oscar party at Morton’s. It had taken ages to get in; the limos were backed up on Robertson as far as they could see.

Jack was unfamiliar with the phrase. “The money shot,” he repeated.

“He’s Canadian,” Myra explained. Jack saw that she was sitting with her sister, Mildred.

“Two tough old broads in a power booth,” Emma would say later.

“In a porn film,” Milly Ascheim explained, without looking at Jack, “the money shot is the male-ejaculation moment. You don’t get it, you got nothin’. Either the guy delivers the goods, or he can’t.”

“What’s it called when you don’t deliver, or you can’t?” Emma asked the porn producer.

“Crabs in ice water,” Milly said. “You gotta deliver the money shot.”

“The equivalent of that shot of you as a hooker, Jack,” Myra said condescendingly. Perhaps she was peeved with him because he hadn’t recognized her. (She wasn’t wearing her baseball cap.)

“I get it,” Jack told the Ascheim sisters. He was anxious to leave. Emma was holding his hand; Jack could tell she wanted to leave, too. The two tough old broads were looking her over, and it wasn’t a friendly assessment.

“It doesn’t matter that you didn’t win, Jack,” Myra continued, staring at Emma.

“It only matters when you win,” Milly corrected her.

“Well, we gotta go—there’s another party,” Emma said. “A younger one.”

“Nice hickey,” Mildred Ascheim told Emma.

“Thanks,” Emma said. “Jack gave it to me—it’s a real doozy.”

Mildred shifted her examining gaze to Jack. “He’s cute, isn’t he?” Myra asked her sister. “You can see what all the fuss is about.”

Jack could tell that Milly Ascheim was thinking over the word cute. In her world, Jack knew, cute didn’t cut it. “I think he’s cuter as a girl,” Mildred Ascheim said; she was scrutinizing Emma again, ignoring Jack. He thought that Milly was weighing whether or not to expose him.

That was when Myra said, “You’re just jealous, Milly, because I met Jack first.”

Uh-oh—here it comes, Jack thought. But Mildred Ascheim surprised him. She gave Jack a withering look, just to let him know she remembered how small his schlong was; yet she didn’t give him away. It was not a reassuring look—on the contrary, Milly wanted Jack to know that she hadn’t forgotten a single disappointing detail of his audition in Van Nuys. This just wasn’t the time for her to bear witness.

“For Christ’s sake, Myra, it’s Oscar night,” Milly told her sister. “We oughta let these kids enjoy it.”

“Yeah, we gotta go,” Emma said again.

“Thank you,” Jack told Mildred Ascheim.

Milly was looking at Emma once more; she just waved to Jack with the back of her hand. He anticipated that Milly would say something as he and Emma were walking away, a parting shot. (“So long, small schlong”—or words to that effect.) But Milly held her tongue.

“Mark my words, Mildred—Jack Burns has a world of money shots ahead of him,” Jack heard Myra Ascheim say.

“Maybe,” Milly said. “I still say he’s cuter as a girl.”

“Don’t let those old bitches bother you, baby cakes,” Emma told him when they were back in their limousine.

They were drifting in a sea of limos. Jack didn’t know or care which party they were going to next. He always let Emma be in charge.

After a night like that, Jack would have expected to hear from everyone he ever knew—even though he lost. (Maybe especially because he lost.) But not that many people reached out to him. Caroline Wurtz called Alice, though. “Please tell Jack I think he should have won,” Miss Wurtz said. “Imagine giving an Oscar to someone for eating people!”

When Jack and Emma got back to their place in Santa Monica, Mr. Ramsey’s was the first message on the answering machine. “Jack Burns!” he cried. That was all; it was enough.

Jack’s old wrestling friends contacted him more slowly. Coach Clum, from Redding, wrote: “You made the right call, Jack. Cauliflower ears wouldn’t have worked on a girl.”

Coach Hudson and Coach Shapiro sent Jack their congratulations, too. Hudson said he hoped that Jack wasn’t taking any of those female hormones, and that Jack’s boobs hadn’t been implants—just falsies. Shapiro was curious to know what had become of the Slavic-looking beauty, whose name he had forgotten; he’d been hoping to catch a glimpse of her at the Academy Awards.

Coach Shapiro meant Claudia, of course. Jack didn’t hear from her. Not a word from Noah Rosen, either—not that Jack expected to hear from him. And not a sound from Michele Maher, who had vanished without a peep. Herman Castro thought she’d gone to medical school, but after that he’d lost track of her. Naturally, Jack heard from Herman, but it was just a note. “Way to go, amigo—you got to the finals.”

Yes, it felt like that—he had gotten to the finals and lost, no contest. There was no telling if or when he might get there again; maybe the Oscar opportunity had been a one-shot deal.

Both Terminator 2: Judgment Day and The Naked Gun 21⁄2: The Smell of Fear did much bigger box office than Normal and Nice, but that little film and the Academy Award nomination gave Jack Burns a face that was recognized everywhere. As a man or as a woman, maybe; as a man, without a doubt. (Jack hadn’t, as yet, tried going anywhere as a woman—except in the movies.) He was a celebrity now.

Emma seemed determined that he take the utmost advantage of his fame. To that end, she persuaded Jack to say he was writing something—though of course he wasn’t. “Keep it nonspecific, baby cakes. Just say you’re always writing.” This amounted to a conversation-stopper in many of Jack’s interviews. It sounded vaguely sinister, as if the alleged something he was always writing were an exposé. But of what? “It makes you more mysterious,” Emma told him. “It adds to your noir thing.” Did she mean that being a writer somehow enhanced his sexually ambiguous reputation as an actor?

Some interviewers only wanted to talk about what Jack was writing; it drove them crazy that he wouldn’t say. For this reason alone, it seemed worth repeating. “I’m not interested in settling down, getting married, having kids—not right now,” he would usually begin. “Now’s the time to concentrate on my work.”

“You mean your acting?”

“Well, sure. And my writing.”

“What are you writing?”

“Something. I’m just always writing.”

Even his mother wanted to know what Jack was writing. “Not a memoir, I hope!” Alice said, laughing nervously.

Leslie Oastler regarded Jack with regret—as if, if she’d known he was going to become a writer, she wouldn’t have shown him her Rose of Jericho.

Emma said her mom never stopped asking her if she’d read any of Jack’s writing. Emma thought her lie was very funny. Not Jack. He didn’t see the point of it.

When Myra Ascheim died—Jack read her obituary in Variety; no one called him—Bob Bookman said that Jack didn’t need a talent manager, anyway. Having an agent at C.A.A. would suffice. Jack already had an agent and an entertainment lawyer—Alan Hergott. “You need a money manager, not a talent manager,” Alan told him.

Because he wanted to support his mother, Jack found a money manager in Buffalo, New York—Willard Saperston. Coming from Buffalo, Willard had connections in Toronto. Jack was getting killed by Canadian taxes. For starters, Willard told him that he had to become an American citizen, which Jack did. He also became an “investor” in Daughter Alice; that way, his mom wouldn’t pay “taxes up the wazoo” for every U.S. dollar he gave her.

It crossed Jack’s mind that his mom might just sell Daughter Alice and stop being a tattoo artist; it also occurred to him that if his mom’s relationship with Mrs. Oastler was based on Leslie’s financial support, which he’d once thought it was, Alice might leave Leslie.

But Jack’s mother felt at home in the tattoo world—it was her one area of expertise—and whatever Jack had once believed were Alice’s reasons for moving in with Mrs. Oastler, he’d been wrong to think that his mother wasn’t Leslie’s willing partner. They were a couple who would go the distance. As Tattoo Ole had first indicated, Jack’s mother was Daughter Alice; she was both an old hippie and a maritimer, and she’d lived up to her tattoo name.

Jack might have spent more time in Toronto if he could have made peace with that—that and the fact that his missing father would never be a topic of conversation between him and his mom.

That Jack Burns was the son of a tattoo artist, and that he’d never known his father—well, anyone could imagine how these things would figure in various interviews and profiles of the successful young actor. The movie media never tired of an exotic childhood; nor did entertainment journalists release their grip on every bone of dysfunction in a celebrity’s life. In the words of one reporter, Jack had a “tattooed past.” (The latter observation was made all the more intriguing by the fact that neither Jack nor his mom was tattooed.)

Canadian television always asked to interview Jack and his mother in Daughter Alice. And soon after the American media published a picture of Jack with this or that date—except for Emma, they were never Canadians, and Emma (also for tax purposes) had become an American citizen—there would be someone from CBC-TV in Daughter Alice, asking Alice if she knew the woman Jack was “seeing” and if the relationship was “serious.”

“Oh, I don’t bug Jack about his personal life,” Alice would say with the unhurried insouciance of the perpetually stoned. (Bob Dylan would be yowling away in the background.) “And Jack doesn’t bug me about mine.”

Jack met a meat heiress in New York. Samantha was an older woman; she liked dressing Jack in her clothes. (Not to go out—he never once went out as a woman in New York, and he wasn’t with Samantha very long.)

He had a fling with an older woman in London, too—Emma’s English publisher. Corinna was fascinated that Jack was writing something; naturally, he never told her what it was. For a publisher, she had very sexy clothes, but Jack wasn’t with her for long, either.

Both of these older women were jealous of his enduring relationship with Emma, and Jack felt he wasted too much time flying from London and New York to L.A. Emma basically refused to leave their crappy house on Entrada, and Jack missed her too much when he was away.

Besides, by not moving from Santa Monica, Emma and Jack could afford to buy a really good car. They bought a silver Audi with gunmetal-gray leather seats, the same model Jack had once driven as a parking valet in his brief employment at Stan’s. Emma understood the symbolism of it. “Just so long as it doesn’t come with a kid in the backseat, baby cakes.”

Having a car like that made Jack glad he didn’t drink—not that he drove appreciably faster. According to Emma, Jack was as irritatingly slow and overcareful a driver as ever. But Emma wasn’t slow or overcareful. “It might have been safer to buy a house in Beverly Hills,” Jack used to tell her. He meant that Emma might have done less driving.

So they went out, and they came home (or not)—and, of course, they met people. Jack was never “with” someone for more than a month or two, at most. There was no one Emma was “with”—not for more than a night, like the pretty boys she met dancing at Coconut Teaszer.

Jack kept his hair long, almost shoulder-length, which made his occasional cross-dressing more natural—if only in the privacy of a boudoir. As a guy, he still favored a little stubble; he stayed lean and mean, because that was his job.

Jack’s roles didn’t always require him to transform himself from a man to a woman, but the potential remained obdurately a part of his character—an element of his noir thing, as Emma called it.

On-screen, Jack was “with” just about everyone: Elisabeth Shue before she did Leaving Las Vegas; Cameron Diaz in a stupid chick flick; Drew Barrymore in a Stephen King screamer. He was Nicole Kidman’s slowly dying husband—it took three quarters of the film for Jack to die. Nicole Kidman was much taller than Jack Burns, but that wasn’t evident from the movie, in which Jack never got out of bed.

Jack was the guy Julia Roberts wisely didn’t marry. He told the lie that made Meg Ryan leave him. He suffered as a smitten waiter, the one who spilled the vichyssoise down Gwyneth Paltrow’s back.

Bruce Willis kicked the crap out of him. Denzel Washington arrested him. And Jack was, albeit briefly, a Bond girl—the one who was killed by a poisonous dart from a cigarette lighter when 007 deduced Jack was a guy.

Myra Ascheim had been right: a world of money shots lay ahead of him. If Jack had to pick a favorite, it would be that bit with Jessica Lee. “The almost cross-dressing moment,” some critic in The New Yorker called it.

Jessica is a beautiful heiress. Jack is a thief, and he’s just slept with her. She’s taking a shower while Jack is alone in her bedroom, taking inventory of her assets. There’s pricey stuff everywhere. He’s just wandering around her bedroom in his boxer shorts while we hear Jessica singing in the shower.

When Jack comes to her wardrobe closet, he is enraptured by her clothes. It’s an inside joke—Jack Burns fingering through a closet full of women’s clothes. Not even the jewelry has attracted this much attention from the thief in his boxers. It’s clear that Jack loves her clothes. He’s so mesmerized that he doesn’t hear the shower shut off; Jessica has stopped singing.

When the bathroom door opens, and Jessica is standing there in that terry-cloth robe—her wet hair wrapped in a towel—her image is reflected in the mirror on the wardrobe-closet door. It’s a great shot: Jessica appears to be standing beside Jack when he holds up her dress to his half-naked body and takes a look at himself (and at her) in the mirror.

He is one cool thief. “Boy, I’ll bet this looks great on you,” Jack says to Jessica Lee. In the film, Jessica’s character is completely taken in. (Because that’s the story: she’s in love with the thief.) But they had to shoot that scene ten times. Jessica herself wasn’t taken in. The first time she saw Jack Burns holding up a dress to his body, Jessica turned pale. It wasn’t in the script. She saw something she didn’t like—something about Jack. It took her ten takes to get over whatever it was she saw; it took Jack a few takes, too.

“What was it? What did you see?” he asked her later.

“I don’t know what it was, Jack,” Jessica said. “You just gave me the willies.”

Jessica Lee’s willies notwithstanding, the final take was a keeper. In any retrospective of Jack Burns, his collected film clips, there was that one of him and Jessica in the mirror. He’s holding up the dress and saying, “Boy, I’ll bet this looks great on you.” She’s in the doorway to the bathroom, smiling that smile. Jessica’s smile is wide enough to fall into, big enough to consume you. But Jack could never see that clip without remembering the first look she gave him. Jessica wasn’t smiling the first time, and she wasn’t acting.

Moments like that made Jack even more of an outsider. When you know you’ve spooked someone, you learn to be careful. What Emma called Jack’s noir thing was a bit creepy. Bankable, yes, but likable?

Jack Burns had found a close-up all his own; it was more disquieting than Toshiro Mifune’s scowl. Jack couldn’t really see himself, only his effect on others. Was it a sexually disturbing look? Yes, definitely. Was it more threatening than noir? Well—it was beyond mischievous, anyway.

“It’s unpredictable, honey pie—that’s your look.”

“That’s just acting,” he told her. (That’s just keeping my audience of one on his toes, Jack thought.)

“No, that’s you, baby cakes. You’re unpredictable. That’s what’s scary about you, Jack.”

“I’m not scary!” he insisted. Jack thought that Emma was the scary one.

He would remember where they were when Emma said he was scary. They were on Sunset Boulevard in the silver Audi. Jack was driving. They were in Hollywood—Château Marmont territory, where John Belushi died—and Jack was trying to figure out what it was that had scared Jessica Lee. “Maybe the dress was all wrong for me,” he said to Emma. “I wish I could just forget about it.”

“Boy, am I sick of the Bar Marmont,” was all Emma said.

Because Jack was famous, he was always admitted to the Bar Marmont, which was adjacent to the hotel. It was big and noisy, a scene—lots of fake boobs and aspiring talent managers, very trendy, ultra young. There were usually about thirty people outside, being denied entrance; on this particular night, Lawrence was among them. Emma looked the other way, but Lawrence caught Jack’s wrist.

“You’re not a girl tonight? You’re just a guy? How disappointing to your fans!” Lawrence cried.

Emma caught him in the nuts with her knee; then she and Jack went inside together. Lawrence was lying in a fetal way, his knees drawn up to his chest in a kind of birthing position—not that anything was forthcoming. Jack would remember thinking that if he’d kneed Lawrence in the balls, there would have been a lawsuit, but Emma could get away with it. (That’s why he thought she was the scary one.)

The Château Marmont—the hotel itself—was another story. Jack didn’t go to that lobby to be with a crowd, but he often saw actors having meetings there. Jack would have a bunch of meetings in that lobby—the lobby was really a bar.

He preferred to have his meetings, when he could choose, in the bar at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills. In Jack’s opinion, this was where the classiest meetings happened. He was convinced that famous ghosts would one day haunt the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills—actors whose meetings went awry. But, for Jack, it was the only place where he felt like an insider.

For the most part, like Emma, he was still an outsider; they were notoriously uncool. The U.S. wasn’t their country. L.A. wasn’t their town. Not that they were Canadians, either. Toronto didn’t feel like home.

Redding had been the first and last place Jack had fit in. Somehow he and Emma knew they would never fit in in L.A. It wasn’t a matter of being famous; that was only what other people saw. With the money they’d made, Emma and Jack could have moved from Entrada, but Jack was more and more persuaded by Emma’s determination to remain an outsider. For them, Los Angeles was a working town; whatever else they were, Emma and Jack were workers. L.A. was their job.

Being seen—being spotted—was part of the job. (Part of Jack’s, anyway; Emma didn’t care who saw her.)

In their own way, they were gods, Emma and Jack—uncool Canadian gods in the city of angels. And like the gods, they were remote. They didn’t see themselves all that clearly; typical of the movie business, they registered their performances by how they were received. But in his heart, Jack Burns knew that Donald, that prick maître d’ at Stan’s, had been right. Donald had seen through him: Jack was a hick from Toronto via New Hampshire. Yes, he was a U.S. citizen and a legal resident of Santa Monica, California, but Jack wasn’t truly living anywhere—he was just biding his time. (At least he knew how to do that. He’d done it before, with Claudia.)

Naturally, Jack was making a ton of money. Yet Jack knew that wasn’t all there was, or all that he was supposed to be.

Jack was in Toronto—unwillingly, as usual. Emma wasn’t with him, though she generally spent more time there than he did; being a writer was such a big deal in Canada.

“Life is a call sheet,” Emma wrote in The Slush-Pile Reader. “You’re supposed to show up when they tell you, but that’s the only rule.”

Hanging out with his mom in Daughter Alice, Jack started arguing with her about tattoo conventions. There never used to be tattoo conventions, but lately Alice had been going to one every month. She’d attended one in Tokyo and another in Madrid, but mostly she went to the conventions in the United States. They were everywhere.

The rare times Alice came to Los Angeles were usually in the fall, and not exclusively to visit Jack. Not so coincidentally, that was the time of the annual Inkslingers Ball—the L.A. tattoo and body-piercing convention. It was allegedly the world’s largest; they held it in the Hollywood Palladium on Sunset Boulevard, a former swing-era dance hall.

The New York tattoo convention, where Daughter Alice was also a regular, was held in the Roseland Ballroom on West Fifty-second Street—that one was in the spring. The one in Atlanta was also in the spring. There was even one in Maine—in February! Despite her promises, Jack’s mom never once came to Maine to visit him at Redding, but she wouldn’t miss the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party in Portland.

Alice went to the Hell City Tattoo Festival—this being in Columbus, Ohio, in a Hyatt Regency Hotel. (That one was in June, if Jack remembered correctly.) He thought his mom liked Philadelphia the best. She had a photograph of herself with Crazy Philadelphia Eddie; he always wore a yellow sports jacket and had his hair so stiff with gel that it stood up like a rooster’s comb.

Wherever the convention was—Dallas or Dublin, the so-called Meeting of the Marked in Pittsburgh, the annual Man’s Ruin in Decatur, Illinois—Daughter Alice went.

She had been to Boston and to Hamburg, Germany. To her great disappointment, Herbert Hoffmann had retired, but she met Robert Gorlt in Hamburg. “He’s six-nine and played basketball in Canada,” she told Jack.

Tattoo artists from all over the world came to these conventions: from Tahiti, Cyprus, Samoa; from Thailand and Mexico, and from Paris, Berlin, and Miami. They even came from Oklahoma, where tattooing was illegal. (There was nowhere Alice wouldn’t go to meet with her colleagues—including some Sheraton in the Meadowlands.) And it was always the same people who went.

“If it’s always the same weirdos, why go?” Jack asked his mother. “Why go again and again?”

“Because we are the same weirdos, Jack. Because we are what we do. We don’t change.”

“For Christ’s sake, Mom, do you have any idea what sort of shit can happen to you in a Hyatt Regency in Columbus, Ohio, or in a fucking Sheraton in the Meadowlands?”

“If Miss Wurtz could hear you, Jack,” his mother said. “If poor Lottie, or Mrs. Wicksteed—may she rest in peace—could hear you. It’s so sad what’s happened to your language. Is it California or the movie business that’s done this to you?”

“Done what to me?”

“Maybe it’s Emma,” Alice said. “It’s living with that foul-mouthed girl—I know it is. It’s for Christ’s sake this and fucking that. To hear you talk, you’d think that shit were an all-purpose noun! And you used to speak so well. You once knew how to talk. You enunciated perfectly.”

She had a point, but it was just like Alice to change the subject. Here Jack was, trying to impress upon her—a middle-aged woman—that these tattoo conventions were freak shows, and his mother got all in a knot about his language. The conventions were absolutely terrifying. The full-body wackos turned up; they had contests! Ex-convicts were tattooed—prison tattoos were a genre as distinctive as biker tattoos. Strippers were tattooed, not to mention porn stars. (Jack’s “research,” meaning countless Hank Long films, had taught him that.)

Just who did Daughter Alice think these conventions were for? Jack had seen those angry voodoo dolls and the slashed heart with the dagger in it—the latter inscribed NO REGRET—at Riley Baxter’s Tabu Tattoo in West L.A. (On Baxter’s business card, under one such voodoo doll, it said DISPOSABLE NEEDLES.)

Alice’s waist had thickened, but she’d not lost her pretty smile; her hair, once an amber or maple-syrup color, was streaked with gray. But her skin was surprisingly unwrinkled, and her choice in clothing took noticeable advantage of her full breasts. She liked dresses with an empire waist, and usually a scoop or square neckline. At her age, she wore an underwire bra—she liked red or fuchsia. That day in Daughter Alice, she wore a peasant-style dress with a neckline that dropped from the apex of her shoulders; her bra straps were showing, but they usually were. Jack thought that she liked her bra straps to show, although she never wore a dress or blouse with a revealing décolletage. “My cleavage,” Alice liked to say, “is nobody’s business.” (Strange, Jack used to think—how his mom wanted everyone to know she had good breasts, but she never bared even a little bit of them.)

And what was a woman who wouldn’t bare her breasts doing at tattoo conventions? “Mom—” Jack tried to say, but she was fussing with a pot of tea; she’d turned her back on him.

“And the women, Jack. Do you know any nice girls? Or have I just not met them?”

“Nice?”

“Like Claudia. She was nice. What’s happened to Claudia?”

“I don’t know, Mom.”

“What about that unfortunate young woman who had an entry-level job at the William Morris Agency? She had the strangest lisp, didn’t she?”

“Gwen somebody,” he said. (That was all he remembered about Gwen—she lisped. Maybe she was still at William Morris, maybe not.)

“Gwen is long gone, is she?” his mom asked. “Do you still take honey in your tea, dear?”

“Yes, Gwen is long gone. No, I don’t take honey—I never have.”

“Actresses, waitresses, office girls, meat heiresses—not to mention the hangers-on,” his mom continued.

“The what?”

“Do you call them groupies?”

“I don’t know any groupies, Mom. There are more groupies in your world than there are in mine.”

“What on earth do you mean, dear?”

“At the tattoo conventions, there must be,” he said.

“You should go to a tattoo convention, Jack. Then you wouldn’t be so afraid.”

“I took you to the Inkslingers Ball,” he reminded her.

“Yes, but you wouldn’t go inside the Palladium,” she said.

“There was a motorcycle gang outside the Palladium!”

“You said it was bad enough to see a bunch of fake boobs at night—you weren’t going to hang around a bunch of fake boobs in broad daylight. That’s exactly what you said. Honestly, your language—”

“Mom—”

“That Brit you were with in London—she was as old as I am!” Alice cried. Jack watched her put honey in his tea.

The door to Queen Street opened and a little bell tinkled, as if Daughter Alice were a shop selling lace doilies or birthday cards. The girl who came in was suffering some kind of inflammation from her latest piercing; an object that looked like a cufflink made her lower lip stick out. She had a ball and chain attached to one eyebrow, which was shaved, but only her lower lip was inflamed.

“What can I do for you, dear?” Alice asked her. “I just made some tea. Would you like some?”

“Yeah, I guess,” the girl said. “I don’t usually do tea, but that’s okay.”

“Jack, fix the young lady some tea, please,” his mother said.

The girl was eighteen—maybe twenty, tops. Her dark hair was dirty; she was wearing jeans and a Grateful Dead T-shirt. “Shit, you look kinda like Jack Burns,” she told Jack, “except you look like a normal guy.”

Alice had put some music on—Bob, of course. “Jack is my son,” Alice told the pierced girl. “This is Jack Burns!”

“Oh, wow,” the girl said. “I’ll bet you’ve been with a lot of women, eh?”

“Not too many,” he told her. “Do you take honey in your tea?”

“Yeah, sure,” she said; she kept touching her sore-looking lower lip with the tip of her tongue.

“What sort of tattoo are you interested in, dear?” Alice asked her. (There was a sign in the window of Daughter Alice: NO PIERCING. The girl had to have come for a tattoo.)

The girl unzipped her jeans and hooked her thumbs under the waistband of her panties, exposing a fringe of pubic hair, above which a honeybee hovered. The bee’s body was no bigger than the topmost joint of Jack’s little finger; its translucent wings were a blur of yellow. The little bee’s body was a darker shade of gold.

“Gold is a tricky pigment,” Alice said—perhaps admiringly. Jack couldn’t tell. “I take a bright yellow and mix it with brick red, or you can use what they call English vermilion—same as mercuric sulfide. I mix that with molasses.” Jack was pretty sure this was three quarters fabrication. Alice would never tell just anyone how she made her pigments—especially a nonprofessional.

“Molasses?” the girl said.

“I cut it with a little witch hazel,” Alice told her. “It’s tricky to get a good gold.” Jack believed that the witch-hazel part was true.

The girl was looking at her honeybee with new eyes. “I got the bee in Winnipeg,” she told them.

“At Tattoos for the Individual, I suppose,” Alice said.

“Yeah, do you know those guys?” the girl asked.

“Sure, I know them. You can’t exactly get lost in Winnipeg. So you want a flower for the bee?” she asked the girl.

“Yeah, but I can’t decide what kinda flower,” the girl said.

Jack was edging toward the door. He thought he’d take his chances out on Queen Street; a fan (or a lunatic) would probably recognize him, but Jack Burns didn’t need to see someone get another tattoo.

“Where are you off to, Jack?” Alice asked, not looking at him. She was laying out her flash of flower choices, to show the honeybee girl.

“You don’t hafta go,” the girl said to Jack. “You can watch—no matter where she puts it.”

“That depends,” Alice told her.

“I’ll see you back at home,” Jack said to his mom. “I’ll take you and Leslie out to dinner.”

Both Alice and the girl looked disappointed that Jack was leaving. Bob Dylan was yowling away. (“Idiot Wind.” Jack would always remember that song.) Jack wasn’t thinking about the girl; he was trying to decipher more exactly the look of disappointment on his mother’s face. What is it about me that bothers you? Jack wanted to ask her, but not with the honeybee girl there.

“Someone’s got it in for me,” Bob complained. Every time Jack came to Toronto, he felt that way. “They say I shot a man named Gray and took his wife to Italy,” Bob sang away. “She inherited a million bucks and when she died it came to me.”

Jack sang the next line out loud, with Bob—never taking his eyes off his mother. “I can’t help it if I’m lucky,” he sang—because that was the principal ingredient in the look his mom was giving him. She thought he’d been lucky!

“So far, Jack—so far!” Alice called after him, as he stepped out on Queen Street and closed the door to Daughter Alice.