John Irving - Until I Find You

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.