John Irving - Until I Find You

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.

B atman 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.