John Irving - Until I Find You

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.