John Irving - Until I Find You

“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?”