John Irving - Until I Find You

“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.

Jack was on a press junket in New York. (“Following Miramax’s marching orders,” as Emma put it.) The only thing memorable about this particular interview was not the opening question itself, which he’d been asked a hundred times before, but the sheer clumsiness of how the journalist worded the question—that and the fact that Emma called in the middle of his oft-repeated answer, and it was the last time Jack would hear her voice.

His interviewer, a matronly woman with a baffling accent, was the same journalist, from the Hollywood Foreign Press, who, in a previous press junket, had asked Jack if he was modeling his appearance on that of a young Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now. She was drinking a Diet Coke and smoking a mentholated cigarette, her artificially sweetened breath wafting over him like smoke from a fire in a mint factory.

“Captain Willard has short hair,” Jack had answered her that previous time.

“Cap-ee-tan who?”

“The Martin Sheen character in Apocalypse Now— Captain Willard,” he’d said. “I’m not a hundred percent sure about his rank.”

“I didn’t mean-a hees hair,” the journalist had said.

“I’m not consciously modeling myself on a young Martin Sheen,” Jack had told her. “I’m not trying to kill Marlon Brando, either.”

“You mean-a young Marlon Brando?” the lady from the Hollywood Foreign Press had asked him.

“In the movie you mentioned,” he had explained to her, slowly, “the young Martin Sheen character is sent to kill Marlon Brando—remember? Not a young Marlon Brando, either.”

“Forget eet,” she’d said. “Let’s-a move on.”

This time her question was breathtaking in its awkwardness, but she had at last moved on from Martin Sheen. “Are you a person who-wa, though not a homosexual, psychologically identifies weeth the opposite sex-sa? I mean-a weeth wee- men.”

“Am I a transvestite, do you mean?”

“Yes!”

“No.”

“But-a you are always dressing as a woo- man—or you seem to be theenking about eet, I mean-a dressing as a woo-man, even when-a you are dressed as a man. ”

“I’m not thinking about dressing as a woman right now,” Jack told her. “It’s just something I occasionally do in a movie—you know, when I’m acting. ”

“Are you writing about eet?”

“About dressing as a woman?”

“Yes!”

“No.”

His cell phone rang. Ordinarily he didn’t answer his phone in the middle of an interview, but Jack could see that the call was from Emma and she’d been depressed lately. Emma was losing the fight with her weight; every morning since he’d been away, Emma called to tell him what she weighed. It was almost lunchtime in New York, but Jack knew that Emma was just getting up in L.A.

He’d told her that he was being interviewed around the clock—Emma knew very well what press junkets were for. In mild exasperation, Jack handed his cell phone to the lady from the Hollywood Foreign Press. “This woman won’t leave me alone,” he said to his interviewer. “Try telling her I’m in the middle of an interview. See how far you get.”

If nothing else, Jack hoped this might interrupt the chain of thought that the journalist from the Hollywood Foreign Press was pursuing. He already knew that his interviewer would have no luck interrupting Emma from her train of thought.

“Hello-a?” the woman who thought he looked like a young Martin Sheen said.

It suddenly sounded like Emma was speaking Italian—of course Jack recognized her spiel. “Pleeze tell-a Jack Burns—eet’s Maria Antonietta Beluzzi on da fon-a!”

“I’m-a sorry. Jack Burns ees in the meedle of an interview,” the lady from the Hollywood Foreign Press said.

“Tell heem I mees-a holding hees pee- nis!” Emma said.

“Eet’s a Ms. Beluzzi, ” his interviewer said, handing him back his cell phone. “Eet sounds urgent.”

“So what do you weigh this morning?” Jack asked Emma.

“Two hundred and fucking five !” Emma wailed—loudly enough for the journalist to hear her.

“You have to go on a diet, Emma,” he told her, for what had to be the hundredth time.

Jack Burns was thirty-two in 1997—Emma was thirty-nine. He had a better metabolism than she had, and he’d always watched what he ate. But now that Jack was in his thirties, even he had to be more strict with his diet.

Emma didn’t understand dieting. Her one bottle of red wine a night had become two; she had pasta for lunch. Here she was, pushing forty, and her favorite food was still gorgonzola mashed potatoes. Jack kept telling her: she could spend all day on the ab machine at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills—she could be bench-pressing her own weight—and not work off those kinds of carbs.

Jack could see that the journalist from the Hollywood Foreign Press was writing everything down—including, as he would later read in her interview, the “two hundred and fucking five. ” She even spelled Maria Antonietta Beluzzi correctly; naturally, it turned out that the journalist was Italian.

“Emma—” Jack started to say.

“ He calls her Emma and brutally tells her to go on a diet, ” the lady from the Hollywood Foreign Press would write.

“Fuck you and your diet, Jack,” Emma said sharply on the phone. “I want you to know I’ve taken good care of you in my will.” Then she hung up.

“Your-a girlfriend?” his interviewer asked. “I mean-a one of them.”

“Kind of,” Jack replied.

“Ees Ms. Beluzzi an actress?”

“She’s a voluptuous tobacconist,” he said. Although the journalist didn’t write this down, voluptuous would somehow make it into her interview—but in reference to Emma.

“I suppose-za you have, or have-a had, many girlfriends,” Jack’s interviewer said.

“Nobody serious,” he said, for what had to be the hundredth time—with apologies to Michele Maher.

Jack was tired. He’d had too many interviews, with too many prying and insinuating journalists. But that was no excuse. He shouldn’t have lost control of this interview. He shouldn’t have so recklessly, even deliberately, allowed this lady from the Hollywood Foreign Press to imagine anything she might want to imagine—but he did.