John Irving - Until I Find You

It’s unlikely that Emma would have chosen the chapel at St. Hilda’s for her memorial service, but she had left her mother no instructions regarding how she wanted to be “remembered.” That Mrs. Oastler chose the St. Hilda’s chapel was only natural. After all, it was in Leslie’s neighborhood and she had already chosen it for her own service.

Alice called Jack to convey Leslie’s request: Mrs. Oastler wanted him to “say a little something” at Emma’s service. “You’re so good with words, dear,” Jack’s mother said. “And for how many years now have you been writing something?”

Well, how could he refuse? Besides, Jack’s mom and Mrs. Oastler had no idea how the myth of his writing something, which Emma had so presciently set in motion, was now a reality.

In her will, Emma had indeed left him everything. (“Lucky you,” Leslie had remarked—little knowing just how lucky he would soon be.) Jack was Emma’s “literary executor” in more ways than one—the exact terms of which would never be known to anyone other than Bob Bookman, Alan Hergott, and Jack Burns himself—for if ever a will were ironclad, that would aptly describe how Emma had set him up.

Upon her death, the film rights to The Slush-Pile Reader, which Emma had so entangled with the kind of approvals never granted to writers—cast approval, director approval, final cut—were passed unencumbered to Jack. He could make the movie of her novel as he saw fit, provided that he wrote the script. What only Bob Bookman, Alan Hergott, and Jack knew was that Emma had already written a rudimentary adaptation of The Slush-Pile Reader— her screenplay was a rough first draft. There were also her notes, addressed to Jack—suggestions as to what he might want to change or add or delete. And there were gaps in the story, some substantial, where it fell to him to fill in the blanks. Or, as Emma put it: “Write your own dialogue, baby cakes.” She had intended, all along, that Jack would play the porn star in the film.

Were he to reject this flagrant plagiarism—should Jack not accept the falsehood that he was the sole screenwriter of The Slush-Pile Reader— the movie could not be made until a requisite number of years had passed (under existing copyright law) and Emma’s novel had at last entered the public domain.

As for Emma’s third novel, Mrs. Oastler had been right—it did not exist. But Emma hadn’t suffered from writer’s block; she’d simply been busy adapting The Slush-Pile Reader as a screenplay by Jack Burns.

He learned from Bob Bookman—whose other clients included directors and writers, not actors—how Emma had persuaded Bob to accept Jack as a client. In her words: “Jack Burns is a writer, not an actor; he just doesn’t know it yet.”

The royalties from Emma’s backlist—the paperback sales of The Slush-Pile Reader and Normal and Nice— were also left to Jack. This would more than compensate him for his time spent “finishing” Emma’s screenplay. In short, Emma had made Jack declare himself a writer to the media while she was alive; in death, she had given him the opportunity to become one.

Both the unfinished draft of the screenplay for The Slush-Pile Reader and Emma’s notes to Jack had been removed from her computer. She hadn’t saved any copies on disk, and she’d deleted the files from her hard drive. The only printed copy, which Alan Hergott kept safely in his office—where he and Bob Bookman explained to Jack the terms of Emma’s will—needed to be transcribed into Jack’s handwriting. From interviews he’d given, most of them bullshit, everyone knew that Jack Burns wrote in longhand; even Leslie Oastler knew that he didn’t own a computer or a typewriter, and that he allegedly liked to write by hand.

Bob and Alan thought that Jack should do the copying into longhand as soon as possible. He could take all the time he needed to “revise.”

“But should I really do this?” Jack asked them. “I mean—is it right?”

“It’s what Emma wanted, Jack, but you don’t have to do it,” Alan said.

“Yeah, it’s entirely your decision,” Bookman told him. “But it’s a pretty good script.”

Jack would read it and concur; if Emma had taken charge of him in life, he saw no reason to resist her efforts to control him from the grave.

That Mrs. Oastler wanted Jack to “say a little something” in remembrance of Emma in the chapel at St. Hilda’s, where Mrs. McQuat had first warned him of the dangers of turning his back on God, seemed appropriate to the kind of writer he’d become.

The public impression—namely, that Emma Oastler had suffered from a writer’s block of several years’ duration and had, as a result, become grossly overweight—was further fueled by the report of that Italian journalist from the Hollywood Foreign Press. According to Jack’s interviewer, Emma’s allegedly platonic but live-in relationship with the actor Jack Burns showed signs of recent strain; yet the bestselling author had been extremely generous to him in her will. It had been known, for years, that Jack was “a closet writer”—as Emma’s obituary notice in Entertainment Weekly would say. Now he was said to be “developing” a screenplay of The Slush-Pile Reader. (Emma, “mysteriously,” had not wanted her novel to be made into a movie while she was alive.)

What guilt Jack might have had—that is, in accepting Emma’s gift to him as rightfully his—was overshadowed by the certainty that, even if he were to tell the truth, the truth was not what Emma had wanted. She had wanted to get The Slush-Pile Reader made as a movie—more or less as she’d written it. But with her name on the script, the film, as she wrote it, would never have been made. Jack Burns, Emma knew, was a movie star; with his name on the screenplay, he could control it.

Thus, at one of the better addresses he knew—in the Beverly Hills offices of Bloom, Hergott, Diemer and Cook, LLP, Attorneys-at-Law—Jack Burns transcribed Emma’s rough draft of The Slush-Pile Reader into his handwriting, and faithfully copied her notes as well. With the first small change he made, which was not even as big an alteration as the choice of a different word— Jack used the contraction “didn’t” where Emma had written “did not”—he discovered how it was possible for a would-be writer to take at least partial possession of a real writer’s work. (And with subsequent changes, deletions, additions, his sense of rightful ownership—though false—only grew.)

This should not have surprised him. After all, Jack was in the movie business; he had seen how scripts were changed, and by how many amateur hands these alterations were wrought. In another draft or two, the screenplay of The Slush-Pile Reader would feel—even to Jack—as if he’d written it. But the structure of the script and its prevailing tone of voice were entirely Emma’s. As an actor, Jack knew how to imitate her voice.

Not all art is imitation, but imitating was what Jack Burns did best. With a little direction—in Emma’s case, she gave him quite a lot—writing (that is, re writing) the script of The Slush-Pile Reader was just another acting job. Jack did his job well.

The decision to make Michele Maher (the character) the movie’s voice-over was Emma’s. The idea to make the penultimate sentence of the novel the opening line of voice-over in the film was Jack’s. (“There are worse relationships in L.A.”) We see Michele, the script reader, in bed with the porn star—just holding his penis, we presume, under the covers. It’s all very tastefully done. The story of how they meet (when she reads the porn star’s atrocious screenplay) is a flashback. Naturally, we never see his (that is, Jack’s) penis.