John Irving - Until I Find You

“ Writers! ” Jack said, more to McSwiney’s friends than to McSwiney. “They can’t even eat without saying too much.”

One of the women smiled, which may or may not have eliminated her as the woman who was with McSwiney.

Jack ground his chin into the top of McSwiney’s head; he wanted to be sure that McSwiney could hear him. “There’s another thing about your screenplay,” Jack told him. “Just what do you think would have happened to a transvestite prostitute in a town full of sailors in 1917? Some sailor would have killed him—long before the Halifax Explosion could have done the job. The story isn’t only prurient and banal— it’s also unbelievable. ”

Jack could tell that McSwiney was trying to say something, but Jack wasn’t about to let the overweight author wriggle out of his paella. The woman who’d smiled at Jack spoke for McSwiney.

“I think Dougie is trying to say that we’re all dying to hear about Lucy, ” the woman said. Jack guessed that she probably was the woman with McSwiney, if not his wife. She was about the writer’s age, which Jack estimated to be late forties—maybe early fifties.

“Well, Lucy is a lot younger than anyone at this table—better tits, and everything,” Jack told them—the way Billy Rainbow would have said it. No one was smiling now.

“Please don’t hurt him,” the woman said.

“That’s all anyone ever had to say,” Jack told them. He lightened up on the full nelson. “I hope you know that I could have hurt you,” Jack said to McSwiney, who tried to nod.

Jack let him go and stepped away from their table. He half expected McSwiney to stagger to his feet and come at him, swinging. But the fat man just sat there, looking more subdued than combative.

The woman who’d spoken to Jack wet her napkin in her water glass and began to fuss over McSwiney. She picked the rice out of his hair and beard, finding a shrimp or two and some sausage—also a piece of chicken. She cleaned him up as best she could, but there was nothing she could do about the saffron; the writer’s beard and forehead were stained a pumpkin-orange color.

A waiter who’d been watching the whole time kept his eye on Jack, who returned to his table but sat with his back to the window, facing McSwiney’s party. Jack didn’t look at any of them directly, but he wanted to see McSwiney coming if the big man came at him. The woman who’d asked him not to hurt McSwiney looked at Jack from time to time, with no discernible expression.

Jack waved the waiter over and told him: “If they’re staying, please offer Mr. McSwiney another paella. I’ll pay for it.”

“They’re not staying,” the waiter said. “Mr. McSwiney is experiencing chest pains—that’s why they’re leaving.”

It would be bad luck to have contributed to the death of the drunken lout—the overweight writer was a blustering god of Canadian letters. The autopsy might reveal that McSwiney had rice in his lungs. He’d been murdered with food; the murder weapon had been the paella! Eulogies would abound, nationwide; a voice blowing over the Canadian landscape like a gale-force wind had been silenced. Worst of all would be the lengthy quotations from McSwiney’s prose, gargantuan descriptions of rocks and trees and seagulls in Quill & Quire.

“Would you know if Mr. McSwiney has experienced chest pains before ?” Jack asked the troubled-looking waiter.

“Oh, all the time,” the waiter said. “He has terrible heartburn.”

Jack ordered a beer. He hadn’t had one since the Heineken he’d had at that party in the Polo Lounge after the Academy Awards. He noticed that a large gob of McSwiney’s paella had landed on his pants; he’d been busy and had somehow missed seeing it. The shrimp coated with saffron-colored rice, the sticky sausage—Jack wiped off the mess with a napkin, but (like McSwiney) there was nothing he could do about the saffron stain.

Whenever he saw the troubled-looking waiter, Jack was distracted by his thoughts of McSwiney’s chest pains. He sincerely hoped it was just heartburn. McSwiney was an asshole, but he was too young to die. Jack had restrained himself from hurting the bastard; it would have been too cruel for it to turn out that Jack had had even an inadvertent hand in killing Doug McSwiney!

And that was Halifax. Jack would beg Dr. García to allow him to tell her a little bit about what happened there. (After all, it might be a year or more before Jack got around to that part of his life story in chronological order.) Because his psychiatrist could see that Jack was agitated, and because she’d already talked to Lucy and Lucy’s mother about the Lucy business, Dr. García indulged him. She at least let him tell her the part about Doug McSwiney.

Jack was fortunate, he admitted to Dr. García, that McSwiney’s chest pains hadn’t amounted to anything. Mrs. Oastler found a small account in the newspaper of a “drunken brawl” in the Press Gang restaurant in Halifax—a case of “two feuding writers who’d earlier come to blows in the bar of The Prince George Hotel,” one Canadian journalist had reported. Because Leslie knew that Jack didn’t drink, she was all the more perplexed by the reporter noting that Jack had calmly sipped a beer while McSwiney was attended to by his friends.

“Jack,” Dr. García said, “it seems to me that you should hire a bodyguard.”

“I don’t need a bodyguard,” he told her. “I just need to watch out for a left hook.”

“I meant that you need a bodyguard to keep you from hurting someone else,” she said.

“Oh.”

“Well, we’ve got our work cut out for us—let’s leave it at that,” his psychiatrist said.

“What should I do?” Jack asked her sincerely.

“You better find a movie to be in soon,” Dr. García told him. “I think you should take a break from being Jack Burns, don’t you?”

The following year, Jack was in three movies; the year after that, he did two more. His handicapped math notwithstanding, even Jack could count that he’d been in five films in two years. He’d taken a big break from being Jack Burns.

In two years’ time, he’d not heard from Michele Maher; she made no response to his letter of explanation about the Lucy episode. Dr. García had urged Jack to recognize that the Michele Maher chapter of his life was behind him, or should be. It was a good thing that he hadn’t heard from Michele, the doctor said.

In those two years, Jack made a lot of money and spent very little. About the only expensive thing he bought was a new Audi; naturally, it was another silver one. He could not motivate himself to sell the place on Entrada Drive and buy something more suitable. This was because what he really wanted was to get out of L.A.—although no other city beckoned, and Jack held fast to Emma’s idea that it was somehow good to be an outsider. Besides, as long as his life story was a work-in-progress, he couldn’t imagine cutting his ties to Dr. García. She was the closest Jack had come to a good marriage, or even a possible one. He saw her twice a week. Putting his life in chronological order for Dr. García had become a more regular and restorative activity in Jack’s life than having sex.

As for sex, in the last two years—since adamantly not having sex with Lucy—Jack had briefly comforted Lucia Delvecchio, who was in the throes of a nasty divorce. Lucia’s divorce was obdurately ongoing—one of those drawn-out battles involving children and credit cards and summer homes and motor vehicles and dogs—and because her irate husband viewed Jack as the root cause of their marital difficulties, Jack’s presence in Lucia’s un married life was of little comfort to her and not long-lasting.