John Irving - Until I Find You

He was romantically linked with three of his co-stars—in three out of his last five films—but these rumors were false in two out of three cases. The one co-star Jack did sleep with, Margaret Becker, was a single mom in her forties. She had a twelve-year-old son named Julian and a house on the ocean in Malibu. Both Margaret and Julian were very sweet, but fragile. The boy had no relationship with his father, and he’d had unrealistic expectations of every boyfriend his mother had had—they’d all left her.

As a result, Julian’s expectations of Jack were aimed a little lower. The boy kept anxiously looking for signs that Jack was preparing to leave him and his mom. Jack liked the boy—he loved having a kid in his life—but Julian was very needy. Margaret, Julian’s mom, was a full-fledged clinger.

Whenever Jack had to go away, she stuffed his suitcase with photographs of herself; in the photos, which were pointedly taken for the occasion of Jack’s trip, Margaret looked stricken with the fear that he would never come back to her. And Jack would often wake up at night and find Margaret staring at him; it was as if she were attempting to penetrate his consciousness, in his sleep, and brainwash him into never leaving.

Julian’s sorrowful eyes followed Jack as if the boy were a dog Jack had neglected to feed. And Margaret said to Jack, at least once a day: “I know you’re going to leave me, Jack. Just try not to walk away when I’m feeling too vulnerable to handle it, or when it would be especially harmful to poor Julian.”

Jack was with her six months; it felt like six years, and leaving Julian hurt Jack more than leaving Margaret. The boy watched him go as if Jack were his absconding father.

“We take terrible risks with the natural affection of children,” Jack would one day say to Dr. García, but she complained that he had told her about these relationships in a sketchy fashion. Or was it that he’d had nothing but sketchy relationships?

Months later, although the dominant sound in Jack’s house on Entrada Drive was the traffic on the Pacific Coast Highway, he would lie in bed hearing the ocean—the way he had listened to it in Margaret’s house in Malibu, while waiting for Julian to come into the bedroom and wake him and Margaret. Jack sincerely missed them, but they had driven him away—almost from the first moment Jack entered their lives. It was Dr. García’s assessment that they were “even needier” than Jack was.

“I’m not needy !” Jack replied indignantly.

“Hmm,” Dr. García said. “Have you considered, Jack, that what you crave most of all is a real relationship and a normal life, but you don’t know anyone who’s normal or real?”

“Yes, I have considered that,” he answered.

“I’ve been seeing you for five years, yet I can’t recall hearing you express a political opinion—not one,” Dr. García said. “What are your politics, Jack?”

“Generally more liberal than conservative,” he said.

“You’re a Democrat?”

“I don’t vote,” Jack admitted. “I’ve never voted.”

“Well, there’s a statement!” Dr. García said.

“Maybe it’s because I started my life as a Canadian, and then I became an American—but I’m really not either,” he said.

“Hmm.”

“I just like my work,” Jack told her.

“You take no vacations?” she asked. “The last vacation I remember hearing about was a school vacation.”

“When an actor isn’t making a movie, he’s on vacation,” Jack said.

“But that’s not exactly true, is it?” Dr. García asked. “You’re always reading scripts, aren’t you? You must spend a lot of time considering new roles, even if you eventually turn them down. And you’ve been reading a lot of novels lately. Since you’ve been credited with writing a screenplay, aren’t you at least thinking about another adaptation? Or an original screenplay, perhaps?”

Jack didn’t say anything; it seemed to him that he was always working, even when he wasn’t.

“You go to the gym, you watch what you eat, you don’t drink,” Dr. García was saying. “But what do you do when you’re just relaxing ? Or are you never relaxed?”

“I have sex,” he said.

“The kind of sex you have is not relaxing,” Dr. García told him.

“I hang out with my friends,” Jack said.

“ What friends? Emma’s dead, Jack.”

“I have other friends!” he protested.

“You have no friends,” Dr. García said. “You have professional acquaintances; you’re on friendly terms with some of them. But who are your friends ?”

Jack pathetically mentioned Herman Castro—the Exeter heavyweight, now a doctor in El Paso. Herman always wrote, “Hey, amigo,” on his Christmas cards.

“The word amigo doesn’t make him your friend,” Dr. García pointed out. “Do you remember his wife’s name, or the names of his children? Have you ever visited him in El Paso?”

“You’re depressing me,” Jack told her.

“I ask my patients to tell me about their life’s most emotional moments—the ups and downs, Jack,” Dr. García said. “In your case, this means what has made you laugh, what has made you cry, and what has made you feel angry.”

“I’m doing it, aren’t I?” he asked her.

“But the purpose for doing this, Jack, is that when you tell me your life story, you reveal yourself—at least that’s what usually happens, that’s what’s supposed to happen,” Dr. García said. “I regret that, in your case, you’ve been a very faithful storyteller—and a very thorough one, I believe—yet I don’t feel that I know you. I know what’s happened to you. Do I ever know it—ad nauseam! But you haven’t revealed yourself, Jack. I still don’t know who you are. Please tell me who you are.”

“According to my mother,” Jack began in a small voice, which both he and Dr. García recognized as Jack’s voice as a child, “I was an actor before I was an actor, but my most vivid memories of childhood are those moments when I felt compelled to hold my mother’s hand. I wasn’t acting then.”

“Then I guess you better find a way to forgive her,” Dr. García told him gently. “You might learn a lesson from your father. I’m just guessing, but when he forgave your mom, maybe it enabled him to move on with his life. You’re thirty-eight, Jack—you’re rich, you’re famous, but you don’t have a life.”

“My dad shouldn’t have moved on with his life without me!” Jack cried. “He shouldn’t have left me!”

“You better find a way to forgive him, too, Jack.” Dr. García sighed. (Jack hated it when she sighed.) “Now you’re crying again,” she observed. “It doesn’t do you any good to cry. You have to stop crying.”

What a bitch Dr. García could be! That’s why Jack didn’t tell her when he heard from Michele Maher. He went to the national convention of dermatologists without letting Dr. García know that he was going, because he knew that she would do everything in her power to persuade him not to go; because Jack was afraid of what the doctor would say; because he knew she was always right.

As for Michele—as if there’d been no hard feelings between them, as if the twenty years they’d not been in each other’s company were shorter than those fleeting summer vacations when they’d been at Exeter—Michele Maher wrote Jack that she was coming to Los Angeles, where she very much looked forward to seeing him.

She didn’t attend the dermatology convention every year, she wanted him to know—usually only when it was in the Northeast. But she’d never been to L.A. (“ Can you imagine? ” she wrote.) And because the convention this year provided Michele with an opportunity to see Jack—well, she made it sound as if he were the reason she’d decided to blow a long weekend in a glitzy Hollywood hotel with a bunch of skin doctors.