John Irving - Until I Find You

The dermatologists had chosen one of those annoying Universal City hotels. Rising out of a landscape of soundstages that resembled bomb shelters, the Sheraton Universal overlooked the Hollywood Hills and was across the street from Universal Studios—the theme park. The hotel had the feeling of a resort, the look of a place where conventioneers not infrequently brought their families.

While the dermatologists talked about skin, their children could go on the rides at the theme park. In the southern California climate, Jack imagined that the children of dermatologists would be sticky with sunscreen and wrapped up to their eyes; in fact, he was surprised that dermatologists would hold a convention in such a sunny place.

Michele Maher’s letter was positively perky; she wrote to Jack with the flippancy of a prep-school girl, her former self. Her letter caused him to remember her old Richard III joke. “Where’s your hump, Dick?” she had asked him.

“It’s in the costume closet, and it’s just a football,” Jack had answered, for maybe the hundredth time.

But she’d been a good sport when he’d beaten her out for the part of Lady Macbeth, and of course Jack also remembered that Michele was over five-ten—a slim honey-blonde with a model’s glowing skin, and (in Ed McCarthy’s vulgar estimation) “a couple of high, hard ones.”

“Why don’t you have a girlfriend, Jack?” Michele had asked him—when they were seventeen. She was just kidding around, or so he’d thought.

But he had to go and give her a line—Jack was just acting. “Because I get the feeling you’re not available,” he’d said.

“I had no idea you were interested in me, Jack. I didn’t think you were interested in anyone, ” she’d told him.

“How can anyone not be interested in you, Michele?” he’d asked her, thus setting in motion a disaster.

What had drawn them together in the first place was acting. The one honest thing Jack had done was not sleep with her—only because he thought he’d caught the clap from Mrs. Stackpole, the dishwasher, and he didn’t want Michele to catch it. But this was hardly honest, as Dr. García had already pointed out to him. Jack didn’t tell Michele why he wouldn’t sleep with her, did he?

Of course he’d thought at the time that almost no one would have believed he was banging Mrs. Stackpole—especially not Michele, who was so beautiful, while Mrs. Stackpole was so unfortunate-looking. (Even in the world of much older women.)

Why, then, didn’t the flirtatious chirpiness of Michele’s letter warn Jack away from her? How desperate was he to connect with someone, to have a so-called real or normal relationship outside the world of acting, that he failed to see the crystal-clear indications? Michele and Jack had never had a real relationship; they hadn’t even almost had a relationship. If he had slept with her—and not given her the clap, which Jack hadn’t caught from Mrs. Stackpole—how soon after that would they have broken up? When Michele went off to Columbia, in New York City, and Jack went off to the University of New Hampshire? Probably. When he met Claudia? Definitely!

In short, Michele Maher had always been Jack’s illusion. The concept of the two of them together had been more the fantasy of other students at Exeter than it had ever been a reality between them. They were the most beautiful girl and the most handsome boy in the school; maybe that’s all they ever were.

“ I have meetings all day, and there are lectures every night, ” Michele wrote to him about the dermatologists’ convention at the Sheraton Universal. “But I can skip a lecture or two. Just tell me which night, or nights, you’re free. I’m dying to see where you hang out. What I mean, Jack, is that you must own that town!”

But Hollywood wasn’t that kind of town. It was a perpetual, glittering, ongoing award; for the most part, Hollywood kept escaping you. There was one night when you owned the town—the night you won the Oscar. But then there came the night (and the next night) after that. How quickly it happened that Hollywood was not your town anymore, and it wouldn’t be—not unless or until you won another Academy Award, and then another one.

The studios once owned Hollywood, but they didn’t own it anymore. There were agents who behaved as if they owned it; there were actors and actresses who thought they owned it, but they were wrong. The only people who truly owned Hollywood had more than one Oscar; they just kept winning Oscars, one after the other, and Jack Burns was not one of those people and never would be. But to Michele Maher, he was a movie star. She believed that was all that mattered.

According to Dr. García, Jack had come closest to having a real or normal relationship with Claudia—it was, at least, an actual relationship, before they went their separate ways. But Michele Maher was both more dangerous and more unforgettable to Jack, because she’d only ever existed as a possible relationship. “They’re the most damaging kind, aren’t they?” Dr. García had asked him. (Of course she also meant the relationship that Jack could only imagine having with his father.)

Thus warned, Jack drove out to Universal City to pick up Michele Maher —Dr. Maher, a thirty-eight-year-old unmarried dermatologist. What was he thinking? He already suspected that he might have a better time with an amnesiac transvestite prostitute. That was Jack’s state of mind when he walked into the lobby of the Sheraton Universal, which was overrun with hyperactive-looking children returning from their day of theme-park rides. Michele had said she would meet him in the bar, where he found her drinking margaritas with three or four of her fellow dermatologists. They were all sloshed, but Jack was heartened to see that Michele could manage to stand; at least she was the only one who stood to greet him.

She must have forgotten how short Jack was, because she was wearing very high heels; at five-ten, even barefoot she towered over him. “You see?” she said to the other doctors. “Aren’t movie stars always smaller than you expect them to be?” (The unkind thought occurred to Jack that, if Penis McCarthy had been there, he would have observed that Jack came up to her high, hard ones.)

He took Michele out to dinner at Jones—a trendy Hollywood hangout. It was not Jack’s favorite place—crowded, irritatingly thriving—but he figured that Michele would be disappointed if he didn’t provide her with an opportunity for a little sightseeing. (The food wasn’t all that interesting, but the clientele was hip—models, starlets, lots of fake boobs with the pizzas and pasta.)

Of course Jack saw Lawrence with one of the models; Jack and Lawrence automatically gave each other the finger. Michele was instantly impressed, if a little unsteady on her feet. “I haven’t eaten all day,” she confessed. “I should have skipped that second margarita.”

“Have some pasta,” Jack said. “That’ll help.” But she downed a glass of white wine while he was still squeezing the lemon into his iced tea.

He kept looking all around for Lawrence, who probably wanted to pay Jack back for the bottle of Taittinger Jack had poured on him in Cannes.

“My Gawd, ” Michele was saying—a conflation of the worst of Boston and New York in her accent. “This place is cool.”

Alas, she wasn’t. Her skin, which he’d remembered as glowing, was dry and a trifle raw-looking—as if she’d just emerged from a hot bath and had stood outside for too long on a New England winter day. Her honey-blond hair was dull and lank. She was too thin and sinewy, in the manner of women who work out to excess or diet too rigorously—or both. She hadn’t had all that much to drink, but her stomach was empty—Michele was one of those people who looked like her stomach was empty most of the time—and even a moderate amount of alcohol would have looped her.