John Irving - Until I Find You

Another woman dermatologist came to Jack’s assistance; she was a homely, caustic person, but at least she hadn’t been drinking. Together they got Michele to her room. The other doctor’s name was Sandra; she was from somewhere in Michigan. Sandra must have assumed that Jack was sleeping with Michele, because she proceeded to undress Michele in front of him.

“Run a bath for her,” Sandra said. “We can’t let her pass out like this. If she vomits, she might choke. People who are dead-drunk often aspirate their vomit. It’s better to wake her up, and let her be sick when she’s awake.”

Jack did what the doctor said. Then he carried Michele to the bath and, with Sandra’s assistance, slid her into it. Naked, she was much too thin—emaciated. Like a woman who’d been recently pregnant, Michele had stretch marks on her small breasts; the skin there looked wrinkled. (It was the weight loss; she hadn’t been pregnant.)

“Christ, how much weight has she lost?” Sandra asked Jack, as if he were the one who’d put Michele up to it.

“I don’t know what she weighed before,” Jack said. “I haven’t seen Michele in twenty years.”

“Well, this is a wonderful way to see her,” Sandra said.

Michele had told him more about the stress-related eczema; it occurred on her elbows and knees. When it was bad, the eczema was the color and nubbly texture of a rooster’s wattle. Jack kept staring at Michele’s elbows and knees while she lolled in the bath; he half expected her mysterious skin ailment to suddenly appear.

“What are you looking at?” Sandra asked him. (Michele, even in the bathwater, was still out cold; Jack held her under her armpits so her head wouldn’t slip underwater.)

He explained about the stress-related eczema, but Sandra assured him that it wasn’t about to blossom before his eyes. “It’s not like time-lapse photography,” she said. Sandra looked at his hands. “Nice ring, ” she commented. (Michele’s mother’s ring was still on Jack’s left pinkie.)

When Michele started coming around, she was unaware that Sandra was with them. “I’ll leave you two lovebirds alone. Just don’t let her throw up in her sleep,” Sandra said. “You seem to enjoy staring at her, anyway.”

“Did we do it yet?” Michele asked him. He heard Sandra letting herself out of the hotel room, the door closing on her harsh laugh.

“No,” Jack said. “We didn’t do it.”

“When are we going to do it, Jack? Or do you think you have the clap again?”

“I didn’t have it the first time. I just thought I might have it,” he explained to her.

“But you can’t even remember who you’ve slept with,” Michele reminded him. “And it’s not as if you drink or anything. You must sleep with an awful lot of women, Jack.”

“Not really,” Jack said.

He felt nothing for her but the kind of pity and contempt you feel for people who aren’t in control of themselves. (As a nondrinker, Jack would have admitted to feeling superior to people who drank too much—whatever the circumstances.) And the pity he felt for Michele was all caught up in those expectations she’d had—for their big night out on the town together; for her parents’ New York apartment, which the gold digger had stolen from her; even for her dead mother’s ring, which didn’t fit any of her fingers. (Jack took the ring off his left pinkie and put it in the soap dish above the bathroom sink.)

He helped Michele dry herself off; she was a little shaky. She wanted to be alone in the bathroom for a moment.

The hotel maid had already turned down the bed and closed the curtains, but Jack opened the curtains to get a look at the view of the Hollywood Hills. The room had floor-to-ceiling windows; it was a spectacular view, but not even the Hollywood Hills could divert him from the sound of Michele retching in the toilet. Jack went and stood next to the bathroom door, to be sure she wasn’t choking. Later, when he heard the toilet flush and the water in the sink running, Jack went back and stood at the giant windows.

It was 2003. He’d been in Los Angeles for sixteen years. He was trying to remember sleeping with that model at Jones—the one who’d said that his penis was small—but he couldn’t remember anything about her. When he closed the curtains, Jack was thinking that he’d seen enough of the Hollywood Hills.

When Michele came out of the bathroom, she was wearing one of the hotel’s terry-cloth robes; she seemed shy, and relatively sober, and she smelled like a whole tube of toothpaste. Jack was sorry that she wanted to sleep with him—he’d been hoping that she wouldn’t want to. But he couldn’t turn her down a second time, not when he knew she was still thinking about the first time he’d rejected her.

It was only later that it occurred to Jack that Michele probably felt as resigned to the act as he did. And there was nothing remarkable about their sexual performance, nothing that would override the longer-lasting impression—namely, that they hadn’t really wanted to sleep with each other. (They had simply expected it would happen.)

“Just what is so terribly universal about this place, anyway?” Michele asked him, after they’d had sex and Jack was touching her breasts. She was lying on her back with her long arms held straight against her sides, like a soldier.

Jack guessed that she meant the name of the hotel, the Sheraton Universal—or where the hotel was located, which was Universal City—but before he could say something, Michele said: “I can tell you one thing that’s universal about tonight, and that is it’s a universal disappointment—like loneliness, or illness, or death. Or like knowing you’ll never have children. It’s just one big universal letdown, isn’t it?”

“Actually, it’s the name of a studio, ” Jack said. “Universal Studios.”

“Your penis isn’t too small, Jack,” Michele Maher said. “That model was simply being cruel.”

“Maybe she had a nose job since I last saw her,” he speculated. “I mean, she’s a model—she could have had her chin done, or her eyes done. I’ll bet she had some kind of face-lift. There’s got to be a reason why I don’t remember her.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Michele said. “What about us ? In a few years, this isn’t going to be memorable, is it?”

So much for that expectation, as he would one day tell Dr. García. It would come as no surprise to Dr. García, but one can appreciate what a blow it was to Jack to discover how quickly Michele Maher could become forgettable.

Bad things happened after that. Jack’s psychiatrist tried to shed a positive light on his failure to connect with Michele Maher. Maybe this would disabuse Jack of what Dr. García called his “if-only romanticism about the past”—meaning if only it had worked out with Michele Maher the first time, he might have been spared the ensuing years of incomplete relationships.

“You always attached too much importance to your botched opportunity with Michele, Jack,” Dr. García said. “You never attached enough importance to what worked with Claudia. At least that relationship lasted.”

“Only four years,” Jack reminded her.

“Who else lasted an eighth as long, Jack? And don’t say Emma! The penis-holding doesn’t count as complete, does it?”

But Jack resisted his psychiatrist’s efforts to shed a positive light on anything. He was down. He embraced the movie-magazine version of himself, his bad-boy image. Jack didn’t care how many models he wouldn’t remember a month later. He had ceased caring about what kind of “nookie house” he lived in, too. (His “Entrada Drive state of mind,” Dr. García called it.)