John Irving - Until I Find You

Jack was in that state of mind in May 2003 when he went to New York to make a movie. He had accepted the Harry Mocco role in The Love Poet— a film by Gillian Scott, the Australian director. Gillian had also written the screenplay.

Harry Mocco is a crippled male model—“ half a model,” Harry calls himself. His legs were crushed in a New York elevator accident. He has always wanted to be an actor; he has a great voice. But there aren’t a lot of roles for a guy in a wheelchair.

Even as a model, Harry’s career is marginal. He is often seen sitting up in bed in the morning—just his top half, naked. (The rest of him is under the sheets.) These are advertisements for women’s clothes; the female model, usually in the foreground of the photograph, is already dressed or half dressed. Her clothes are what’s being sold; the top half of Harry, in the background, is depicted as one of her accessories.

Or, if he’s the one modeling the clothes, you see Jack-as-Harry sitting at a desk or in the driver’s seat of an expensive car. He does a lot of ads for wristwatches, usually in a tuxedo—but the naked, half-a-male accessory in those advertisements for women’s clothing are his specialty.

Harry Mocco doesn’t really need the money. He made a fortune suing the building with the elevator that crushed his legs; in and around New York, where the film is set, Jack-as-Harry is quite a famous and photogenic cripple. The modeling is more for what little remains of his dignity than it is a financial necessity. He actually lives pretty well—in one of those New York buildings with a doorman. Naturally, Harry’s gym is wheelchair-accessible. He lifts weights half the day and plays wheelchair basketball—even wheelchair tennis.

Jack-as-Harry also memorizes and recites love poems, or parts of love poems—not always a welcome activity, especially since he’s not with anyone. He’s always urging his friends—gym friends, male-model friends—to woo their girlfriends with love poetry. No one seems interested. Harry knows a lot of supermodels—some of the hottest female models in New York. But they’re just friends; the supermodels are unmoved by the love poetry.

Jack-as-Harry has sex only once in the first hour and fifteen minutes of the film; to no one’s surprise, it’s a disaster. His partner is a young woman who frequently dresses him for the photo shoots—she’s very plain and nervous, an unglamorous girl with a pierced lower lip. The love poetry works on her, but his being crippled doesn’t. Jack had to give Gillian Scott credit for capturing a sex scene of award-winning awkwardness.

The voice-over, which is Harry Mocco’s, is all love poetry. Everything from the grimmest of the grim, Thomas Hardy, to Philip Larkin; everything from George Wither to Robert Graves. (There was too much Graves, in Jack’s opinion.)

Harry Mocco usually doesn’t get to recite more than a couplet, rarely a complete stanza. Nobody he knows wants to hear a whole poem.

“I’m not sure about the suitability of this role for you,” Dr. García had forewarned Jack. “A crippled male model who hasn’t found his audience. Isn’t that coming a little close to home?” Nor, in Dr. García’s opinion, was the length of his separation from her advisable. “I don’t do house calls as far away as New York, Jack—although I could stand to do a little shopping.”

Why don’t your children, if that’s who they are, grow older? he’d wanted to ask her. The photographs in Dr. García’s office were an irreplaceable, seemingly permanent collection. The older husband—or her father, if that’s who he was—was fixed in time. All of them seemed fixed in time, like bugs preserved in amber. But Jack didn’t ask her about it.

He just went to New York and made the movie. “Work is work, Dr. García,” he’d said defensively. “A part is just a part. I’m not Harry Mocco, nor am I in danger of becoming him. I’m not anybody.”

“That’s part of your problem, Jack,” she had reminded him.

The whole movie had a fifty-two-day shooting schedule. For the Harry Mocco part, including rehearsals, Jack had to be in New York a couple of months.

He was in the habit of seeing Dr. García twice a week—two months without seeing her would necessitate a certain number of phone calls. He couldn’t tell her his life story over the phone; in an emergency, he could talk to her, but the chronological-order part would have to wait.

In Dr. García’s view, the chronological-order part was what determined how Jack was doing. It was one thing to babble out loud about an emotionally or psychologically disturbing moment; it was quite another obstacle to organize the story and tell it (exactly as it had happened) to an actual person. In this respect, the chronological-order part was like acting; in Dr. García’s view, if Jack couldn’t tell the story in an orderly fashion, that meant that he couldn’t handle it psychologically and emotionally.

Jack Burns put everything he had into Harry Mocco. He remembered how Mrs. Malcolm had tyrannized the classroom, her head-on crashing into desks—her racing up and down the aisles in the St. Hilda’s chapel, skinning her knuckles on the pews. He remembered how Bonnie Hamilton could climb into her wheelchair, or extricate herself from it, the second his head was turned. He never saw her slip or fall, but he noticed the bruises—the evidence that she wasn’t perfect.

Jack not only did wheelchair tricks on the set of The Love Poet; he insisted on using the wheelchair when he was off the set, too. He pretended he was crippled. Jack wheeled around the hotel like a psycho invalid; he made them load him into limos, and unload him. He practiced falling, too. He did a fantastic, head-over-heels wheelie in the lobby of the Trump International on Central Park West—the startled bellman and concierge running to assist him.

They had a great gym at the Trump. Jack went there in his wheelchair; he would get on the treadmill and run for half an hour with the wheelchair parked alongside, as if it were for another person.

When Harry Mocco has wheelchair accidents in The Love Poet, the voice-over is heavy on Robert Graves. (A little of Graves goes a long way. “Love is a universal migraine,” for example.)

Or:

Why have such scores of lovely, gifted girls

Married impossible men?

Simple self-sacrifice may be ruled out,

And missionary endeavour, nine times out of ten.

When Jack-as-Harry is crawling on all fours from the bed to the bathroom, the girl who’s just slept with him is watching him—repulsed. The voice-over is Harry’s, reciting e. e. cummings.

i like my body when it is with your

body.

Jack-as-Harry tries to win over the pierced-lip girl with a love poem by Ted Hughes, but a little of Hughes goes a long way, too. The girl is out the door before he can finish the first stanza.

We sit late, watching the dark slowly unfold:

No clock counts this.

Harry’s more self-pitying moments—repeatedly banging his head on a bathtub drain, unable to climb out of the slippery tub—are pure pathos. (The voice-over to the bathtub scene is Harry’s recitation of George Wither.)

Shall I, wasting in despair,

Die because a woman’s fair?

The Love Poet is a noir love story—more noir than love story for three quarters of the film, more love story than noir at the end. Jack-as-Harry meets a recently crippled young woman in his gym. She is wheelchair-bound, too. Harry can tell it’s her first public outing in her new but permanent condition; she’s tentative. She’s being introduced to various weight machines and exercises by a blowhard personal trainer whom Harry despises. The girl is what wheelchair veterans like Harry call a “newborn.”