John Irving - Until I Find You

“Leave the newborn to me,” Jack-as-Harry tells the trainer.

Harry then proceeds to demonstrate every weight machine and exercise in slapstick; he drops things, he stages spectacular falls.

“See? This is easy !” he tells the newborn, imitating the hearty bullshit of the personal trainer. Jack-as-Harry hurls himself out of his wheelchair as awkwardly as possible, demonstrating to the recently crippled young woman that nothing is going to be easy for her.

When they fall in love, the voice-over is Harry’s; he’s reciting A. E. Housman. (In a gym, of all places.)

Oh, when I was in love with you,

Then I was clean and brave,

And miles around the wonder grew

How well did I behave.

Shame on Jack Burns—that month in New York, he was not as well behaved as Harry Mocco. He met a transvestite dancer at a downtown club. Jack was distracted by her strong-looking hands and her prominent Adam’s apple. He knew she was a man. Still, he went along with the seduction-in-progress—up to a point. Jack let her wheel him through the lobby of the Trump, and into the hotel’s bar. She sat in his lap in the wheelchair and they sang a Beatles song together, the bar crowd joining in.

When I get older losing my hair,

Many years from now.

Will you still be sending me a Valentine,

Birthday greetings bottle of wine?

Jack tried to say good night to the transvestite dancer at the elevator, but she insisted on coming to his room with him. All the way up on the elevator, they kept singing. (She sat in his lap in the elevator, too.)

If I’d been out till quarter to three

Would you lock the door,

Will you still need me, will you still feed me,

When I’m sixty-four?

The transvestite wheeled him down the hall to his hotel room. At the door, Jack tried again to say good night to her.

“Don’t be silly, Jack,” she said, wheeling him inside the room.

“I’m not going to have sex with you,” Jack told her.

“Yes, you are,” the pretty dancer said.

Jack soon had a fight on his hands. When a transvestite wants to have sex, she feels as strongly about it as a guy—because she is a guy! Jack had a battle on his hands. The room got trashed a little—one lamp, especially. Yes, Jack was aroused—but even he knew the difference between wanting to have sex and actually having it. Not even he would submit to every desire.

“Look, it’s obvious you want me,” the dancer said. “Stop fighting it.” She’d taken off all her clothes and had managed to destroy most of Jack’s. “You have a hard-on, ” she kept pointing out, as if Jack didn’t know.

“I get a hard-on in my sleep,” he told her.

“ Look at me!” she screamed. “ I have a hard-on!”

“I can see that you do,” Jack said. “ And you have breasts.” (They were as hard as apples; Jack knew, because he was trying to push them out of his face.)

This time, he saw the left hook coming—and the right uppercut, and the head-butt, too. She may have been a dancer, but she was not without some other training; this wasn’t her first fight.

Naturally, the phone was ringing—the front-desk clerk, Jack assumed. There had probably been calls to the front desk from those rooms adjacent to Jack’s, within hearing distance of the destroyed lamp and all the rest. Well, wouldn’t Donald Trump love this! Jack was thinking. (The Trump’s fabulous view of Central Park—for the time being, utterly ignored.)

He heard the security guys picking at the lock on his hotel-room door, but Jack had a Russian front headlock on the dancer and he wasn’t letting go—not even to open the door. Her fingernails were like claws, and he had to give up the front headlock when she bit him in the forearm.

“You fight like a girl,” Jack told her.

He knew that would really piss her off. When she came at him, Jack hit a pretty good duck-under and got behind her. He held her chest-down on the rug with a double-armbar, where she couldn’t bite him. The security guys finally got the door open; there were two of them, plus the night manager.

“We’re here to help you, Mr. Burns—I mean Mr. Mocco, ” the night manager said.

“I have a distraught dancer on my hands,” Jack told them.

“He had a hard-on. I saw it,” the transvestite said.

One of the security guys had thought that Jack really was a cripple. He’d never seen Jack out of the wheelchair—not even in the movies. (He wasn’t a moviegoer, clearly.) From the other security guy’s reaction when the three of them were forcibly dressing the dancer, chicks with dicks were new to him.

Jack never went to bed; he stayed up, rehearsing how he would tell this part of the story of his life to Dr. García. He knew this episode wouldn’t wait for chronological order. Jack kept a cold washcloth on his forearm, where the transvestite dancer had bitten him. She hadn’t broken the skin, but the bite marks were sore and ugly-looking.

In the late morning, when Jack talked to Dr. García from the set of The Love Poet, he told her that the unfortunate incident was out of character for Harry Mocco but sadly typical of Jack Burns. (Jack thought he might preempt her criticism by criticizing himself.)

“You acquiesce too much, Jack,” Dr. García said. “You should never have let the transvestite into the elevator—you should have had the fight in the lobby, where it would have been a shorter fight. For that matter, you should never have let her sit in your lap in the bar.”

“It wouldn’t have been a good idea to have had that fight in the bar,” he assured Dr. García.

“But why did you leave the nightclub with her in the first place?” Dr. García asked him.

“She turned me on. I was aroused,” he admitted.

“I’m sure you were, Jack. That’s what transvestites do, isn’t it? They go to great lengths to turn men on. But what does that lead to, Jack? Every time, where does that go?”

He couldn’t think of what to say.

“You keep getting in trouble,” Dr. García was saying. “It’s always just a little trouble, but you know what that leads to—don’t you, Jack? Don’t you know where that goes?”

It was July 2003 when they had the wrap party for The Love Poet in New York, and Jack flew back to L.A. He’d succumbed to Harry Mocco’s habit of reciting fragments of love poems to total strangers, but in the case of the attractive stewardess on his flight from New York to Los Angeles, this wasn’t entirely Jack’s fault. She’d asked him to tell her about his next movie, and Jack began by explaining to her that Harry Mocco compulsively memorizes love poems and recites them at the drop of a hat.

“For example, do you know the poem ‘Talking in Bed’ by Philip Larkin?” he asked her. (She was probably Jack’s age.)

“Do I want to know it?” she asked him warily. “I’m married. ”

But he kept trying. (Jack hadn’t slept with a stewardess in years.) “Or ‘In Bertram’s Garden’ by Donald Justice,” he went on, as if the flight attendant were encouraging him. “ ‘Jane looks down at her organdy skirt / As if it somehow were the thing disgraced—’ ”

“Whoa!” the stewardess said, cutting him off. “I don’t want to hear about it.”

That’s what happens when you ask an actor to tell you about his next movie.

When Jack walked into his place on Entrada Drive, he immediately called a real estate agent and asked to have the house put on the market. ( Sell the fucker! Jack was thinking; maybe that would force me to live a little differently. )