John Irving - Until I Find You

“We’ll see about that,” Ginny replied.

“What’s happening?” Jack asked Emma.

“Nothing, baby cakes. Don’t you worry.”

“ Less than nothing,” Penny Hamilton said.

“He’s frightened. This isn’t right,” Bonnie Hamilton said. “He’s too young—he’s just a kid !” She leaned over Jack. When Bonnie looked at him, it was in the same way that she scrutinized the text in her capacity as prompter—as if his face were the only true map of the unfolding story and Bonnie Hamilton was the absolute authority on what he might be feeling.

Bonnie’s limp compelled Jack to look at her and imagine her accident. It was his first understanding that physical attraction, even sexual desire, was stimulated by more than the perfection of a body or the beauty of a face. He was drawn to Bonnie’s past, to everything traumatic that had happened to her before he met her. Her crippling accident drew Jack to her. This was worse than what Emma had correctly identified as his older-woman thing. He was attracted to how Bonnie had been damaged; that she’d been hurt made her more desirable. The thought was so troubling to Jack that he began to cry.

“I’ve had it with penises,” Ginny Jarvis was saying.

“Maybe it’s asleep or something,” Penny Hamilton suggested.

“Don’t let them frighten you, Jack,” Bonnie Hamilton said.

It surprised him that she was the one who looked stricken with fear, as if she were a prisoner in the passenger seat and saw the fast-approaching collision seconds before the driver could react to it. Bonnie pinched her lower lip with her teeth and stared at Jack as if she were transfixed—as if he were the upcoming accident and, even though she saw him coming, she couldn’t turn away. “What’s wrong?” he asked her. “What do you see ?” Bonnie’s eyes welled up with tears.

“Don’t cry on the kid, Bonnie —you’re the one who’s frightening him,” Penny Hamilton said.

“ Something’s working,” Ginny Jarvis observed. “Maybe it’s the crying.”

“Keep crying. See if I care,” Penny told her sister.

“If Jack is frightened, we should stop,” Emma said.

“I think Bonnie’s frightened,” Penny said with a laugh.

“If Bonnie is frightened, we should stop,” Jack said—not that he was aware of what they had started. Bonnie Hamilton looked terrified to him. He felt increasingly afraid of whatever was frightening her.

“This is a frightened little boy!” Bonnie Hamilton cried.

“I’m here, baby cakes,” Emma said. She leaned over Jack and kissed him on the mouth. He wouldn’t remember if she used her tongue; his fixation was with her upper lip. It must have been her mustache that made Jack hold his breath.

“Keep kissing him, Emma,” Ginny Jarvis said.

“Something’s definitely happening,” Penny Hamilton more closely observed.

It wasn’t that he couldn’t breathe; he’d simply stopped. He saw a multitude of streaming stars, the speckled glow of northern lights—the aurora borealis, that radiant emission beloved by all Canadians. “Better let him breathe, Emma,” he heard Bonnie Hamilton say.

“ Whoa! Look out!” Ginny Jarvis cried. His ejaculation caught Penny Hamilton as she was taking a closer look—too close, as it turned out. (And to think that no one had touched him!)

“You got her smack between the eyes, honey pie,” Emma told him later. “I’m so proud of you! I felt responsible that you were afraid. Never again are those girls getting anywhere near you, Jack. I’m taking better care of you from now on.”

At the time, Bonnie Hamilton’s eyes were locked onto Jack’s; she couldn’t stop staring at the boy. “What do you see?” she asked him. “Jack, what is it?”

“You’re the most beautiful of all the girls,” he told her, still gasping for breath.

“He’s delirious—he doesn’t know what he’s saying,” Emma said cruelly, but Bonnie didn’t seem to hear her; she just went on looking at Jack. Her sister, Penny, was furiously wiping her forehead with a wad of tissues. Naturally, Jack asked to see the blood.

“The what, baby cakes?”

“He must think he’s Darlin’ Jenny!” Ginny Jarvis said. “Boys are truly sick.”

Emma Oastler took him by the hand. They left the older girls’ residence—traipsing through the junior school the way they’d come. They went to the theater, where Jack dressed in his own clothes backstage. He wanted to practice bursting the blood bag, but Mr. Ramsey had gone home for the day.

Jack and Emma found Peewee sleeping in the Town Car. They went to the house on the corner of Lowther and Spadina, because Lottie was spending most of her time at the hospital, where she said Mrs. Wicksteed was “at death’s door,” and Alice was either at the Chinaman’s or with Mrs. Oastler. Jack was touched that Emma had stood up for him, and that she’d promised to keep the older girls away from him, but for how much longer? Wasn’t he being sent to Maine for his fifth-grade year? (Who would keep the older boys away?)

Also troubling was Emma’s discovery that she, upon entering grade eleven, would become a boarder. Why? Jack wondered. Emma lived at home. She could walk to school! “My mom doesn’t want me around,” was all Emma would say. She was even more sullen than usual at the prospect of being a boarder.

They were in Jack’s bedroom, where Emma was examining the little guy. “No signs of wear and tear,” she said. “I don’t suppose you remember what you were thinking.” Jack could barely remember not breathing, but he was wondering—after his near-death ejaculation—if Mrs. Wicksteed would see that radiant emission of northern lights when she passed away. He was also struggling to articulate to Emma exactly what had attracted him to Bonnie Hamilton—not just the limp but her overall aura of damage, of having been hurt. Jack couldn’t quite express it, nor could he convey to Emma how Bonnie had looked at him—how he’d recognized that she was smitten, although Bonnie herself might not have known it.

Jack even tried to talk about it with The Gray Ghost—without letting on to her that he’d had a near-death ejaculation in the older girls’ residence, of course. “This was one of the older girls?” Mrs. McQuat asked. “And she looked at you how ?”

“Like she couldn’t look away, like she couldn’t help herself,” he said.

“Tell me who this was, Jack.”

“Bonnie Hamilton.”

“She’s in grade twelve !”

“I told you she was older.”

“Jack, when an older girl looks at you like that, you just look away.”

“What if I can’t look away or help myself, either?”

“Mercy!” Mrs. McQuat exclaimed. Thinking she was changing the subject, she asked: “How’s it going with the mail-order-bride business?”

“The blood is the tricky part,” he said.

“There’s blood this year, actual blood?”

“It’s red food coloring with water—it’s just a prop.”

“A prop ! I think I like blood better when I have to imagine it. Maybe I should have a word with Mr. Ramsey.” But if The Gray Ghost ever had a word with Mr. Ramsey, nothing of their conversation was reflected in the premiere performance of A Mail-Order Bride in the Northwest Territories. On Saturday night, the St. Hilda’s theater was packed. To Jack’s surprise, not only was The Wurtz in attendance, but The Gray Ghost sat in the front row beside her. Maybe Mrs. McQuat believed that her encouraging presence would serve to mitigate Miss Wurtz’s scathing condemnation of the play.