John Irving - Until I Find You

More surprising still, and also occupying front-row seats, Alice had come with Mrs. Oastler and Emma. (Lottie, Jack knew, was maintaining her vigil at Mrs. Wicksteed’s deathbed—otherwise Lottie would have been at the theater, too.) And most surprising of all, Peewee was there! He must have overheard Emma and Jack talking about the play in the backseat of the Town Car. A strikingly beautiful black woman was with him. Peewee had a wife or girlfriend! Whoever she was, Peewee’s date seemed stunningly overdressed among the divorced moms and dads who were the usual audience for a senior-school play at St. Hilda’s. Mrs. Peewee wore a flowery dress with a plunging neckline; from Jack’s backstage perspective, her hat resembled a stuffed parrot.

It was a most impressive audience, especially by the junior-school standards Jack was familiar with from Miss Wurtz’s dramatizations. But some of the cast suffered from stage fright. Penny-Hamilton-as-Madame-Auber, whose French accent was such a hit with Torontonians, had a fit getting into her evil-chaperone costume. (In retrospect, Jack would like to think that Penny was distracted from the task of dressing herself by her memory of his jism nailing her in the forehead.)

Sandra Stewart, a grade-nine girl who was small for her age, played Sarah, the bilingual stutterer—who ended up freezing to death after losing her virginity on a dog sled. Sandra threw up backstage, which prompted Mr. Ramsey to say: “It’s just butterflies.”

Ginny-Jarvis-as-Mr.-Halliday, sweating in her fur-trapper costume, said: “That looks like worse than butterflies.” (Naturally, Jack thought that Mr. Ramsey and Ginny were referring to the contents of Sandra’s vomit.)

For the first two acts of the play, Jack kept stealing looks at Bonnie Hamilton, whose eyes not once met his. Jack caught only a few backstage glimpses of the audience. Peewee seemed to be enjoying himself. Mrs. Peewee had removed the stuffed parrot from her head. The Wurtz spent much of the evening scowling and muttering to Mrs. McQuat. The Gray Ghost was in character, unreadable most of the time. Mrs. Oastler looked bored—she had no doubt seen better theater in her sophisticated life. Emma fidgeted in her seat; she’d been to most of the rehearsals and was interested only in what would happen with the blood.

When Jack-as-Darlin’-Jenny shot Ginny-as-Halliday twice with the starting gun, Peewee jumped to his feet and pumped both fists in the air. (Miss Wurtz, knowing the shots were coming, had covered her ears.) Alice, who hadn’t read the play and had only the dimmest idea of its heavy-handed subject, looked growingly appalled. When the gun went off, she flinched as if she’d been shot.

The curtain fell at the end of Act Two; the houselights came up and revealed more of the audience. But from backstage, Jack’s attention lingered on the first row. Peewee was still excited about the shooting. Emma was chewing gum. Miss Wurtz appeared to be delivering a lengthy critique of the play, and no doubt the entire subject of menstruation, to a taciturn Mrs. McQuat. Alice and Mrs. Oastler were holding hands.

Why were they holding hands? Jack wondered. He knew that this was fairly common among Dutch women and other Europeans, but he’d not seen any Canadian women holding hands—some of the girls at St. Hilda’s excluded. Young women or girls occasionally held hands, but not women the age of Alice and Leslie Oastler. Furthermore, Emma’s mom had kicked off her shoes. With one bare foot, smaller than Emma’s, she was stroking Alice’s bare calf. Jack looked uncomprehendingly upon this curious behavior. He had not yet made the leap, which Emma would make before him, regarding why his mother and Mrs. Oastler wanted to live alone in such a big house; that Emma and Jack were a “bad combination” was only part of the reason.

Mr. Ramsey interrupted Jack’s scrutiny of the audience from backstage—it was time for him to tie the blood bag around the boy’s waist, and for Jack to put his trial dress on. Maybe Jack was supposed to resemble Joan of Arc, although (despite getting his first period onstage) he would fare better than poor Joan. The dress was a sackcloth sheath, as beige as a potato. The blood, Mr. Ramsey assured him, would be most vivid against such a neutral background. The clamminess of the plastic bag, which flopped against Jack’s bare abdomen, was at first disconcerting under the dress. While it wasn’t a very big bag, Mr. Ramsey worried that it might make Jack-as-Jenny look pregnant. Mr. Ramsey loosened the knot at the top of the bag to release any excess air. This may have precipitated the slow leak, which Jack didn’t notice until he sat down in the witness box to give his testimony. He thought he was sweating. But the trickle down one leg was blood, or water with red food coloring—not sweat. Given Jack’s near-death ejaculation, he first feared that his penis was bleeding. When he realized that the bag of colored water was leaking, he wondered if there would be sufficient blood left in the bag for the all-important bursting scene.

After the performance, Mr. Ramsey would praise what he called Jack’s “preparation” for the standing, screaming, bleeding extravaganza—the way the boy squirmed in the witness chair as if, unbeknownst to him, his first period was already starting. But it was !

Jenny faltered in her testimony, a hesitation Mr. Ramsey later termed “brilliant”—but one that caused the faithful prompter, Bonnie Hamilton, to look up from her lap and regard Jack-as-Jenny with the utmost concern. (Jack could read his as-yet-unspoken lines on her lips.) He could see that the audience was growing anxious; he hoped that no one in the audience could see the trickle of blood. But Peewee saw it. The poor man was not a regular theatergoer; he’d come out of fondness for Jack. Peewee knew nothing of props—the gun had taken him totally by surprise. And now he saw that Jack was bleeding— the strain of the moment, or something hemorrhoidal, or a stab wound inflicted by one of the older girls backstage? Jack was only a couple of lines away from his big moment when Peewee rose from his seat and pointed at the boy. “Jack, you are bleeding, mon!” he cried.

It was everything The Wurtz feared—it was improv. Jack spontaneously decided to edit his remaining testimony, which made Bonnie Hamilton gasp. But he was already bleeding. Wasn’t the blood, and his reaction to it, his best witness? Jack jumped to his feet and struck the leaking bag of colored water with both fists. The bag had lost more blood than he’d realized; it was not full enough to burst easily. Darlin’ Jenny struck herself in the lower abdomen again and again. The last time, she hit herself a little too hard; Jack-as-Jenny doubled over at the force of the blow. The bag burst with the sound of a tendon snapping, the blood exploding under the potato-colored dress.

“Jack, you are making it worse, mon!” Peewee cried.

But Jack was at that moment in his performance when his audience of one took over completely. He screamed and screamed. He raised his bound wrists above his head, his hands dripping blood; the blood dripped on his face. What was meant to represent a first and long-withheld period suddenly looked like a terminal hemorrhage. Someone on the jury (one of the two women) was supposed to say that this clearly had to be Jenny’s first experience with menstruation, but Jack-as-Jenny didn’t hear the line. The audience couldn’t have heard it, either. Even Bonnie, the prompter, had stopped prompting. Jack was wailing like a banshee.

He was being sent away, to Maine ! He had managed to ejaculate not only because he was drawn to Bonnie Hamilton’s pain, but also because of his enduring infatuation with Emma Oastler’s mustache—and holding his breath while kissing Emma had almost killed him! Mrs. Wicksteed lay dying. Lottie was taking the boat back to Prince Edward Island. Jack’s world was changing, once again. He couldn’t stop screaming. Jack-as-Jenny bled enough for a young woman having her first five periods!