John Irving - Until I Find You

The boy got out of bed in a checkered pair of boxers that hung to his knees. Fittingly, the checks were gray and maroon—the familiar St. Hilda’s colors. He followed the light to the far end of the guest-wing hall, and went downstairs to offer what comfort he could to Mrs. Machado. Jack could see her in the front hall, circling the grandfather clock as if the clock were her opponent. When she balanced on her left foot, he was impressed by the perfect, bent-knee position of her kicking leg; her elevated foot was held at a right angle to her ankle, like the flared head of a cobra.

Jack should have said something, or at least cleared his throat, but Mrs. Machado was concentrating so fiercely that he was afraid he might startle her if he spoke. She was also breathing too hard to hear the boy’s descending footsteps on the stairs—her breaths catching on short, choked-back sobs. Tears bathed her face, she was sweating, her black tank top had become untucked from her powder-blue gym shorts, and her heavy, low-slung breasts swayed as she rocked back and forth on her left foot, which Krung called “the pivot foot”—her strenuously maintained point of balance.

Mrs. Machado must have seen Jack’s partial reflection in the glass door of the grandfather clock—a half-naked man, her height or a little taller, sneaking up on her from behind. Jack was still two or three steps upstairs from the front hall when she saw him, which is why Mrs. Machado misjudged his height. (And maybe it was just like her ex-husband to take off most of his clothes before he attacked her.) The sharp squeak of her pivot foot froze Jack on the stairs. Her high-groin kick would have made Mr. Bangkok proud—notwithstanding Krung’s purist disapproval of such kicks. Because Jack was standing on the stairs, Mrs. Machado’s aim was a little lower than he expected; her full-contact kick caught him in the balls. “Ha!” she cried.

Jack crumpled like a pair of boxer shorts with no one inside them. He lay curled in a fetal position in the front hall. His testicles, which he imagined were suddenly the size of grapefruits, felt as if they had risen to the back of his throat. “Oh! Oh! Oh!” Mrs. Machado was crying, still hopping on one foot.

Jack wanted to die, or at least throw up, but neither option for relief was forthcoming. “I am coming queeckly to the rescue with ice, lots of ice !” Mrs. Machado was calling from the kitchen.

She then helped him to his feet and half carried him up the stairs; a plastic bag full of ice cubes dangled from her mouth. “Jack, Jack—my poor dahleen Jack!” Mrs. Machado managed to say through her clenched teeth.

She spread a bath towel on his bed and made him take off his boxers. Having shown the little guy to Emma and her friends, Jack was more anxious about the ice than he was embarrassed. However, Mrs. Machado seemed agitated by how small his penis was. Maybe she’d had daughters. (Or if she’d had sons, perhaps it was long ago when they’d been little boys; maybe Mrs. Machado had forgotten the ridiculous size of their balls and penises.) “Ees eet smaller ?” she asked in alarm.

“Smaller than what?”

“Smaller than eet was before I keecked you!”

Jack quickly took a look himself, but everything appeared to be the same. His balls ached, his penis throbbed, and the little guy might have been shrinking at the thought of the ice, which Mrs. Machado packed around Jack’s balls and penis as he lay on his back on the towel. “It’s cold. It hurts more, ” he told her.

“Eet will hurt more for just a few meenutes, Jack.”

“Oh. How long do you ice it?”

“Feefteen meenutes.”

That seemed long enough to freeze a penis, Jack was thinking. “Have you ever iced a penis before?” he asked Mrs. Machado.

“Not thees way,” she answered.

His penis was so cold that Jack started to cry. Mrs. Machado lay down beside him and rocked him in her arms. She sang a Portuguese song. In ten minutes, Jack was still shivering, but his teeth had stopped chattering. To make the boy warmer, Mrs. Machado stretched out on top of him; her breasts felt like a sofa cushion wedged between them. “I can feel the ice, too, you know,” Mrs. Machado told him, after a minute or two. “Eet’s not so bad.” The pain had subsided; his balls were numb and he couldn’t feel his penis at all.

After fifteen minutes, Mrs. Machado removed the bag of ice. Jack was afraid to look at himself in case he had disappeared. He listened to Mrs. Machado pouring the ice water and the remaining cubes into the bathroom sink. She came back to the bed and sat beside him. “Eet’s very red,” she observed.

“I have no feeling. I think it died,” Jack told her.

She gently patted the little guy with the towel. “I theenk eet will come back to life,” Mrs. Machado said, holding the towel against his penis. Jack could feel the heat of her hand through the towel. She sat in profile to him. Her coarse, glossy black hair was pulled back from her face in an unruly ponytail—her “fighting hairdo,” Mrs. Machado called it. Jack could see that the skin under her chin and on her throat was loose and sagging, and her breasts drooped to her thick waist. She had never been pretty. But when you’re ten years old and a woman is holding your penis, nothing else matters.

“Ha!” Mrs. Machado said, removing the towel. “Meester Penis has come back to life with beeg plans!” The little guy was unused to being treated with such respect. (Mister Penis was more familiar with expressions of disappointment—even disparagement and reproach.) Clearly flattered by Mrs. Machado’s attention, the little guy had more than recovered from the high-groin kick; Jack’s penis rose to the occasion with the stiffening determination of a war hero. “My goodness, Meester Penis!” Mrs. Machado exclaimed. “Are you just showing off, or ees there something you want?”

Of course there is always something penises want—not that Jack, at age ten, could articulate exactly what his penis wanted. But Mrs. Machado must have been a mind reader. “What ees Meester Penis theenking ?” she asked the little guy.

“I don’t know, Mrs. Machado,” Jack answered truthfully.

When the back of his hand brushed her hip, the contact was incidental—but it was no accident that Mrs. Machado pressed her hip against him, pinning Jack’s hand to his side. She reached behind her head and undid her ponytail in one quick motion, her hair hiding her face as she leaned over his penis. The little guy could feel her breath. “I theenk I know what Meester Penis wants,” Mrs. Machado said.

Jack felt the weight of her breasts on his stomach as she slid his penis into her mouth. Looking back, Jack would concede that Mister Penis had been a bit reckless ever since. The corresponding movement of Jack’s hips was involuntary, but his excitement wasn’t entirely pleasurable. (The boy was afraid that Mrs. Machado might swallow him!) “What’s happening?” he asked her.

Perhaps Chenko had been wrong to assume that Mrs. Machado wasn’t very agile, because she shifted her weight and changed her position so suddenly that Jack was unable to respond with any movement of his own. Surely Mrs. Machado was not a magician, but Jack didn’t see her take off her tank top or her bra—and how she managed to remove her powder-blue gym shorts and her panties would remain a mystery to him. He got only a glimpse of the huge hairy place between her legs—that is, huge in comparison to his earlier sightings of Mrs. Oastler’s and Emma’s places of business. And if his mother’s tattoo of a Rose of Jericho was artistically consistent—that is, the flower within the rose was always the same—Jack realized (at the moment Mrs. Machado mounted him) how the real thing was remarkably different in each case. On the irrefutable evidence of these formative examples, it would be Jack Burns’s unfortunate fate to believe that every vagina was unique.