John Irving - Until I Find You

And if Jack’s mother wouldn’t talk to him about her lover, why should he tell his mom about Mrs. Machado? It was Emma he should have talked to about Mrs. Machado—that is, sooner than he did. But before Jack knew it, it was July. Emma was off in Georgian Bay, and Mrs. Machado was once again his sparring-partner nanny.

If what Mrs. Machado did to Jack qualified as “abuse,” why didn’t he feel abused at the time? It wouldn’t be long before Jack had other relationships that he knew were sexual; the things he did and the things that were done to him only then registered as experiences he’d previously had with Mrs. Machado. But at the time it was happening, he had no frame of reference to understand how inappropriate she was with him.

She sometimes physically hurt him, but never intentionally. And he was repulsed by her, but many times—on occasion, simultaneously to being repulsed—Jack was also attracted to her. He was often frightened, too. Or at least Jack didn’t understand what she was doing to him, and why—or what she wanted him to do to her, and how he was supposed to do it.

One thing was certain: she cared for him. He felt it at the time; no later reconstruction of his pliable memory could convince Jack that she didn’t, in her heart, adore him. In fact, however confusingly, Mrs. Machado made him feel loved—at a time when his mother was sending him to Maine!

Interestingly, it was only when Jack asked Mrs. Machado about her children that she was ever short-tempered with him. He presumed that they had simply grown up—that this was why they’d moved “away”—but it was a sore point with her.

It was Mrs. Machado’s fondest hope, or so she said, that Mister Penis would never be taken advantage of. But by whom? By willful girls and venal women?

Jack was an adult when he saw his first psychiatrist, who told him that many women who sexually molest children believe that they are protecting them—that what the rest of us might call abuse is for these women a form of mothering. (“Too weird,” as a girl Jack hadn’t yet met would say.)

What he noticed most of all, at the time, was that he changed overnight from someone who could keep nothing from his mother to someone who was determined to keep everything from her. Even more than he submitted to having sex with Mrs. Machado, he absolutely embraced the secrecy of it—most of all, the idea of keeping Mrs. Machado a secret from his mom.

Alice was so involved with Leslie Oastler, which was a parallel pursuit to Alice distancing herself from Jack, that the boy could have kept anything a secret from her. That Mrs. Machado was obsessed with doing the laundry—not only Jack’s sheets and towels and underwear, and his workout clothes, but also Alice’s and Mrs. Oastler’s laundry—was nothing Alice or Leslie appeared to notice. (If he’d gotten Mrs. Machado pregnant— if he actually could have—it’s doubtful that Alice or Mrs. Oastler would have noticed that!)

When Emma came home from Georgian Bay in August—with her body all tanned, and the dark hair on her arms bleached blond by the sun —Emma noticed that something had changed in him, and not only because her mom and Jack’s were lovers. “What’s wrong with you, baby cakes?” Emma asked. “What’s with all the wrestling ? Anyone would think you were fucking Mrs. Machado!”

In retrospect, Jack would wonder why Chenko—or Boris, or Pavel—didn’t suspect something. They certainly observed that many of the women in Krung’s kickboxing classes were inordinately interested in watching him wrestle with Mrs. Machado. And after Emma returned from Georgian Bay, she once again became Jack’s nighttime nanny. Surely Chenko and Boris and Pavel were aware that he regularly left the gym in Mrs. Machado’s company—for an hour or two almost every day, in either the late morning or the early afternoon.

“Thees ees a growing boy, and eet’s August in the ceety ! He needs to breathe some fresh air!” Mrs. Machado announced.

They went to her apartment, which was within walking distance on St. Clair—a dirty, dark-brown building, in which Mrs. Machado barely maintained a sparsely furnished walk-up on the third floor. There was a partial view of the ravine that ran behind Sir Winston Churchill Park and the St. Clair reservoir, and in the building’s small courtyard, where the grass had died, were an unused jungle gym and swing set and slide—as if all the children in Mrs. Machado’s apartment building had grown up and moved “away,” and no more children had been born to replace them.

The air was no fresher in Mrs. Machado’s small apartment than in the Bathurst Street gym, and Jack was struck by the absence of family photographs. Well, it was no surprise that pictures of Mrs. Machado’s ex-husband were absent—because he was alleged to assault her periodically. Why would she want a picture of him ? But of her two children there were only two photographs—she had one photo of each boy. In the photographs, they were both about Jack’s age, although Mrs. Machado said they were born four years apart and they were “all grown up now.” (She wouldn’t tell Jack their present ages—as if the numbers themselves were unlucky, or she was simply too upset to acknowledge that they were no longer children.)

It was a one-bedroom apartment, to be kind, with only a chest of drawers and a queen-size mattress on the floor of the bedroom. There was a combination kitchen and dining room, with no living room—and not even a hutch or sideboard for dishes. There was little evidence of kitchenware, which suggested to Jack that Mrs. Machado, if she ate at all, ate out. As to how she might have fed her family, when she’d had a family, he had no clue; there wasn’t even a dining-room table, or chairs, and there was only one stool at the strikingly uncluttered kitchen counter.

It looked less like an apartment where Mrs. Machado’s children had grown up than a place where Mrs. Machado had just recently moved in. But they came there only for the purpose of having sex, and to have a quick shower. Jack didn’t think to ask her where her children had slept. Or why she still called herself Mrs. Machado, or why the nameplate by the buzzer in the foyer of the building said M. Machado—as if the Mrs. were, or had permanently become, her first name. (Given her ex-husband’s reported hostility, why was she still a Mrs. at all?)

It was these trysts in her apartment, in the less-than-fresh air of August, that finally took their toll on Jack—not the wrestling. He was tired all the time. Chenko was concerned that he had lost five pounds—his mother’s response was that Jack should drink more milk—and his wet dreams, which had started that summer, suddenly stopped. (How could he have wet dreams when he was getting laid almost every day?)

Jack had other dreams instead—bad ones, as Leslie Oastler might have said. Moreover, he had taken it to heart when his mom told him he was too old to be in bed with her. He knew he wasn’t welcome to crawl into bed with his mother and Mrs. Oastler, and if he could—albeit only occasionally—persuade his mom to get into his bed with him, she wouldn’t stay long. Jack knew that Leslie would come and take her away.

Their “family dinners,” which Emma spoke of with mounting scorn, were an exercise in awkwardness. Alice couldn’t cook, Mrs. Oastler didn’t like to eat, and Emma had put back on the weight she’d lost in California.

“What did you expect would happen to me in Georgian Bay?” Emma asked her mom. “Does anyone lose weight eating barbecue ?” For dinner, they usually went to a Thai place or ordered takeout. As Emma put it: “In my mind, it always comes down to Thai or pizza.”