John Irving - Until I Find You

“Do you miss her, Jack?” Emma asked him one night. He had been thinking that he missed some of the things Mrs. Machado did, but not that he missed her. He felt awkward telling Emma about the things he missed. Jack didn’t want her to feel that he was ungrateful to her for saving him from Mrs. Machado. But they were true friends and workout partners. Emma understood him. “It sounds like you were excited but frightened,” Emma said.

“Yes.”

“I shudder to think what kind of trouble the little guy can get into in Maine, ” Emma said.

“What do you mean, Emma?”

They were in her room. Emma had a king-size bed, if you didn’t count the stuffed animals. Jack was wearing just his boxers, and Emma was wearing a T-shirt that Pavel or Boris had given her. It was from a wrestling tournament in Tbilisi, but you had to be able to read Georgian to know where it was from; more to Emma’s liking, the T-shirt was faded and torn and it had old bloodstains on it.

“Take off your boxers, honey pie.” Emma was removing her T-shirt under the covers, which created a little chaos among the stuffed animals. “I’m going to show you how not to get in trouble, Jack.” She took his hand and placed it on his penis. “Use your other hand, if you prefer,” Emma told him. “Just do whatever’s comfortable.”

“Comfortable?”

“Just beat off, Jack! You can do that, can’t you?”

“Beat what ?”

“Don’t tell me this is your first time, honey pie.”

“It’s my first time,” he admitted.

“Well, take your time—you’ll get the hang of it,” Emma told him. “You can kiss me, or touch me with your other hand. Just do something, Jack—for Christ’s sake!”

Jack was trying. At least he wasn’t frightened. “I think my left hand works better,” he told her, “even though I’m right-handed.”

“It’s not as complicated as a Russian arm-tie,” Emma said. “We don’t have to discuss it.”

He hugged her as hard as he could—she was so strong, so solid. When she kissed him, Jack remembered to breathe—at least at the beginning. “I think it’s working,” he said.

“Try not to make a mess all over the place, baby cakes,” Emma said. “I’m just kidding,” she quickly added.

It was becoming difficult to kiss her and keep breathing—not to mention talk. “What exactly are we doing? What is this?” he asked Emma.

“This is how you survive Maine,” Emma told him.

“But you won’t be there!” he cried.

“You have to imagine me, baby cakes, or I’ll send you pictures.” Oh, that aurora borealis—those northern lights! “Well, if that isn’t ‘all over the place,’ I don’t know what is,” Emma was saying, while Jack practiced breathing again. “Just look at this mess. I never want to hear you say I don’t love you.”

“I love you, Emma,” the boy blurted out.

“You don’t have to make a commitment or anything,” Emma said. “That you’re my best friend is enough of a miracle.”

“I’m going to miss you!” Jack cried.

“ Shhh, don’t cry—they’ll hear you. Don’t give them the satisfaction.”

“The what?”

“I’m going to miss you, too, honey pie,” she whispered. She was putting her T-shirt back on—more stuffed animals were getting out of her way, in whatever way they could—when Jack heard his mother in the hall. Emma’s bedroom door was partially open.

“Was that you, Jackie?” his mom was calling. (No doubt he’d been making unusual sounds.)

Both Emma and Jack knew he hadn’t put his boxers back on. He didn’t even know where they were; he hoped they were under the covers. His head was on Emma’s shoulder; one of her arms was thrown loosely around his neck. The “loosely” made it not yet a headlock, but there was no question that they were snuggled together, under the covers, when Alice came into the room.

“I had a dream,” Jack told his mom.

“I see,” she said.

“There’s more room for him to have a bad dream in my bed than in his,” Emma told Alice.

“Yes, I see that there is,” Alice replied.

“It was that dream about the moat,” Jack said. “You remember the littlest soldier.”

“Yes, of course,” Alice said.

“It was that one,” he told her.

“I didn’t know you still had that one,” his mother said.

“All the time,” he lied. “More than usual, lately.”

“I see,” his mom said. “Well, I’m sorry.”

There were stuffed animals scattered everywhere, as if there’d been a massacre. Jack kept hoping his boxers weren’t lying among them. Alice started to leave Emma’s bedroom, but she paused in the doorway to the hall and turned back to face them.

“Thank you for being such a good friend to Jack, Emma,” Alice said.

“We’re gonna be friends for life, Alice,” Emma told her.

“Well, I hope so,” Alice said. “Good night, you two,” she called softly, as she went down the hall.

“Good night, Mom!” Jack called after her.

“Good night!” Emma called. Under the covers, her hand found and held the little guy, who appeared to have fallen asleep.

“How quickly you forget,” Emma whispered to his penis.

Like old times, Jack thought, as he was falling asleep—without ascertaining very clearly what had been good about the aforementioned “old times” and what hadn’t. It was even a comfort to listen to Emma snoring.

Emma had shot a whole roll of photographs of Jack with Chenko in the Bathurst Street gym. Various angles of Chenko’s wolf-head tattoo; Jack sitting cross-legged on the wrestling mat beside the old Ukrainian; Chenko’s arm around Jack’s shoulders in what the boy thought of as a fatherly way.

Jack lay listening to Emma snoring, just visualizing those photographs. Soon he would be in Maine, but he was no longer frightened. As he drifted away, Jack believed there was nothing in Maine that could scare him.

Jack Burns would miss those girls, those so-called older women. Even the ones who had molested him. (Sometimes especially the ones who had molested him!) He would miss Mrs. Machado, too—more than he ever admitted to Emma Oastler.

Jack even missed the girls who never abused him—among them Sandra Stewart, who had played the bilingual stutterer, the vomiter, the mail-order bride who gets fucked on a dog sled and wanders off and freezes to death in the snow, in a histrionic blizzard! How sick was it that he remembered her ?

He would miss each one, every major and minor character in his sea of girls. Those girls—those women, at the time—had made him strong. They prepared Jack Burns for the terra firma (and not so firma) of the life ahead, including his life with boys and men. After the sea of girls, what pushovers boys were! After Jack’s older-women experiences, how easy it would be to deal with men !

In those hectic last days before Jack left for Maine, his mother devoted herself to sewing name tags on his new clothes. Mrs. Oastler had taken him shopping. There were no school uniforms at Redding, no special colors, but the boys wore jackets and ties, and either khakis or wool-flannel trousers—not jeans. With Leslie Oastler choosing his clothes, Jack would be one of the best-dressed boys at the school.

Alice should have talked to him; she should have told Jack everything. But in lieu of conversation, she sewed.

It made no sense to Jack: when he was four, they’d spent the better part of a year searching those North Sea ports for his runaway dad; yet in Jack’s five years at St. Hilda’s, Alice rarely spoke of William. At ten, Jack was increasingly curious about his father; that William had been demonized made the boy afraid of himself and who he might become. But his mom would not indulge Jack’s questions about his dad. Alice was rarely cruel to Jack, but she could be cold, and nothing drew the coldness out of her as predictably as Jack asking her about his father.