John Irving - Until I Find You

“I see,” Jack said. “And if I don’t make it as an actor—”

“Well, making it is the point, isn’t it, Jack? If you don’t turn out to be a movie star, I’ll tell everyone that I never coached a wrestler as vain about his ears as Jack Burns.”

“I’ll bet you it turns out being a practical decision,” Jack told him.

“What’s that, Jack?”

“I’ll bet you a whole dollar that I make it as an actor,” the boy said.

“Since we’re the only ones awake,” Coach Clum whispered, “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that, Jack.” It was the school philosophy again. As Mr. Ramsey (who had read the handbook more carefully than Jack) could have told him, there was no gambling at Redding. Jack shut his eyes and prayed for sleep, but Coach Clum went on whispering in the dark bus. “Memorize this, Jack,” the coach whispered. “If I had to guess —guess, I say, not bet— you’re going to end up being a starter somewhere.”

“You can count on it,” Jack told him.

That was Redding. To Jack’s surprise, and Emma’s—not to mention how shocked Alice and Mrs. Oastler were—he loved the place. It was what such schools are, or can be, to some boys. You travel to what seems, or is, a foreign country; your troubles may travel with you, but nonetheless you fit in. Jack Burns had never fit in before.

Jack did not fit in at Exeter, where he was admitted on the strength of Redding’s reputation for building character—with the additional support, in the admissions office, of Exeter’s wrestling coach, who knew that Coach Clum’s boys were “grinders.” Jack was a grinder— a hard-nosed kid, if little more—and while he was good enough to wrestle on the Exeter team, he was not at all prepared for how difficult a school Phillips Exeter Academy was.

That Noah Rosen was also admitted to Exeter (Noah deserved to be) was Jack’s salvation. Coach Hudson, the Exeter wrestling coach, further intervened on Jack’s behalf: the coach arranged for Noah to be Jack’s roommate, and Noah helped Jack with his homework. Jack’s memorization skills notwithstanding, Exeter was so academically demanding, so intellectually rigorous, that his abilities at mere mimicry just couldn’t keep up. The memorization helped him, both as a wrestler and as an actor-to-be, but Noah Rosen kept him in school.

Jack rewarded Noah by sleeping with his older sister, who was a college student at Radcliffe at the time. Jack had met Leah Rosen at one of the Thanksgivings he spent with Noah and his family in Cambridge. Leah was four years older than Noah and Jack; she was at Andover while they were at Redding, and she entered Radcliffe when they began at Exeter. She was not especially pretty, but she had wonderful hair and a Gibson girl’s bosom—and she was attractive to Jack in what was becoming a familiar, older-woman way.

Noah was his best friend; a nonathlete, he was nevertheless closer to Jack than any of Jack’s wrestler friends. When Leah dropped out of Radcliffe for a semester—not just to have an abortion but to worry obsessively about it—Noah didn’t know Jack was the father.

After he’d stopped sleeping with Leah and was having an affair with a married woman who worked as a dishwasher in the academy kitchen—Mrs. Stackpole was a short, stout woman with several mercifully faded tattoos—Jack learned from Noah that Leah was depressed and seeing a psychiatrist. Jack still didn’t tell him.

Unlike at Redding, where everyone had a work-job, the only work-jobs at Exeter were done by the scholarship students. Noah was a scholarship kid at Exeter. Once, when Noah was sick, Jack took his work-job in the school dining hall; he collected the used trays from the cafeteria and carried them into the kitchen, which is how and when he came to know Mrs. Stackpole.

He visited Mrs. Stackpole midmornings, between classes, in her small, shabby house near the gasworks. Jack came and went in a hurry, because Mrs. Stackpole’s husband worked in the gasworks and always ate his lunch at home. The lunch, a leftover from the previous evening’s supper, was warming in the oven while Mrs. Stackpole spread a towel on the living-room couch and she and Jack engaged in a combative kind of lovemaking—reminiscent of the boy’s initiation to sex with Mrs. Machado. The dishwasher’s heavy breathing was accompanied by a whistling sound, which Jack first thought was coming from the husband’s mystery lunch; perhaps it was about to explode in the oven. But Mrs. Stackpole suffered from a deviated nasal septum, the result of a broken nose her husband had given her. (Possibly because of an unsavory lunchtime experience—Mrs. Stackpole never explained the circumstances to Jack.)

He couldn’t imagine that she’d ever been attractive, nor could he have articulated why he was attracted to her (in part) for that reason—her glum, expressionless face, the downturned corners of her sullen mouth, her oily skin, the bad tattoos, and what she referred to as the “love handles” girdling her thick waist—but the dishwasher was passionate about certain sexual positions, wherein Mrs. Adkins had merely sighed or taken some evident pains to endure. Among these was Mrs. Stackpole’s preference for the top position, which allowed her to look down on Jack while she mounted and rode him.

“You’re too good-lookin’ for a guy,” she told him once, during one such rough ride.

The husband’s lunch sent forth an odor of cauliflower, caraway seeds, and smoked sausage—maybe kielbasa. Something too powerful to be contained in the oven, anyway. Strong stuff—like Mrs. Stackpole herself, Jack was thinking.

“I wonder,” Jack said to Noah once, in their senior year at Exeter, “if older women can look at younger boys and know the ones who are attracted to them—even if no one else is.”

“Why would you wonder about that?” Noah asked.

Jack then told him almost everything—about Mrs. Machado, too. But somewhere, maybe from his mother, he’d learned to be selective about telling the truth. He didn’t tell Noah that he’d slept with Leah, or even about Mrs. Adkins. (Jack knew that Noah loved his sister, and Noah had been awfully fond of Mrs. Adkins.)

Jack’s mistake was that Noah simply told the truth; he wasn’t at all selective about it. Noah told Leah that Jack had an unusual older-woman thing; he told his sister about the dishwasher and about Mrs. Machado, too.

At Exeter, where his fellow students were absorbing all manner of requisite information—at the highest level of learning—Jack chiefly learned how one can fuck up a friendship by telling the truth selectively, which of course amounts to not telling it. It was Leah, not Jack, who told Noah that she’d been pregnant with Jack’s child; she told her brother about the abortion, too. So when Leah dropped out of Radcliffe again—this time, for good—Jack knew he thoroughly deserved to lose Noah Rosen as a friend.

Jack had spent what felt like a lifetime in childhood, but his adolescence passed as quickly and unclearly as those road signs out the window of his wrestling team’s bus. Jack Burns had no better understanding of women, or what might constitute correct behavior with them, than poor Lambrecht did of frost heaves—or that it was sorrow and boredom that drove Mrs. Adkins and Mrs. Stackpole and Leah Rosen to sleep with Jack, when they knew he was nothing but a horny boy.

When Jack graduated from Exeter in the spring of 1983, Noah Rosen wouldn’t shake his hand. For years, Jack couldn’t bear to think of him. In essence, Jack had obliterated Noah from his life—at a time when Noah was the warmest presence in it.