John Irving - Until I Find You

Jack’s second year at Exeter, when he was fifteen going on sixteen, Emma was twenty-two. After the wrestling matches, most Saturdays, Emma took Jack to the movie theater in Durham, New Hampshire. Durham was an easy drive from Exeter, and it was a university town; they had an art-house kind of cinema, where they showed both old and current foreign films. At Exeter, they showed only the old ones.

Jack loved Fellini’s La Strada, which he saw (more than once) with Emma holding his penis. They both believed that Chenko could have kicked the crap out of the Anthony Quinn character, but only in those days before Chenko needed a new hip. Jack wasn’t as crazy about La Dolce Vita. The Marcello Mastroianni character was the playboy Jack imagined his father to be—the sex-seeker Jack feared he would become. And he didn’t like 81⁄2 at all—Mastroianni again.

Fellini won Jack Burns back with Amarcord. Emma had already seen the film in New York, but she made a point of taking Jack to Durham to see it. She wanted to witness his response to the tobacconist with the huge hooters. With her hand in Jack’s lap, Emma knew the little guy’s reaction almost before Jack knew it. “How’s that for an older woman, baby cakes?”

They committed to memory the little-known name of the actress who played the big-breasted tobacconist from Rimini. When Emma called Jack in his dorm at Exeter, she would occasionally adopt an Italian accent and say to whoever answered the phone: “Pleeze tell-a Jack Burns—eet’s Maria Antonietta Beluzzi on da fon-a!”

More often, when Emma phoned, she just said she was Jack’s sister. Jack had stopped calling Emma his step sister; he referred to her as his older sister instead.

No one at Exeter was insensitive enough to comment on the lack of a family resemblance—with the exception of Ed McCarthy, Jack’s wrestling teammate, who was hit-and-miss in his attention to details. At wrestling practice, McCarthy once forgot to wear a jock; his penis slipped out of his shorts and lay like a slug on the mat, where his workout partner, a fellow one-hundred-and-seventy-seven-pounder, stepped on it.

Jack felt like stepping on McCarthy’s penis the day he made an unkind remark about Emma. “It’s too bad you got all the good looks in your family, Burns. Your sister looks more like a wrestler than you do.”

They were in the locker room—wooden benches, metal lockers, cement floors—getting dressed for practice. Jack underhooked one of McCarthy’s arms and collared the bigger boy’s neck with his right hand, snapping him forward. When McCarthy pulled away, his weight shifting to the heel of his right foot, Jack caught him with a foot-sweep and McCarthy fell on his bare ass on the cement floor—hitting his back on an open locker door and giving his elbow a whack on the bench on his way down.

Jack assumed that McCarthy would get to his feet and beat the shit out of him, but McCarthy just sat there. “I could kick the crap out of you, Burns,” he said.

“Do it then,” Jack told him.

Even in his senior year, Jack never once wrestled above one-forty-five. After he stopped growing, he was five-eight, but only if he stood on his toes—and he competed better at one-thirty-five than he did at one-forty.

Jack was one of Exeter’s better wrestlers in his final two years at the academy. Ed McCarthy would never be better than unexceptional as a wrestler. Jack might have beaten McCarthy in a wrestling match, but not in a fight. Even a mediocre one-seventy-seven-pounder can take a halfway decent one-thirty-five-pounder, and McCarthy knew it. He got to his feet, rubbing his back and his sore elbow.

As Mr. Ramsey had advised Jack, although this time it was unintentional, he had an audience. “You shouldn’t call anyone’s sister ugly, Ed,” one of the lightweights said.

“Jack’s sister is ugly,” McCarthy replied.

That’s what saved Jack—not McCarthy’s belligerence but his insistence on the word ugly. While there were no rules regarding niceness at Exeter, no points off for saying something derogatory or dismissive— in fact, the intellectual fashion at the school favored everything negative and derisive— it was true that, for a few sentimental souls, sisters were sacred, especially if they weren’t good-looking. And with Emma, who had just missed being pretty, there was also the problem with her weight.

“Who got all the good looks in your family, McCarthy?” the team’s heavyweight asked. His name was Herman Castro; he was a scholarship kid from El Paso, Texas, and while he was a halfway decent wrestler, he might have stolen a few matches by frightening his opponents. He was so scary-looking that one was ill advised to use the word ugly within his hearing.

“I wasn’t speaking to you, Herman,” Ed McCarthy said.

“You are now,” Herman Castro told him, and that was the end of it. Or it would have been, if Jack had let it be the end of it. His loyalty to Emma was fierce.

Ed McCarthy wasn’t ugly—although his penis was, especially after that guy had stepped on it—but he wasn’t at all handsome, either. He didn’t have a girlfriend till his senior year, and the best he could do was a startled-looking girl with red hair and freckles who was only in grade ten. The redhead had just turned sixteen; McCarthy was eighteen. It was almost certainly not a sexual relationship, but it was probably the first relationship of any kind for both of them.

Jack toyed with the idea of seducing her—certainly not to have sex with her, because she was far too young and startled-looking for him, but simply to turn her against McCarthy, who’d said such cruel things about Emma.

Jack found Ed McCarthy’s girlfriend in the cafeteria—she was at the salad bar. During wrestling season, Jack lived on salad; he could not weigh in at one hundred and thirty-four and a half pounds and eat much else. (He had a bowl of oatmeal for breakfast, sometimes with a banana; salad for lunch; salad for supper, occasionally with another banana.)

The redhead with the freckles became even more startled-looking than usual when Jack spoke to her. “Is he treating you okay?” Jack asked.

Her name was Molly—he didn’t know her last name—and she was staring at him as if she expected some unknown and uncontrollable reaction from her body, as if he’d just injected one of her veins with a hallucinogenic drug.

He touched her hand, which, unbeknownst to her, had slipped into the stainless-steel bin of raw mushrooms, where it lay like something severed. “I mean McCarthy,” Jack said. “He can be cruel to women, and superficial. I hope he’s not like that with you.”

“Did he hurt someone you know?” Molly asked; she seemed truly frightened of McCarthy.

“I suppose he only hurt my feelings—about my older sister,” Jack said.

As he had taught himself to do, his eyes welled up with tears. All those movies, with Emma holding his penis, had conditioned him to imagine the close-up. By then Jack had seen Anthony Quinn in tears maybe half a dozen times. If Zampanò, the strongman, could cry, so could he.

Jack had not done much acting at Exeter. He had too much schoolwork to take part in most of the productions chosen by the school’s dramatic association, the Dramat.

He was neutral to Death of a Salesman, which was the fall play in his ninth-grade year. Jack knew he was too boyish-looking to play Willy Loman, and too small to be either of Willy’s sons, Happy or Biff. He bravely auditioned for the part of Linda, beating out a bunch of girls in the process—two seniors who were fourth-year members of the Dramat among them. But in Jack’s first experience with dramatic criticism, The PEAN, the school yearbook, described Jack’s performance as “overly distraught,” and The Exonian, the school newspaper, stated that Linda was miscast—“resulting in the kind of sexual parody audiences must have been forced to endure in those dark ages when Exeter was an all-boys’ school.” What do they know? Jack thought. Try telling Linda that she’s “overly distraught”!