John Irving - Until I Find You

“Ed thinks my older sister, Emma, is ugly,” Jack explained to Michele Maher. He saw that it was hopeless to bring her back; she was too far gone already. “Naturally, I don’t see Emma that way, because I love her.”

Ed McCarthy’s best move—under the circumstances, perhaps his only move—was to walk away; even so, Jack was a little surprised when McCarthy did so. McCarthy had just lost his pathetic girlfriend—and the only way, for the rest of his life, he would ever breathe the same air as the Michele Mahers of this world was if he were standing beside the likes of Jack Burns. It was the Jack Burnses of this world who got the Michele Mahers—in Jack’s case, without half trying.

One weekend, in the spring of their senior year, Michele took Jack home with her to New York. It was the first time Jack felt he was being unfaithful to Emma, not because he was with Michele but because he didn’t tell Emma he was going to be in the city. Michele was so pretty, Jack was afraid it would hurt Emma’s feelings to meet her—or that Emma would treat Michele badly. (The whole Maher family was beautiful, even the dog.)

Besides, Jack rationalized, would it really matter to Emma if he was in town and didn’t tell her? Emma had graduated from NYU and was a fledgling comedy writer for a late-night New York TV show. She hated it. She’d come to the conclusion that, at least in her case, the hallway to making movies did not pass through television; she wasn’t even sure she still wanted to make movies.

“I’m going to be a writer, honey pie—I mean novels, not screenplays. I mean literature, not journalism.”

“When are you going to write?” he’d asked her.

“On the weekends.”

Thus Jack gave himself the impression that he might disturb Emma’s writing if he bothered her on a weekend.

Michele’s parents had an apartment on Park Avenue; it took up half a building and was bigger than Jack’s fifth-grade dorm at Redding. He’d not known that people had apartments with “fine art” that they actually owned. He didn’t even know that people could privately own fine art. Maybe that was a particularly Canadian underestimation of the power of the private sector, or else he’d been in Maine and New Hampshire long enough to have been deprived of his city sensibilities.

There was a small Picasso in the guest-room bathroom; it was low on the wall, beside the toilet, where you could see it best when you were sitting down. Jack was so impressed by it, he almost peed on it when he was standing up. For some reason, his penis produced an errant stream.

He thought there was something wrong with his penis—a little gonorrhea, maybe. Jack knew it was entirely possible that he’d caught the clap from Mrs. Stackpole. (Who knew who else she was fucking, or who else her husband was fucking?) Now, after almost pissing on the knee-high Picasso, Jack convinced himself that he had a venereal disease—something he might pass on to Michele Maher. Not that he imagined Michele would have sex with him. It was their first time away from Exeter together. Yes, he had kissed her—but he hadn’t once felt what Ed McCarthy crudely called her “high, hard ones.”

Just Jack’s luck—Michele’s beautiful parents went off to some black-tie event, leaving Jack and Michele in the vast Park Avenue apartment with the beautiful dog. They began by watching the TV in Michele’s bedroom, after her mom and dad had left. “They’ll be gone all evening,” Michele said.

Jack was prepared to make out, but he’d never imagined that Michele Maher was the kind of girl who would “go all the way”—to use one of Alice’s prehippie expressions. “I just hope you don’t know any girls who go all the way, Jack,” was what his mom had said when he was back in Toronto, in the snow, for his last so-called spring break.

Michele Maher wasn’t the kind of girl who went all the way, but she wanted to talk about it. Perhaps she’d been wrong not to do it.

“No, I think you’ve been right,” Jack quickly told her.

Short of telling her that he might have caught the clap from an Exeter dishwasher, he didn’t know what else to do but claim to be an advocate of not going all the way himself.

It was a John Wayne night on one of the TV channels, beginning with The Fighting Kentuckian. Leading a regiment of Kentucky riflemen, John Wayne wears what looks like an entire raccoon on his head. Jack liked John Wayne, but Emma had undermined Jack’s enthusiasm for Wayne’s kind of heroics; she’d been feeding him a strict diet of Truffaut and Bergman films. Jack liked Truffaut, but he loved Bergman.

It was true that he’d been bored by The Four Hundred Blows, and had said so. Emma was so disappointed in him that she stopped holding his penis; she picked it up again for Shoot the Piano Player, a film Jack adored, and held it without once letting go through Jules and Jim, while Jack imagined that Jeanne Moreau, not Emma, was holding his penis.

As for Ingmar Bergman, there was never enough. The Seventh Seal, The Virgin Spring, Winter Light, The Silence— those were the films that sold Jack Burns on the movies and made him want to act in films rather than the theater. Scenes from a Marriage, Face to Face, Autumn Sonata— those were the movies that inspired him. He couldn’t stop imagining his expression in close-up with those Bergman women. With every line he spoke, not neglecting the slightest gesture, Jack imagined that the camera was so tight on him that his whole face filled the giant screen—or just the fingers of his hand, making a fist, or even the tip of his index finger coming into frame alongside a doorbell.

Not to mention the sex in Bergman’s films—oh, those older women! And to think that Jack met all of them while Emma Oastler held his penis in her hand! (Bibi Andersson, Gunnel Lindblom, Ingrid Thulin, Liv Ullmann.) Meanwhile, Alice hoped that Jack didn’t know any girls who went all the way! What was she thinking ?

“What’s wrong, Dick? Lost your hump?” Michele Maher asked. It was another Richard III joke.

Jack usually answered, “No, it’s just deflated. ”

He couldn’t claim he was distracted by The Fighting Kentuckian, not for a moment. Michele and Jack made out through Rio Grande, too. John Wayne is at war again, this time with the Apaches. He is also at war with his estranged, tempestuous wife—Maureen O’Hara with her hooters. But Jack had eyes only for Michele Maher. God, she was beautiful! And nice, and smart, and funny. How he wanted her.

Michele Maher wanted him that night, too, but he refused to have sex with her—notwithstanding that he couldn’t take his eyes off her. He couldn’t stop himself from kissing her, touching her, holding her. He kept repeating her name. For years he would wake up saying it: “Michele Maher, Michele Maher, Michele Maher.”

“Jack Burns,” she said, half-mocking in her tone. “Richard the Humpback, also known as Third, ” she said. “ Lady Macbeth,” she teased him. She was the best kisser he would ever encounter, hands down—not forgetting that Emma Oastler could kiss up a storm. No one could hold a candle to Michele Maher in the kissing department.

Why, then, didn’t Jack simply tell her the truth? That he was afraid he had a dose of gonorrhea; that he might have caught the clap from an adulterous dishwasher, a woman old enough to be his mother! (It sounded like the subject of a play the Dramat might have chosen—or, more likely, a sequel to A Mail-Order Bride in the Northwest Territories. )

Why didn’t Jack tell Michele that he loved her, and that he wanted most of all to protect her from everything he imagined or knew to be bad about himself? He should have made up a story—God knows, he could act. He could have told Michele Maher that his workout partner had stepped on his penis in the wrestling room, a surprisingly common but little-discussed injury among wrestlers. Under the circumstances, he was simply too sore to have sex with her—or so he could have claimed.