John Irving - Until I Find You

One small measure of pride Jack took in his academic efforts at Exeter was that he managed to pass four years of German without Noah Rosen’s assistance. German was the only subject Noah couldn’t and didn’t help him with. (Quite understandably, as a Jew, Noah felt that German was the language of his people’s executioners and he refused to learn a word of it.)

Noah couldn’t help Jack with the SATs, either. There Jack was on his own; there aptitude was a far superior tool to attitude. Jack’s effort notwithstanding, his talent lagged behind that of his Exeter classmates. He had the lowest SAT scores in the Class of ’83.

“Actors don’t do multiple choice,” was the way Jack put it to Herman Castro.

“Why not?” Herman asked.

“Actors don’t guess, ” Jack replied. “Actors do have choices, but they know what they are. If you don’t know the answer, you don’t guess.”

“If you don’t mind my saying so, Jack, that’s a pretty stupid approach to a multiple-choice examination.”

Because of his miserable SAT scores, Jack wouldn’t be joining Herman Castro and Noah Rosen at Harvard. He wouldn’t be attending any of the so-called better colleges or universities. His mother begged him to return to Toronto and go to university there. But he didn’t want to go back to Toronto.

Having initiated the distance between them, Alice suddenly wanted Jack to be close to her again. He wanted nothing to do with her. Jack was way over “the lesbian thing,” as Emma called it—Emma was way over it, too. They no longer cared that Alice and Mrs. Oastler were an item; in fact, both Emma and Jack were pleased, even proud, that their mothers were still together. So many couples weren’t still together, both the couples they’d known among their friends and the parents of so many of their friends.

But Jack couldn’t forget that he’d been sent away from Toronto—and from Canada, his country. For eight years, he’d been living in the United States; his fellow students, for the most part, were Americans, and the films that made him want to be an actor in the movies were European.

Jack applied to, and was accepted at, the University of New Hampshire. Emma was all over him. “For Christ’s sake, baby cakes, you shouldn’t choose UNH because of how much you like the local movie theater!” But he’d made his decision. He liked Durham and that movie theater, which was never the same, Jack would admit, when Emma Oastler wasn’t sitting beside him holding his penis.

That trip to the North Sea with his mother had formed Jack Burns. St. Hilda’s had established what Emma would correctly call his older-woman thing, and the school had given him some pretty basic acting techniques—also a belief in himself that he could be convincing, even as a girl. Redding had taught him how to work hard. Mrs. Adkins had drawn him to her sadness. And at Exeter he’d discovered that he was not an intellectual, but he had learned how to read and write. (At the time, Jack didn’t know how rare and useful this knowledge was—no more than he could have defined the vulnerability Mrs. Stackpole had exposed in him.)

The female faculty at Exeter struck Jack as sexually unapproachable, in that older-woman way. Whether Jack was right or wrong in that assumption, they were certainly not as approachable as Mrs. Stackpole—her crude, suggestive urgency had captivated him. Redding was a wilderness where women went and became weary, or at least weary-looking. At Exeter, on the other hand, there were some attractive faculty wives who captured the boys’ attention—if only at the fantasy level. (Jack wouldn’t have dreamed of approaching a single one of them; they all looked too happy.)

Least approachable of them all was Madame Delacorte, a French fox who worked in the library and whose husband taught in the Department of Romance Languages. Romance was not what Madame Delacorte brought to mind. There wasn’t a boy at Exeter who could look her in the eye—nor was there a boy who ever visited the library without searching longingly for her.

Madame Delacorte looked as if she’d just been laid but wanted more, much more. (Yet, somehow, the first sweaty encounter had not mussed her hair.) Madame Delacorte was as commanding a presence as Jeanne Moreau in Jules and Jim; not even her husband could approach her without stuttering, and he was from Paris.

Jack was cramming for his history final in the library one spring night; he had a favorite carrel on the second floor of the stacks. He’d burned his bridges with Noah Rosen and Michele Maher, and he was feeling resigned about his next four years in Durham, New Hampshire.

Emma Oastler was moving to Iowa City. She’d sent some of her writing to Iowa and had been admitted to the Writers’ Workshop there. Jack had never heard of the place. He knew only that Iowa was in the Midwest, and that he would miss Emma.

“You can come visit me, honey pie. I’m sure they have movie theaters there, despite all the writers. They probably have the movie theaters to purposely drive the writers crazy. ”

In this context, Jack wasn’t worried about his history final—he was just a little depressed. When Madame Delacorte came to his carrel, he’d been plowing through a bunch of books he was supposed to have read already. He’d made a pile of the ones he was finished with; among them was a dusty tome about Roman law, which Madame Delacorte said someone had been looking for. She wanted him to return the book to the stacks on the third floor. The classics were kept there—all the Greek and Latin.

“Okay,” Jack said to Madame Delacorte. He could never look at her above her slender waist; her waist alone was enough to undo him. He went off to the third floor with the book about Roman law.

“Come right back, Jack,” Madame Delacorte called after him. “I don’t want to be responsible for distracting you.” As if she, or Jack, had any control of that!

It seemed that, as usual, there was no one in the stacks on the third floor. Jack quickly found where the book belonged, but—above the moldy bindings, in the next aisle—a pair of disembodied eyes regarded him. “Michele Maher isn’t the girl for you,” the voice that went with the eyes said. “You’re already good-looking. What do you need a good-looking girl for? You need something else, something real. ”

Another dishwasher? Jack wondered. But he recognized the voice and the diluted, washed-out blue of the eyes. It was Molly whatever-her-name-was, Ed McCarthy’s ex-girlfriend. ( Penis McCarthy, as Herman Castro less-than-lovingly called him.)

“Hi, Molly,” Jack said; he came around into her aisle and stood next to her.

“ I should be your girlfriend,” Molly told him. “I know you love your sister, and she’s ugly. Well, I’m ugly, too.”

“You’re not ugly, Molly.”

“Yes, I am,” she said. She was demented, clearly. She also had a cold; the rims of her nostrils were red and her nose was running. Molly whatever-her-name-was leaned back against the stacks and closed her eyes. “Take me,” she whispered.

Jack didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. He did neither. On an impulse largely meant to do her minimal harm, he fell to his knees and lifted her skirt. He pushed his face into her panties; with both his hands on her buttocks, he pulled the waistband of her panties down.

Jack Burns actually licked a tenth-grade girl, a sixteen-year-old, in the stacks on the third floor of the Exeter library! From Mrs. Machado and Mrs. Stackpole, he knew exactly how to do it; the difference was, this time he initiated it. He could feel Molly’s fingers in his hair; she was pulling his head into her. He could feel her slumping against the stacks as she came on his face—not one’s usual library experience. And the worst of it was that he didn’t know her last name; he couldn’t even write her a letter of explanation.