John Irving - Until I Find You

Back at the farmhouse, after Emma had passed out, Claudia helped Jack carry Emma to her bedroom, where they undressed her and put her to bed. Emma was already snoring, but this failed to distract Claudia and Jack; they couldn’t help noticing the perfect vagina tattooed on Emma’s right hip.

“Exactly what is your relationship with Emma?” Claudia asked.

“I don’t really know,” Jack replied honestly.

“Boy, I’ll say you don’t!” Claudia said, laughing.

When they were in bed, Claudia asked him: “When did the penis-holding start? I mean with Emma. I know when it started with me.”

Jack pretended not to remember exactly. “When I was eight or nine,” he said. “Emma would have been fifteen or sixteen. Or maybe it was a little earlier. I might have been seven. Emma was maybe fourteen.”

Claudia went on holding his penis, not saying anything. When he was almost asleep, she asked him: “Do you have any idea how weird that is, Jack?”

Michele Maher had made him sensitive to his alleged weirdness—as in too weird. Jack harbored no illusion that Claudia had mistaken him for the love of her life; surely Claudia was too smart to imagine for a moment that Jack thought she was the love of his life. But it hurt him that Claudia thought he was weird.

“ Too weird?” Jack asked her.

“That depends, Jack.”

He didn’t like this game. Depends on what? he knew she wanted him to ask her. But he wouldn’t ask—he already knew the answer. He held her breasts, he nuzzled her neck, but just as his penis was coming to life in her hand, Claudia let it go. “Why doesn’t Emma want to have children?” she asked.

Well, Jack Burns was an actor—he knew a loaded question when he heard one. “Maybe she doesn’t think she’ll be a good mother,” Jack ventured, still holding Claudia’s breasts. The question was really about him, of course. Why didn’t he want children? Because, if he turned out to be like his father, he would leave, he had told Claudia once. He didn’t want to be the kind of father who left.

But this answer hadn’t satisfied Claudia. Jack was well aware she wanted to have children. As an actress, Claudia hated her body; that she had “a body designed to have children” was the only positive thing she ever said about herself. She said this as if she meant it, too. To Jack, it didn’t sound like an act. Clearly, in her mind, the kind of father Jack would turn out to be was Jack’s problem.

“It depends on whether or not you want children, Jack,” Claudia said.

Jack let go of her breasts and rolled over, turning his back to her in the bed. Claudia rolled toward him, wrapping her arm around his waist and once more holding his penis.

“We don’t graduate from college for another two years,” Jack pointed out to her.

“I don’t mean I want children now, Jack.”

He’d already told Claudia that he never wanted children. “Not till the day I discover that my dad has been a loving father to a child, or children, he didn’t leave.” That was how Jack had put it to her.

Was it any wonder Claudia held herself back from him?

Yet they had fun together—in summer stock, especially. The previous summer, they’d done Romeo and Juliet in a playhouse in the Berkshires. The older, veteran actors got all the main parts. Claudia was Juliet’s understudy. The dull, flat-chested robot they cast as Juliet never missed a night’s performance—not even a matinee. Jack had wanted to be Romeo—or, failing that, Mercutio—but because he’d been a wrestler and looked confrontational, they made him Tybalt, that cocky asshole.

Claudia was always taking their picture; maybe she thought that if there were sufficient photographic evidence of them as a couple, they might stay together. She had a camera with a delayed-shutter mechanism; she would set the timer and then run to get in the photo. (The obsessive picture-taking sometimes made Jack wonder if Claudia just might have mistaken him for the love of her life.)

After their visit to Emma, Claudia and Jack did a García Lorca play —The House of Bernarda Alba— at a summer playhouse in Connecticut. The setting was Spain, 1936. Claudia and Jack both played women. Jack had eaten some bad clams and was food-poisoned for one evening performance. There was no intermission. The director, who was also a woman, told him to “suck it up and wear a longer skirt.” His understudy had a yeast infection, and the director was more sympathetic to her ailment than she was to Jack’s. (There were nine women in the cast, plus Jack.)

He had terrible stomach cramps and diarrhea. In the grip of an alarmingly explosive episode, he flinched so violently that one of his falsies slipped out of his bra; he managed to trap it against his ribs with his elbow. Claudia later told him that he looked as if he were mocking the moment of the playwright’s assassination in the Spanish Civil War; Jack was thankful García Lorca was not alive to suffer through his performance.

“What a learning experience!” Mr. Ramsey responded, when Jack wrote him about the long night of the bad clams.

Miss Wurtz would have been proud of him; never had he concentrated with such pinpoint accuracy on his audience of one. He could almost see his father in the audience. (It was the perfect play for William, Jack was thinking—all women!)

Claudia and Jack were both understudies that summer in Cabaret, their first musical. He was the understudy to the Emcee, a Brit who told Jack pointedly on opening night not to get his hopes up; he’d never been sick a day in his life. Jack’s heart wasn’t in the Emcee role, anyway. He would have been a better Sally Bowles than the woman who was cast as Sally—even better than Claudia, who was her understudy.

But it would have been too aggressive a moment in their relationship—had Jack auditioned for the Sally Bowles character and beaten out Claudia for the part. They spent a month singing “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” and “Maybe This Time” to each other—in the privacy of their boudoir, where all understudies shine.

But he and Claudia were cast as Kit Kat Girls in Cabaret, so they got to strut their stuff to an audience. Given the scant costume, not to mention the period—Berlin, 1929–30—Jack was a somewhat transparent transvestite, but the audience loved him. Claudia said she was jealous because he looked hotter than she did.

“You better be careful, Jack,” Claudia warned him. It was the summer they were both twenty. “If you get any better in drag, no one’s going to cast you as a guy anymore.” (Under the circumstances, Jack thought it was better not to tell her how badly he had wanted the Sally Bowles part.)

How well he would remember that summer in Connecticut. When Sally Bowles and the Kit Kat Girls sang “Don’t Tell Mama” and “Mein Herr,” Jack was looking right at the audience; he saw their faces. They were staring at him, the transvestite Kit Kat Girl—not at Sally. They couldn’t take their eyes off him. Every man in that audience made his skin crawl.

Both Claudia and Jack were good enough students to skip a few classes in order to attend the film festival in Toronto that September. Their teachers permitted them to write about the movies they saw, in place of the work they would miss—Jack’s first and last adventure in film criticism, except at small dinner parties.

When he took Claudia to Daughter Alice to meet his mother for the first time, Jack was questioning Claudia’s claim that she had seen Raul Julia coming out of a men’s room at the Park Plaza. Alice immediately took Claudia’s side. Jack knew that film festivals were full of such real or imagined sightings, but he wanted his mom and Claudia to like each other; he held his tongue.