John Irving - Until I Find You

The wicked Father Frollo, who first imagines he is in love with Esmeralda, ultimately wants her to be put to death—not only because Esmeralda doesn’t love him but because Esmeralda is a guy. (Father Frollo is a French homophobe.) Quasimodo, who also falls in love with Esmeralda, is in the end relieved that Esmeralda is in love with Captain Phoebus.

“It’s a better story,” Bruno Litkins told the shocked ensemble, “because Quasimodo isn’t sad to give up Esmeralda to the soldier.” (His hunchback notwithstanding, Quasimodo is straight. )

“What would Victor Hugo say?” Claudia asked. Poor Claudia saw that her cherished role was gone; at least onstage, Jack Burns was born to be a transvestite Esmeralda.

“Keep the audience guessing !” Bruno Litkins, flapping his long arms, liked to say. “Is Esmeralda a woman? Is she a man? Make them guess !”

There was, of course, another beautiful Gypsy girl in the play—Quasimodo’s murdered mother, who has a brief but moving part. And there were other plays in that Cape Cod summer season—not all of them musicals that opened themselves to new, gay interpretations. Claudia would have bigger and better roles. She was the eponymous Salomé in Bruno Litkins’s production of the Oscar Wilde play—Bruno revered Wilde and wouldn’t change a purple word he’d written. Claudia was one hot Salomé. Her absurd dance of the seven veils was Wilde’s fault, not Claudia’s—although the Chinese scepter on her inner right thigh required a lot of makeup to conceal. (Without the makeup, the scepter might have been confusing to the audience—possibly mistaken for a birthmark, or a wound.)

Jack had the smaller part in Salomé— the prophet Jokanaan, good old John the Baptist, whose decapitated head Salomé kisses. That was some kiss. (Jack was kneeling under a table with a hole cut in the top for his head; the tablecloth hid not only his hard-on, but all the rest of him.) Yet the damage to his relationship with Claudia had already been done; not even that kiss could undo their drifting apart.

The gay version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame merely served to further the distance between them. In retrospect, Jack didn’t blame Claudia for her one-night stand with the handsome actor who played the gay Captain Phoebus, but he blamed her at the time. (Jack knew that Claudia had every right to repay him for cheating on her with a tango teacher that previous spring.)

Claudia’s luck was bad. The actor who played Captain Phoebus gave her and Jack the clap. Jack would never have found out about the affair otherwise, unless Claudia eventually told him—and given her unrepentant lies about her age, Jack had no reason to think that she ever would have let him in on her little secret. It was the captain’s gonorrhea that gave her away.

Naturally, Jack pretended it was much more painful than it was, dropping to his knees and screaming upon every act of urination—while Claudia called from the bedroom, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry !”

In Bruno’s brilliantly choreographed scene where Jack-as-the-transvestite-Esmeralda reveals to Captain Phoebus that he is, below the waist, a man, Jack is singing his heart out to the captain while Phoebus both acquiesces and retreats. (The captain is attracted to Jack, but the idiot still thinks Jack is a girl— hence his reluctance.)

Jack seizes one of the captain’s hands and holds it to one of his falsies; Phoebus looks underwhelmed. Jack seizes the captain’s other hand and holds it to his crotch; Phoebus gives the audience an astonished look while Jack whispers in his ear. Then they both sing the song Bruno Litkins wrote for his gay version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame— “Same As Me, Babe,” to the tune of Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me, Babe.” (Jack knew his Bob; he sang it well.)

But the night of the performance after Jack learned he had gonorrhea—and Claudia confessed where it came from—Jack had something real to whisper in Captain Phoebus’s ear while he held the captain’s hand against his pecker. “Thanks for the clap, babe,” Jack whispered.

It was quite a good look Phoebus gave the audience every night—it usually brought the house down. Such a look of recognition—Esmeralda has a penis ! Of course the audience already knows. Jack-as-Esmeralda had earlier shown Father Frollo, thinking it would make Frollo stop hitting on him—never realizing that Frollo is such an overreactor that he’ll insist on having Esmeralda hanged!

But that memorable night Captain Phoebus held Esmeralda’s penis and Jack-as-Esmeralda thanked Phoebus for giving him the clap was a showstopper for the handsome soldier. The look he gave the audience that night interrupted the performance for a full minute or more; the audience spontaneously rose as one and gave Captain Phoebus a standing ovation.

“Maybe take a little something off the look, Phoebus,” Bruno Litkins told the actor after that performance.

Jack just gave the captain his best Esmeralda-as-a-transvestite smile. Phoebus knew Jack could kick the crap out of him if he wanted to.

In truth, Jack was grateful to Captain Phoebus for making Claudia feel guilty; Phoebus had made Jack feel a little less guilty about the fact that he and Claudia were drifting apart.

The summer following their graduation from the University of New Hampshire, Claudia and Jack finally went their separate ways. She was going the graduate-student route—an MFA theater program at one of the Big Ten universities. (Jack would make a point of forgetting which one.) It seemed sensible for them to apply to different summer-stock playhouses that summer. Claudia was at a Shakespeare festival in New Jersey. Jack did a Beauty and the Beast and a Peter Pan and Wendy at a children’s theater workshop in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

He might have been feeling nostalgic about his lost friend Noah Rosen—or Noah’s more irrevocably lost sister, Leah—but Jack fondly recalled those foreign films in the movie theaters around Harvard Square. A summer of subtitles—and audiences of children, and their young mothers—somehow suited him.

Claudia said—and if these weren’t truly her last spoken words to him, they were the last words he would remember—“What do you want to perform for children for? You don’t want any.”

Jack played the Beast to an older-woman Belle; she was also one of the founders of the children’s theater workshop, and she’d hired him. Yes, he slept with her—they had a summer-long affair, not a day longer. She was way too old to play Wendy to Jack’s Peter Pan, but she was a reasonably youthful-looking Mrs. Darling—Wendy’s mom. (Imagine Peter Pan screwing Wendy’s mother, if only for a summer.)

Jack needed to go to graduate school, to continue to be a student, or else get a real job—hence a green card—if he didn’t want to go back to Canada, and he didn’t. Emma, once again, would save him. She’d been out of Iowa for two years, living in Los Angeles and writing her first novel, which sounded like a contradiction in terms. Who went to L.A. to write a novel ? But being an outsider had always suited Emma.

She’d found a job reading scripts at one of the studios; like Jack, she was still a Canadian citizen and had only a Canadian passport, but Emma also had a green card. The script-reading job was more the result of her year as a comedy writer for New York television than it was anything she’d prepared herself to do at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She was writing her novel, which Emma said was to be her revenge on the time she’d wasted as a film major—and all the while she was, as she put it, “working for the enemy and getting paid for it.”