by John Irving
He might have said worse, had Leah died in Chile before Mrs. Stackpole was found in the Exeter River. But Leah was still in Madison, Wisconsin, though no doubt she was already in a Chile frame of mind.
In those years away at school, Jack extended the distance between his mother and himself--a process Alice had initiated when Jack was still at St. Hilda's. But what little he saw of Emma was always elevating, and their fondness for each other grew. He was too young--and too inclined to think of women as novelties--to acknowledge that he adored Emma.
Only Emma understood why, for four years at Exeter, which was a coed school, Jack never really had a girlfriend. Emma knew he liked older women; the Exeter girls were just girls. When Jack was in grade nine, when he was fourteen going on fifteen, some of the Exeter seniors, who were seventeen or eighteen, attracted him, but he was no longer a pretty little boy. He was a gawky young teenager; in his first two years at Exeter, the older teenage girls ignored him.
Naturally, Jack saw something of Emma in those years--and not only over school vacations or for parts of every summer. Upon her graduation from St. Hilda's, Emma had gone to McGill in Montreal, which Mrs. Oastler, who was a fiercely loyal Torontonian, considered an un-Toronto (or an anti-Toronto) thing to do.
Emma was quickly bored, not by McGill but with the Quebecois. She was always an excellent student, although French wasn't her favorite subject; she discovered that she liked French movies better with subtitles. It was movies themselves that Emma decided she liked.
She got into NYU, where she declared herself a film major. Her grades had been good at McGill; she was able to transfer all her credits, and she loved living in New York. When Jack began at Exeter, in the fall of 1979, Emma was starting her second year of university but her first at NYU. On her invitation, Jack traveled to New York to see her for a weekend that fall. It wasn't much of a weekend. Exeter had a half-day of classes on Saturday; getting from New Hampshire to New York City took the rest of the day, and Jack was required to be back at the academy by eight o'clock Sunday night.
Nevertheless he had a thrilling Saturday night and Sunday morning with Emma and her film-major friends. They went to an all-night cinema that was playing Billy Wilder movies. Jack wasn't that familiar with Wilder, although he'd seen Some Like It Hot in Toronto with his mother; he must have been nine or ten. When Marilyn Monroe sang "I Wanna Be Loved by You" in that sequined dress, Jack got a boner and made the mistake of showing it to his mom. (Alice's sarcasm toward her son's penis could be brutal. She didn't say, "Just like your father," but the look she gave Jack said it for her.)
In New York, the first film Emma and her friends and Jack saw was Five Graves to Cairo, but Jack would remember only the beginning: that ghost tank transporting dead soldiers through the desert. After the tank, he forgot everything that happened to Franchot Tone--largely because Emma put her hand in his lap and held his penis for the rest of the movie. It was not until years later that Jack realized Erich von Stroheim had been Rommel.
There was more penis-holding through The Lost Weekend, during which Jack got the idea that Ray Milland looked like his father--or like what he imagined his dad might look like if William were drunk.
Jack had fallen asleep on Emma's shoulder for the whole of Sunset Blvd.; then he woke up and although he had to pee, he watched every minute of Ace in the Hole. On Sunday morning, over breakfast, Emma's film-major friends said Jack should have slept through Ace in the Hole and stayed awake for Sunset Blvd.
"That's what I love about you, honey pie--don't listen to them," Emma said. Jack didn't like her friends very much, but being with Emma was worth every minute of that long trip.
He would never be a Billy Wilder fan, although Wilder was born in Vienna and Jack could see what was European about even the most American of his films. It was the European filmmakers who first interested Jack, and it was Emma Oastler who introduced him to them. Whether with Emma on weekends in New York, or with Noah on weekends in Cambridge--when they would see all the foreign films in Harvard Square--Jack became a fan of films with subtitles. With the exception of Westerns, he didn't like American movies at all.
On the subject of not being like his father, it would occur to Jack that if William had met Emma when he was a young man, he probably would have had sex with her--and from everything she'd heard about Jack's father, Emma agreed that she would have submitted to his charms.
"That's one reason you can be happy that we haven't had sex," Emma told Jack. As to how she felt about not having sex with Jack, Emma didn't say.
Every winter term at Exeter, Jack's weekends were taken up by wrestling. Emma would often rent a car and come to see his matches; she herself had stopped wrestling and was once again struggling with her weight. Emma was a binge eater, but she was a binge weightlifter, too. She would take up smoking, quit smoking, start overeating, stop, and then go kill herself in the gym. When the cycle began again, Emma seemed powerless to interrupt its predictable course.
What she needed was Chenko, her favorite workout partner, but Chenko was not only far away in Toronto--he was waiting for a hip replacement. Boris had gone back to Belarus. "A family matter," was all Pavel, who had moved to Vancouver, would say. He'd married a woman from British Columbia--someone he met in his cab.
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 stepsister; 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 McCarth
y 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 Zampano, 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"!
After that, when Jack realized how hard the academic workload was for him, he pretended to be disdainful of what the Dramat chose for its plays. For the most part, this wasn't hard; many of the choices reflected the taste of the dated hippie who was the dramatic association's faculty adviser. More to the point, Jack was saving himself for the occasional Shakespeare, which not even amateurs could seriously harm.
His fellow thespians in the Dramat had resented his female impersonation of Linda in Death of a Salesman. They tried to force male roles on him, urging him to audition for Mister Roberts--as if the movie hadn't been bad enough. Talk about dated! Jack evoked Wendy Holton. "I'd rather die," he said.
This was excellent for his reputation as an actor--playing hard-to-get worked. (And what was the risk?)
He decided to surprise everyone by volunteering for a small role in The Teahouse of the August Moon. Jack knew that the part of Lotus Blossom, a geisha girl, would cement his hold on any future female role he wanted. The part he really desired was in the spring play his penultimate year at the academy. Jack was Lady Macbeth, of course--and just who was going to give him shit about it? Another wrestler? (One senior girl in the Dramat rationalized that the part called for a "domineering" woman--hence a more "masculine" choice might work.)
When the Dramat at last thought they had him figured out--Burns likes Shakespeare, Burns wants to do everything in drag--he surprised them one more time. Jack auditioned for Richard III, but only if he could be Richard. Let them fart around with Our Town till the cows come home, Jack thought. He wanted that football, his choice for a humpback, behind his neck.
It was the winter of Jack's senior year--wrestling season, when he was especially gaunt. He would show them a "winter of discontent" like they'd never seen; he would offer his "kingdom for a horse" and make them believe it, which he did.
Jack's tears now fell on Molly's hand, in the mushrooms; his tears fell on the broccoli and on the sliced cucumbers, too. A radish rolled off his plate. He didn't even try to catch it.
Molly led him to one of the cafeteria tables. Other students made room for them. "Tell me everything," Molly said, clutching his hand. Her eyes were a diluted, washed-out blue; one of the freckles on her throat looked infected.
"I didn't ask to be born good-looking," Jack told her. "My sister wasn't so lucky--my older sister," he added, as if Emma's advanced age were a telltale indication that she would never have a boyfriend. (In truth, Emma fooled around a lot--mostly with boys who were Jack's age, or younger. She claimed that she didn't have sex with them--"not exactly.")
"Your sister doesn't look like you?" Molly asked Jack.
"McCarthy says my sister is ugly," he told her. "Naturally, I don't see her that way--I love her!"
"Of course you do!" Molly cried, clutching his hand harder.
She was not only not pretty; at sixteen, Molly was probably as appealing as she would ever be. She'd never liked looking in a mirror--and she would like it less and less as she grew older, Jack imagined. That her boyfriend had called another girl ugly must have hit too close to home.
Jack had cried enough; the overacting had left his salad a little wet. Anothe
r close-up came to mind, that of the slightly quivering but stiff upper lip. "I'm sorry I brought this up," he said. "There's nothing anyone can do about it. I won't bother you again."
"No!" she said, grabbing his wrist as he tried to take his tray and go. A raw carrot fell off his plate; a little iced tea spilled from his glass. Jack drank so much iced tea in the wrestling season, he was bouncing off the walls. His fingers always trembled, as if he were riding on a speeding train.
"I better go, Molly," Jack said; he left her without looking back. He knew that she and Ed McCarthy were finished. (He also knew that Ed would be having his lunch soon.)
Jack wandered back over to the salad bar; he was basically starving. The prettiest girl in the school was there--Michele Maher, a fellow senior. She was a slim honey-blonde with a model's glowing skin and--in McCarthy's crude appraisal--"a couple of high, hard ones."
Michele was over five-ten--she had two inches on Jack. She was in the Dramat. Jack had beaten her out for Lady Macbeth, but she'd been a good sport about it--one of the few who had. Despite her good looks, everyone liked her; she was smart, but she was also nice to people. She'd done the early-acceptance thing at Columbia, because she was from New York and wanted to be back in the city; so, unlike most of the seniors, she wasn't thinking about where she might end up in college--she already knew.
"Jack Burns, looking lean and mean," Michele said.
"That's me," he told her. "I'm a starving heart of darkness."
"Where's your hump, Dick?" she asked. It was a Richard III joke--everyone in the Dramat kept asking him.
"It's in the costume closet, and it's just a football," Jack said, for maybe the hundredth time.
"Why don't you have a girlfriend, Jack?" Michele asked. She was just kidding around, or so he thought.
"Because I get the feeling you're not available," Jack told her.
It was just a line. Jack was still acting--he didn't mean it. He saw at once he'd made a mistake, but he couldn't think fast enough to correct it. All that iced tea on an empty stomach was giving him a buzz.
Michele Maher lowered her eyes, as if the salad bar had consumed her interest. Her posture, which was generally excellent, crumpled; for a moment, Jack was almost as tall as she was.