Until I Find You

by John Irving

  Hey, it was just a line, he almost said--he should have said. But Michele was faster. "I had no idea you were interested in me, Jack. I didn't think you were interested in anyone."

  The problem was, Jack liked her; he didn't want to hurt her feelings. And the truth is, if he'd told Michele Maher he was banging Mrs. Stackpole, Michele wouldn't have believed him. Mrs. Stackpole was so ugly, to use McCarthy's word--so unfortunate-looking in the world of women, even in the world of much older women--that the dishwasher herself had expressed disbelief that Jack Burns was banging her.

  "Why me?" Mrs. Stackpole had asked him once, with all her weight crushing the breath out of him. He couldn't speak, not that he knew the answer. There was an urgency about Mrs. Stackpole's need to be with him; boys like Jack Burns had never even looked at her. How could Jack have been forthcoming about that to a beauty like Michele Maher?

  "How can anyone not be interested in you, Michele?" Jack asked.

  Maybe if he'd made that his end line, and walked away, it would have been all right. But he was too hungry to take a step away from the salad bar. When someone grabbed him, Jack first thought it was Michele. He hoped it was Michele.

  "What the fuck did you say to Molly, asshole?" McCarthy asked him.

  "Just the truth," Jack replied. "You said my sister is ugly--isn't that what you said?"

  Jack hadn't meant to make Michele Maher fall for him, but she was standing next to him. And what could Ed McCarthy do? Jack was a Redding boy. McCarthy knew that Jack could take a beating. And what would Coach Hudson do to McCarthy if he hurt Jack, and one of the Exeter wrestling team's best lightweights missed several matches at the end of the season?

  Also, Herman Castro would have kicked the crap out of Ed McCarthy if McCarthy had laid a hand on Jack. Jack had made a friend for life of Herman Castro, just by standing up for ugliness.

  "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, to
o, 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.

  But, no, Jack was such a fool, he proposed masturbating with Michele Maher--this instead of having sex with her! "It's the safest sex there is," Jack told her, while a bloody Indian war raged around them--the Apaches were whooping and dying. John Wayne was fighting for his life while Jack was committing suicide with Michele Maher. "You know, we take our clothes off, but I just touch myself, and you touch yourself," he went on, digging his grave. "We keep looking at each other, we kiss--we just imagine it, the way actors do."

  The tears in Michele Maher's eyes would have broken hearts on the big screen; she was a girl who could withstand the tightest close-up. "Oh, Jack," she said. "All this time, I've defended you. When people say, 'Jack Burns is just too weird,' I always say, 'No, he isn't!' "

  "Michele--" Jack started to say, but he could see it in her eyes. He had watched her fall for him; now he saw how irreversibly he'd lost her. The John Wayne Western on the TV was wreathed with a funereal dust--fallen horses, dead Apaches.

  Jack left Michele Maher alone in her bedroom; he was sensitive enough to know that she wanted to be alone. The beautiful dog stayed with her. In his guest bedroom, with its fine-art bathroom, Jack was alone with the knee-high Picasso and his own TV. He watched The Quiet Man by himself.

  John Wayne is an Irish-American prizefighter who gives up boxing when he unintentionally kills an opponent in the ring. He goes to Ireland and falls in love with Maureen O'Hara and her hooters (again). But Maureen's brother (Victor McLaglen) is an asshole; in what is arguably the longest and least believable fistfight in Ireland's history, Wayne has to put up his dukes again.

  In the throes of Jack's self-pity, he concluded that Victor McLaglen would have kicked the crap out of John Wayne. (McLaglen was a pro; he fought Jack Johnson, and gave Johnson all he could handle. Wayne wouldn't have lasted a round with McLaglen.)

  It was a long, largely silent trip back to Exeter with Michele Maher. Jack made matters worse between them by professing that he loved her; he declared that he'd only suggested mutual masturbation as an indication of his respect for her.

  "I'll tell you what's weird about you, Jack--" Michele started to say, but she burst into tears and didn't tell him. He was left to finish her thought in his imagination. For almost twenty years, Jack Burns would wish he could have that weekend back.

  "If I had to guess," Noah Rosen ventured, "it didn't work out between you and Michele because you couldn't stop looking at each other."

  Jack was only a week or two away from telling Noah about Mrs. Stackpole, which led Noah to tell his sister--and that would be the end of Jack's friendship with Noah. A painful loss--at the time, more devastating to Jack than losing Michele Maher. But Noah would fade; Michele would persist.

  Michele did nothing wrong. She was Jack's age, seventeen going on eighteen, but she had the self-restraint and dignity not to tell her closest friends that Jack was a creep--or even that he was as weird as some of them thought he was. In truth, she went on defending him from the weirdness charge. Herman Castro later told Jack that Michele always spoke well of him, even after they'd "broken up." Herman said: "When I think of the two of you together--well, I just can't imagine it. You both must have felt you were models in a magazine or something."

  Herman Castro would go on to Harvard and Harvard Medical School. He became a doctor of infectious diseases and went back to El Paso, where he treated mostly AIDS patients. He married a very attractive Mexican-American woman, and they had a bunch of kids. From Herman's Christmas cards, Jack would be relieved to see that the children took after her. Herman, as much as Jack loved him, was always hard to look at. He was slope-shouldered and jug-shaped, with a flattened nose and a protruding forehead; above his small, black, close-together eyes, his forehead bulged like a baked potato.

  Herman Castro was the wrestling team's photographer. In those days, heavyweights always wrestled last; Herman took pictures of his teammates wrestling even when he was warming up. Jack used to think that Herman liked to hide his face from view. Maybe the camera was his shield.

  "Hey, amigo," the note on Herman Castro's Christmas card traditionally said, "when I think of your love life--well, I just can't imagine it."

  Little did Herman know. Over time, Jack Burns would believe that he lost the love of his life on the night he lost Michele Maher. It would be small consolation to him to imagine that his father, at Jack's age, would have fucked her--clap or no clap.

  And he didn't have the clap! Jack had himself checked at the infirmary when he got back from New York. The doctor said it was just some irritation, possibly caused by the change in his diet since the end of the wrestling season.

  "It's not gonorrhea?" Jack asked in disbelief.

  "It's nothing, Jack."

  After all, he'd been screwing a one-hundred-seventy-pound dishwasher for months on end--sometimes as often as four or five times a week. No doubt there was sufficient irritation to make Jack piss sideways at a knee-high Picasso--not to mention ruin his chances with "la belle Michele," as Noah Rosen called Michele Maher.

  Michele and Jack were in only one class together--fourth-year German. Many of the students who took German at the academy imagined that they might become doctors. German was said to be a good second language for the study of medicine. Jack had no such hope--he wasn't strong in the sciences. What he liked about German was the word order--the verbs all lay in wait till the end of the sentence. Talk about end lines! In a German sentence, all the action happened at the end. German was an actor's language.

  Jack liked Goethe, but he loved Rilke, and in German IV, he loved most of all Shakespeare in German, particularly the love sonnets, which the teacher, Herr Richter, claimed were better auf Deutsch than they were in English.

  Michele Maher, bless her heart, disagreed. "Surely, Herr Richter, you would not argue that 'Lascivious grace, in whom all ill well shows,' is improved by 'Mutwillige Anmut, reizend noch im Schlimmen'!"

  "Ah, but Michele," Herr Richter intoned, "surely you would agree that 'Sonst pruft die kluge Welt der Tranen Sinn, Und hohnt dich um mich, wenn ich nicht mehr bin' is a considerable improvement on the original. Would you say it for us in English, Jack? You say it so well."

  " 'Lest the wise world should look into your moan,' " Jack recited to Michele Maher, " 'And mock you with me after I am gone.' "

  "You see?" Herr Richter asked the class. "It's a sizable stretch to make gone rhyme with moan, isn't it? Whereas bin with Sinn--well, I rest my case."

  Jack could not look at Michele, nor she at him. To imagine that his last words to her might be the sizable stretch of trying to make gone rhyme with moan--it was too cruel.

  In their last class together
, Michele handed Jack a note. "Read it later, please," was all she said.

  It was something by Goethe. Michele liked Goethe better than Jack did. "Behandelt die Frauen mit Nachsicht." He knew the line. "Be lenient when handling womankind."

  If he'd had the courage to give Michele a note, Jack would have chosen Rilke. "Sie lachelte einmal. Es tat fast weh." But Michele Maher would have said it was too prosaic. "She smiled once. It was almost painful."

  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.