by John Irving
Furthermore, Emma had envisioned a heroic character--one capable of touchingly unselfish gestures--notwithstanding that Emma was generally too cynical to be heroic herself. The main character of The Slush-Pile Reader, the eponymous reader, is not a cynic. On the contrary, Michele Maher (of all names!) is a pure-hearted optimist with an indestructibly sunny disposition. Michele Maher--that is, Emma's character--is such a good girl that her purity survives her most degrading experiences, and she has a few.
Unlike Emma, Michele is a preternaturally thin young woman who has to force herself to eat. She haunts gyms and health-food stores, gagging on protein powder and popping all the dietary supplements that bodybuilders use, but she never manages to put on a pound. Despite all her weightlifting, she looks like a wire. Michele Maher has the body and metabolism of a twelve-year-old boy.
Also unlike Emma, Michele is conscience-stricken by the bad scripts she reads. The worst, most self-deluded screenwriters break her heart. Michele wants to help them be better writers; to that futile end, she writes them encouraging letters on the studio letterhead. These letters are very different in content and tone from the notes Michele submits to the studio execs; in those notes, she is critical in the extreme. In short, Michele does her job well: she tells her bosses all the reasons why they shouldn't waste their time reading this crap.
But to the rock-bottom writers themselves, Michele Maher is an angel of hope; she always finds something positive to say about their most abhorrent excrescences. In the first chapter of The Slush-Pile Reader, Michele writes a warm, enthusiastic letter to a heavily tattooed bodybuilder and porn star named Miguel Santiago. His porn name is Jimmy.
In his pathetic screenplay, which is the story of his life, Santiago describes himself as a porn star who hates his work. The only way Santiago can have sex on command is to imagine he is a young James Stewart falling in love with Margaret Sullavan in The Shopworn Angel, or submitting to the sentimental bliss of domestic life with Donna Reed in It's a Wonderful Life. Santiago manages to stay the course through such epics as Bored Housewives 4 and Keep It Up, Inc., by imagining he is the one and only Jimmy Stewart in these black-and-white soap-opera masterpieces.
There's no story: we see Miguel Santiago lifting weights and getting tattooed, we see him memorizing lines from The Shopworn Angel and It's a Wonderful Life, and of course we see him performing as the other Jimmy. In her notes to the studio execs, Michele Maher states that such a film is "not makable"--easily a third of it would be a porn movie! But in her letter to Miguel Santiago, Michele calls his screenplay "a bittersweet memoir." And her letter takes a personal turn: she asks Miguel where he works out.
Santiago, of course, imagines that Michele Maher is a studio exec--not a slush-pile reader. Little does he know that she goes to the video store and rents all four of the Bored Housewives movies. In one of her more self-degrading moments, Michele masturbates to Keep It Up, Inc.; sexually repressed, she goes to the gym where Miguel Santiago (alias Jimmy) trains, just to watch him work out. In this respect, Michele Maher is like Emma: she has a thing for bodybuilder-types. But unlike Emma, Michele doesn't usually act on her cravings. And what bodybuilder would ever hit on Michele? She's built like a pencil.
What makes The Slush-Pile Reader moving is that Miguel Santiago is a dim-witted but genuinely nice guy. When Michele Maher gets up the nerve to introduce herself to him, she confesses she's no exec--she's just a first reader who felt sorry for him. They begin a relationship that one reviewer of The Slush-Pile Reader would call "L.A. dysfunctional"--this was in praise of the novel, which generally got terrific reviews. "More noir than noir," said The New York Times.
Miguel and Michele end up living together--"within breathing distance of a sushi Dumpster in Venice." (Jack knew where that came from.) They don't have sex. His schlong is too big for Michele--it hurts. She just holds it. (Jack knew where that came from, too--if not the "too big" part.)
Over time, out of his growing and abiding love for her, Miguel introduces Michele to other bodybuilders he knows at the gym; he's seen them in the shower, so he knows who's got the small schlongs. Michele sleeps with them. "A muted pleasure," as she puts it to Miguel. Holding his porn-movie penis with mixed emotions, she tells him she's happy.
As for Miguel Santiago--a.k.a. Jimmy, the penile phenomenon--he gets all the sex he wants or needs at his day job, which he stoically endures. He accepts his relationship with Michele for what it is. Michele sleeps with the occasional small schlong, but she always goes home to Miguel and they lie in bed together, she holding his huge, unacceptable penis--the two of them not saying anything--while they watch Waterloo Bridge on the VCR, the 1940 remake with Vivien Leigh and Robert Taylor. It's Miguel's kind of movie, a real tearjerker.
At the end of Emma's novel, Michele Maher and Miguel Santiago are still living together. Michele doesn't write letters of encouragement to bad screenwriters anymore; she restricts her comments to the notes she gives the studio execs, who never read the screenplays she reads. The worst scripts still break her heart, but she doesn't talk about her day when she comes home to Miguel; naturally, he doesn't talk about his. They consume some protein powder and dietary supplements, and they go to the gym. He says he likes it when she sleeps in a World Gym tank top--her small, almost nonexistent breasts are easy to touch under the angry gorilla holding the bending barbell.
"There are worse relationships in L.A.," Emma writes; it was a line quoted in a lot of her reviews, and a pretty good setup to the novel's last sentence: "If you or your partner is in a bad movie, or in any number of bad movies--even if you're perpetually in the act of rewriting the same bad movie--there are worse things to be ashamed of."
Jack liked the novel's first sentence better: "Either there are no coincidences in this town, or everything in this town is a coincidence."
Take the message on the answering machine from Myra Ascheim, for example. Jack didn't know that Emma already knew who Mildred Ascheim was, not to mention that Emma had been watching porn films day and night--"research" for The Slush-Pile Reader, she later called it--and this was before he happened to meet Hank Long on the set of Muffy the Vampire Hooker 3 and Jack and Emma started watching Hank Long movies together.
Jack told Emma that he couldn't read about Miguel Santiago without seeing Hank Long in the part, but Emma objected to his premature conclusion that her novel would one day be a film. "Spare me the movie talk, baby cakes," was how she put it. "You're getting ahead of yourself."
Jack first read The Slush-Pile Reader while the manuscript was still making the rounds of New York literary agents; Emma had decided she was more American than Canadian and she wanted to sell the U.S. rights before she even showed the novel to a Toronto publisher--notwithstanding that Charlotte Breasts-with-Bones-in-Them Barford, her old pal from St. Hilda's, was a young up-and-comer in Canadian publishing.
"Did you have to call her Michele Maher?" Jack asked Emma. "I adored Michele Maher, I worshiped her. I will always worship her. You never even met her, Emma."
"You kept her away from me, Jack. Besides, Michele is a very positive character--in the book, I mean."
"Michele is a very positive character in real life!" Jack protested. "You've given her the body of a twelve-year-old boy! You've made her this pathetic creature who's enslaved to bodybuilders!"
"It's just a name," Emma said. "You're overreacting."
Naturally, Jack was sensitive about the small-schlong business, too--that part about sleeping with a guy with a small penis being "a muted pleasure."
"It's a novel, honey pie--a work of fiction. Don't you know how to read a novel?"
"You've been holding my penis for years, Emma. I didn't know you were making a size assessment."
"It's a novel," Emma repeated. "You're taking it too personally. You've missed the point about penises, Jack."
"What point is that?"
"When they're too big, it hurts, baby cakes. I mean, it hurts if the woman is too small."
Jack thought
about it; he hadn't known that a woman could be too small. (Too big, maybe, but not too small.) Did Emma mean that "a muted pleasure" was preferable to pain? Was that the point? Then he saw that Emma was crying. "I liked the novel," he told her. "I didn't mean that I didn't like it."
"You don't get it," Emma said.
Jack thought she was talking about The Slush-Pile Reader, which he believed he'd understood fairly well. "I get it, Emma," he said. "It may not be exactly my cup of tea--I mean it's hardly an old-fashioned novel with a complicated plot and a complex cast of characters. It may be a little contemporary for my taste--a psychological study of a relationship more than a narrative, and a dysfunctional relationship at that. But I liked it--I really did. I thought the tone of voice was consistent--a kind of sarcastic understatement, I guess you'd call it. There was a deadpan voice in the more emotional scenes, which I particularly liked. And the relationship, imperfect though it is, is better than no relationship. I get that. They don't have sex, they can't have sex, but--for different reasons--not having sex is almost a relief for them."
"Oh, shut the fuck up!" Emma said; she was still crying.
"What don't I get?" he asked.
"It's not the novel you don't get--it's me!" she cried. "I'm too small, Jack," Emma said softly. "Even not-very-big guys hurt me."
Jack was completely surprised. Emma was such a big girl, such a strong young woman, and she was always battling her weight; she was much taller and heavier than Jack. How was it possible that she was too small? "Have you seen a doctor?" he asked.
"A gynecologist--yes, several. They say I'm not too small. It's all in my mind, apparently."
"The pain is in your mind?" he asked her.
"No, that's not where the pain is," she said.
Emma's condition had an uncomfortable-sounding name. Vaginismus, Emma explained, was a conditioned response; often a spasm of the perineal muscles occurred if there was any stimulation of the area. In some women, even the anticipation of vaginal insertion could result in muscle spasm.
"You want to avoid penetration?" Jack asked Emma.
"It's involuntary, honey pie. I can't help it--it's chronic."
"There's no treatment?"
Emma laughed. She'd tried hypnosis--an attempt to retrain the muscles to relax instead of involuntarily contracting. But even the psychiatrist had forewarned her that this worked with only a small percentage of sufferers, and it hadn't worked with Emma.
On the advice of a Toronto gynecologist, Emma had experimented with a treatment known as systematic desensitization--or the Q-tip method, as her Los Angeles gynecologist disparagingly called it. By inserting something as narrow as a Q-tip--and when this was accomplished, progressively inserting slightly larger objects--
"Stop," Jack told her; he didn't want to know all the treatments she'd tried. "Has anything worked?" he asked Emma.
The only thing that worked (and this didn't work every time) was the absolute cooperation of a partner. "I have to be on top, baby cakes, and the guy can't move at all. If he makes even one move, I get a spasm." Emma had to be in complete control. All the moves were her moves; only that worked. It went without saying that such a willing partner was hard to find.
Jack was thinking many things, most of them unutterable. How Emma's attraction to bodybuilders wasn't the best idea; how her longstanding interest in boys much younger than herself made more sense. And he remembered how adamant Emma was about not having children. No doubt the vaginismus was a reason--a more compelling one than fearing she'd be a bad mother, or like her mother.
It would have been insensitive to ask her if she'd inquired about a surgical solution to her problem. Emma felt squeamish in a doctor's office; she dreaded everything medical, most of all surgery. Besides, it didn't sound as if there was a surgical solution to vaginismus--not if it was all in her mind.
Jack didn't have the heart to tell Emma that she should consider revising The Slush-Pile Reader. He thought that the vaginismus would make a better story than all the small-schlong, big-schlong business--not to mention the unlikelihood of the Michele Maher character having a vagina that was too small. But he understood that Emma's fiction was a purer choice--a fable of acceptance, and as close as Emma could allow herself to approach her problem. A life in the top position; a lifetime looking for the unmoving partner. It seemed too cruel. Or would this method eventually train her perineal muscles to relax?
"What causes vaginismus?" Jack asked, but Emma might not have heard him, or she was distracted. Maybe she didn't know what caused it--maybe nothing did--or else she didn't want to discuss it further.
They took off their clothes and went to bed. Emma held his penis. Jack got very hard--unusually hard, it seemed to him--but all Emma said was, "You're not really all that small, Jack. Smallish, I would say. If I were you, honey pie, I wouldn't worry about it."
Emma didn't exactly say she'd seen smaller--he'd only heard her say she'd seen bigger--but Jack didn't press her. It was enough that she held his penis. He was awfully fond of the way she held it.
"We should move," Emma said sleepily.
"Maybe roommates aren't the best readers," Jack ventured to say, touching her breasts.
"I didn't mean we should stop living together, Jack. I meant I'm sick of Venice."
That struck Jack as too bad, but he didn't say anything. He would miss Venice--even l'eau de Dumpster from Hama Sushi. He had grown fond of World Gym, and--despite Emma's bad experience--he occasionally went to Gold's, though Jack Burns was no bodybuilder; in both gyms, when he wanted to use the free weights, he did his lifting at the women's end of the weight room.
"You're going to be a strong boy, Jack--not very big, but strong," Leslie Oastler had told him.
"Do you think so?" he'd asked her.
"I know so," Mrs. Oastler had said. "I can tell."
Jack lay there remembering that, with his smallish penis as hard as a diamond in Emma's big, strong hand. Jack had small hands, like his mother. He lay there thinking how strange it was that he hadn't thought of his mom in months. Maybe Jack didn't like to think of her because he believed he more and more reminded her of his father; and while it wasn't his physical resemblance to his dad that bothered Jack, surely any resemblance he bore to William would have been upsetting to Alice. Jack just got the feeling that his mother didn't like him.
Jack was also wondering where he and Emma might move. He'd once mentioned the Palisades to Emma. It was like a village; you could walk everywhere. But Emma said the Palisades was "swarming with children"--it was, in her view, "a place where formerly sane people went to breed." Jack guessed that they wouldn't be moving there.
Clearly Beverly Hills was too expensive for them; besides, it was too far away from the beach. Emma said she liked to see the ocean every day--not that she ever set foot on the beach. Malibu maybe, Jack was thinking, or Santa Monica. But given Emma's revelation that sex hurt her--quite possibly, it hurt her most of the time--it would have been insensitive of Jack to pursue a conversation about where they might move. Save it for another time, he thought.
"Say it in Latin for me," he said to Emma.
She knew what he meant--it was the epigraph she'd set at the beginning of her novel. She went around saying it like a litany, but until now Jack had not realized she meant them.
"Nihil facimus sed id bene facimus," Emma whispered, holding his penis like no one before or since.
"We do nothing but we do it well," Jack said in English, holding her breasts.
It was the fall of 1988. Rain Man would be the year's top-grossing film and would clean up at the Academy Awards. Jack's favorite film that year was A Fish Called Wanda. He would have killed to have had Kevin Kline's part, for which Kline would win an Oscar for Best Actor in a Supporting Role.
Jack Burns was twenty-three. Emma Oastler was thirty. Boy, were their lives about to change!
Jack met Myra Ascheim at a breakfast place on Montana, shortly after he and Emma had moved to a rental in Santa Monica. Emm
a, who bought all Jack's clothes, dressed him for his meeting. A coffee-colored, long-sleeved shirt--untucked, with the top two buttons unbuttoned--medium-tan chinos, and the dark-brown loafers he wore as a waiter. His hair was a little long, with more gel in it than usual, and he hadn't shaved for two days--all of which was entirely Emma's decision. She said he was "almost feminine" when he was clean-shaven, but three days' growth made him "too Toshiro Mifune." The shirt was linen. Emma liked the wrinkles.
Jack was reminded of Mrs. Oastler buying his clothes for Redding--later, for Exeter--and he commented to Emma that he felt remiss for never thanking her mother. Emma was spreading the gel through his hair with her hands, a little roughly. "And she paid my tuition at both schools," Jack added. "Your mom must think I'm ungrateful."
"Please don't thank her, honey pie."
"Why not?" he asked.
"Just don't," Emma said, yanking his hair.
It was evident that no one had dressed Myra Ascheim as attentively as Leslie Oastler and Emma had dressed Jack. He first mistook Myra for a homeless person who'd wandered east on Montana from that narrow strip of park on the Pacific side of Ocean Avenue. She was smoking a cigarette on the sidewalk in front of the Marmalade Cafe--a woman in her late sixties, maybe seventy, wearing dirty running shoes, baggy gray sweatpants, and a faded-pink, unlaundered sweatshirt. With her lank, dirty-white hair--in a ponytail that protruded from an Anaheim Angels baseball cap, from which the halo had fallen off the letter A--Myra bore no resemblance to her younger and far more stylish sister, Mildred.
She even toted an overstuffed shopping bag, in which she carried an old raincoat. Jack walked right by her. It wasn't until Myra spoke to him that he recognized her, and then it was only because she had Milly's porn-producer voice. "You should lose the stubble," she said, "and go easy on the gel in your hair. You look like you've been sleeping under a car."
"Ms. Ascheim?" he asked.
"What a bright boy you are, Jack Burns. And don't listen to Lawrence--you're not too pretty."