by John Irving
"So what do you weigh this morning?" Jack asked Emma.
"Two hundred and fucking five!" Emma wailed--loudly enough for the journalist to hear her.
"You have to go on a diet, Emma," he told her, for what had to be the hundredth time.
Jack Burns was thirty-two in 1997--Emma was thirty-nine. He had a better metabolism than she had, and he'd always watched what he ate. But now that Jack was in his thirties, even he had to be more strict with his diet.
Emma didn't understand dieting. Her one bottle of red wine a night had become two; she had pasta for lunch. Here she was, pushing forty, and her favorite food was still gorgonzola mashed potatoes. Jack kept telling her: she could spend all day on the ab machine at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills--she could be bench-pressing her own weight--and not work off those kinds of carbs.
Jack could see that the journalist from the Hollywood Foreign Press was writing everything down--including, as he would later read in her interview, the "two hundred and fucking five." She even spelled Maria Antonietta Beluzzi correctly; naturally, it turned out that the journalist was Italian.
"Emma--" Jack started to say.
"He calls her Emma and brutally tells her to go on a diet," the lady from the Hollywood Foreign Press would write.
"Fuck you and your diet, Jack," Emma said sharply on the phone. "I want you to know I've taken good care of you in my will." Then she hung up.
"Your-a girlfriend?" his interviewer asked. "I mean-a one of them."
"Kind of," Jack replied.
"Ees Ms. Beluzzi an actress?"
"She's a voluptuous tobacconist," he said. Although the journalist didn't write this down, voluptuous would somehow make it into her interview--but in reference to Emma.
"I suppose-za you have, or have-a had, many girlfriends," Jack's interviewer said.
"Nobody serious," he said, for what had to be the hundredth time--with apologies to Michele Maher.
Jack was tired. He'd had too many interviews, with too many prying and insinuating journalists. But that was no excuse. He shouldn't have lost control of this interview. He shouldn't have so recklessly, even deliberately, allowed this lady from the Hollywood Foreign Press to imagine anything she might want to imagine--but he did.
Of course it wasn't the interview that would bother him; such things aren't truly damaging, not for long. But that Emma's last words to Jack were about her will--well, that would hurt him forever.
By the time the interview was published, Emma would be dead--and the Italian journalist from the Hollywood Foreign Press had figured out that he couldn't have been having a relationship with Maria Antonietta Beluzzi, the big-breasted tobacconist in Fellini's Amarcord. (Ms. Beluzzi would be old enough to be Jack's grandmother!)
It had to have been Emma Oastler Jack was talking to, the journalist wrote--he and Emma, who were "just roommates," were known to be living together--and anyone who'd seen the famous author recently knew at a glance she was overweight, if not that she weighed as much as two hundred and five pounds. (In this context, Jack's use of the word voluptuous appeared to mock Emma for becoming so fat.)
Besides, the Italian lady concluded, Emma was said to have been depressed that her third novel--after many years, it was still only a work-in-progress--was growing too long.
"How long is it?" all the journalists would ask Jack, after Emma's death. But by then he had learned, the hard way, to be more careful with the press.
That trip to New York, Jack was staying at The Mark. He had registered in the name of Billy Rainbow--the character he played in the soon-to-be-released film he was promoting at the press junket. He usually registered in hotels in the name of the character he was playing in his most recent, not-yet-released movie. That way, the Jack Burns fans couldn't find him.
They weren't all exactly fans. Some of the "chicks with dicks" had taken offense that Jack repeatedly denied he was a transsexual or a transvestite. In almost every interview, Jack said he was a cross-dresser only occasionally--and only in the movies. Real transsexuals and transvestites were offended; they said that Jack was "merely acting." Well--of course he was!
So Jack was registered at The Mark as Billy Rainbow; the front desk screened all his calls. Jack always told his mom where he was staying--and who he was, this time--and of course Emma knew, and his agent, Bob Bookman, and his lawyer, Alan Hergott. And the publicist for whichever studio was making his most recent movie, in this case Erica Steinberg from Miramax. Naturally, Harvey Weinstein knew, too. If you were making a Miramax movie, Harvey knew where you were staying and under what name.
At the time, Jack was sleeping with the well-known cellist Mimi Lederer, so she knew where he was staying, too. In fact, he was in bed with her--asleep at The Mark--when Emma died.
That night, after dinner, Mimi had brought her cello back to his hotel room; she'd played two solos naked for him. It had been awkward at dinner, because Mimi wouldn't check her cello. The big instrument, in its case, occupied a third chair at their table; Mimi would look at it from time to time, as if she expected the cello to say something.
Jack didn't tell Mimi that he'd met another cellist when he was a little boy--Hannele, a music student at Sibelius Academy and one (of two) of his father's girlfriends in Helsinki. Hannele had shared a tattoo with her friend Ritva. Hannele got the vertical left side of a heart torn in two; it was tattooed on her heart-side breast. And Hannele's armpits were unshaven--Jack would always remember that.
When Mimi Lederer was playing for Jack in his hotel room at The Mark, it made him shudder to remember how Hannele had sat for her tattoo--like Mimi, maybe like all female cellists, with her legs spread apart. That was when Jack wondered if Hannele had ever played naked for his dad, which again caused him to wonder if he was like William. (The way William was with women, especially.)
Jack would remember what Mimi Lederer played for him that night at The Mark, when Emma was still alive--a cello solo, part of something from a Mozart trio. (Jack had made a point of learning as little as he could about classical music because it reminded him of organ music, or church music, which reminded him of his derelict dad.)
"Divertimento--E Flat Major," Mimi Lederer whispered to him, before she began to play. Like Hannele, maybe like all female cellists, Mimi was tall with long arms and small breasts. Naturally, Jack wondered if your breasts got in the way when you were playing a cello.
The second piece Mimi played naked for him was part of something from a Beethoven string quartet. "Razumovsky Opus Fifty-Nine," Mimi murmured to him, "Number One." Just the names of pieces of classical music made Jack's teeth ache. Why couldn't composers think of better titles? But it was wonderful to witness Mimi Lederer's control of that big instrument she so confidently straddled.
They were still asleep when the phone rang. It was way too early in the morning for it to be Emma--that was Jack's first thought. Toronto, like New York, was on Eastern time; that was the second idea to pop into his head. He saw it was a little after six in the morning--too early for it to be his mother, either, or so Jack thought.
Erica Steinberg was both too nice and too tactful to call him this early in the morning, and Erica knew that Jack was sleeping with Mimi Lederer--Erica knew everything. Jack thought maybe it was Harvey Weinstein on the phone. He would call you when he wanted to; he'd called Jack early in the morning before. Maybe Jack had said something in one of his interviews that he shouldn't have said.
Mimi Lederer and Jack had to get up early, anyway--although not quite this early. Jack had another day to go on the press junket, and Mimi was teaching a class at Juilliard; then she had to catch a plane. Mimi was a member of some trio or quartet; they had a concert in Minneapolis, or maybe it was Cleveland. Jack didn't remember.
"It must be room service," Mimi said. "It's probably about your breakfast order. I told you last night, Jack--you should order a normal breakfast."
Mimi had made an issue of Jack's breakfast order--his "breakfast manifesto," she'd called it. The room-ser
vice staff at The Mark (as in most New York hotels) was struggling with English as a second language. Jack should have just checked what he wanted for breakfast, Mimi had said; he should not have written a "thesis" on the little card they hung on the door.
But you have to be specific about a soft-boiled egg, Jack had argued--and how complicated is it to understand "nonfat yogurt or no yogurt"?
"It's Harvey Weinstein," Jack told Mimi, finally picking up the telephone. "Yes?" he said into the mouthpiece.
"It's your mother, Mr. Rainbow," the young man at the front desk said.
In the movie, Billy Rainbow doesn't have a mother, but Jack said, "Please put her through." Where is she? he was wondering. (According to Mimi Lederer, he was still half asleep.)
There'd been a tattoo convention in Santa Rosa. Had his mom come to see him in Los Angeles on her way to it, or on her way home from it? She'd been on her way home, Jack dimly recalled--she'd told him all about the convention.
It had been at the Flamingo Hotel, or maybe it was the Pink Flamingo. She'd said something about a blues band--possibly the Wine Drinkin' Roosters. She'd told Jack everything about everyone who was there.
By his mother's own admission, it had been a three-day party; tattoo artists party like underage drinkers. Alice was a wreck on her way back from Santa Rosa. How could Jack have forgotten her telling him about Captain Don's sword-swallowing act? Or Suzy Ming, the contortionist, writhing her way into indelible memory--if not exactly art. (So his mom wasn't calling from Santa Rosa.)
Paris, perhaps--that would explain the earliness of her call. It was the middle of the day in Paris; maybe Alice had miscalculated the time difference. But hadn't she come home from Paris, too?
Yes, Jack remembered--she had. She told him she'd met up with Uncle Pauly and Little Vinnie Myers, among other tattoo artists. It hadn't been a convention, not exactly; it had been about planning a Mondial du Tatouage in Paris. The whole thing had probably been Tin-Tin's idea; he was the best tattoo artist in Paris, in Alice's view. Stephane Chaudesaigues from Avignon would surely have been there, and Filip Leu from Lausanne--maybe even Roonui from Moorea, French Polynesia.
They'd all stayed at some hotel in the red-light district. "Just down the street from the Moulin Rouge," Alice had told Jack. Le Tribal Act, a body-piercing group, had provided one memorable evening's entertainment: they'd hoisted some fairly remarkable household items with their nipples and penises, and other pierced parts.
But this was weeks (maybe months) ago! Jack's mother was calling from Toronto, where it was as early in the morning as it was in New York. Jack really must have been out of it.
"Oh, Jackie, I'm sorry--I'm so sorry!" his mother cried into the phone.
"Mom, are you in Toronto?"
"Of course I'm in Toronto, dear," she said, with sudden indignation. "Oh, Jackie--it's so awful!"
Maybe she'd passed out, drunk or stoned at Daughter Alice. She'd just woken up--after a night of sleeping in the needles, Jack imagined. Or one of her colleagues in the tattoo world had died, one of the old-timers; maybe a maritime man was eternally sleeping in the needles. Her old pal Sailor Jerry, possibly--her friend from Halifax and fellow apprentice to Charlie Snow.
"It makes me sick to have to tell you, dear," Alice said.
It crossed Jack's mind that Leslie Oastler had left her--for another woman! "Mom--just tell me what it is, for Christ's sake."
"It's Emma--Emma's gone, Jack. She's gone."
"Gone where, Mom?"
But he knew the second he said it--the telephone suddenly cold against his ear. Jack saw that dazzling-blue glint of the Pacific, the way you see it for the first time--turning off Sunset Boulevard, barreling down Chautauqua. Below you, depending on the time of day, the dead-slow or lightning-fast lanes of the Pacific Coast Highway, sometimes a sea of cars, always a tongue of concrete--the last barrier between you and the fabulous West Coast ocean.
"Gone how?" Jack asked his mother.
He didn't realize he was sitting up in bed and shivering--not until Mimi Lederer held him from behind, the way she held her cello. She wrapped her long arms around him; her long legs, wide apart, gripped his hips.
"Leslie's already left for the airport," Alice went on, as if she hadn't heard him. "I should have gone with her, but you know Leslie--she wasn't even crying!"
"Mom--what happened to Emma?"
"Oh, no--not Emma!" Mimi Lederer cried. She was draped over Jack like a shroud; he felt her lips brush the back of his neck.
"Jack--you're not alone!" his mother said.
"Of course I'm not alone! What happened to Emma, Mom?"
"It looks like you should have been with her, Jack."
"Mom--"
"Emma was dancing," Alice began. "She met a boy dancing. Leslie told me the name of the place. Oh, it's awful! Something like Coconut Squeezer."
"Teaszer, not Squeezer, Mom--Coconut Teaszer."
"Emma took the boy home with her," Alice said.
Jack knew that if Emma had brought some kid from Coconut Teaszer back to their dump on Entrada Drive, she hadn't died dancing. "What did Emma die of, Mom?"
"Oh, it's awful!" Alice said again. "They said it was a heart attack, but she was a young woman."
"Who said? Who's they?" Jack asked.
"The police--they called here. But how could she have had a heart attack, Jack?"
In Emma's case, he could imagine it--even at thirty-nine--considering the food, the wine, the weightlifting, and the occasional kid from Coconut Teaszer. But Emma didn't do drugs. There'd been more kids from Coconut Teaszer lately. (Both Emma and Jack had thought the kids were safer than the bodybuilders.)
"There will probably be an autopsy," Jack told his mother.
"An autopsy--if it was just a heart attack?" Alice asked.
"You're not supposed to have a heart attack at thirty-nine, Mom."
"The boy was . . . underage," Alice whispered. "The police won't release his name."
"Who cares about his name?" Jack said. There'd been more and more kids who looked underage to him. Poor Emma had died fucking a minor from Coconut Teaszer!
As for the kid himself, Jack could only imagine that it must have been a traumatizing experience. He knew that Emma liked the top position, and that she would have told the boy not to move. (Maybe he'd moved.) If the boy had been a virgin--and Emma would have picked him only if he looked small--what would it have been like to have a two-hundred-and-five-pound woman die on you, your first time?
"The boy called the police," his mother went on; she was still whispering. "Oh, Jack, was Emma in the habit of--"
"Sometimes," was all he said.
"You must meet Leslie in Los Angeles, Jack. She shouldn't have to go through this alone. I know Leslie. She'll break down, eventually."
Jack couldn't imagine it, but he was uncomfortable with the idea of Mrs. Oastler alone in the Entrada Drive house. What kind of stuff would Emma have left lying around? The notion of Leslie discovering Emma's collection of porn films wasn't as disturbing as the thought of her reading Emma's writing--whatever Emma hadn't finished, or what she didn't want published. Jack had not seen a word of Emma's work-in-progress--her third novel, which was reportedly growing too long.
"I'll leave New York as soon as I can, Mom. If Leslie calls, tell her I'll be in L.A. before dark."
He knew that Erica Steinberg was a good soul; Jack assumed she would release him from his interviews at the press junket.
Everyone who knew Jack knew that Emma had been part of his family. As it turned out, Miramax arranged everything for him--including the car to the airport. Erica got him his ticket; she even offered to fly with him. It wasn't necessary for her to come with him, Jack told her, but he appreciated the offer.
There was another call to Jack's room at The Mark that morning. Mimi Lederer had been right--room service was confused by his breakfast order. Although he'd stopped shivering, Mimi had gone on holding him as if he were her cello, until the phone rang that second
time.
"I don't give a rat's ass about the yogurt," Mimi heard Jack say into the phone. "Any kind of yogurt will do."
"Are you okay, Jack?" Mimi asked.
"Emma's dead," he snapped at her. "I guess I can worry about the fucking yogurt another day."
"Are you acting?" she asked him. "I mean even now. Are you still acting?"
Jack didn't know what she meant, but she was covering herself with the bedsheet as if he were a total stranger to her. "What's wrong?" he asked.
"What's wrong with you, Jack?"
They were both sitting up in bed, and Jack could see himself in the mirror above the dresser. There was nothing wrong with him, but that was the problem. Jack didn't look as if his best friend had died; on the contrary, he looked as if nothing had happened to him. His face was a clean slate--"more noir than noir," The New York Times might have said.
Jack couldn't stop staring at himself--that was a problem, too. Mimi Lederer said later that she couldn't stand the sight of him, not at that moment. "You're not in a movie, Jack," Mimi started to say, but Jack looked at her as if he really were Billy Rainbow. "Why aren't you crying?" Mimi Lederer asked him.
Jack couldn't answer her, and he was good at tears. When his part called for crying, he would usually start when he heard the A.D. say, "Quiet, please."
"Rolling," the cameraman would say; Jack's eyes were already watering away.
"Speed," said the sound guy--Jack's face would be bathed in tears.
When the director (even Wild Bill Vanvleck) said, "Action!"--well, Jack could cry on-camera like nobody's business. His eyes would well with tears just reading a script!
But that morning at The Mark, Jack was as tough-guy noir as he'd ever been--on film or off. He was as deadpan as Emma when she wrote, "Life is a call sheet. You're supposed to show up when they tell you, but that's the only rule."
That was what Jack Burns was doing--he was going to L.A., just to show up. He would probably hold Mrs. Oastler's hand, because he was supposed to--those were just the rules.
"Jesus, Jack--" Mimi Lederer started to say; then she stopped. Jack realized, as if he'd missed something she'd said, that she was getting dressed. "If you didn't love Emma, you never loved anyone," Mimi was saying. "She was the person closest to you, Jack. Can you love anyone? If you didn't love her, I think not."