by John Irving
"Not even that," he told her.
"What did you do? You must have done something," Michele said.
"We kissed, I touched her breasts, she held my penis."
In reaching for her wineglass, Michele's elbow came down on the edge of her plate; her mother's ring went flying. The ring landed on an adjacent table, startling two models who were on a red-wine diet.
One of the models picked up the ring and looked at Jack. "Oh, you shouldn't have," she said, slipping the ring onto one of her pretty fingers.
"I'm sorry--it's her mother's ring," Jack told the model; she pouted at him while Michele looked mortified.
"You don't remember me, do you, Jack?" the other model asked.
Jack got up and went over to their table, holding his hand out to the model who was still wearing Michele's ring. He was trying to buy a little time, struggling to remember who the other model was.
"I was afraid you'd forgotten me," he told her. (It was one of Billy Rainbow's lines--Jack had always liked it.)
It was not the answer the model had been expecting. Jack still couldn't place her, or else he'd never met her before in his life and she was just playing a game with him.
The model who had Michele's ring was playing another kind of game with Jack; she was trying to put the ring on one of his fingers. "Who would have thought Jack Burns had such little hands?" she was saying. (The ring was a loose fit on his left pinkie; Jack went back to his table wearing it.)
"Jack Burns has a little penis," the other model said.
Jack guessed that she did know him, but he still didn't remember her. Michele just sat there looking glassy-eyed. "I don't feel very well," she told Jack. "I think I'm drunk, if you want to know the truth."
"You should try to eat something," he said.
"Don't you know that you can't tell a doctor what to do, Jack?"
"Come on. I'll take you back to the hotel," he said.
"I want to see where you live!" Michele said plaintively. "It must be fabulous."
"It's a hole in the wall," the model who knew Jack said. "Don't tell me you've actually moved out of that nookie house on Entrada, Jack."
"We're much closer to your hotel than we are to where I live," he told Michele.
"Did you sleep with that girl?" Michele asked him, when they were back in the Audi. "You didn't look like you knew her."
"I don't remember sleeping with her," Jack said.
"What's a nookie house?" she asked him.
"It's slang for brothel," Jack explained.
"Do you really live in a hole in the wall on La Strada?" Michele asked.
"Yes, I do," he admitted. "It's on Entrada."
"But why do you live in a hole in the wall? Why wouldn't Jack Burns live in a mansion?"
"I don't really know where I want to live, Michele."
"My Gawd," she said again.
Michele fell sound asleep on the Hollywood Freeway. Jack had to carry her into the lobby of the Sheraton Universal. He didn't know her room number; he couldn't find her room key in her purse. He carried her into the bar, where he was sure he would find a few of her drunken colleagues. Jack hoped that one of them would be sober enough to recognize Michele.
Another woman dermatologist came to Jack's assistance; she was a homely, caustic person, but at least she hadn't been drinking. Together they got Michele to her room. The other doctor's name was Sandra; she was from somewhere in Michigan. Sandra must have assumed that Jack was sleeping with Michele, because she proceeded to undress Michele in front of him.
"Run a bath for her," Sandra said. "We can't let her pass out like this. If she vomits, she might choke. People who are dead-drunk often aspirate their vomit. It's better to wake her up, and let her be sick when she's awake."
Jack did what the doctor said. Then he carried Michele to the bath and, with Sandra's assistance, slid her into it. Naked, she was much too thin--emaciated. Like a woman who'd been recently pregnant, Michele had stretch marks on her small breasts; the skin there looked wrinkled. (It was the weight loss; she hadn't been pregnant.)
"Christ, how much weight has she lost?" Sandra asked Jack, as if he were the one who'd put Michele up to it.
"I don't know what she weighed before," Jack said. "I haven't seen Michele in twenty years."
"Well, this is a wonderful way to see her," Sandra said.
Michele had told him more about the stress-related eczema; it occurred on her elbows and knees. When it was bad, the eczema was the color and nubbly texture of a rooster's wattle. Jack kept staring at Michele's elbows and knees while she lolled in the bath; he half expected her mysterious skin ailment to suddenly appear.
"What are you looking at?" Sandra asked him. (Michele, even in the bathwater, was still out cold; Jack held her under her armpits so her head wouldn't slip underwater.)
He explained about the stress-related eczema, but Sandra assured him that it wasn't about to blossom before his eyes. "It's not like time-lapse photography," she said. Sandra looked at his hands. "Nice ring," she commented. (Michele's mother's ring was still on Jack's left pinkie.)
When Michele started coming around, she was unaware that Sandra was with them. "I'll leave you two lovebirds alone. Just don't let her throw up in her sleep," Sandra said. "You seem to enjoy staring at her, anyway."
"Did we do it yet?" Michele asked him. He heard Sandra letting herself out of the hotel room, the door closing on her harsh laugh.
"No," Jack said. "We didn't do it."
"When are we going to do it, Jack? Or do you think you have the clap again?"
"I didn't have it the first time. I just thought I might have it," he explained to her.
"But you can't even remember who you've slept with," Michele reminded him. "And it's not as if you drink or anything. You must sleep with an awful lot of women, Jack."
"Not really," Jack said.
He felt nothing for her but the kind of pity and contempt you feel for people who aren't in control of themselves. (As a nondrinker, Jack would have admitted to feeling superior to people who drank too much--whatever the circumstances.) And the pity he felt for Michele was all caught up in those expectations she'd had--for their big night out on the town together; for her parents' New York apartment, which the gold digger had stolen from her; even for her dead mother's ring, which didn't fit any of her fingers. (Jack took the ring off his left pinkie and put it in the soap dish above the bathroom sink.)
He helped Michele dry herself off; she was a little shaky. She wanted to be alone in the bathroom for a moment.
The hotel maid had already turned down the bed and closed the curtains, but Jack opened the curtains to get a look at the view of the Hollywood Hills. The room had floor-to-ceiling windows; it was a spectacular view, but not even the Hollywood Hills could divert him from the sound of Michele retching in the toilet. Jack went and stood next to the bathroom door, to be sure she wasn't choking. Later, when he heard the toilet flush and the water in the sink running, Jack went back and stood at the giant windows.
It was 2003. He'd been in Los Angeles for sixteen years. He was trying to remember sleeping with that model at Jones--the one who'd said that his penis was small--but he couldn't remember anything about her. When he closed the curtains, Jack was thinking that he'd seen enough of the Hollywood Hills.
When Michele came out of the bathroom, she was wearing one of the hotel's terry-cloth robes; she seemed shy, and relatively sober, and she smelled like a whole tube of toothpaste. Jack was sorry that she wanted to sleep with him--he'd been hoping that she wouldn't want to. But he couldn't turn her down a second time, not when he knew she was still thinking about the first time he'd rejected her.
It was only later that it occurred to Jack that Michele probably felt as resigned to the act as he did. And there was nothing remarkable about their sexual performance, nothing that would override the longer-lasting impression--namely, that they hadn't really wanted to sleep with each other. (They had simply expected it would happen.)
Jack guessed that she meant the name of the hotel, the Sheraton Universal--or where the hotel was located, which was Universal City--but before he could say something, Michele said: "I can tell you one thing that's universal about tonight, and that is it's a universal disappointment--like loneliness, or illness, or death. Or like knowing you'll never have children. It's just one big universal letdown, isn't it?"
"Actually, it's the name of a studio," Jack said. "Universal Studios."
"Your penis isn't too small, Jack," Michele Maher said. "That model was simply being cruel."
"Maybe she had a nose job since I last saw her," he speculated. "I mean, she's a model--she could have had her chin done, or her eyes done. I'll bet she had some kind of face-lift. There's got to be a reason why I don't remember her."
"Oh, I don't know," Michele said. "What about us? In a few years, this isn't going to be memorable, is it?"
So much for that expectation, as he would one day tell Dr. Garcia. It would come as no surprise to Dr. Garcia, but one can appreciate what a blow it was to Jack to discover how quickly Michele Maher could become forgettable.
36
Claudia's Ghost
Bad things happened after that. Jack's psychiatrist tried to shed a positive light on his failure to connect with Michele Maher. Maybe this would disabuse Jack of what Dr. Garcia called his "if-only romanticism about the past"--meaning if only it had worked out with Michele Maher the first time, he might have been spared the ensuing years of incomplete relationships.
"You always attached too much importance to your botched opportunity with Michele, Jack," Dr. Garcia said. "You never attached enough importance to what worked with Claudia. At least that relationship lasted."
"Only four years," Jack reminded her.
"Who else lasted an eighth as long, Jack? And don't say Emma! The penis-holding doesn't count as complete, does it?"
But Jack resisted his psychiatrist's efforts to shed a positive light on anything. He was down. He embraced the movie-magazine version of himself, his bad-boy image. Jack didn't care how many models he wouldn't remember a month later. He had ceased caring about what kind of "nookie house" he lived in, too. (His "Entrada Drive state of mind," Dr. Garcia called it.)
Jack was in that state of mind in May 2003 when he went to New York to make a movie. He had accepted the Harry Mocco role in The Love Poet--a film by Gillian Scott, the Australian director. Gillian had also written the screenplay.
Harry Mocco is a crippled male model--"half a model," Harry calls himself. His legs were crushed in a New York elevator accident. He has always wanted to be an actor; he has a great voice. But there aren't a lot of roles for a guy in a wheelchair.
Even as a model, Harry's career is marginal. He is often seen sitting up in bed in the morning--just his top half, naked. (The rest of him is under the sheets.) These are advertisements for women's clothes; the female model, usually in the foreground of the photograph, is already dressed or half dressed. Her clothes are what's being sold; the top half of Harry, in the background, is depicted as one of her accessories.
Or, if he's the one modeling the clothes, you see Jack-as-Harry sitting at a desk or in the driver's seat of an expensive car. He does a lot of ads for wristwatches, usually in a tuxedo--but the naked, half-a-male accessory in those advertisements for women's clothing are his specialty.
Harry Mocco doesn't really need the money. He made a fortune suing the building with the elevator that crushed his legs; in and around New York, where the film is set, Jack-as-Harry is quite a famous and photogenic cripple. The modeling is more for what little remains of his dignity than it is a financial necessity. He actually lives pretty well--in one of those New York buildings with a doorman. Naturally, Harry's gym is wheelchair-accessible. He lifts weights half the day and plays wheelchair basketball--even wheelchair tennis.
Jack-as-Harry also memorizes and recites love poems, or parts of love poems--not always a welcome activity, especially since he's not with anyone. He's always urging his friends--gym friends, male-model friends--to woo their girlfriends with love poetry. No one seems interested. Harry knows a lot of supermodels--some of the hottest female models in New York. But they're just friends; the supermodels are unmoved by the love poetry.
Jack-as-Harry has sex only once in the first hour and fifteen minutes of the film; to no one's surprise, it's a disaster. His partner is a young woman who frequently dresses him for the photo shoots--she's very plain and nervous, an unglamorous girl with a pierced lower lip. The love poetry works on her, but his being crippled doesn't. Jack had to give Gillian Scott credit for capturing a sex scene of award-winning awkwardness.
The voice-over, which is Harry Mocco's, is all love poetry. Everything from the grimmest of the grim, Thomas Hardy, to Philip Larkin; everything from George Wither to Robert Graves. (There was too much Graves, in Jack's opinion.)
Harry Mocco usually doesn't get to recite more than a couplet, rarely a complete stanza. Nobody he knows wants to hear a whole poem.
"I'm not sure about the suitability of this role for you," Dr. Garcia had forewarned Jack. "A crippled male model who hasn't found his audience. Isn't that coming a little close to home?" Nor, in Dr. Garcia's opinion, was the length of his separation from her advisable. "I don't do house calls as far away as New York, Jack--although I could stand to do a little shopping."
Why don't your children, if that's who they are, grow older? he'd wanted to ask her. The photographs in Dr. Garcia's office were an irreplaceable, seemingly permanent collection. The older husband--or her father, if that's who he was--was fixed in time. All of them seemed fixed in time, like bugs preserved in amber. But Jack didn't ask her about it.
He just went to New York and made the movie. "Work is work, Dr. Garcia," he'd said defensively. "A part is just a part. I'm not Harry Mocco, nor am I in danger of becoming him. I'm not anybody."
"That's part of your problem, Jack," she had reminded him.
The whole movie had a fifty-two-day shooting schedule. For the Harry Mocco part, including rehearsals, Jack had to be in New York a couple of months.
He was in the habit of seeing Dr. Garcia twice a week--two months without seeing her would necessitate a certain number of phone calls. He couldn't tell her his life story over the phone; in an emergency, he could talk to her, but the chronological-order part would have to wait.
In Dr. Garcia's view, the chronological-order part was what determined how Jack was doing. It was one thing to babble out loud about an emotionally or psychologically disturbing moment; it was quite another obstacle to organize the story and tell it (exactly as it had happened) to an actual person. In this respect, the chronological-order part was like acting; in Dr. Garcia's view, if Jack couldn't tell the story in an orderly fashion, that meant that he couldn't handle it psychologically and emotionally.
Jack Burns put everything he had into Harry Mocco. He remembered how Mrs. Malcolm had tyrannized the classroom, her head-on crashing into desks--her racing up and down the aisles in the St. Hilda's chapel, skinning her knuckles on the pews. He remembered how Bonnie Hamilton could climb into her wheelchair, or extricate herself from it, the second his head was turned. He never saw her slip or fall, but he noticed the bruises--the evidence that she wasn't perfect.
Jack not only did wheelchair tricks on the set of The Love Poet; he insisted on using the wheelchair when he was off the set, too. He pretended he was crippled. Jack wheeled around the hotel like a psycho invalid; he made them load him into limos, and unload him. He practiced falling, too. He did a fantastic, head-over-heels wheelie in the lobby of the Trump International on Central Park West--the startled bellman and concierge running to assist him.
They had a great gym at the Trump. Jack went there in his wheelchair; he would ge
t on the treadmill and run for half an hour with the wheelchair parked alongside, as if it were for another person.
When Harry Mocco has wheelchair accidents in The Love Poet, the voice-over is heavy on Robert Graves. (A little of Graves goes a long way. "Love is a universal migraine," for example.)
Or:
Why have such scores of lovely, gifted girls
Married impossible men?
Simple self-sacrifice may be ruled out,
And missionary endeavour, nine times out of ten.
When Jack-as-Harry is crawling on all fours from the bed to the bathroom, the girl who's just slept with him is watching him--repulsed. The voice-over is Harry's, reciting e. e. cummings.
i like my body when it is with your
body.
Jack-as-Harry tries to win over the pierced-lip girl with a love poem by Ted Hughes, but a little of Hughes goes a long way, too. The girl is out the door before he can finish the first stanza.
We sit late, watching the dark slowly unfold:
No clock counts this.
Harry's more self-pitying moments--repeatedly banging his head on a bathtub drain, unable to climb out of the slippery tub--are pure pathos. (The voice-over to the bathtub scene is Harry's recitation of George Wither.)
Shall I, wasting in despair,
Die because a woman's fair?
The Love Poet is a noir love story--more noir than love story for three quarters of the film, more love story than noir at the end. Jack-as-Harry meets a recently crippled young woman in his gym. She is wheelchair-bound, too. Harry can tell it's her first public outing in her new but permanent condition; she's tentative. She's being introduced to various weight machines and exercises by a blowhard personal trainer whom Harry despises. The girl is what wheelchair veterans like Harry call a "newborn."
"Leave the newborn to me," Jack-as-Harry tells the trainer.
Harry then proceeds to demonstrate every weight machine and exercise in slapstick; he drops things, he stages spectacular falls.