by John Irving
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. Another 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.
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, too, 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.