by John Irving
It was Jack’s turn to say nothing for the next hundred miles. And to make a point of not responding to someone is another acting opportunity.
Jack soon would make a point of not responding to The Gray Ghost, too. A letter came from her not long after he and Claudia were back in New Hampshire. The Gray Ghost made merely a passing reference to Claudia’s “extraordinary beauty”—Mrs. McQuat also referred to Claudia as his “reluctant bride.” But neither Claudia herself nor Jack’s reluctance to have children was the true subject of The Gray Ghost’s letter. Mrs. McQuat was writing to remind him that he must pay closer attention to his mother, whom she felt certain he was neglecting.
“Don’t neglect her, Jack,” The Gray Ghost said.
Well, hadn’t she told him before? Jack threw her letter away without answering it. Later, when he learned that Mrs. McQuat had died, he wondered if he’d had a premonition of her death. Not only would he not pay closer attention to his mother; by not answering The Gray Ghost’s letter, it was as if he’d sensed that Mrs. McQuat was already dying—a death-in-progress, so to speak—and that when she was gone, the voice of Jack’s conscience would leave him, too.
They were just a few miles outside Durham, not far from Claudia’s apartment in Newmarket, before Claudia broke the silence. “God damn you, Jack,” she said. “After I die, I’m going to haunt you—I promise you I will—I might even haunt you before I die.”
Well, Jack Burns was an actor—he should have known an end line when he heard one. He should have committed Claudia’s warning to memory more deeply than he did.
20
Two Canadians in the City of Angels
Despite their growing estrangement, Jack and Claudia would live together their final two years at UNH. It was more than inertia that bound them; they were actors-in-training, learning the tricks of concealment. By what they managed to hide of themselves, they instructed each other. They became keen but sullen observers of their innermost secrets, their hidden characters.
The summer following their Toronto trip, they again did summer stock, this time at a playhouse on Cape Cod. The artistic director was a gay guy whom Jack liked a lot. Bruno Litkins was a tall, graceful man who swooped onstage; waving his long arms, he looked like a heron making an exaggerated if misguided effort to teach other, smaller birds to fly.
To Bruno Litkins, a musical based on a play or a novel was something to be tampered with—to be reinvented in a shockingly different way with each new production. The original text might be sacred to Bruno, but once someone had made a musical out of the material, there were no limits regarding how the story and the characters could be altered further.
Announcing auditions for The Hunchback of Notre Dame—in which Claudia had her heart set on the role of the beautiful Gypsy girl, Esmeralda—Bruno Litkins said that his Esmeralda was a beautiful transvestite who would liberate the reluctant homosexuality that flickered in the heart of Captain Phoebus like a flame in need of air. Esmeralda, the Gypsy drag queen of Paris, would wrestle the gay captain out of his closet. She was the oxygen Captain Phoebus needed in order to awaken his homosexual self!
The wicked Father Frollo, who first imagines he is in love with Esmeralda, ultimately wants her to be put to death—not only because Esmeralda doesn’t love him but because Esmeralda is a guy. (Father Frollo is a French homophobe.) Quasimodo, who also falls in love with Esmeralda, is in the end relieved that Esmeralda is in love with Captain Phoebus.
“It’s a better story,” Bruno Litkins told the shocked ensemble, “because Quasimodo isn’t sad to give up Esmeralda to the soldier.” (His hunchback notwithstanding, Quasimodo is straight.)
“What would Victor Hugo say?” Claudia asked. Poor Claudia saw that her cherished role was gone; at least onstage, Jack Burns was born to be a transvestite Esmeralda.
“Keep the audience guessing!” Bruno Litkins, flapping his long arms, liked to say. “Is Esmeralda a woman? Is she a man? Make them guess!”
There was, of course, another beautiful Gypsy girl in the play—Quasimodo’s murdered mother, who has a brief but moving part. And there were other plays in that Cape Cod summer season—not all of them musicals that opened themselves to new, gay interpretations. Claudia would have bigger and better roles. She was the eponymous Salomé in Bruno Litkins’s production of the Oscar Wilde play—Bruno revered Wilde and wouldn’t change a purple word he’d written. Claudia was one hot Salomé. Her absurd dance of the seven veils was Wilde’s fault, not Claudia’s—although the Chinese scepter on her inner right thigh required a lot of makeup to conceal. (Without the makeup, the scepter might have been confusing to the audience—possibly mistaken for a birthmark, or a wound.)
Jack had the smaller part in Salomé—the prophet Jokanaan, good old John the Baptist, whose decapitated head Salomé kisses. That was some kiss. (Jack was kneeling under a table with a hole cut in the top for his head; the tablecloth hid not only his hard-on, but all the rest of him.) Yet the damage to his relationship with Claudia had already been done; not even that kiss could undo their drifting apart.
The gay version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame merely served to further the distance between them. In retrospect, Jack didn’t blame Claudia for her one-night stand with the handsome actor who played the gay Captain Phoebus, but he blamed her at the time. (Jack knew that Claudia had every right to repay him for cheating on her with a tango teacher that previous spring.)
Claudia’s luck was bad. The actor who played Captain Phoebus gave her and Jack the clap. Jack would never have found out about the affair otherwise, unless Claudia eventually told him—and given her unrepentant lies about her age, Jack had no reason to think that she ever would have let him in on her little secret. It was the captain’s gonorrhea that gave her away.
Naturally, Jack pretended it was much more painful than it was, dropping to his knees and screaming upon every act of urination—while Claudia called from the bedroom, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!”
In Bruno’s brilliantly choreographed scene where Jack-as-the-transvestite-Esmeralda reveals to Captain Phoebus that he is, below the waist, a man, Jack is singing his heart out to the captain while Phoebus both acquiesces and retreats. (The captain is attracted to Jack, but the idiot still thinks Jack is a girl—hence his reluctance.)
Jack seizes one of the captain’s hands and holds it to one of his falsies; Phoebus looks underwhelmed. Jack seizes the captain’s other hand and holds it to his crotch; Phoebus gives the audience an astonished look while Jack whispers in his ear. Then they both sing the song Bruno Litkins wrote for his gay version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame—“Same As Me, Babe,” to the tune of Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me, Babe.” (Jack knew his Bob; he sang it well.)
But the night of the performance after Jack learned he had gonorrhea—and Claudia confessed where it came from—Jack had something real to whisper in Captain Phoebus’s ear while he held the captain’s hand against his pecker. “Thanks for the clap, babe,” Jack whispered.
It was quite a good look Phoebus gave the audience every night—it usually brought the house down. Such a look of recognition—Esmeralda has a penis! Of course the audience already knows. Jack-as-Esmeralda had earlier shown Father Frollo, thinking it would make Frollo stop hitting on him—never realizing that Frollo is such an overreactor that he’ll insist on having Esmeralda hanged!
But that memorable night Captain Phoebus held Esmeralda’s penis and Jack-as-Esmeralda thanked Phoebus for giving him the clap was a showstopper for the handsome soldier. The look he gave the audience that night interrupted the performance for a full minute or more; the audience spontaneously rose as one and gave Captain Phoebus a standing ovation.
“Maybe take a little something off the look, Phoebus,” Bruno Litkins told the actor after that performance.
Jack just gave the captain his best Esmeralda-as-a-transvestite smile. Phoebus knew Jack could kick the crap out of him if he wanted to.
In truth, Jack was grateful to Captain Phoebus for
making Claudia feel guilty; Phoebus had made Jack feel a little less guilty about the fact that he and Claudia were drifting apart.
The summer following their graduation from the University of New Hampshire, Claudia and Jack finally went their separate ways. She was going the graduate-student route—an MFA theater program at one of the Big Ten universities. (Jack would make a point of forgetting which one.) It seemed sensible for them to apply to different summer-stock playhouses that summer. Claudia was at a Shakespeare festival in New Jersey. Jack did a Beauty and the Beast and a Peter Pan and Wendy at a children’s theater workshop in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
He might have been feeling nostalgic about his lost friend Noah Rosen—or Noah’s more irrevocably lost sister, Leah—but Jack fondly recalled those foreign films in the movie theaters around Harvard Square. A summer of subtitles—and audiences of children, and their young mothers—somehow suited him.
Claudia said—and if these weren’t truly her last spoken words to him, they were the last words he would remember—“What do you want to perform for children for? You don’t want any.”
Jack played the Beast to an older-woman Belle; she was also one of the founders of the children’s theater workshop, and she’d hired him. Yes, he slept with her—they had a summer-long affair, not a day longer. She was way too old to play Wendy to Jack’s Peter Pan, but she was a reasonably youthful-looking Mrs. Darling—Wendy’s mom. (Imagine Peter Pan screwing Wendy’s mother, if only for a summer.)
Jack needed to go to graduate school, to continue to be a student, or else get a real job—hence a green card—if he didn’t want to go back to Canada, and he didn’t. Emma, once again, would save him. She’d been out of Iowa for two years, living in Los Angeles and writing her first novel, which sounded like a contradiction in terms. Who went to L.A. to write a novel? But being an outsider had always suited Emma.
She’d found a job reading scripts at one of the studios; like Jack, she was still a Canadian citizen and had only a Canadian passport, but Emma also had a green card. The script-reading job was more the result of her year as a comedy writer for New York television than it was anything she’d prepared herself to do at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She was writing her novel, which Emma said was to be her revenge on the time she’d wasted as a film major—and all the while she was, as she put it, “working for the enemy and getting paid for it.”
Why didn’t he come live with her? Emma asked Jack. She’d find him a job in the movie business. “There are some good-looking guys out here, baby cakes—it’s tougher competition than you’d have in Toronto. But there aren’t that many good-looking guys who can act as well as you.”
So that was Jack’s plan, to the extent that he had one. He’d had it with the theater—and no wonder, when you consider the preponderance of musicals. It was fine with him if his last onstage performance was as Peter Pan, taking Wendy Darling and her brothers off to Neverland—while in the wee hours of the morning, long after the curtain fell, he was banging Wendy’s mom, Mrs. Darling.
“What would J. M. Barrie say?” Claudia might have asked, had she known. It made Jack sad to think about her.
The thing about Los Angeles, Jack would learn, is that it’s unimpressed by you—no matter who you are. Eventually, the city tells you, your comeuppance will come; exclusivity fades. But Jack Burns wasn’t moving in exclusive circles when he first went to L.A.—he wasn’t famous yet. In the fall of 1987, when he moved in with Emma, the nearest landmark representing the sundry entertainments that the future held in store was that garish playground of possibilities, the Santa Monica Pier.
All that Jack and Emma really cared about was that they were bathed in the warm Pacific air; it didn’t matter that they were breathing in an ocean spiked with smog. They were living together again—not in Toronto, and not with their mothers.
Emma, who was twenty-nine, looked considerably older. Her struggles with her weight were apparent to anyone who knew her, but a different, interior battle had been more costly to her; her shifting ambitions were at war with her obdurate determination. That Emma was a restless soul was obvious, but not even Jack (not even Emma) was aware that something was seriously wrong with her.
Numbers were never Jack’s strong suit. Living with Emma in L.A., he couldn’t remember how much their rent was, or what day of the month they were supposed to pay it.
“Your math sucks, honey pie, but what do you need to know math for? You’re gonna be an actor!”
At St. Hilda’s, Jack had needed Miss Wurtz bending over him—as if breathing her in were a substitute for learning his numbers. And while it’s true that Mrs. McQuat had helped him, even more than Miss Wurtz, he had never mastered math.
Mrs. Adkins had assisted him with his algebra at Redding—she who’d dressed him in her old clothes, she who’d made love to him with such a morbid air of resignation. (It was as if Mrs. Adkins were undressing to drown herself in the Nezinscot, or at least practicing for that loneliest of moments in her future.)
“You shouldn’t trust yourself to count past ten,” Noah Rosen had once cautioned Jack.
Mr. Warren, Jack’s faculty adviser at Exeter, had been more kind but no less pessimistic. “I would advise you, Jack, never to rely on your numerical evaluation of a situation.”
Jack Burns would live in Los Angeles for sixteen years. He liked all the driving. He and Emma first shared one half of a rat-eaten duplex in Venice. It was on Windward Avenue, downwind of a sushi place on the corner of Windward and Main—more to the point, downwind of the restaurant’s Dumpster. Hama Sushi was good. Emma and Jack ate there a lot. The fish was really fresh—less fresh, alas, was whatever ended up in the Dumpster.
Jack’s first girlfriend in L.A. was a waitress he met at Hama Sushi. She shared an overused house with some other girls on one of those small streets off Ocean Front Walk—Eighteenth, Nineteenth, or Twentieth Avenue. He could never remember the number. He went one night to the wrong house, possibly on the wrong avenue. There were a bunch of girls who welcomed him inside when he pushed the buzzer, but his waitress friend was not among them. By the time Jack realized it was the wrong bunch of girls, he’d met someone who interested him more than the sushi waitress. Numbers, once again, had misled him.
“You oughta carry a calculator,” Emma told him, “or at least write everything down.”
He liked Venice—the beach, the gyms, the underlying grubbiness of it. After Emma had a bad experience at Gold’s Gym—she’d met a bodybuilder there who had beaten her up—she got Jack and herself a membership at World Gym; she said she liked the gorilla on the World Gym T-shirts and tank tops. A big gorilla standing on the planet Earth, the size of a beach ball, with a barbell in his hairy hands—the barbell had to weigh three or four hundred pounds, not that this was a credible explanation for why the bar was bending.
The World Gym tank tops were cut low; they had a scoop neck and a lot of space under the arms. They weren’t made for women to wear—at least not the ones Emma bought, which were all in workout-gray with Day-Glo orange lettering. The tank tops showed a lot of cleavage, and Emma’s breasts would occasionally fall out at the sides, but she only got the World Gym tank tops to wear as nightshirts or when she was writing.
Emma and Jack had their own bedrooms in the duplex, but most nights, when they didn’t have “dates,” they slept in the same bed—not really doing anything. Emma would hold Jack’s penis until one of them fell asleep—that is, if they even went to bed at the same time, which they didn’t often. Jack would occasionally hold her breasts, nothing more. He never once masturbated in the bed when she was there.
Emma and Jack had had their one time; they seemed to know this without discussing it. She had taught him how to beat off; she’d even invited him to imagine her when he did it. But this was entirely for Jack’s self-preservation in prep school, especially at Redding, and although she’d sent him photographs of herself naked—and, unbeknownst to Emma, Jack still had one of them—it was their mutual under
standing in Los Angeles that they were more than friends, and certainly a little different from other brothers and sisters, but they were not lovers. (The penis-holding notwithstanding—and no matter how many times they were undressed in each other’s company, without seeming to think twice about it.)
Emma met another bodybuilder—this one at World Gym—and he didn’t beat her up. He worked as a waiter at Stan’s, which was on the corner of Rose and Main.
Stan’s was one of those places that wouldn’t last long in Venice. The waiters weren’t as brash as they were in a New York steakhouse, like Smith & Wollensky, and for steaks and chops and Maine lobsters, which was all they served, the white tablecloths seemed out of place; yet the waiters wore white dress shirts with their sleeves rolled up, and no ties, and those starched white aprons that made them look like butchers who’d not yet made contact with any meat. It’s hard to feel superior in a steakhouse, but the waiters at Stan’s (there were no waitresses) took naturally to superiority. It was as if they’d been born in those starched white aprons—remarkably, without a drop of blood being shed in the process.
The waiter Emma knew who worked at Stan’s had a name like Giorgio or Guido; he could bench-press three hundred pounds. Emma managed to persuade him that Jack was an experienced waiter, and Giorgio or Guido reluctantly introduced Jack to Donald, the maître d’ at Stan’s—a headwaiter of intimidating snottiness.
Admittedly, Jack had had no experience as a waiter, but Emma had skillfully revised Mr. Ramsey’s written recommendation of Jack’s training as an actor, which repeatedly cited his “vast potential.” The studio in West Hollywood where, every morning, Emma turned in her notes and picked up an armload of new screenplays—she read and critiqued three or four scripts a day—had lots of fancy copying equipment, with which Emma slickly executed Mr. Ramsey’s edited recommendation of Jack.