Authors: John Irving
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.)
“Just what is so terribly
universal
about this place, anyway?” Michele asked him, after they’d had sex and Jack was touching her breasts. She was lying on her back with her long arms held straight against her sides, like a soldier.
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. García. It would come as no surprise to Dr. García, but one can appreciate what a blow it was to Jack to discover how quickly Michele Maher could become
forgettable.
36
Claudia’s Ghost
B
ad 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. García 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. García 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. García 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. García 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. García’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. García’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. García,” 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. García 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. García’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. García’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 get 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.
“See? This is
easy
!” he tells the newborn, imitating the hearty bullshit of the personal trainer. Jack-as-Harry hurls himself out of his wheelchair as awkwardly as possible, demonstrating to the recently crippled young woman that
nothing
is going to be easy for her.
When they fall in love, the voice-over is Harry’s; he’s reciting A. E. Housman. (In a gym, of all places.)
Oh, when I was in love with you,
Then I was clean and brave,
And miles around the wonder grew
How well did I behave.
Shame on Jack Burns—that month in New York, he was not as well behaved as Harry Mocco. He met a transvestite dancer at a downtown club. Jack was distracted by her strong-looking hands and her prominent Adam’s apple. He knew she was a man. Still, he went along with the seduction-in-progress—up to a point. Jack let her wheel him through the lobby of the Trump, and into the hotel’s bar. She sat in his lap in the wheelchair and they sang a Beatles song together, the bar crowd joining in.