Authors: John Irving
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.
Herman Castro was the wrestling team’s photographer. In those days, heavyweights always wrestled last; Herman took pictures of his teammates wrestling even when he was warming up. Jack used to think that Herman liked to hide his face from view. Maybe the camera was his shield.
“
Hey, amigo,
” the note on Herman Castro’s Christmas card traditionally said, “
when I think of your love life—well, I just can’t imagine it.
”
Little did Herman know. Over time, Jack Burns would believe that he lost the love of his life on the night he lost Michele Maher. It would be small consolation to him to imagine that his father, at Jack’s age, would have fucked her—clap or no clap.
And he
didn’t
have the clap! Jack had himself checked at the infirmary when he got back from New York. The doctor said it was just some irritation, possibly caused by the change in his diet since the end of the wrestling season.
“It’s not gonorrhea?” Jack asked in disbelief.
“It’s nothing, Jack.”
After all, he’d been screwing a one-hundred-seventy-pound dishwasher for months on end—sometimes as often as four or five times a week. No doubt there was sufficient
irritation
to make Jack piss sideways at a knee-high Picasso—not to mention ruin his chances with “la belle Michele,” as Noah Rosen called Michele Maher.
Michele and Jack were in only one class together—fourth-year German. Many of the students who took German at the academy imagined that they might become doctors. German was said to be a good second language for the study of medicine. Jack had no such hope—he wasn’t strong in the sciences. What he liked about German was the word order—the verbs all lay in wait till the end of the sentence. Talk about end lines! In a German sentence, all the action happened at the end. German was an actor’s language.
Jack liked Goethe, but he loved Rilke, and in German IV, he loved most of all Shakespeare
in German,
particularly the love sonnets, which the teacher, Herr Richter, claimed were better
auf Deutsch
than they were in English.
Michele Maher, bless her heart, disagreed. “Surely, Herr Richter, you would not argue that ‘Lascivious grace, in whom all ill well shows,’ is
improved
by ‘
Mutwillige Anmut, reizend noch im Schlimmen
’!”
“Ah, but Michele,” Herr Richter intoned, “surely
you
would agree that ‘
Sonst prüft die kluge Welt der Tränen
Sinn,
Und höhnt dich um mich, wenn ich nicht mehr
bin’ is a considerable improvement on the original. Would you say it for us in English, Jack? You say it so well.”
“ ‘Lest the wise world should look into your
moan,
’ ” Jack recited to Michele Maher, “ ‘And mock you with me after I am
gone.
’ ”
“You see?” Herr Richter asked the class. “It’s a sizable stretch to make
gone
rhyme with
moan,
isn’t it? Whereas
bin
with
Sinn—
well, I rest my case.”
Jack could not look at Michele, nor she at him. To imagine that his last words to her might be the sizable stretch of trying to make
gone
rhyme with
moan—
it was too cruel.
In their last class together, Michele handed Jack a note. “Read it later, please,” was all she said.
It was something by Goethe. Michele liked Goethe better than Jack did.
“Behandelt die Frauen mit Nachsicht.”
He knew the line. “Be lenient when handling womankind.”
If he’d had the courage to give Michele a note, Jack would have chosen Rilke.
“Sie lächelte einmal. Es tat fast weh.”
But Michele Maher would have said it was too prosaic. “She smiled once. It was almost painful.”
One small measure of pride Jack took in his academic efforts at Exeter was that he managed to pass four years of German without Noah Rosen’s assistance. German was the only subject Noah couldn’t and didn’t help him with. (Quite understandably, as a Jew, Noah felt that German was the language of his people’s executioners and he refused to learn a word of it.)
Noah couldn’t help Jack with the SATs, either. There Jack was on his own; there
aptitude
was a far superior tool to
attitude.
Jack’s effort notwithstanding, his talent lagged behind that of his Exeter classmates. He had the lowest SAT scores in the Class of ’83.
“Actors don’t do multiple choice,” was the way Jack put it to Herman Castro.
“Why not?” Herman asked.
“Actors don’t
guess,
” Jack replied. “Actors
do
have choices, but they know what they are. If you don’t know the answer, you don’t guess.”
“If you don’t mind my saying so, Jack, that’s a pretty stupid approach to a multiple-choice examination.”
Because of his miserable SAT scores, Jack wouldn’t be joining Herman Castro and Noah Rosen at Harvard. He wouldn’t be attending any of the so-called better colleges or universities. His mother begged him to return to Toronto and go to university there. But he didn’t want to go back to Toronto.
Having initiated the distance between them, Alice suddenly wanted Jack to be close to her again. He wanted nothing to do with her. Jack was way over “the lesbian thing,” as Emma called it—Emma was way over it, too. They no longer cared that Alice and Mrs. Oastler were an item; in fact, both Emma and Jack were pleased, even proud, that their mothers were still together. So many couples
weren’t
still together, both the couples they’d known among their friends
and
the parents of so many of their friends.
But Jack couldn’t forget that he’d been sent away from Toronto—and from Canada, his country. For eight years, he’d been living in the United States; his fellow students, for the most part, were Americans, and the films that made him want to be an actor in the movies were European.
Jack applied to, and was accepted at, the University of New Hampshire. Emma was all over him. “For Christ’s sake, baby cakes, you shouldn’t choose UNH because of how much you like the local movie theater!” But he’d made his decision. He liked Durham
and
that movie theater, which was never the same, Jack would admit, when Emma Oastler
wasn’t
sitting beside him holding his penis.
That trip to the North Sea with his mother had formed Jack Burns. St. Hilda’s had established what Emma would correctly call his older-woman thing, and the school had given him some pretty basic acting techniques—also a belief in himself that he could be convincing, even as a girl. Redding had taught him how to work hard. Mrs. Adkins had drawn him to her sadness. And at Exeter he’d discovered that he was not an intellectual, but he had learned how to read and write. (At the time, Jack didn’t know how rare and useful this knowledge was—no more than he could have defined the vulnerability Mrs. Stackpole had exposed in him.)
The female faculty at Exeter struck Jack as sexually unapproachable, in that older-woman way. Whether Jack was right or wrong in that assumption, they were certainly not as approachable as Mrs. Stackpole—her crude, suggestive urgency had captivated him. Redding was a wilderness where women went and became weary, or at least weary-looking. At Exeter, on the other hand, there were some attractive faculty wives who captured the boys’ attention—if only at the fantasy level. (Jack wouldn’t have dreamed of approaching a single one of them; they all looked too happy.)
Least approachable of them all was Madame Delacorte, a French fox who worked in the library and whose husband taught in the Department of Romance Languages.
Romance
was not what Madame Delacorte brought to mind. There wasn’t a boy at Exeter who could look her in the eye—nor was there a boy who ever visited the library without searching longingly for her.
Madame Delacorte looked as if she’d just been laid but wanted more,
much
more. (Yet, somehow, the first sweaty encounter had not mussed her hair.) Madame Delacorte was as commanding a presence as Jeanne Moreau in
Jules and Jim;
not even her husband could approach her without stuttering, and he was from Paris.
Jack was cramming for his history final in the library one spring night; he had a favorite carrel on the second floor of the stacks. He’d burned his bridges with Noah Rosen
and
Michele Maher, and he was feeling resigned about his next four years in Durham, New Hampshire.
Emma Oastler was moving to Iowa City. She’d sent some of her writing to Iowa and had been admitted to the Writers’ Workshop there. Jack had never heard of the place. He knew only that Iowa was in the Midwest, and that he would miss Emma.
“You can come visit me, honey pie. I’m sure they have movie theaters there, despite all the writers. They probably have the movie theaters to purposely drive the writers
crazy.
”
In this context, Jack wasn’t worried about his history final—he was just a little depressed. When Madame Delacorte came to his carrel, he’d been plowing through a bunch of books he was supposed to have read already. He’d made a pile of the ones he was finished with; among them was a dusty tome about Roman law, which Madame Delacorte said someone had been looking for. She wanted him to return the book to the stacks on the third floor. The classics were kept there—all the Greek and Latin.
“Okay,” Jack said to Madame Delacorte. He could never look at her above her slender waist; her waist alone was enough to undo him. He went off to the third floor with the book about Roman law.
“Come right back, Jack,” Madame Delacorte called after him. “I don’t want to be responsible for distracting you.” As if she, or Jack, had any control of that!
It seemed that, as usual, there was no one in the stacks on the third floor. Jack quickly found where the book belonged, but—above the moldy bindings, in the next aisle—a pair of disembodied eyes regarded him. “Michele Maher isn’t the girl for you,” the voice that went with the eyes said. “You’re already good-looking. What do
you
need a good-looking girl for? You need something else, something
real.
”
Another dishwasher? Jack wondered. But he recognized the voice and the diluted, washed-out blue of the eyes. It was Molly whatever-her-name-was, Ed McCarthy’s ex-girlfriend. (
Penis
McCarthy, as Herman Castro less-than-lovingly called him.)
“Hi, Molly,” Jack said; he came around into her aisle and stood next to her.
“
I
should be your girlfriend,” Molly told him. “I know you love your sister, and she’s ugly. Well, I’m ugly, too.”