Authors: John Irving
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 understanding 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.
The word
actor
was replaced with
waiter,
and the names of certain plays or dramatizations (even the musicals) were presented to the clueless American reader as the names of trendy Toronto restaurants, in which Mr. Ramsey extolled the virtue of Jack’s “performance”—an oft-repeated word, which Emma left unaltered, except she sometimes changed it to a verb.
Hence Jack had “performed” superbly at an alleged bistro called Mail-Order Bride (there was another restaurant called Northwest Territories) and at what was probably a French place, d’Urbervilles, and at several restaurants of note in the northeastern United States, among them The Restaurant of Notre Dame and Peter and Wendy’s—not to mention what must have been a Spanish eatery, Bernarda Alba.
Mr. Ramsey’s letterhead—namely, that of St. Hilda’s—which stated he was Chairman of English and Drama, had been tweaked to identify him as Chairman of the Hotel and Restaurant of that oddly religious-sounding name. Mr. Ramsey’s opening sentence described St. Hilda’s (he meant, of course, the school) as “one of Toronto’s best.”
But Donald was an imperious prick—a headwaiter from Hell. “When I’m recommending a hotel with a good restaurant in Toronto, I always recommend the Four Seasons,” he told Jack. He then challenged Jack to take a minute or two to memorize the specials.
“If you give me ten minutes, I can memorize the whole menu,” Jack told him.
But Donald didn’t give him the chance. The maître d’ later told Giorgio or Guido that Jack’s attitude had offended him. He had sized up Jack as “a hick from Toronto via New Hampshire”—or so he said to Giorgio or Guido. Jack had already decided he didn’t want the waiter job—not in such a self-important
steakhouse.
But when Donald offered him an opportunity in the restaurant’s valet-parking department, Jack accepted. He was a good driver.
It wasn’t that Emma thought the job was beneath him; her objection was political. “You can’t be a parking valet, baby cakes. English is your first language. You’re taking a job from some unfortunate illegal alien.”
But Giorgio or Guido looked relieved. He didn’t want Jack to be a fellow waiter at Stan’s. He’d had enough difficulty accepting Jack as Emma’s roommate, no matter how many times Emma had told him that she and Jack didn’t have sex together. (Jack wondered what Giorgio or Guido’s problem was. How could you bench-press three hundred pounds and be
that
insecure?)
Jack didn’t last long as a parking valet; he was fired from the job his first night—in fact, he never got to park his first car.
It was a silver Audi with gunmetal-gray leather seats, and the guy who flipped Jack the keys was a young, arty type who appeared to have been quarreling with his young, arty wife—or his girlfriend, Jack had thought, before he’d driven less than a block and the little girl sat up in the backseat. Her face, which was streaked with tears, was perfectly framed in the rearview mirror. She was maybe four, at the most five, years old, and she wasn’t sitting in a booster seat. Evidently the backseat was her bed for the evening, because she was wearing pajamas and clutching both a blanket and a teddy bear to her chest. Jack saw a pillow propped against the armrest on the passenger side of the backseat; the booster seat was on the floor, kicked out of the way.
“Are you parking in a garage or outdoors?” the little girl asked him, wiping her nose on the sleeve of her pajamas.
“You can’t stay in the car,” Jack told her. He stopped the Audi and put on the hazard blinkers; she had scared the shit out of him and his heart was pounding.
“I’m not well enough behaved to eat in a grown-up restaurant,” the little girl said.
Jack didn’t know what to do. Maybe the young, arty couple had been arguing about leaving the little girl in the backseat, but he thought not. The girl had the look of a valet-parking veteran. “I like the garages better than parking on the street,” she explained. “It will be dark soon,” the little girl observed.
Jack drove down Main to Windward, where a gang of rowdies—noisy singles, though it was early in the evening—were crowding the entrance to Hama Sushi, waiting for tables. He left the Audi running at the curb and rang the buzzer to the half of the ratty duplex he shared with Emma; then he went back to the car and waited beside it. The little girl was never out of his sight.
“Is this where we’re parking?” she asked.
“I’m not leaving you alone, not anywhere,” he told her.
Emma opened the door and came out on the sidewalk; she was wearing one of her World Gym tank tops and nothing else. Because she looked more than usually pissed off, Jack guessed she’d been writing her novel.
“Nice car, honey pie. Does it come with the kid?” Jack explained the situation while the little girl observed them from the backseat. She’d probably never seen anyone quite like Emma in her World Gym tank top. “I told you—you shouldn’t be parking cars,” Emma said. She kept looking at the little girl. “I’m not babysitter material, Jack.”
“I usually sleep on the floor, if I think anyone can see me sleeping on the backseat,” the little girl said.
The “usually” made up Jack’s mind for him—that and what Emma said before she walked back inside to continue what must have been one of the angrier passages in her novel-in-progress. “Nothing good can come of this job, baby cakes.”
Jack put the little girl in the middle of the backseat and fastened a seat belt around her, because he couldn’t figure out how the stupid booster seat worked. “It’s probably hard to understand if you don’t have children,” the little girl told him forgivingly. Her name was Lucy. “I’m almost five,” she said.
When Jack returned to the corner of Rose and Main, he pulled up at the curb in front of Stan’s; his fellow valet parkers looked surprised to see him. “
¿Qué pasa?
” Roberto asked, when Jack handed him the keys.
“Better not park the Audi just yet,” Jack told him, taking Lucy into the restaurant. She wanted to bring her blanket and her teddy bear, but not the pillow, which was okay with Jack.
The asshole maître d’, Donald, was standing at his desk as if it were a pulpit and the book of reservations a Bible. Lucy, seeing all the people, wanted Jack to pick her up, which he did. “
Now
we’re going to get in trouble,” the child whispered in his ear.
“You’re going to be fine, Lucy,” Jack told her. “
I’m
the one who’s going to get in trouble.”
“You’re already in trouble, Burns,” Donald said, but Jack walked past him into the restaurant. Lucy spotted her parents before Jack did. It was still early, a soft light outside; the tables weren’t full yet. (Maybe the tables were never full at Stan’s.)
Lucy’s mother got up from her chair and met them halfway to her table. “Is something wrong?” she asked Jack. What a question. And women (not only Claudia) gave Jack a hard time when he said he wasn’t ready to be a parent!
“You forgot something,” Jack said to the young, arty mom. “You left Lucy in the car.” The woman just stared at him, but Lucy held out her arms and her mother took her from Jack—teddy bear and blanket and all.
Jack hoped that would be the end of it, but Donald, the headwaiter from Hell, wouldn’t let him leave. “There is no St. Hilda’s, hotel
or
restaurant, in Toronto,” he hissed. “There is no Mail-Order Bride—”
“So you’re from Toronto,” Jack interrupted him. The way Donald had said, “
T’ronto,
” had given him away. Jack should have known. Donald was another undiscovered Canadian working as a waiter in L.A.
Naturally, the young, arty husband and bad father wouldn’t let Jack leave Stan’s without giving him his two cents’ worth. “I’m gonna get you fired, pretty boy,” the guy said.
“It’s a good job to lose,” Jack told him, making note of the line.
Giorgio or Guido was hovering around, to the extent that a bodybuilder who can bench-press three hundred pounds can
hover.
“You better get
outta
here, Jack,” he was saying.
“I’m
trying
to get out of here,” Jack said.
He was abreast of the reservation desk when he spotted the telephone; it occurred to him to call 911 and report a clear case of child neglect, but he thought better of it. Jack didn’t know the license plate of the silver Audi. He would have to write it down if he wanted to remember it—damn numbers again.
But the bad father was too angry to let Jack go. He stepped in front of Jack and blocked his way; he was a medium-tall young man, and his chin was level to Jack’s eyes. Jack waited for the guy to touch him. When he grabbed Jack’s shoulders, Jack stepped back a little and the young man pulled Jack toward him. Jack let him pull, head-butting him in the lips. Jack didn’t butt him all that hard, but the guy was a big bleeder.
“I’m calling nine-one-one the second I’m home,” Jack said to Giorgio or Guido. “Tell Donald.”
“Donald says you’re fired, Jack,” the bodybuilder said.
“It’s a good job to lose,” Jack repeated. (He knew that line would have legs.)
Out on the sidewalk, Roberto was still holding the keys to the silver Audi. That’s when Jack remembered he had the parking chit in his shirt pocket; he’d already written down the license-plate numbers. “You’ll have to write out a new chit for the Audi,” he told Roberto.
“No problem,” Roberto said.
Jack walked along Main to Windward. It was a nice evening, only now growing dark. (When you’ve grown up in Toronto, Maine, and New Hampshire, when
isn’t
it a nice evening in L.A.?)
Emma was writing away when Jack got home, but she overheard his 911 call. “What did you do with the kid?” she asked him, after he’d hung up.
“Gave her to her parents.”
“What’s that on your forehead?” Emma asked.
“A little ketchup, maybe—I’ve been in a food fight.”
“It’s
blood,
baby cakes—I can see the teeth-marks.”
“You should’ve seen the fucker’s lips,” he told her.
“Ha!” Emma said. (Shades of Mrs. Machado—that exclamation always gave Jack the shivers.)
They went out to Hama Sushi. You could talk about anything at Hama Sushi—it was so noisy. Jack really liked the place, but it was partly what Emma called “
l’eau de
Dumpster” (her Montreal French) that eventually drove them away from their Windward Avenue duplex.
“So what did you learn from your brief experience as a parking valet, honey pie?”
“I got one good line out of it,” Jack said.
What convinced Emma that Jack should be a waiter at American Pacific, a restaurant in Santa Monica not far from the beach, was neither the location nor the menu. She went there on a date one night and liked what the waiters were wearing—blue Oxford cloth button-down shirts with solid burgundy ties, khakis with dark-brown belts, and dark-brown loafers. “It’s very Exeter, baby cakes—you’ll fit right in. I stole a dinner menu for you. Just think of it as an acting opportunity, as Mr. Ramsey would say.”
Emma meant that memorizing the menu was an acting opportunity. It took Jack the better part of a morning. Counting the salads and other starters together with the main courses, there were about twenty items.
Jack then called Mr. Ramsey in Toronto and alerted him to the modifications Emma had made in Mr. Ramsey’s recommendation for Jack; just in case someone phoned Mr. Ramsey to verify Jack’s credentials as a waiter, Jack wanted his beloved mentor to know that Mail-Order Bride was supposed to be a fabulous bistro.