Authors: John Irving
Not to Emma; she was both indignant and unreasonable about it. “The execs should still
read
them, even if they’re bad,” she insisted.
“But they hired you, Emma, so they wouldn’t have to read all the junk!”
“Someone
wrote
that junk, baby cakes. It took hours and hours.”
Emma surely exaggerated what she called wasting her time as a film major. What was the point of learning to appreciate good films? Emma argued. The way the movie industry worked had nothing to do with film as an art form. Jack thought that Emma’s motive for revenge was misguided; it was the machinations of the movie industry that had wasted her time, not her having been a film major.
Emma insisted that the studio execs were responsible for making many terrible movies that should never have been made; therefore, to make some small measure of atonement for their crimes, they should read their fair share of bad screenplays.
Jack argued that Emma should have been more upset about what happened in that rare case of an unknown screenwriter who wrote a script the studio execs actually read and
liked.
On only two occasions had Emma
loved
an unsolicited screenplay; both times, she’d managed to persuade the execs to read it. In each case, they promptly bought the rights and offered the screenwriter a fee to write a second draft; they rejected the second draft, paid off the screenwriter, and hired an established writer to reconstruct the story in all the usual, conventional ways. Whatever quality had been good enough to catch Emma’s attention (in the original script) was lost, but the studio now owned and continued to develop what they called “the property.”
This didn’t upset Emma at all. “It’s the writer’s fault—the writer caved to the money. That’s what the damn writers do. You want to maintain control of your screenplay, you take no money up front—you don’t even let the fuckers buy you lunch, honey pie.”
“But what if the writer
needs
the money?” Jack asked. “The writer probably needs
lunch
!”
“Then the writer should get a day job,” Emma said.
Arguing with Emma drove Jack crazy. It also worried him about Emma’s novel—that the writing would descend to a level of autobiographical complaining; that it would be an
un
imagined story, without an iota of invention, full of rantings and accusatory anecdotes he’d heard before. That the main character of
The Slush-Pile Reader
was a young Canadian woman—a newcomer to L.A. who’d gone to school “back East” and had Emma’s job—did not, Jack thought, bode well. But it turned out that Emma had invented a character who seemed most unlike herself; she’d actually imagined a story, one that was far more interesting than her own. And, sentence by sentence, she wrote well—she’d taken the necessary pains to revise herself.
Furthermore, Emma had envisioned a
heroic
character—one capable of touchingly unselfish gestures—notwithstanding that Emma was generally too cynical to be heroic herself. The main character of
The Slush-Pile Reader,
the eponymous reader, is not a cynic. On the contrary, Michele Maher (of all names!) is a pure-hearted optimist with an indestructibly sunny disposition. Michele Maher—that is, Emma’s character—is such a good girl that her purity survives her most degrading experiences, and she has a few.
Unlike Emma, Michele is a preternaturally thin young woman who has to force herself to eat. She haunts gyms and health-food stores, gagging on protein powder and popping all the dietary supplements that bodybuilders use, but she never manages to put on a pound. Despite all her weightlifting, she looks like a wire. Michele Maher has the body and metabolism of a twelve-year-old boy.
Also unlike Emma, Michele is conscience-stricken by the bad scripts she reads. The worst, most self-deluded screenwriters break her heart. Michele wants to help them be better writers; to that futile end, she writes them encouraging letters on the studio letterhead. These letters are very different in content and tone from the notes Michele submits to the studio execs; in those notes, she is critical in the extreme. In short, Michele does her job well: she tells her bosses all the reasons why they shouldn’t waste their time reading this crap.
But to the rock-bottom writers themselves, Michele Maher is an angel of hope; she always finds something positive to say about their most abhorrent excrescences. In the first chapter of
The Slush-Pile Reader,
Michele writes a warm, enthusiastic letter to a heavily tattooed bodybuilder and porn star named Miguel Santiago. His porn name is Jimmy.
In his pathetic screenplay, which is the story of his life, Santiago describes himself as a porn star who hates his work. The only way Santiago can have sex on command is to imagine he is a young James Stewart falling in love with Margaret Sullavan in
The Shopworn Angel,
or submitting to the sentimental bliss of domestic life with Donna Reed in
It’s a Wonderful Life.
Santiago manages to stay the course through such epics as
Bored Housewives 4
and
Keep It Up, Inc.,
by imagining he is the one and only Jimmy Stewart in these black-and-white soap-opera masterpieces.
There’s no story: we see Miguel Santiago lifting weights and getting tattooed, we see him memorizing lines from
The Shopworn Angel
and
It’s a Wonderful Life,
and of course we see him performing as the
other
Jimmy. In her notes to the studio execs, Michele Maher states that such a film is “not makable”—easily a third of it would be a porn movie! But in her letter to Miguel Santiago, Michele calls his screenplay “a bittersweet memoir.” And her letter takes a personal turn: she asks Miguel where he works out.
Santiago, of course, imagines that Michele Maher is a studio exec—not a slush-pile reader. Little does he know that she goes to the video store and rents all four of the
Bored Housewives
movies. In one of her more self-degrading moments, Michele masturbates to
Keep It Up, Inc.;
sexually repressed, she goes to the gym where Miguel Santiago (alias Jimmy) trains, just to watch him work out. In this respect, Michele Maher is like Emma: she has a thing for bodybuilder-types. But unlike Emma, Michele doesn’t usually act on her cravings. And what bodybuilder would ever hit on Michele? She’s built like a pencil.
What makes
The Slush-Pile Reader
moving is that Miguel Santiago is a dim-witted but genuinely nice guy. When Michele Maher gets up the nerve to introduce herself to him, she confesses she’s no exec—she’s just a first reader who felt sorry for him. They begin a relationship that one reviewer of
The Slush-Pile Reader
would call “L.A. dysfunctional”—this was in praise of the novel, which generally got terrific reviews. “More
noir
than
noir,
” said
The New York Times.
Miguel and Michele end up living together—“within breathing distance of a sushi Dumpster in Venice.” (Jack knew where that came from.) They don’t have sex. His schlong is too big for Michele—it hurts. She just holds it. (Jack knew where that came from, too—if not the “too big” part.)
Over time, out of his growing and abiding love for her, Miguel introduces Michele to other bodybuilders he knows at the gym; he’s seen them in the shower, so he knows who’s got the small schlongs. Michele sleeps with them. “A muted pleasure,” as she puts it to Miguel. Holding his porn-movie penis with mixed emotions, she tells him she’s happy.
As for Miguel Santiago—a.k.a. Jimmy, the penile phenomenon—he gets all the sex he wants or needs at his day job, which he stoically endures. He accepts his relationship with Michele for what it is. Michele sleeps with the occasional small schlong, but she always goes home to Miguel and they lie in bed together, she holding his huge, unacceptable penis—the two of them not saying anything—while they watch
Waterloo Bridge
on the VCR, the 1940 remake with Vivien Leigh and Robert Taylor. It’s Miguel’s kind of movie, a real tearjerker.
At the end of Emma’s novel, Michele Maher and Miguel Santiago are still living together. Michele doesn’t write letters of encouragement to bad screenwriters anymore; she restricts her comments to the notes she gives the studio execs, who never read the screenplays she reads. The worst scripts still break her heart, but she doesn’t talk about her day when she comes home to Miguel; naturally, he doesn’t talk about his. They consume some protein powder and dietary supplements, and they go to the gym. He says he likes it when she sleeps in a World Gym tank top—her small, almost nonexistent breasts are easy to touch under the angry gorilla holding the bending barbell.
“There are worse relationships in L.A.,” Emma writes; it was a line quoted in a lot of her reviews, and a pretty good setup to the novel’s last sentence: “If you or your partner is in a bad movie, or in any number of bad movies—even if you’re perpetually in the act of rewriting the
same
bad movie—there are worse things to be ashamed of.”
Jack liked the novel’s first sentence better: “Either there are no coincidences in this town, or everything in this town is a coincidence.”
Take the message on the answering machine from Myra Ascheim, for example. Jack didn’t know that Emma already knew who
Mildred
Ascheim was, not to mention that Emma had been watching porn films day and night—“research” for
The Slush-Pile Reader,
she later called it—and this was
before
he happened to meet Hank Long on the set of
Muffy the Vampire Hooker 3
and Jack and Emma started watching Hank Long movies together.
Jack told Emma that he couldn’t read about Miguel Santiago without seeing Hank Long in the part, but Emma objected to his premature conclusion that her novel would one day be a film. “Spare me the movie talk, baby cakes,” was how she put it. “You’re getting ahead of yourself.”
Jack first read
The Slush-Pile Reader
while the manuscript was still making the rounds of New York literary agents; Emma had decided she was more American than Canadian and she wanted to sell the U.S. rights before she even showed the novel to a Toronto publisher—notwithstanding that Charlotte Breasts-with
-Bones-
in-Them Barford, her old pal from St. Hilda’s, was a young up-and-comer in Canadian publishing.
“Did you have to call her Michele Maher?” Jack asked Emma. “I adored Michele Maher, I
worshiped
her. I will always worship her. You never even met her, Emma.”
“You kept her away from me, Jack. Besides, Michele is a very positive character—in the book, I mean.”
“Michele is a very positive character
in real life
!” Jack protested. “You’ve given her the body of a twelve-year-old boy! You’ve made her this pathetic creature who’s enslaved to bodybuilders!”
“It’s just a name,” Emma said. “You’re overreacting.”
Naturally, Jack was sensitive about the small-schlong business, too—that part about sleeping with a guy with a small penis being “a muted pleasure.”
“It’s a
novel,
honey pie—a work of
fiction.
Don’t you know how to read a novel?”
“You’ve been holding my penis for years, Emma. I didn’t know you were making a
size
assessment.”
“It’s a
novel,
” Emma repeated. “You’re taking it too personally. You’ve missed the point about penises, Jack.”
“What point is that?”
“When they’re too big, it hurts, baby cakes. I mean, it hurts if the woman is too small.”
Jack thought about it; he hadn’t known that a woman
could
be too small. (Too
big,
maybe, but not too small.) Did Emma mean that “a muted pleasure” was preferable to pain? Was that the point? Then he saw that Emma was crying. “I
liked
the novel,” he told her. “I didn’t mean that I didn’t like it.”
“You don’t get it,” Emma said.
Jack thought she was talking about
The Slush-Pile Reader,
which he believed he’d understood fairly well. “I get it, Emma,” he said. “It may not be exactly my cup of tea—I mean it’s hardly an old-fashioned novel with a complicated plot and a complex cast of characters. It may be a little contemporary for my taste—a psychological study of a relationship more than a narrative, and a dysfunctional relationship at that. But I
liked
it—I really did. I thought the tone of voice was consistent—a kind of sarcastic understatement, I guess you’d call it. There was a deadpan voice in the more emotional scenes, which I particularly liked. And the relationship, imperfect though it is, is better than
no
relationship. I get that. They don’t have sex, they
can’t
have sex, but—for different reasons—not having sex is almost a
relief
for them.”
“Oh, shut the fuck up!” Emma said; she was still crying.
“What don’t I get?” he asked.
“It’s not the
novel
you don’t get—it’s
me
!” she cried. “
I’m
too small, Jack,” Emma said softly. “Even not-very-big guys hurt me.”
Jack was completely surprised. Emma was such a big girl, such a strong young woman, and she was always battling her weight; she was much taller and heavier than Jack. How was it possible that she was too small? “Have you seen a doctor?” he asked.
“A gynecologist—yes, several. They say I’m
not
too small. It’s all in my mind, apparently.”
“The pain is in your mind?” he asked her.
“No, that’s not where the pain is,” she said.
Emma’s condition had an uncomfortable-sounding name. Vaginismus, Emma explained, was a conditioned response; often a spasm of the perineal muscles occurred if there was any stimulation of the area. In some women, even the anticipation of vaginal insertion could result in muscle spasm.
“You want to avoid penetration?” Jack asked Emma.
“It’s involuntary, honey pie. I can’t help it—it’s chronic.”