Until I Find You (106 page)

In those two years, Jack made a lot of money and spent very little. About the only expensive thing he bought was a new Audi; naturally, it was another silver one. He could not motivate himself to sell the place on Entrada Drive and buy something more suitable. This was because what he really wanted was to get out of L.A.—although no other city beckoned, and Jack held fast to Emma’s idea that it was somehow good to be an outsider. Besides, as long as his life story was a work-in-progress, he couldn’t imagine cutting his ties to Dr. García. She was the closest Jack had come to a good marriage, or even a possible one. He saw her twice a week. Putting his life in chronological order for Dr. García had become a more regular and restorative activity in Jack’s life than having sex.

As for sex, in the last two years—since adamantly
not
having sex with Lucy—Jack had briefly comforted Lucia Delvecchio, who was in the throes of a nasty divorce. Lucia’s divorce was obdurately ongoing—one of those drawn-out battles involving children and credit cards and summer homes and motor vehicles and dogs—and because her irate husband viewed
Jack
as the root cause of their marital difficulties, Jack’s presence in Lucia’s
un
married life was of little comfort to her and not long-lasting.

He was romantically linked with three of his co-stars—in three out of his last five films—but these rumors were false in two out of three cases. The one co-star Jack did sleep with, Margaret Becker, was a single mom in her forties. She had a twelve-year-old son named Julian and a house on the ocean in Malibu. Both Margaret and Julian were very sweet, but fragile. The boy had no relationship with his father, and he’d had unrealistic expectations of every boyfriend his mother had had—they’d all left her.

As a result, Julian’s expectations of Jack were aimed a little lower. The boy kept anxiously looking for signs that Jack was preparing to leave him and his mom. Jack liked the boy—he
loved
having a kid in his life—but Julian was very needy. Margaret, Julian’s mom, was a full-fledged
clinger.

Whenever Jack had to go away, she stuffed his suitcase with photographs of herself; in the photos, which were pointedly taken for the occasion of Jack’s trip, Margaret looked stricken with the fear that he would never come back to her. And Jack would often wake up at night and find Margaret staring at him; it was as if she were attempting to penetrate his consciousness, in his sleep, and brainwash him into never leaving.

Julian’s sorrowful eyes followed Jack as if the boy were a dog Jack had neglected to feed. And Margaret said to Jack, at least once a day: “I know you’re going to leave me, Jack. Just try not to walk away when I’m feeling too vulnerable to handle it, or when it would be especially harmful to poor Julian.”

Jack was with her six months; it felt like six years, and leaving Julian hurt Jack more than leaving Margaret. The boy watched him go as if Jack were his absconding father.

“We take terrible risks with the natural affection of children,” Jack would one day say to Dr. García, but she complained that he had told her about these relationships in a sketchy fashion. Or was it that he’d had nothing but sketchy relationships?

Months later, although the dominant sound in Jack’s house on Entrada Drive was the traffic on the Pacific Coast Highway, he would lie in bed hearing the ocean—the way he had listened to it in Margaret’s house in Malibu, while waiting for Julian to come into the bedroom and wake him and Margaret. Jack sincerely missed them, but they had driven him away—almost from the first moment Jack entered their lives. It was Dr. García’s assessment that they were “even needier” than
Jack
was.

“I’m not
needy
!” Jack replied indignantly.

“Hmm,” Dr. García said. “Have you considered, Jack, that what you crave most of all is a real relationship and a normal life, but you don’t know anyone who’s normal or real?”

“Yes, I have considered that,” he answered.

“I’ve been seeing you for five years, yet I can’t recall hearing you express a political opinion—not one,” Dr. García said. “What are your politics, Jack?”

“Generally more liberal than conservative,” he said.

“You’re a Democrat?”

“I don’t vote,” Jack admitted. “I’ve never voted.”

“Well,
there’s
a statement!” Dr. García said.

“Maybe it’s because I started my life as a Canadian, and then I became an American—but I’m really not either,” he said.

“Hmm.”

“I just like my work,” Jack told her.

“You take no vacations?” she asked. “The last vacation I remember hearing about was a
school
vacation.”

“When an actor isn’t making a movie, he’s on vacation,” Jack said.

“But that’s not exactly true, is it?” Dr. García asked. “You’re always reading scripts, aren’t you? You must spend a lot of time considering new roles, even if you eventually turn them down. And you’ve been reading a lot of novels lately. Since you’ve been
credited
with writing a screenplay, aren’t you at least thinking about another adaptation? Or an original screenplay, perhaps?”

Jack didn’t say anything; it seemed to him that he was
always
working, even when he wasn’t.

“You go to the gym, you watch what you eat, you don’t drink,” Dr. García was saying. “But what do you do when you’re just
relaxing
? Or are you never relaxed?”

“I have sex,” he said.

“The kind of sex you have is not relaxing,” Dr. García told him.

“I hang out with my friends,” Jack said.

“
What
friends? Emma’s dead, Jack.”

“I have other friends!” he protested.

“You have no friends,” Dr. García said. “You have professional acquaintances; you’re on friendly terms with some of them. But who are your
friends
?”

Jack pathetically mentioned Herman Castro—the Exeter heavyweight, now a doctor in El Paso. Herman always wrote,
“Hey, amigo,”
on his Christmas cards.

“The word
amigo
doesn’t make him your friend,” Dr. García pointed out. “Do you remember his wife’s name, or the names of his children? Have you ever visited him in El Paso?”

“You’re depressing me,” Jack told her.

“I ask my patients to tell me about their life’s most emotional moments—the ups and downs, Jack,” Dr. García said. “In your case, this means what has made you laugh, what has made you cry, and what has made you feel angry.”

“I’m doing it, aren’t I?” he asked her.

“But the
purpose
for doing this, Jack, is that when you tell me your life story, you reveal yourself—at least that’s what usually happens, that’s what’s
supposed
to happen,” Dr. García said. “I regret that, in your case, you’ve been a very faithful storyteller—and a very
thorough
one, I believe—yet I don’t feel that I know you. I know what’s
happened
to you. Do I ever know it—ad nauseam! But you haven’t
revealed
yourself, Jack. I still don’t know who you
are.
Please tell me who you are.”

“According to my mother,” Jack began in a small voice, which both he and Dr. García recognized as Jack’s voice as a child, “I was an actor before I was an actor, but my most vivid memories of childhood are those moments when I felt compelled to hold my mother’s hand. I wasn’t acting then.”

“Then I guess you better find a way to forgive her,” Dr. García told him gently. “You might learn a lesson from your father. I’m just guessing, but when
he
forgave your mom, maybe it enabled him to move on with his life. You’re thirty-eight, Jack—you’re rich, you’re famous, but you don’t have a life.”

“My dad shouldn’t have moved on with his life without me!” Jack cried. “He shouldn’t have left me!”

“You better find a way to forgive him, too, Jack.” Dr. García sighed. (Jack hated it when she sighed.) “Now you’re crying again,” she observed. “It doesn’t do you any good to cry. You have to stop crying.”

What a
bitch
Dr. García could be! That’s why Jack didn’t tell her when he heard from Michele Maher. He went to the national convention of dermatologists without letting Dr. García know that he was going, because he knew that she would do everything in her power to persuade him not to go; because Jack was afraid of what the doctor would say; because he knew she was always right.

As for Michele—as if there’d been no hard feelings between them, as if the twenty years they’d not been in each other’s company were shorter than those fleeting summer vacations when they’d been at Exeter—Michele Maher wrote Jack that she was coming to Los Angeles, where she very much looked forward to seeing him.

She didn’t attend the dermatology convention every year, she wanted him to know—usually only when it was in the Northeast. But she’d never been to L.A. (“
Can you imagine?
” she wrote.) And because the convention this year provided Michele with an opportunity to see Jack—well, she made it sound as if he were the reason she’d decided to blow a long weekend in a glitzy Hollywood hotel with a bunch of skin doctors.

The dermatologists had chosen one of those annoying Universal City hotels. Rising out of a landscape of soundstages that resembled bomb shelters, the Sheraton Universal overlooked the Hollywood Hills and was across the street from Universal Studios—the theme park. The hotel had the feeling of a resort, the look of a place where conventioneers not infrequently brought their families.

While the dermatologists talked about skin, their children could go on the rides at the theme park. In the southern California climate, Jack imagined that the children of dermatologists would be sticky with sunscreen and wrapped up to their eyes; in fact, he was surprised that dermatologists would hold a convention in such a
sunny
place.

Michele Maher’s letter was positively perky; she wrote to Jack with the flippancy of a prep-school girl, her former self. Her letter caused him to remember her old
Richard III
joke. “Where’s your hump, Dick?” she had asked him.

“It’s in the costume closet, and it’s just a football,” Jack had answered, for maybe the hundredth time.

But she’d been a good sport when he’d beaten her out for the part of Lady Macbeth, and of course Jack also remembered that Michele was over five-ten—a slim honey-blonde with a model’s glowing skin, and (in Ed McCarthy’s vulgar estimation) “a couple of high, hard ones.”

“Why don’t you have a girlfriend, Jack?” Michele had asked him—when they were seventeen. She was just kidding around, or so he’d thought.

But he had to go and give her a line—Jack was just acting. “Because I get the feeling you’re not available,” he’d said.

“I had no idea you were interested in me, Jack. I didn’t think you were interested in
anyone,
” she’d told him.

“How can anyone not be interested in you, Michele?” he’d asked her, thus setting in motion a disaster.

What had drawn them together in the first place was
acting.
The one honest thing Jack had done was not sleep with her—only because he thought he’d caught the clap from Mrs. Stackpole, the dishwasher, and he didn’t want Michele to catch it. But this was hardly
honest,
as Dr. García had already pointed out to him. Jack didn’t tell Michele
why
he wouldn’t sleep with her, did he?

Of course he’d thought at the time that almost no one would have believed he was banging Mrs. Stackpole—especially not Michele, who was so beautiful, while Mrs. Stackpole was so
unfortunate-looking.
(Even in the world of
much
older women.)

Why, then, didn’t the flirtatious chirpiness of Michele’s letter warn Jack away from her? How desperate was he to connect with someone, to have a so-called real or normal relationship outside the world of acting, that he failed to see the crystal-clear indications? Michele and Jack had never had a real relationship; they hadn’t even
almost
had a relationship. If he
had
slept with her—and not given her the clap, which Jack hadn’t caught from Mrs. Stackpole—how soon after that would they have broken up? When Michele went off to Columbia, in New York City, and Jack went off to the University of New Hampshire? Probably. When he met Claudia?
Definitely!

In short, Michele Maher had always been Jack’s illusion. The concept of the two of them together had been more the fantasy of other students at Exeter than it had ever been a reality between them. They were the most beautiful girl and the most handsome boy in the school; maybe that’s all they
ever
were.

“
I have meetings all day, and there are lectures every night,
” Michele wrote to him about the dermatologists’ convention at the Sheraton Universal.
“But I can skip a lecture or two. Just tell me which night, or nights, you’re free. I’m dying to see where you hang out. What I mean, Jack, is that you must
own
that town!”

But Hollywood wasn’t that kind of town. It was a perpetual, glittering, ongoing award; for the most part, Hollywood kept escaping you. There
was
one night when you owned the town—the night you won the Oscar. But then there came the night (and the next night) after that. How quickly it happened that Hollywood was
not
your town anymore, and it
wouldn’t
be—not unless or until you won
another
Academy Award, and then another one.

The studios once owned Hollywood, but they didn’t own it anymore. There were agents who
behaved
as if they owned it; there were actors and actresses who
thought
they owned it, but they were wrong. The only people who truly owned Hollywood had more than one Oscar; they just kept winning Oscars, one after the other, and Jack Burns was
not
one of those people and never would be. But to Michele Maher, he was a movie star. She believed that was all that mattered.