Until I Find You (66 page)

“Sure, I know them. You can’t exactly get lost in Winnipeg. So you want a flower for the bee?” she asked the girl.

“Yeah, but I can’t decide what
kinda
flower,” the girl said.

Jack was edging toward the door. He thought he’d take his chances out on Queen Street; a fan (or a lunatic) would probably recognize him, but Jack Burns didn’t need to see someone get another tattoo.

“Where are you off to, Jack?” Alice asked, not looking at him. She was laying out her flash of flower choices, to show the honeybee girl.

“You don’t hafta go,” the girl said to Jack. “You can watch—no matter where she puts it.”

“That depends,” Alice told her.

“I’ll see you back at home,” Jack said to his mom. “I’ll take you and Leslie out to dinner.”

Both Alice and the girl looked disappointed that Jack was leaving. Bob Dylan was yowling away. (“Idiot Wind.” Jack would always remember that song.) Jack wasn’t thinking about the girl; he was trying to decipher more exactly the look of disappointment on his mother’s face.
What
is
it about me that bothers you?
Jack wanted to ask her, but not with the honeybee girl there.

“
Someone’s got it in for me,
” Bob complained. Every time Jack came to Toronto, he felt that way. “
They say I shot a man named Gray and took his wife to Italy,
” Bob sang away.
“She inherited a million bucks and when she died it came to me.”

Jack sang the next line out loud, with Bob—never taking his eyes off his mother. “
I can’t help it if I’m lucky,
” he sang—because
that
was the principal ingredient in the look his mom was giving him. She thought he’d been lucky!

“So far, Jack—so far!” Alice called after him, as he stepped out on Queen Street and closed the door to Daughter Alice.

IV

Sleeping in the Needles

23

Billy Rainbow

J
ack was on a press junket in New York. (“Following Miramax’s marching orders,” as Emma put it.) The only thing memorable about this particular interview was not the opening question itself, which he’d been asked a hundred times before, but the sheer clumsiness of how the journalist worded the question—that and the fact that Emma called in the middle of his oft-repeated answer, and it was the last time Jack would hear her voice.

His interviewer, a matronly woman with a baffling accent, was the same journalist, from the Hollywood Foreign Press, who, in a previous press junket, had asked Jack if he was modeling his appearance on that of a young Martin Sheen in
Apocalypse Now.
She was drinking a Diet Coke and smoking a mentholated cigarette, her artificially sweetened breath wafting over him like smoke from a fire in a mint factory.

“Captain Willard has short hair,” Jack had answered her that previous time.

“Cap-ee-tan who?”

“The Martin Sheen character in
Apocalypse Now—
Captain Willard,” he’d said. “I’m not a hundred percent sure about his rank.”

“I didn’t mean-a hees hair,” the journalist had said.

“I’m not consciously modeling myself on a young Martin Sheen,” Jack had told her. “I’m not trying to kill Marlon Brando, either.”

“You mean-a
young
Marlon Brando?” the lady from the Hollywood Foreign Press had asked him.

“In the movie you mentioned,” he had explained to her, slowly, “the young Martin Sheen character is sent to kill Marlon Brando—remember? Not a young Marlon Brando, either.”

“Forget eet,” she’d said. “Let’s-a move on.”

This time her question was breathtaking in its awkwardness, but she had at last moved on from Martin Sheen. “Are you a person who-wa, though not a homosexual, psychologically identifies weeth the opposite sex-sa? I mean-a weeth
wee-
men.”

“Am I a transvestite, do you mean?”

“Yes!”

“No.”

“But-a you are always dressing as a
woo-
man—or you seem to be theenking about eet, I mean-a dressing as a woo-man, even when-a you are dressed as a
man.
”

“I’m not thinking about dressing as a woman right now,” Jack told her. “It’s just something I occasionally do in a movie—you know, when I’m
acting.
”

“Are you
writing
about eet?”

“About dressing as a woman?”

“Yes!”

“No.”

His cell phone rang. Ordinarily he didn’t answer his phone in the middle of an interview, but Jack could see that the call was from Emma and she’d been depressed lately. Emma was losing the fight with her weight; every morning since he’d been away, Emma called to tell him what she weighed. It was almost lunchtime in New York, but Jack knew that Emma was just getting up in L.A.

He’d told her that he was being interviewed around the clock—Emma knew very well what press junkets were for. In mild exasperation, Jack handed his cell phone to the lady from the Hollywood Foreign Press. “This woman won’t leave me alone,” he said to his interviewer. “Try telling her I’m in the middle of an interview. See how far you get.”

If nothing else, Jack hoped this might interrupt the chain of thought that the journalist from the Hollywood Foreign Press was pursuing. He already knew that his interviewer would have no luck interrupting Emma from
her
train of thought.

“Hello-a?” the woman who thought he looked like a young Martin Sheen said.

It suddenly sounded like
Emma
was speaking Italian—of course Jack recognized her spiel. “Pleeze tell-a Jack Burns—eet’s Maria Antonietta
Beluzzi
on da fon-a!”

“I’m-a sorry. Jack Burns ees in the meedle of an interview,” the lady from the Hollywood Foreign Press said.

“Tell heem I mees-a holding hees
pee-
nis!” Emma said.

“Eet’s a Ms.
Beluzzi,
” his interviewer said, handing him back his cell phone. “Eet sounds urgent.”

“So what do you weigh this morning?” Jack asked Emma.

“Two hundred and fucking
five
!” Emma wailed—loudly enough for the journalist to hear her.

“You have to go on a diet, Emma,” he told her, for what had to be the hundredth time.

Jack Burns was thirty-two in 1997—Emma was thirty-nine. He had a better metabolism than she had, and he’d always watched what he ate. But now that Jack was in his thirties, even he had to be more strict with his diet.

Emma didn’t understand dieting. Her one bottle of red wine a night had become two; she had pasta for
lunch.
Here she was, pushing forty, and her favorite food was still gorgonzola mashed potatoes. Jack kept telling her: she could spend all day on the ab machine at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills—she could be bench-pressing her own weight—and not work off those kinds of carbs.

Jack could see that the journalist from the Hollywood Foreign Press was writing everything down—including, as he would later read in her interview, the “two hundred and fucking
five.
” She even spelled Maria Antonietta Beluzzi correctly; naturally, it turned out that the journalist was Italian.

“Emma—” Jack started to say.

“
He calls her Emma and brutally tells her to go on a diet,
” the lady from the Hollywood Foreign Press would write.

“Fuck you and your diet, Jack,” Emma said sharply on the phone. “I want you to know I’ve taken good care of you in my will.” Then she hung up.

“Your-a girlfriend?” his interviewer asked. “I mean-a
one
of them.”

“Kind of,” Jack replied.

“Ees Ms. Beluzzi an actress?”

“She’s a voluptuous tobacconist,” he said. Although the journalist didn’t write this down,
voluptuous
would somehow make it into her interview—but in reference to
Emma.

“I suppose-za you have, or have-a had,
many
girlfriends,” Jack’s interviewer said.

“Nobody serious,” he said, for what had to be the hundredth time—with apologies to Michele Maher.

Jack was tired. He’d had too many interviews, with too many prying and insinuating journalists. But that was no excuse. He shouldn’t have lost control of this interview. He shouldn’t have so recklessly, even deliberately, allowed this lady from the Hollywood Foreign Press to imagine anything she might want to imagine—but he did.

Of course it wasn’t the interview that would bother him; such things aren’t truly damaging, not for long. But that Emma’s last words to Jack were about her
will—
well, that would hurt him forever.

By the time the interview was published, Emma would be dead—and the Italian journalist from the Hollywood Foreign Press had figured out that he couldn’t have been having a relationship with Maria Antonietta Beluzzi, the big-breasted tobacconist in Fellini’s
Amarcord.
(Ms. Beluzzi would be old enough to be Jack’s grandmother!)

It had to have been Emma Oastler Jack was talking to, the journalist wrote—he and Emma, who were “just roommates,” were known to be living together—and anyone who’d seen the famous author recently knew at a glance she was overweight, if not that she weighed as much as two hundred and five pounds. (In this context, Jack’s use of the word
voluptuous
appeared to mock Emma for becoming so fat.)

Besides, the Italian lady concluded, Emma was said to have been depressed that her third novel—after many years, it was still only a work-in-progress—was growing too long.

“How long
is
it?” all the journalists would ask Jack, after Emma’s death. But by then he had learned, the hard way, to be more careful with the press.

That trip to New York, Jack was staying at The Mark. He had registered in the name of Billy Rainbow—the character he played in the soon-to-be-released film he was promoting at the press junket. He usually registered in hotels in the name of the character he was playing in his most recent, not-yet-released movie. That way, the Jack Burns fans couldn’t find him.

They weren’t all exactly fans. Some of the “chicks with dicks” had taken offense that Jack repeatedly denied he was a transsexual or a transvestite. In almost every interview, Jack said he was a cross-dresser only occasionally—and only in the movies.
Real
transsexuals and transvestites were offended; they said that Jack was “merely acting.” Well—of course he was!

So Jack was registered at The Mark as Billy Rainbow; the front desk screened all his calls. Jack always told his mom where he was staying—and who he was, this time—and of course Emma knew, and his agent, Bob Bookman, and his lawyer, Alan Hergott. And the publicist for whichever studio was making his most recent movie, in this case Erica Steinberg from Miramax. Naturally, Harvey Weinstein knew, too. If you were making a Miramax movie, Harvey knew where you were staying
and
under what name.

At the time, Jack was sleeping with the well-known cellist Mimi Lederer, so she knew where he was staying, too. In fact, he was in bed with her—asleep at The Mark—when Emma died.

That night, after dinner, Mimi had brought her cello back to his hotel room; she’d played two solos naked for him. It had been awkward at dinner, because Mimi wouldn’t check her cello. The big instrument, in its case, occupied a third chair at their table; Mimi would look at it from time to time, as if she expected the cello to say something.

Jack didn’t tell Mimi that he’d met another cellist when he was a little boy—Hannele, a music student at Sibelius Academy and one (of two) of his father’s girlfriends in Helsinki. Hannele had shared a tattoo with her friend Ritva. Hannele got the vertical left side of a heart torn in two; it was tattooed on her heart-side breast. And Hannele’s armpits were unshaven—Jack would always remember that.

When Mimi Lederer was playing for Jack in his hotel room at The Mark, it made him shudder to remember how Hannele had sat for her tattoo—like Mimi, maybe like
all
female cellists, with her legs spread apart. That was when Jack wondered if Hannele had ever played naked for his dad, which again caused him to wonder if he was like William. (The way William was with women, especially.)

Jack would remember what Mimi Lederer played for him that night at The Mark, when Emma was still alive—a cello solo, part of something from a Mozart trio. (Jack had made a point of learning as little as he could about classical music because it reminded him of organ music, or church music, which reminded him of his derelict dad.)

“Divertimento—E Flat Major,” Mimi Lederer whispered to him, before she began to play. Like Hannele, maybe like
all
female cellists, Mimi was tall with long arms and small breasts. Naturally, Jack wondered if your breasts got in the way when you were playing a cello.

The second piece Mimi played naked for him was part of something from a Beethoven string quartet. “
Razumovsky
Opus Fifty-Nine,” Mimi murmured to him, “Number One.” Just the names of pieces of classical music made Jack’s teeth ache. Why couldn’t composers think of better titles? But it was wonderful to witness Mimi Lederer’s control of that big instrument she so confidently straddled.

They were still asleep when the phone rang. It was way too early in the morning for it to be Emma—that was Jack’s first thought. Toronto, like New York, was on Eastern time; that was the second idea to pop into his head. He saw it was a little after six in the morning—too early for it to be his mother, either, or so Jack thought.

Erica Steinberg was both too nice and too tactful to call him this early in the morning, and Erica knew that Jack was sleeping with Mimi Lederer—Erica knew everything. Jack thought maybe it was Harvey Weinstein on the phone. He would call you when he wanted to; he’d called Jack early in the morning before. Maybe Jack had said something in one of his interviews that he shouldn’t have said.

Mimi Lederer and Jack had to get up early, anyway—although not quite this early. Jack had another day to go on the press junket, and Mimi was teaching a class at Juilliard; then she had to catch a plane. Mimi was a member of some trio or quartet; they had a concert in Minneapolis, or maybe it was Cleveland. Jack didn’t remember.