Until I Find You (70 page)

Jack finished dressing without saying anything. He went into the bathroom and shut the door. He tried to do something about his hair; he washed his face. He was grateful to Mrs. Oastler for leaving him her tube of toothpaste, if not her toothbrush, which he presumed she’d packed. He smeared a dab of toothpaste on his teeth with his index finger and rinsed his mouth in the sink. Jack heard the hotel-room door close before he was finished in the bathroom; when he came back out into the room, Leslie was gone.

He had some trouble leaving Shutters. Mrs. Oastler had paid the bill, but the paparazzi were waiting for him. Thankfully, they’d missed Mrs. Oastler. Someone had spotted Jack Burns having dinner with a good-looking older woman at One Pico; someone had figured out that they’d spent the night at Shutters.

“Who was the woman, Jack?” one of the photographers kept asking.

There were a few more paparazzi waiting for him at Entrada Drive, but that was to be expected. Jack wondered why they hadn’t been there the night before; they could have followed him and Leslie to Shutters. He stripped Emma’s bed and put her linens and towels in the washing machine; he straightened up the place a little. His mom called before he’d managed to make himself any breakfast. He told her that Leslie was already on the plane, and that they’d had a comforting night together.

“
Comforting?
You didn’t sleep with her—did you, Jack?”

“Of course not!” he said with indignation.

“Well, Leslie can be a little
lawless,
” Alice said.

Jack could only imagine how Mrs. Oastler might have reacted to that. He would have guessed that, in their relationship, his mom was the more
lawless
of the two. But he didn’t say anything. Jack knew he was supposed to talk to his mother, but he didn’t know what to say.

“Leslie said I should talk to you, Mom. She said I should ask you everything, while there’s still time.”

“Goodness, what a morbid night you two must have had!” Alice said.

“Mom,
talk
to me.”

“We
are
talking, dear.”

She was being coy. Jack simply turned against her. There was a time when he’d
tried
to ask her everything, and she’d wanted no part of it. Now he didn’t want to give her the opportunity to unburden herself. What did Jack care about any of it now—what did it matter? When he was a kid, when it would have mattered, she was silent. Jack was the one who was silent now.

“If there’s anything you want to ask me, dear, ask away!” his mother said.

“Are you faithful to Leslie?” he asked. “Isn’t she more faithful to you than you are to her?” That wasn’t what Jack really cared about—he was just testing his mother’s willingness to give him a straight answer.

“Jackie—what a question!”

“What kind of guy was my dad? Was he a good guy or a bad one?”

“Jack, I think you should come home to Toronto for a few days—so we can talk.”

“We
are
talking, Mom.”

“You’re just being argumentative, dear.”

“Please tell Leslie that I
tried
to talk to you,” Jack said.

“You didn’t sleep with her,
really
?” his mom asked.

Jack almost regretted that he hadn’t
really
slept with Leslie Oastler, but all he said was: “No, Mom, I did not.”

After that, their conversation (such as it was) slipped away. When Jack told his mother that he’d thanked Mrs. Oastler for all she’d done for him—for
them,
he meant—his mom responded with her usual “That’s nice, dear.”

He also should have said that Leslie was funny about his thanking her, but he didn’t.

Jack was on the cordless phone, looking out the window at a TV crew in his driveway. They were filming the exterior of the Entrada Drive house, which really pissed Jack off. He was distracted and didn’t understand what his mom was saying about some tattoo convention in Woodstock, New York.

Out of the blue, Jack asked her: “Do you remember when I was at Redding? One year, you were going to come see me in Maine, but something happened and you couldn’t come. I was at Redding for four years, but you never came to see me.”

“Well, that’s quite some story—why I didn’t come to Redding. Of
course
I remember! I’ll have to tell you that story sometime, Jack. It’s a good one.”

Somehow this didn’t strike him as what Mrs. Oastler meant by
talking
to his mother. They were talking in circles. Jack had lived with Emma for ten years; now Emma was gone, and he and his mom couldn’t talk to each other. They never
had.
It was pretty clear that she didn’t want to tell him anything, ever.

Alice wanted to know what was entailed in being a literary executor—not that Jack knew. “I guess I’ll find out what’s involved,” was all he could say.

Jack was surprised to see that there was only one message on the answering machine, which he played while his mom was still on the phone. It was Mildred (“Milly”) Ascheim, the porn producer, calling with her condolences. Her voice was so much like Myra’s that, for a moment, Jack thought that Myra was summoning him from the grave. “Dear Jack Burns,” Milly Ascheim said, as if she were dictating a letter to him. “I’m sorry you’ve lost your friend.”

She didn’t leave her number or say her name, but she must have known that he knew the Ascheim sisters spoke with one voice. He was touched that she’d called, but once again he was distracted from what his mom was saying—something about Mrs. Oastler, again.

“Jack, are you alone?”

“Yes, I’m alone, Mom.”

“I heard a woman’s voice.”

“It was someone on television,” he lied.

“I asked you if Leslie kept her clothes on, Jack.”

“Well, I think I would have noticed if she’d taken them off,” he told her.

“Actor,” Alice said.

“Mom, I gotta go.” (It was the way Emma would have said
gotta,
they both noticed.)

“Good-bye, Billy Rainbow,” his mother said, hanging up the phone.

24

The Button Trick

A
St. Hilda’s Old Girl, like Leslie Oastler, would often choose to have her funeral or memorial service in the school’s chapel, where the Old Girls had both fond and traumatizing memories of their younger days, many of which had not been spent in the contaminating presence of boys—except for those
little
boys, who were neither a threat nor a temptation to the much more grown-up girls. (Except for Jack Burns.)

It’s unlikely that Emma would have chosen the chapel at St. Hilda’s for her memorial service, but she had left her mother no instructions regarding how she wanted to be “remembered.” That Mrs. Oastler chose the St. Hilda’s chapel was only natural. After all, it was in Leslie’s neighborhood and she had already chosen it for her own service.

Alice called Jack to convey Leslie’s request: Mrs. Oastler wanted him to “say a little something” at Emma’s service. “You’re so good with words, dear,” Jack’s mother said. “And for how many years now have you been writing something?”

Well, how could he refuse? Besides, Jack’s mom and Mrs. Oastler had no idea how the myth of his
writing something,
which Emma had so presciently set in motion, was now a reality.

In her will, Emma had indeed left him
everything.
(“Lucky you,” Leslie had remarked—little knowing just how lucky he would soon be.) Jack was Emma’s “literary executor” in more ways than one—the exact terms of which would never be known to anyone other than Bob Bookman, Alan Hergott, and Jack Burns himself—for if ever a will were ironclad, that would aptly describe how Emma had set him up.

Upon her death, the film rights to
The Slush-Pile Reader,
which Emma had so entangled with the kind of approvals never granted to writers—cast approval, director approval, final cut—were passed unencumbered to Jack. He could make the movie of her novel as he saw fit, provided that he wrote the script. What only Bob Bookman, Alan Hergott, and Jack knew was that Emma had already written a rudimentary adaptation of
The Slush-Pile Reader—
her screenplay was a rough first draft. There were also her notes, addressed to Jack—suggestions as to what he might want to change or add or delete. And there were gaps in the story, some substantial, where it fell to him to fill in the blanks. Or, as Emma put it: “Write your own dialogue, baby cakes.” She had intended, all along, that Jack would play the porn star in the film.

Were he to reject this flagrant plagiarism—should Jack not accept the falsehood that he was the sole screenwriter of
The Slush-Pile Reader—
the movie could not be made until a requisite number of years had passed (under existing copyright law) and Emma’s novel had at last entered the public domain.

As for Emma’s
third
novel, Mrs. Oastler had been right—it did not exist. But Emma hadn’t suffered from writer’s block; she’d simply been busy adapting
The Slush-Pile Reader
as a screenplay by Jack Burns.

He learned from Bob Bookman—whose other clients included directors and writers, not actors—how Emma had persuaded Bob to accept Jack as a client. In her words: “Jack Burns is a writer, not an actor; he just doesn’t know it yet.”

The royalties from Emma’s backlist—the paperback sales of
The Slush-Pile Reader
and
Normal and Nice—
were also left to Jack. This would more than compensate him for his time spent “finishing” Emma’s screenplay. In short, Emma had made Jack declare himself a writer to the media while she was alive; in death, she had given him the opportunity to become one.

Both the unfinished draft of the screenplay for
The Slush-Pile Reader
and Emma’s notes to Jack had been removed from her computer. She hadn’t saved any copies on disk, and she’d deleted the files from her hard drive. The only printed copy, which Alan Hergott kept safely in his office—where he and Bob Bookman explained to Jack the terms of Emma’s will—needed to be transcribed into Jack’s handwriting. From interviews he’d given, most of them bullshit, everyone knew that Jack Burns wrote in longhand; even Leslie Oastler knew that he didn’t own a computer or a typewriter, and that he allegedly
liked
to write by hand.

Bob and Alan thought that Jack should do the copying into longhand as soon as possible. He could take all the time he needed to “revise.”

“But should I really do this?” Jack asked them. “I mean—is it right?”

“It’s what Emma wanted, Jack, but you don’t
have
to do it,” Alan said.

“Yeah, it’s entirely your decision,” Bookman told him. “But it’s a pretty good script.”

Jack would read it and concur; if Emma had taken charge of him in life, he saw no reason to resist her efforts to control him from the grave.

That Mrs. Oastler wanted Jack to “say a little something” in remembrance of Emma in the chapel at St. Hilda’s, where Mrs. McQuat had first warned him of the dangers of turning his back on God, seemed appropriate to the kind of writer he’d become.

The public impression—namely, that Emma Oastler had suffered from a writer’s block of several years’ duration and had, as a result, become grossly overweight—was further fueled by the report of that Italian journalist from the Hollywood Foreign Press. According to Jack’s interviewer, Emma’s allegedly platonic but live-in relationship with the actor Jack Burns showed signs of recent strain; yet the bestselling author had been extremely generous to him in her will. It had been known, for years, that Jack was “a closet writer”—as Emma’s obituary notice in
Entertainment Weekly
would say. Now he was said to be “developing” a screenplay of
The Slush-Pile Reader.
(Emma, “mysteriously,” had not wanted her novel to be made into a movie while she was alive.)

What guilt Jack might have had—that is, in accepting Emma’s gift to him as rightfully his—was overshadowed by the certainty that, even if he were to tell the truth, the
truth
was not what Emma had wanted. She had wanted to get
The Slush-Pile Reader
made as a movie—more or less as she’d written it. But with
her
name on the script, the film, as she wrote it, would never have been made. Jack Burns, Emma knew, was a movie star; with
his
name on the screenplay, he could control it.

Thus, at one of the better addresses he knew—in the Beverly Hills offices of Bloom, Hergott, Diemer and Cook, LLP, Attorneys-at-Law—Jack Burns transcribed Emma’s rough draft of
The Slush-Pile Reader
into his handwriting, and faithfully copied her notes as well. With the first small change he made, which was not even as big an alteration as the choice of a different
word—
Jack used the contraction “didn’t” where Emma had written “did not”—he discovered how it was possible for a would-be writer to take at least partial possession of a real writer’s work. (And with subsequent changes, deletions, additions, his sense of rightful ownership—though false—only grew.)

This should not have surprised him. After all, Jack was in the movie business; he had seen how scripts were changed, and by how many amateur hands these alterations were wrought. In another draft or two, the screenplay of
The Slush-Pile Reader
would feel—even to Jack—as if he’d written it. But the structure of the script and its prevailing tone of voice were entirely Emma’s. As an actor, Jack knew how to imitate her voice.

Not all art is imitation, but imitating was what Jack Burns did best. With a little direction—in Emma’s case, she gave him quite a lot—writing (that is,
re
writing) the script of
The Slush-Pile Reader
was just another acting job. Jack did his job well.

The decision to make Michele Maher (the character) the movie’s voice-over was Emma’s. The idea to make the penultimate sentence of the novel the opening line of voice-over in the film was Jack’s. (“There are worse relationships in L.A.”) We see Michele, the script reader, in bed with the porn star—just holding his penis, we presume, under the covers. It’s all very tastefully done. The story of how they meet (when she reads the porn star’s atrocious screenplay) is a flashback. Naturally, we never see his (that is, Jack’s) penis.