"No, I think you've been right," Jack quickly told her.
Short of telling her that he might have caught the clap from an Exeter dishwasher, he didn't know what else to do but claim to be an advocate of not going all the way himself.
It was a John Wayne night on one of the TV channels, beginning with The Fighting Kentuckian. Leading a regiment of Kentucky riflemen, John Wayne wears what looks like an entire raccoon on his head. Jack liked John Wayne, but Emma had undermined Jack's enthusiasm for Wayne's kind of heroics; she'd been feeding him a strict diet of Truffaut and Bergman films. Jack liked Truffaut, but he loved Bergman.
It was true that he'd been bored by The Four Hundred Blows, and had said so. Emma was so disappointed in him that she stopped holding his penis; she picked it up again for Shoot the Piano Player, a film Jack adored, and held it without once letting go through Jules and Jim, while Jack imagined that Jeanne Moreau, not Emma, was holding his penis.
As for Ingmar Bergman, there was never enough. The Seventh Seal, The Virgin Spring, Winter Light, The Silence--those were the films that sold Jack Burns on the movies and made him want to act in films rather than the theater. Scenes from a Marriage, Face to Face, Autumn Sonata--those were the movies that inspired him. He couldn't stop imagining his expression in close-up with those Bergman women. With every line he spoke, not neglecting the slightest gesture, Jack imagined that the camera was so tight on him that his whole face filled the giant screen--or just the fingers of his hand, making a fist, or even the tip of his index finger coming into frame alongside a doorbell.
Not to mention the sex in Bergman's films--oh, those older women! And to think that Jack met all of them while Emma Oastler held his penis in her hand! (Bibi Andersson, Gunnel Lindblom, Ingrid Thulin, Liv Ullmann.) Meanwhile, Alice hoped that Jack didn't know any girls who went all the way! What was she thinking?
"What's wrong, Dick? Lost your hump?" Michele Maher asked. It was another Richard III joke.
Jack usually answered, "No, it's just deflated."
He couldn't claim he was distracted by The Fighting Kentuckian, not for a moment. Michele and Jack made out through Rio Grande, too. John Wayne is at war again, this time with the Apaches. He is also at war with his estranged, tempestuous wife--Maureen O'Hara with her hooters. But Jack had eyes only for Michele Maher. God, she was beautiful! And nice, and smart, and funny. How he wanted her.
Michele Maher wanted him that night, to
o, but he refused to have sex with her--notwithstanding that he couldn't take his eyes off her. He couldn't stop himself from kissing her, touching her, holding her. He kept repeating her name. For years he would wake up saying it: "Michele Maher, Michele Maher, Michele Maher."
"Jack Burns," she said, half-mocking in her tone. "Richard the Humpback, also known as Third," she said. "Lady Macbeth," she teased him. She was the best kisser he would ever encounter, hands down--not forgetting that Emma Oastler could kiss up a storm. No one could hold a candle to Michele Maher in the kissing department.
Why, then, didn't Jack simply tell her the truth? That he was afraid he had a dose of gonorrhea; that he might have caught the clap from an adulterous dishwasher, a woman old enough to be his mother! (It sounded like the subject of a play the Dramat might have chosen--or, more likely, a sequel to A Mail-Order Bride in the Northwest Territories.)
Why didn't Jack tell Michele that he loved her, and that he wanted most of all to protect her from everything he imagined or knew to be bad about himself? He should have made up a story--God knows, he could act. He could have told Michele Maher that his workout partner had stepped on his penis in the wrestling room, a surprisingly common but little-discussed injury among wrestlers. Under the circumstances, he was simply too sore to have sex with her--or so he could have claimed.
But, no, Jack was such a fool, he proposed masturbating with Michele Maher--this instead of having sex with her! "It's the safest sex there is," Jack told her, while a bloody Indian war raged around them--the Apaches were whooping and dying. John Wayne was fighting for his life while Jack was committing suicide with Michele Maher. "You know, we take our clothes off, but I just touch myself, and you touch yourself," he went on, digging his grave. "We keep looking at each other, we kiss--we just imagine it, the way actors do."
The tears in Michele Maher's eyes would have broken hearts on the big screen; she was a girl who could withstand the tightest close-up. "Oh, Jack," she said. "All this time, I've defended you. When people say, 'Jack Burns is just too weird,' I always say, 'No, he isn't!' "
"Michele--" Jack started to say, but he could see it in her eyes. He had watched her fall for him; now he saw how irreversibly he'd lost her. The John Wayne Western on the TV was wreathed with a funereal dust--fallen horses, dead Apaches.
Jack left Michele Maher alone in her bedroom; he was sensitive enough to know that she wanted to be alone. The beautiful dog stayed with her. In his guest bedroom, with its fine-art bathroom, Jack was alone with the knee-high Picasso and his own TV. He watched The Quiet Man by himself.
John Wayne is an Irish-American prizefighter who gives up boxing when he unintentionally kills an opponent in the ring. He goes to Ireland and falls in love with Maureen O'Hara and her hooters (again). But Maureen's brother (Victor McLaglen) is an asshole; in what is arguably the longest and least believable fistfight in Ireland's history, Wayne has to put up his dukes again.
In the throes of Jack's self-pity, he concluded that Victor McLaglen would have kicked the crap out of John Wayne. (McLaglen was a pro; he fought Jack Johnson, and gave Johnson all he could handle. Wayne wouldn't have lasted a round with McLaglen.)
It was a long, largely silent trip back to Exeter with Michele Maher. Jack made matters worse between them by professing that he loved her; he declared that he'd only suggested mutual masturbation as an indication of his respect for her.
"I'll tell you what's weird about you, Jack--" Michele started to say, but she burst into tears and didn't tell him. He was left to finish her thought in his imagination. For almost twenty years, Jack Burns would wish he could have that weekend back.
"If I had to guess," Noah Rosen ventured, "it didn't work out between you and Michele because you couldn't stop looking at each other."
Jack was only a week or two away from telling Noah about Mrs. Stackpole, which led Noah to tell his sister--and that would be the end of Jack's friendship with Noah. A painful loss--at the time, more devastating to Jack than losing Michele Maher. But Noah would fade; Michele would persist.
Michele did nothing wrong. She was Jack's age, seventeen going on eighteen, but she had the self-restraint and dignity not to tell her closest friends that Jack was a creep--or even that he was as weird as some of them thought he was. In truth, she went on defending him from the weirdness charge. Herman Castro later told Jack that Michele always spoke well of him, even after they'd "broken up." Herman said: "When I think of the two of you together--well, I just can't imagine it. You both must have felt you were models in a magazine or something."
Herman Castro would go on to Harvard and Harvard Medical School. He became a doctor of infectious diseases and went back to El Paso, where he treated mostly AIDS patients. He married a very attractive Mexican-American woman, and they had a bunch of kids. From Herman's Christmas cards, Jack would be relieved to see that the children took after her. Herman, as much as Jack loved him, was always hard to look at. He was slope-shouldered and jug-shaped, with a flattened nose and a protruding forehead; above his small, black, close-together eyes, his forehead bulged like a baked potato.
Herman Castro was the wrestling team's photographer. In those days, heavyweights always wrestled last; Herman took pictures of his teammates wrestling even when he was warming up. Jack used to think that Herman liked to hide his face from view. Maybe the camera was his shield.
"Hey, amigo," the note on Herman Castro's Christmas card traditionally said, "when I think of your love life--well, I just can't imagine it."
Little did Herman know. Over time, Jack Burns would believe that he lost the love of his life on the night he lost Michele Maher. It would be small consolation to him to imagine that his father, at Jack's age, would have fucked her--clap or no clap.
And he didn't have the clap! Jack had himself checked at the infirmary when he got back from New York. The doctor said it was just some irritation, possibly caused by the change in his diet since the end of the wrestling season.