Jack just gave the captain his best Esmeralda-as-a-transvestite smile. Phoebus knew Jack could kick the crap out of him if he wanted to.
In truth, Jack was grateful to Captain Phoebus for making Claudia feel guilty; Phoebus had made Jack feel a little less guilty about the fact that he and Claudia were drifting apart.
The summer following their graduation from the University of New Hampshire, Claudia and Jack finally went their separate ways. She was going the graduate-student route--an MFA theater program at one of the Big Ten universities. (Jack would make a point of forgetting which one.) It seemed sensible for them to apply to different summer-stock playhouses that summer. Claudia was at a Shakespeare festival in New Jersey. Jack did a Beauty and the Beast and a Peter Pan and Wendy at a children's theater workshop in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
He might have been feeling nostalgic about his lost friend Noah Rosen--or Noah's more irrevocably lost sister, Leah--but Jack fondly recalled those foreign films in the movie theaters around Harvard Square. A summer of subtitles--and audiences of children, and their young mothers--somehow suited him.
Claudia said--and if these weren't truly her last spoken words to him, they were the last words he would remember--"What do you want to perform for children for? You don't want any."
Jack played the Beast to an older-woman Belle; she was also one of the founders of the children's theater workshop, and she'd hired him. Yes, he slept with her--they had a summer-long affair, not a day longer. She was way too old to play Wendy to Jack's Peter Pan, but she was a reasonably youthful-looking Mrs. Darling--Wendy's mom. (Imagine Peter Pan screwing Wendy's mother, if only for a summer.)
Jack needed to go to graduate school, to continue to be a student, or else get a real job--hence a green card--if he didn't want to go back to Canada, and he didn't. Emma, once again, would save him. She'd been out of Iowa for two years, living in Los Angeles and writing her first novel, which sounded like a contradiction in terms. Who went to L.A. to write a novel? But being an outsider had always suited Emma.
She'd found a job reading scripts at one of the studios; like Jack, she was still a Canadian citizen and had only a Canadian passport, but Emma also had a green card. The script-reading job was more the result of her year as a comedy writer for New York television than it was anything she'd prepared herself to do at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She was writing her novel, which Emma said was to be her revenge on the time she'd wasted as a film major--and all the while she was, as she put it, "working for the enemy and getting paid for it."
Why didn't he come live with her? Emma asked Jack. She'd find him a job in the movie business. "There are some good-looking guys out here, baby cakes--it's tougher competition than you'd have in Toronto. But there aren't that many good-looking guys who can act as well as you."
So that was Jack's plan, to the extent that he had one. He'd had it with the theater--and no wonder, when you consider the preponderance of musicals. It was fine with him if his last onstage performance was as Peter Pan, taking Wendy Darling and her brothers off to Neverland--while in the wee hours of the morning, long after the curtain fell, he was banging Wendy's mom, Mrs. Darling.
"What would J. M. Barrie say?" Claudia might have asked, had she known. It made Jack sad to think about her.
The thing about Los Angeles, Jack would learn, is that it's unimpressed by you--no matter who you are. Eventually, the city tells you, your comeuppance will come; exclusivity fades. But Jack Burns wasn't moving in exclusive circles when he first went to L.A.--he wasn't famous yet. In the fall of 1987, when he moved in with Emma, the nearest landmark representing the sundry entertainments that the future held in store was that garish playground of possibilities, the Santa Monica Pier.
All that Jack and Emma really cared about was that they were bathed in the warm Pacific air; it didn't matter that they were breathing in an ocean spiked with smog. They were living together again--not in Toronto, and not with their mothers.
Emma, who was twenty-nine, looked considerably older. Her struggles with her weight were apparent to anyone who knew her, but a different, interior battle had been more costly to her; her shifting ambitions were at war with her obdurate determination. That Emma was a restless soul was obvious, but not even Jack (not even Emma) was aware that something was seriously wrong with her.
Numbers were never Jack's strong suit. Living with Emma in L.A., he couldn't remember how much their rent was, or what day of the month they were supposed to pay it.
"Your math sucks, honey pie, but what do you need to know math for? You're gonna be an actor!"
At St. Hilda's, Jack had needed Miss Wurtz bending over him--as if breathing her in were a substitute for learning his numbers. And while it's true that Mrs. McQuat had helped him, even more than Miss Wurtz, he had never mastered math.
Mrs. Adkins had assisted him with his algebra at Redding--she who'd dressed him in her old clothes, she who'd made love to him with such a morbid air of resignation. (It was as if Mrs. Adkins were undressing to drown herself in the Nezinscot, or at least practicing for that loneliest of moments in her future.)
"You shouldn't trust yourself to count past ten," Noah Rosen had once cautioned Jack.
Mr. Warren, Jack's faculty adviser at Exeter, had been more kind but no less pessimistic. "I would advise you, Jack, never to rely on your numerical evaluation of a situation."
Jack Burns would live in Los Angeles for sixteen years. He liked all the driving. He and Emma first shared one half of a rat-eaten duplex in Venice. It was on Windward Avenue, downwind of a sushi place on the corner of Windward and Main--more to the point, downwind of the restaurant's Dumpster. Hama Sushi was good. Emma and Jack ate there a lot. The fish was really fresh--less fresh, alas, was whatever ended up in the Dumpster.
Jack's first girlfriend in L.A. was a waitress he met at Hama Sushi. She shared an overused house with some other girls on one of those small streets off Ocean Front Walk--Eighteenth, Nineteenth, or Twentieth Avenue. He could never remember the number. He went one night to the wrong house, possibly on the wrong avenue. There were a bunch of girls who welcomed him inside when he pushed the buzzer, but his waitress friend was not among them. By the time Jack realized it was the wrong bunch of girls, he'd met someone who interested him more than the sushi waitress. Numbers, once again, had misled him.
"You oughta carry a calculator," Emma told him, "or at least write everything down."
He liked Venice--the beach, the gyms, the underlying grubbiness of it. After Emma had a bad experience at Gold's Gym--she'd met a bodybuilder there who had beaten her up--she got Jack and herself a membership at World Gym; she said she liked the gorilla on the World Gym Tshirts and tank tops. A big gorilla standing on the planet Earth, the size of a beach ball, with a barbell in his hairy hands--the barbell had to weigh three or four hundred pounds, not that this was a credible explanation for why the bar was bending.
The World Gym tank tops were cut low; they had a scoop neck and a lot of space under the arms. They weren't made for women to wear--at least not the ones Emma bought, which were all in workout-gray with Day-Glo orange lettering. The tank tops showed a lot of cleavage, and Emma's breasts would occasionally fall out at the sides, but she only got the World Gym tank tops to wear as nightshirts or when she was writing.
Emma and Jack had their own bedrooms in the duplex, but most nights, when they didn't have "dates," they slept in the same bed--not really doing anything. Emma would hold Jack's penis until one of them fell asleep--that is, if they even went to bed at the same time, which they didn't often. Jack would occasionally hold her breasts, nothing more. He never once masturbated in the bed when she was there.
Emma and Jack had had their one time; they seemed to know this without discussing it. She had taught him how to beat off; she'd even invited him to imagine her when he did it. But this was entirely for Jack's self-preservation in prep school, especially at Redding, and although she'd sent him photographs of herself naked--and, unbeknownst to Emma, Jack still had one of them--it was their mutual understanding in Los Angeles that they were more than friends, and certainly a little different from other brothers and sisters, but they were not lovers. (The penis-holding notwithstanding--and no matter how many times they were undressed in each other's company, without seeming to think twice about it.)
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Emma met another bodybuilder--this one at World Gym--and he didn't beat her up. He worked as a waiter at Stan's, which was on the corner of Rose and Main.
Stan's was one of those places that wouldn't last long in Venice. The waiters weren't as brash as they were in a New York steakhouse, like Smith & Wollensky, and for steaks and chops and Maine lobsters, which was all they served, the white tablecloths seemed out of place; yet the waiters wore white dress shirts with their sleeves rolled up, and no ties, and those starched white aprons that made them look like butchers who'd not yet made contact with any meat. It's hard to feel superior in a steakhouse, but the waiters at Stan's (there were no waitresses) took naturally to superiority. It was as if they'd been born in those starched white aprons--remarkably, without a drop of blood being shed in the process.