Until I Find You - Page 225

Here we go, Jack thought; here comes "too weird," and all the rest of it. "Emma and I were just roommates--we lived together, but we never had sex."

"That's so hard to imagine," Michele said, toying with the ring on the edge of her plate. "You mean you just masturbated together?"

"Not even that," he told her.

"What did you do? You must have done something," Michele said.

"We kissed, I touched her breasts, she held my penis."

In reaching for her wineglass, Michele's elbow came down on the edge of her plate; her mother's ring went flying. The ring landed on an adjacent table, startling two models who were on a red-wine diet.

One of the models picked up the ring and looked at Jack. "Oh, you shouldn't have," she said, slipping the ring onto one of her pretty fingers.

"I'm sorry--it's her mother's ring," Jack told the model; she pouted at him while Michele looked mortified.

"You don't remember me, do you, Jack?" the other model asked.

Jack got up and went over to their table, holding his hand out to the model who was still wearing Michele's ring. He was trying to buy a little time, struggling to remember who the other model was.

"I was afraid you'd forgotten me," he told her. (It was one of Billy Rainbow's lines--Jack had always liked it.)

It was not the answer the model had been expecting. Jack still couldn't place her, or else he'd never met her before in his life and she was just playing a game with him.

The model who had Michele's ring was playing another kind of game with Jack; she was trying to put the ring on one of his fingers. "Who would have thought Jack Burns had such little hands?" she was saying. (The ring was a loose fit on his left pinkie; Jack went back to his table wearing it.)

"Jack Burns has a little penis," the other model said.

Jack guessed that she did know him, but he still didn't remember her. Michele just sat there looking glassy-eyed. "I don't feel very well," she told Jack. "I think I'm drunk, if you want to know the truth."

"You should try to eat something," he said.

"Don't you know that you can't tell a doctor what to do, Jack?"

"Come on. I'll take you back to the hotel," he said.

"I want to see where you live!" Michele said plaintively. "It must be fabulous."

"It's a hole in the wall," the model who knew Jack said. "Don't tell me you've actually moved out of that nookie house on Entrada, Jack."

"We're much closer to your hotel than we are to where I live," he told Michele.

"Did you sleep with that girl?" Michele asked him, when they were back in the Audi. "You didn't look like you knew her."

"I don't remember sleeping with her," Jack said.

"What's a nookie house?" she asked him.

"It's slang for brothel," Jack explained.

"Do you really live in a hole in the wall on La Strada?" Michele asked.

"Yes, I do," he admitted. "It's on Entrada."

"But why do you live in a hole in the wall? Why wouldn't Jack Burns live in a mansion?"

"I don't really know where I want to live, Michele."

"My Gawd," she said again.

Tags: John Irving Fiction
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