“Oh, it’s awful!” Alice said again. “They said it was a heart attack, but she was a young woman.”
“Who said? Who’s they?” Jack asked.
“The police—they called here. But how could she have had a heart attack, Jack?”
In Emma’s case, he could imagine it—even at thirty-nine—considering the food, the wine, the weightlifting, and the occasional kid from Coconut Teaszer. But Emma didn’t do drugs. There’d been more kids from Coconut Teaszer lately. (Both Emma and Jack had thought the kids were safer than the bodybuilders.)
“There will probably be an autopsy,” Jack told his mother.
“An autopsy—if it was just a heart attack?” Alice asked.
“You’re not supposed to have a heart attack at thirty-nine, Mom.”
“The boy was … underage,” Alice whispered. “The police won’t release his name.”
“Who cares about his name?” Jack said. There’d been more and more kids who looked underage to him. Poor Emma had died fucking a minor from Coconut Teaszer!
As for the kid himself, Jack could only imagine that it must have been a traumatizing experience. He knew that Emma liked the top position, and that she would have told the boy not to move. (Maybe he’d moved.) If the boy had been a virgin—and Emma would have picked him only if he looked small—what would it have been like to have a two-hundred-and-five-pound woman die on you, your first time?
“The boy called the police,” his mother went on; she was still whispering. “Oh, Jack, was Emma in the habit of—”
“Sometimes,” was all he said.
“You must meet Leslie in Los Angeles, Jack. She shouldn’t have to go through this alone. I know Leslie. She’ll break down, eventually.”
Jack couldn’t imagine it, but he was uncomfortable with the idea of Mrs. Oastler alone in the Entrada Drive house. What kind of stuff would Emma have left lying around? The notion of Leslie discovering Emma’s collection of porn films wasn’t as disturbing as the thought of her reading Emma’s writing—whatever Emma hadn’t finished, or what she didn’t want published. Jack had not seen a word of Emma’s work-in-progress—her third novel, which was reportedly growing too long.
“I’ll leave New York as soon as I can, Mom. If Leslie calls, tell her I’ll be in L.A. before dark.”
He knew that Erica Steinberg was a good soul; Jack assumed she would release him from his interviews at the press junket.
Everyone who knew Jack knew that Emma had been part of his family. As it turned out, Miramax arranged everything for him—including the car to the airport. Erica got him his ticket; she even offered to fly with him. It wasn’t necessary for her to come with him, Jack told her, but he appreciated the offer.
There was another call to Jack’s room at The Mark that morning. Mimi Lederer had been right—room service was confused by his breakfast order. Although he’d stopped shivering, Mimi had gone on holding him as if he were her cello, until the phone rang that second time.
“I don’t give a rat’s ass about the yogurt,” Mimi heard Jack say into the phone. “Any kind of yogurt will do.”
“Are you okay, Jack?” Mimi asked.
“Emma’s dead,” he snapped at her. “I guess I can worry about the fucking yogurt another day.”
“Are you acting?” she asked him. “I mean even now. Are you still acting?”
Jack didn’t know what she meant, but she was covering herself with the bedsheet as if he were a total stranger to her. “What’s wrong?” he asked.
“What’s wrong with you, Jack?”
They were both sitting up in bed, and Jack could see himself in the mirror above the dresser. There was nothing wrong with him, but that was the problem. Jack didn’t look as if his best friend had died; on the contrary, he looked as if nothing had happened to him. His face was a clean slate—“more noir than noir,” The New York Times might have said.
Jack couldn’t stop staring at himself—that was a problem, too. Mimi Lederer said later that she couldn’t stand the sight of him, not at that moment. “You’re not in a movie, Jack,” Mimi started to say, but Jack looked at her as if he really were Billy Rainbow. “Why aren’t you crying?” Mimi Lederer asked him.
Jack couldn’t answer her, and he was good at tears. When his part called for crying, he would usually start when he heard the A.D. say, “Quiet, please.”
“Rolling,” the cameraman would say; Jack’s eyes were already watering away.
“Speed,” said the sound guy—Jack’s face would be bathed in tears.
When the director (even Wild Bill Vanvleck) said, “Action!”—well, Jack could cry on-camera like nobody’s business. His eyes would well with tears just reading a script!
But that morning at The Mark, Jack was as tough-guy noir as he’d ever been—on film or off. He was as deadpan as Emma when she wrote, “Life is a call sheet. You’re supposed to show up when they tell you, but that’s the only rule.”
That was what Jack Burns was doing—he was going to L.A., just to show up. He would probably hold Mrs. Oastler’s hand, because he was supposed to—those were just the rules.
“Jesus, Jack—” Mimi Lederer started to say; then she stopped. Jack realized, as if he’d missed something she’d said, that she was getting dressed. “If you didn’t love Emma, you never loved anyone,” Mimi was saying. “She was the person closest to you, Jack. Can you love anyone? If you didn’t love her, I think not.”
That was the last Jack saw of Mimi Lederer, and he liked Mimi—he really did. But she didn’t like him anymore after that morning at The Mark. Mimi said when she left that she didn’t know who he was. But the scary thing was that Jack didn’t know who he was.
As an actor, he could be anybody. On-screen, the world had seen Jack Burns cry—as a man and as a woman. He’d made his mascara run many times—anything for a movie! Yet Jack couldn’t cry for Emma; he didn’t shed a single tear that morning at The Mark.
It was still pretty early when he left the hotel for the airport. The front-desk clerk was a young man Jack hadn’t seen before—probably the same young man who’d put through Alice’s call. Of course the clerk knew it was the Jack Burns—everyone did. But as Jack was leaving, the clerk called out—his voice full of the utmost sincerity, of the kind that young people express when they genuinely want to please you. “Have a nice day, Mr. Rainbow!”
As it turned out, Jack had been wrong to envision Emma’s death as a heart attack, which typically has some familiar symptoms antecedent to death—like sweating, shortness of breath, light-headedness, and chest pains. But Emma Oastler died of a heart condition called Long QT Syndrome; an inherited disease, it affects the sodium and potassium channels in the heart. (This, in turn, leads to abnormalities in the heart’s electrical system.) Emma died of a sudden arrhythmia—ventricular fi-brillation, her doctor told Jack. Her heart suddenly stopped pumping; Emma died before she was even aware of not feeling well.
With Long QT Syndrome, often sudden death is the first indication of a problem. In sixty percent of patients, a resting EKG would indicate an abnormality, which would alert a doctor to the possibility of the condition. But the other forty percent would have completely normal examinations—unless exercise EKG’s were used. (Emma’s doctor told Jack that Emma had never had one.)