“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.