Please return the stamped, self-addressed postcard—checking the appropriate box.
Yours,
Jack
On a postcard of the Oudezijds Voorburgwal canal, he gave Michele the following options.
o No.
o Yes. Let’s talk about it!
Love,
Michele
Of course he didn’t send that letter or the postcard. For one thing, he didn’t have a U.S. stamp for the return delivery; for another, the “Love, Michele” was taking a lot for granted after fifteen years.
His second day alone, Jack almost went to see Els again in her apartment on the Sint Jacobsstraat. He didn’t want to sleep with a prostitute in her seventies—he just liked Els.
Mainly Jack would lie awake at night—imagining his little face on the ship’s deck, where his mother had lifted him above the rail. Jack was just smiling, and waving to beat the band, while the damage was being done around him—especially to his dad.
In Hamburg, maybe William had met someone; that might have helped him to forget Jack, if he’d ever managed to forget his son. After all, he’d had a correspondence with Miss Wurtz when Jack was attending St. Hilda’s. It wasn’t as if William had stopped thinking about Jack, cold.
When Richard arrived, he went straight to bed and Jack went back to the gym. Jack was eating more carbs and had changed his weightlifting routine; he’d managed to put on a few pounds, but Jack was still no Jimmy Stronach. (Not that there was anything he could have done to acquire Jimmy’s penis.)
In the gym on the Rokin, possibly in a failing effort to drown out the awful music in the weight room, Jack tried singing that ditty his mother had sung only when she was drunk or stoned—the one that seemed to resurrect her Scottish accent.
Oh, I’ll never be a kittie
or a cookie
or a tail.
The one place worse than
Dock Place
is the Port o’ Leith jail.
No, I’ll never be a kittie,
of one true thing I’m sure—
I won’t end up on Dock Place
and I’ll never be a hure.
How funny that it had once been Alice’s mantra to never be a whore.
Jack thought of their nightly prayer, which—when he was a child—they usually said together. He remembered one night in Amsterdam when she fell asleep before he did, and he said the prayer by himself. Jack had spoken a little louder than usual, because he had to pray for the two of them. “The day Thou gavest, Lord, is ended. Thank You for it.” (Of course that had probably happened more than once.)
Jack took a footbridge across the canal on his way back to the Grand. He stood on the bridge and watched a sightseeing boat drift by. In the stern, a small boy sat looking up at the footbridge—his face pressed to the glass. Jack waved, but the boy didn’t wave back.
It was already dark when Jack walked with Richard Gladstein to the Herengracht, to a restaurant called Zuid Zeeland, where they were meeting William Vanvleck. Jack was in no mood for the meeting. He kept thinking about the other William—the one he would have loved but was afraid to meet.
V. Dr. García
31. Therapy
Five years later—as if striking the match that would set fire to Jack’s life in Los Angeles, strip his character bare, and ultimately lead him to seek his father—a young woman (younger than he realized at the time) sat not quite fully clothed on Jack’s living-room couch in that forlorn dump he still lived in on Entrada Drive. She was thumbing through his address book, which she’d picked up off his desk, and reading aloud the women’s names. In an insinuating tone of voice, she would first say the name and then guess what relationship Jack might have had, or still had, with the woman.
This juvenile behavior should have alerted him to the fact that she was clearly younger than she’d told him she was—not that Jack shouldn’t have guessed her real age for other reasons. But he did have difficulties with math.
She got into the G’s before Jack said, “That’s enough,” and took his address book away from her; that’s when the trouble really started.
“Elena García,” the girl had just said. “Your cleaning lady, or former cleaning lady? You definitely fucked her.”
Elena García—Dr. García—was Jack’s psychiatrist. He had never had sex with her. For five years, Dr. García had not once been a love interest—but Jack had never depended on anyone to the degree that he depended on her. Elena García knew more about Jack Burns than anyone had ever known—including Emma Oastler.
Jack had often called Dr. García in tears, not always but sometimes in the middle of the night. He’d called her from Cannes—once when he was at a party at the Hôtel du Cap. That same day Jack had pushed a female photographer, a stalker paparazzo, off a chartered yacht; he’d had to pay an outrageous fine.
Another time, he banged some bimbo on the beach of the Hotel Martinez. She said she was an actress, but she turned out to be one of those Croisette dog-walkers; she’d been arrested for fucking on the beach before. And Jack should have won the Palme d’Or for bad behavior for the fracas he got into in that glass-and-concrete eyesore, the Palais des Festivals. This happened after the evening’s red-carpet promenade. Jack was on a narrow staircase leading to one of the Palais’s upstairs rooms. Some journalist shoved him into one of those thugs who comprise the festival’s security staff; the security guy thought that Jack had purposely shoved him, which led to Jack’s impromptu lateral drop. Chenko would have been proud of Jack for the perfect execution of his move—Coaches Clum, Hudson, and Shapiro, too—but the incident was in all the papers. The security thug broke his collarbone, and Jack got another stiff fine. The weaselly French!
Lastly, from his ocean-front suite at the Carlton, Jack poured a whole bottle of Taittinger (chilled) onto that former agent Lawrence. The fink was giving Jack the finger from the terrace. Lawrence was just the kind of asshole you ran into at Cannes. Jack hated Cannes.
From Dr. García’s point of view, Jack’s behavior was only marginally better in Venice, Deauville, and Toronto—the three film festivals where Richard Gladstein, Wild Bill Vanvleck, Lucia Delvecchio, and Jack promoted The Slush-Pile Reader. (A recent headline in Variety—LOTS OF LIBIDO ON THE LIDO—could have been written about Jack Burns.)
They had a very good run with what Jack would usually call Emma’s movie; careerwise, it may have been Jack’s best year. They shot the film in the fall of ’98 and took it to those festivals in August and September of ’99—before the premieres in New York and London near the end of that year.
There was the unfortunate incident with Lucia Delvecchio in the Hotel des Bains in Venice; she’d had too much to drink, and bitterly regretted having slept with Jack. But no one knew—not even Richard or Wild Bill. And no one except Lucia’s husband, who was not in Venice, would have cared. Bad things happened in that languid lagoon.