Jack was fortunate, he admitted to Dr. García, that McSwiney’s chest pains hadn’t amounted to anything. Mrs. Oastler found a small account in the newspaper of a “drunken brawl” in the Press Gang restaurant in Halifax—a case of “two feuding writers who’d earlier come to blows in the bar of The Prince George Hotel,” one Canadian journalist had reported. Because Leslie knew that Jack didn’t drink, she was all the more perplexed by the reporter noting that Jack had calmly sipped a beer while McSwiney was attended to by his friends.
“Jack,” Dr. García said, “it seems to me that you should hire a bodyguard.”
“I don’t need a bodyguard,” he told her. “I just need to watch out for a left hook.”
“I meant that you need a bodyguard to keep you from hurting someone else,” she said.
“Oh.”
“Well, we’ve got our work cut out for us—let’s leave it at that,” his psychiatrist said.
“What should I do?” Jack asked her sincerely.
“You better find a movie to be in soon,” Dr. García told him. “I think you should take a break from being Jack Burns, don’t you?”
35. Forgettable
The following year, Jack was in three movies; the year after that, he did two more. His handicapped math notwithstanding, even Jack could count that he’d been in five films in two years. He’d taken a big break from being Jack Burns.
In two years’ time, he’d not heard from Michele Maher; she made no response to his letter of explanation about the Lucy episode. Dr. García had urged Jack to recognize that the Michele Maher chapter of his life was behind him, or should be. It was a good thing that he hadn’t heard from Michele, the doctor said.
In those two years, Jack made a lot of money and spent very little. About the only expensive thing he bought was a new Audi; naturally, it was another silver one. He could not motivate himself to sell the place on Entrada Drive and buy something more suitable. This was because what he really wanted was to get out of L.A.—although no other city beckoned, and Jack held fast to Emma’s idea that it was somehow good to be an outsider. Besides, as long as his life story was a work-in-progress, he couldn’t imagine cutting his ties to Dr. García. She was the closest Jack had come to a good marriage, or even a possible one. He saw her twice a week. Putting his life in chronological order for Dr. García had become a more regular and restorative activity in Jack’s life than having sex.
As for sex, in the last two years—since adamantly not having sex with Lucy—Jack had briefly comforted Lucia Delvecchio, who was in the throes of a nasty divorce. Lucia’s divorce was obdurately ongoing—one of those drawn-out battles involving children and credit cards and summer homes and motor vehicles and dogs—and because her irate husband viewed Jack as the root cause of their marital difficulties, Jack’s presence in Lucia’s unmarried life was of little comfort to her and not long-lasting.
He was romantically linked with three of his co-stars—in three out of his last five films—but these rumors were false in two out of three cases. The one co-star Jack did sleep with, Margaret Becker, was a single mom in her forties. She had a twelve-year-old son named Julian and a house on the ocean in Malibu. Both Margaret and Julian were very sweet, but fragile. The boy had no relationship with his father, and he’d had unrealistic expectations of every boyfriend his mother had had—they’d all left her.
As a result, Julian’s expectations of Jack were aimed a little lower. The boy kept anxiously looking for signs that Jack was preparing to leave him and his mom. Jack liked the boy—he loved having a kid in his life—but Julian was very needy. Margaret, Julian’s mom, was a full-fledged clinger.
Whenever Jack had to go away, she stuffed his suitcase with photographs of herself; in the photos, which were pointedly taken for the occasion of Jack’s trip, Margaret looked stricken with the fear that he would never come back to her. And Jack would often wake up at night and find Margaret staring at him; it was as if she were attempting to penetrate his consciousness, in his sleep, and brainwash him into never leaving.
Julian’s sorrowful eyes followed Jack as if the boy were a dog Jack had neglected to feed. And Margaret said to Jack, at least once a day: “I know you’re going to leave me, Jack. Just try not to walk away when I’m feeling too vulnerable to handle it, or when it would be especially harmful to poor Julian.”
Jack was with her six months; it felt like six years, and leaving Julian hurt Jack more than leaving Margaret. The boy watched him go as if Jack were his absconding father.
“We take terrible risks with the natural affection of children,” Jack would one day say to Dr. García, but she complained that he had told her about these relationships in a sketchy fashion. Or was it that he’d had nothing but sketchy relationships?
Months later, although the dominant sound in Jack’s house on Entrada Drive was the traffic on the Pacific Coast Highway, he would lie in bed hearing the ocean—the way he had listened to it in Margaret’s house in Malibu, while waiting for Julian to come into the bedroom and wake him and Margaret. Jack sincerely missed them, but they had driven him away—almost from the first moment Jack entered their lives. It was Dr. García’s assessment that they were “even needier” than Jack was.
“I’m not needy!” Jack replied indignantly.
“Hmm,” Dr. García said. “Have you considered, Jack, that what you crave most of all is a real relationship and a normal life, but you don’t know anyone who’s normal or real?”
“Yes, I have considered that,” he answered.
“I’ve been seeing you for five years, yet I can’t recall hearing you express a political opinion—not one,” Dr. García said. “What are your politics, Jack?”
“Generally more liberal than conservative,” he said.
“You’re a Democrat?”
“I don’t vote,” Jack admitted. “I’ve never voted.”
“Well, there’s a statement!” Dr. García said.
“Maybe it’s because I started my life as a Canadian, and then I became an American—but I’m really not either,” he said.
“Hmm.”
“I just like my work,” Jack told her.
“You take no vacations?” she asked. “The last vacation I remember hearing about was a school vacation.”
“When an actor isn’t making a movie, he’s on vacation,” Jack said.
“But that’s not exactly true, is it?” Dr. García asked. “You’re always reading scripts, aren’t you? You must spend a lot of time considering new roles, even if you eventually turn them down. And you’ve been reading a lot of novels lately. Since you’ve been credited with writing a screenplay, aren’t you at least thinking about another adaptation? Or an original screenplay, perhaps?”
Jack didn’t say anything; it seemed to him that he was always working, even when he wasn’t.
“You go to the gym, you watch what you eat, you don’t drink,” Dr. García was saying. “But what do you do when you’re just relaxing? Or are you never relaxed?”
“I have sex,” he said.
“The kind of sex you have is not relaxing,” Dr. García told him.
“I hang out with my friends,” Jack said.
“What friends? Emma’s dead, Jack.”
“I have other friends!” he protested.