“Look, it’s obvious you want me,” the dancer said. “Stop fighting it.” She’d taken off all her clothes and had managed to destroy most of Jack’s. “You have a hard-on,” she kept pointing out, as if Jack didn’t know.
“I get a hard-on in my sleep,” he told her.
“Look at me!” she screamed. “I have a hard-on!”
“I can see that you do,” Jack said. “And you have breasts.” (They were as hard as apples; Jack knew, because he was trying to push them out of his face.)
This time, he saw the left hook coming—and the right uppercut, and the head-butt, too. She may have been a dancer, but she was not without some other training; this wasn’t her first fight.
Naturally, the phone was ringing—the front-desk clerk, Jack assumed. There had probably been calls to the front desk from those rooms adjacent to Jack’s, within hearing distance of the destroyed lamp and all the rest. Well, wouldn’t Donald Trump love this! Jack was thinking. (The Trump’s fabulous view of Central Park—for the time being, utterly ignored.)
He heard the security guys picking at the lock on his hotel-room door, but Jack had a Russian front headlock on the dancer and he wasn’t letting go—not even to open the door. Her fingernails were like claws, and he had to give up the front headlock when she bit him in the forearm.
“You fight like a girl,” Jack told her.
He knew that would really piss her off. When she came at him, Jack hit a pretty good duck-under and got behind her. He held her chest-down on the rug with a double-armbar, where she couldn’t bite him. The security guys finally got the door open; there were two of them, plus the night manager.
“We’re here to help you, Mr. Burns—I mean Mr. Mocco,” the night manager said.
“I have a distraught dancer on my hands,” Jack told them.
“He had a hard-on. I saw it,” the transvestite said.
One of the security guys had thought that Jack really was a cripple. He’d never seen Jack out of the wheelchair—not even in the movies. (He wasn’t a moviegoer, clearly.) From the other security guy’s reaction when the three of them were forcibly dressing the dancer, chicks with dicks were new to him.
Jack never went to bed; he stayed up, rehearsing how he would tell this part of the story of his life to Dr. García. He knew this episode wouldn’t wait for chronological order. Jack kept a cold washcloth on his forearm, where the transvestite dancer had bitten him. She hadn’t broken the skin, but the bite marks were sore and ugly-looking.
In the late morning, when Jack talked to Dr. García from the set of The Love Poet, he told her that the unfortunate incident was out of character for Harry Mocco but sadly typical of Jack Burns. (Jack thought he might preempt her criticism by criticizing himself.)
“You acquiesce too much, Jack,” Dr. García said. “You should never have let the transvestite into the elevator—you should have had the fight in the lobby, where it would have been a shorter fight. For that matter, you should never have let her sit in your lap in the bar.”
“It wouldn’t have been a good idea to have had that fight in the bar,” he assured Dr. García.
“But why did you leave the nightclub with her in the first place?” Dr. García asked him.
“She turned me on. I was aroused,” he admitted.
“I’m sure you were, Jack. That’s what transvestites do, isn’t it? They go to great lengths to turn men on. But what does that lead to, Jack? Every time, where does that go?”
He couldn’t think of what to say.
“You keep getting in trouble,” Dr. García was saying. “It’s always just a little trouble, but you know what that leads to—don’t you, Jack? Don’t you know where that goes?”
It was July 2003 when they had the wrap party for The Love Poet in New York, and Jack flew back to L.A. He’d succumbed to Harry Mocco’s habit of reciting fragments of love poems to total strangers, but in the case of the attractive stewardess on his flight from New York to Los Angeles, this wasn’t entirely Jack’s fault. She’d asked him to tell her about his next movie, and Jack began by explaining to her that Harry Mocco compulsively memorizes love poems and recites them at the drop of a hat.
“For example, do you know the poem ‘Talking in Bed’ by Philip Larkin?” he asked her. (She was probably Jack’s age.)
“Do I want to know it?” she asked him warily. “I’m married.”
But he kept trying. (Jack hadn’t slept with a stewardess in years.) “Or ‘In Bertram’s Garden’ by Donald Justice,” he went on, as if the flight attendant were encouraging him. “ ‘Jane looks down at her organdy skirt / As if it somehow were the thing disgraced—’ ”
“Whoa!” the stewardess said, cutting him off. “I don’t want to hear about it.”
That’s what happens when you ask an actor to tell you about his next movie.
When Jack walked into his place on Entrada Drive, he immediately called a real estate agent and asked to have the house put on the market. (Sell the fucker! Jack was thinking; maybe that would force me to live a little differently.)
He headed off for his appointment with Dr. García—his first in two months—feeling like a new man.
“But you haven’t really made a decision about where you want to live, Jack,” Dr. García pointed out. “Aren’t you pulling the rug out from under your feet, so to speak?”
But if Jack couldn’t make up his mind about his life, he had at least decided to make something happen.
“Is it the house itself that let Lucy come inside?” Dr. García asked him. “Is it because of your mother’s lies to you, or your missing father, that you are an unanchored ship—in danger of drifting wherever the wind or the currents, or the next sexual encounter, will take you?”
Jack didn’t say anything.
“Think about Claudia,” Dr. García said. “If you want to make something meaningful happen—if you really want to live differently—think about finding a woman like that. Think about committing yourself to a relationship; it doesn’t even have to last four years. Think about being with a woman you could live with for one year! Start small, but start something.”
“You asked me not to mistake you for a dating service,” Jack reminded her.
“I’m recommending that you stop dating, Jack. I’m suggesting that, if you tried to live with someone, you would have to live a lot differently. You don’t need a new house. You need to find someone you can live with,” Dr. García said.
“Someone like Claudia? She wanted children, Dr. García.”
“I don’t mean someone like Claudia in that respect, but a relationship like that—one that has a chance of lasting, Jack.”
“Claudia is probably very fat now,” he told Dr. García. “She had an epic battle with her weight ahead of her.”
“I don’t necessarily mean someone like Claudia in that respect, either, Jack.”
“Claudia wanted children so badly—she’s probably a grandmother now!” he said to Dr. García.
“You never could count, Jack,” she told him.
Jack didn’t blame Dr. García. He would take full responsibility for what happened. But the very idea of Claudia—the reason she was recently on his mind—surely came from the Claudia conversation in his therapy session with Dr. García. Jack was thinking about her—that’s all he would say in his own defense—when he drove back home to Santa Monica from a dinner party one warm night that summer.