“I’m probably not that good,” he admitted.
“Jack, I think you’re very sweet,” Claudia’s daughter said, kissing his cheek. “Mom and Dad are going to write you—I know they will. A big thank-you letter, at the very least. For the rest of your life, you’ll be on their mailing list; they’ll probably ask you for money every year. I don’t mean another hundred-thou or anything, but they’ll ask you for something. I always thought they should ask you.”
In the Nuts & Bolts Playhouse brochure, Claudia was wearing a tent-shaped dress and looked bigger than Kathy Bates climbing into that hot tub with Jack Nicholson in whatever that movie was. Her husband was a tall, bearded man who looked as if he were always cast as a betrayed king. The younger daughters were as big-boned and pretty as Sally.
When Jack pulled up to the curb at The Georgian Hotel on Ocean Avenue, Sally kissed him on his forehead. “You seem like a good guy, Jack—just a sad one,” she said.
“Please give your mother my fondest regards,” he told the fifteen-year-old.
“Thanks for the money, Jack. It means a lot—I’m not kidding.”
“How does this constitute haunting me?” he asked her. “I mean, it was a sting. A pretty good one—I’ll give you that, Sally. But how have you haunted me, exactly?”
“Oh, you’ll see,” Sally said. “This will haunt you, Jack—and I don’t mean the money.”
He went back to Entrada Drive—the scene of the crime, so to speak. It was a crime, not only according to the California Penal Code; it felt very much like a crime to Jack Burns. He’d had sex with a fifteen-year-old girl, and it had cost him only $100,000.
Jack stayed up late reading every word of the brochure Sally had left with him; he looked at all the pictures, over and over again. The Nuts & Bolts Playhouse was dedicated to that noble idea of theater as a public service. A neighbor who was an electrician had installed the new stage lights for free; a couple of local carpenters had built the sets for three Shakespearean productions, also at no charge. In a small southern Vermont town, virtually everyone had contributed something to the community playhouse.
The area schoolchildren performed their school plays in the theater; a women’s book club staged dramatizations of scenes from their favorite novels. A New York City opera company rehearsed there for the month of January, before going on tour; some local children with good voices were taught to sing by professional opera singers. Poets gave readings; there were concerts, too. The summer-stock productions, while pandering to tourists’ fondness for popular entertainment, included at least two “serious” plays every summer. Jack recognized a few of the guest performers in the summer casts—actors and actresses from New York.
There were two pictures of Claudia; in both she looked radiant and joyful, and fat. Her daughters were most photogenic—self-confident girls who’d been taught to perform. Certainly Claudia could be proud of Sally for possessing both poise and determination beyond her years. Did Claudia and her husband know that Sally was a model of self-assurance and independent thinking? Probably. Did her parents also know that Sally was as sexually active (on her family’s behalf) as she was? Probably not.
Claudia had made the theater her family’s business—perhaps more successfully than she knew. But no matter how hard Jack tried to understand the financing, he couldn’t grasp how a so-called nonprofit foundation worked. (His math let him down again.) All Jack knew was that he would be writing out checks to The Nuts & Bolts Foundation for the rest of his life; regular donations of $100,000, or more, seemed a small price to pay for what he had done.
He wanted to call Dr. García, but it was by now two or three in the morning and he knew what she would say. “Tell me in chronological order, Jack. I’m not a priest. I don’t hear confessions.” What she meant was that she didn’t give absolution, not that there was any forgiveness for his having had sex with Claudia’s daughter—not even if Jack could have convinced himself that Sally really was Claudia’s ghost.
Jack was turning out the lights in the kitchen, before he finally went to bed, when he saw the rudimentary grocery list he had fastened to the refrigerator with one of his mom’s Japanese-tattoo magnets.
COFFEE BEANS
MILK
CRANBERRY JUICE
It didn’t add up to much of a life. He was already beginning to see how Claudia had kept her promise to haunt him.
Jack discovered that when you’re ashamed, your life becomes a what-if world. Claudia’s daughter Sally was fifteen; it wasn’t hard to imagine a girl of that age having some sort of falling-out with her mom. Teenage girls didn’t need legitimate provocation to hate their mothers. What if, for some stupid reason, Sally wanted to hurt her mom? What if Sally told Claudia that she’d slept with Jack?
Or what if, later in her life, Sally came to the illogical conclusion that Jack had taken advantage of her? What if—for a host of reasons, possibly having nothing to do with what had inspired Sally to seduce Jack in the first place—the wayward girl simply decided that he deserved to pay for his crime, or that Jack Burns should at least be publicly exposed?
“Well, Jack, I’m sure your shame is even greater than your fear of the California Penal Code,” Dr. García would later tell him. “But in our past, don’t many of us have someone who could destroy us with a letter or a phone call?”
“You don’t have someone like that, do you, Dr. García?”
“I’m not the patient, Jack. I don’t have to answer that kind of question. Let’s just say, we all have to learn to live with something.”
It was August 2003. Jack’s house on Entrada Drive was still for sale, but he felt that Claudia’s ghost had moved in to stay; it was as if she were living with him. Wherever else he might go, before or after that wretched house was sold, Jack had no doubt that Claudia’s ghost would come with him.
Krung, the Thai kickboxer from that long-ago gym on Bathurst Street, had told him once: “Gym rats always gotta find a new ship, Jackie.” Well, Jack was a gym rat who would soon have to find a new ship, but now he was a gym rat with a ghost.
Jack found that you don’t sleep well when you’re living with a ghost. He had meaningless but disturbing dreams, from which he would awaken with the conviction that his hand was touching Emma’s tattoo. (That perfect vagina, the not-a-Rose-of-Jericho, which his mom had tattooed on Emma’s right hip—just below the panty line.)
Jack took his real estate agent’s advice and moved out; this allowed her to empty the house of all the old and ugly furniture, most of which Emma had acquired for their first apartment in Venice, as well as the rugs and Jack’s gym equipment; the floors were sanded and the walls were painted white. The house became a clean and spare-looking dump, at least—and Jack moved into a modest set of rooms at the Oceana in Santa Monica.
It was a third-floor suite with four rooms, including a kitchen, overlooking the courtyard and the swimming pool. He could have chosen a view of Ocean Avenue, but the Oceana was a moderately priced residential hotel that appealed to families; Jack liked the sound of the children playing in the pool. Some of the families were Asian or European; Jack liked listening to the foreign languages, too. He accepted the transience of staying there, because Jack Burns was transient—impermanent, almost ceasing to exist.