Until I Find You

“I’ll tell you what’s weird about you, Jack—” Michele started to say, but she burst into tears and didn’t tell him. He was left to finish her thought in his imagination. For almost twenty years, Jack Burns would wish he could have that weekend back.

“If I had to guess,” Noah Rosen ventured, “it didn’t work out between you and Michele because you couldn’t stop looking at each other.”

Jack was only a week or two away from telling Noah about Mrs. Stackpole, which led Noah to tell his sister —and that would be the end of Jack’s friendship with Noah. A painful loss—at the time, more devastating to Jack than losing Michele Maher. But Noah would fade; Michele would persist.

Michele did nothing wrong. She was Jack’s age, seventeen going on eighteen, but she had the self-restraint and dignity not to tell her closest friends that Jack was a creep—or even that he was as weird as some of them thought he was. In truth, she went on defending him from the weirdness charge. Herman Castro later told Jack that Michele always spoke well of him, even after they’d “broken up.” Herman said: “When I think of the two of you together—well, I just can’t imagine it. You both must have felt you were models in a magazine or something.”

Herman Castro would go on to Harvard and Harvard Medical School. He became a doctor of infectious diseases and went back to El Paso, where he treated mostly AIDS patients. He married a very attractive Mexican- American woman, and they had a bunch of kids. From Herman’s Christmas cards, Jack would be relieved to see that the children took after her. Herman, as much as Jack loved him, was always hard to look at. He was slope-shouldered and jug-shaped, with a flattened nose and a protruding forehead; above his small, black, close-together eyes, his forehead bulged like a baked potato.

Herman Castro was the wrestling team’s photographer. In those days, heavyweights always wrestled last; Herman took pictures of his teammates wrestling even when he was warming up. Jack used to think that Herman liked to hide his face from view. Maybe the camera was his shield.

“Hey, amigo,” the note on Herman Castro’s Christmas card traditionally said, “when I think of your love life—well, I just can’t imagine it.”

Little did Herman know. Over time, Jack Burns would believe that he lost the love of his life on the night he lost Michele Maher. It would be small consolation to him to imagine that his father, at Jack’s age, would have fucked her—clap or no clap.

And he didn’t have the clap! Jack had himself checked at the infirmary when he got back from New York. The doctor said it was just some irritation, possibly caused by the change in his diet since the end of the wrestling season.

“It’s not gonorrhea?” Jack asked in disbelief.

“It’s nothing, Jack.”

After all, he’d been screwing a one-hundred-seventy-pound dishwasher for months on end—sometimes as often as four or five times a week. No doubt there was sufficient irritation to make Jack piss sideways at a knee-high Picasso—not to mention ruin his chances with “la belle Michele,” as Noah Rosen called Michele Maher.

Michele and Jack were in only one class together—fourth-year German. Many of the students who took German at the academy imagined that they might become doctors. German was said to be a good second language for the study of medicine. Jack had no such hope—he wasn’t strong in the sciences. What he liked about German was the word order—the verbs all lay in wait till the end of the sentence. Talk about end lines! In a German sentence, all the action happened at the end. German was an actor’s language.

Jack liked Goethe, but he loved Rilke, and in German IV, he loved most of all Shakespeare in German, particularly the love sonnets, which the teacher, Herr Richter, claimed were better auf Deutsch than they were in English.

Michele Maher, bless her heart, disagreed. “Surely, Herr Richter, you would not argue that ‘Lascivious grace, in whom all ill well shows,’ is improved by ‘Mutwillige Anmut, reizend noch im Schlimmen’!”

“Ah, but Michele,” Herr Richter intoned, “surely you would agree that ‘Sonst pruft die kluge Welt der Tranen Sinn, Und hohnt dich um mich, wenn ich nicht mehr bin’ is a considerable improvement on the original. Would you say it for us in English, Jack? You say it so well.”

“ ‘Lest the wise world should look into your moan,’ ” Jack recited to Michele Maher, “ ‘And mock you with me after I am gone.’ ”

“You see?” Herr Richter asked the class. “It’s a sizable stretch to make gone rhyme with moan, isn’t it? Whereas bin with Sinn —well, I rest my case.”

Jack could not look at Michele, nor she at him. To imagine that his last words to her might be the sizable stretch of trying to make gone rhyme with moan—it was too cruel.

In their last class together, Michele handed Jack a note. “Read it later, please,” was all she said.

It was something by Goethe. Michele liked Goethe better than Jack did. “Behandelt die Frauen mit Nachsicht.” He knew the line. “Be lenient when handling womankind.”

If he’d had the courage to give Michele a note, Jack would have chosen Rilke. “Sie lachelte einmal. Es tat fast weh.” But Michele Maher would have said it was too prosaic. “She smiled once. It was almost painful.”

One small measure of pride Jack took in his academic efforts at Exeter was that he managed to pass four years of German without Noah Rosen’s assistance. German was the only subject Noah couldn’t and didn’t help him with. (Quite understandably, as a Jew, Noah felt that German was the language of his people’s executioners and he refused to learn a word of it.)

Noah couldn’t help Jack with the SATs, either. There Jack was on his own; there aptitude was a far superior tool to attitude. Jack’s effort notwithstanding, his talent lagged behind that of his Exeter classmates. He had the lowest SAT scores in the Class of ’83.

“Actors don’t do multiple choice,” was the way Jack put it to Herman Castro.

“Why not?” Herman asked.

“Actors don’t guess,” Jack replied. “Actors do have choices, but they know what they are. If you don’t know the answer, you don’t guess.”

“If you don’t mind my saying so, Jack, that’s a pretty stupid approach to a multiple-choice examination.”

Because of his miserable SAT scores, Jack wouldn’t be joining Herman Castro and Noah Rosen at Harvard. He wouldn’t be attending any of the so-called better colleges or universities. His mother begged him to return to Toronto and go to university there. But he didn’t want to go back to Toronto.

Having initiated the distance between them, Alice suddenly wanted Jack to be close to her again. He wanted nothing to do with her. Jack was way over “the lesbian thing,” as Emma called it—Emma was way over it, too. They no longer cared that Alice and Mrs. Oastler were an item; in fact, both Emma and Jack were pleased, even proud, that their mothers were still together. So many couples weren’t still together, both the couples they’d known among their friends and the parents of so many of their friends.

But Jack couldn’t forget that he’d been sent away from Toronto—and from Canada, his country. For eight years, he’d been living in the United States; his fellow students, for the most part, were Americans, and the films that made him want to be an actor in the movies were European.

Jack applied to, and was accepted at, the University of New Hampshire. Emma was all over him. “For Christ’s sake, baby cakes, you shouldn’t choose UNH because of how much you like the local movie theater!” But he’d made his decision. He liked Durham and that movie theater, which was never the same, Jack would admit, when Emma Oastler wasn’t sitting beside him holding his penis.

That trip to the North Sea with his mother had formed Jack Burns. St. Hilda’s had established what Emma would correctly call his older-woman thing, and the school had given him some pretty basic acting techniques—also a belief in himself that he could be convincing, even as a girl. Redding had taught him how to work hard. Mrs.