Until I Find You

Adkins had drawn him to her sadness. And at Exeter he’d discovered that he was not an intellectual, but he had learned how to read and write. (At the time, Jack didn’t know how rare and useful this knowledge was—no more than he could have defined the vulnerability Mrs. Stackpole had exposed in him.)

The female faculty at Exeter struck Jack as sexually unapproachable, in that older-woman way. Whether Jack was right or wrong in that assumption, they were certainly not as approachable as Mrs. Stackpole—her crude, suggestive urgency had captivated him. Redding was a wilderness where women went and became weary, or at least weary-looking. At Exeter, on the other hand, there were some attractive faculty wives who captured the boys’ attention—if only at the fantasy level. (Jack wouldn’t have dreamed of approaching a single one of them; they all looked too happy.)

Least approachable of them all was Madame Delacorte, a French fox who worked in the library and whose husband taught in the Department of Romance Languages. Romance was not what Madame Delacorte brought to mind. There wasn’t a boy at Exeter who could look her in the eye—nor was there a boy who ever visited the library without searching longingly for her.

Madame Delacorte looked as if she’d just been laid but wanted more, much more. (Yet, somehow, the first sweaty encounter had not mussed her hair.) Madame Delacorte was as commanding a presence as Jeanne Moreau in Jules and Jim; not even her husband could approach her without stuttering, and he was from Paris.

Jack was cramming for his history final in the library one spring night; he had a favorite carrel on the second floor of the stacks. He’d burned his bridges with Noah Rosen and Michele Maher, and he was feeling resigned about his next four years in Durham, New Hampshire.

Emma Oastler was moving to Iowa City. She’d sent some of her writing to Iowa and had been admitted to the Writers’ Workshop there. Jack had never heard of the place. He knew only that Iowa was in the Midwest, and that he would miss Emma.

“You can come visit me, honey pie. I’m sure they have movie theaters there, despite all the writers. They probably have the movie theaters to purposely drive the writers crazy.”

In this context, Jack wasn’t worried about his history final—he was just a little depressed. When Madame Delacorte came to his carrel, he’d been plowing through a bunch of books he was supposed to have read already. He’d made a pile of the ones he was finished with; among them was a dusty tome about Roman law, which Madame Delacorte said someone had been looking for. She wanted him to return the book to the stacks on the third floor. The classics were kept there—all the Greek and Latin.

“Okay,” Jack said to Madame Delacorte. He could never look at her above her slender waist; her waist alone was enough to undo him. He went off to the third floor with the book about Roman law.

“Come right back, Jack,” Madame Delacorte called after him. “I don’t want to be responsible for distracting you.” As if she, or Jack, had any control of that!

It seemed that, as usual, there was no one in the stacks on the third floor. Jack quickly found where the book belonged, but—above the moldy bindings, in the next aisle—a pair of disembodied eyes regarded him. “Michele Maher isn’t the girl for you,” the voice that went with the eyes said. “You’re already good-looking. What do you need a good-looking girl for? You need something else, something real.”

Another dishwasher? Jack wondered. But he recognized the voice and the diluted, washed-out blue of the eyes. It was Molly whatever-her-name-was, Ed McCarthy’s ex-girlfriend. (Penis McCarthy, as Herman Castro less-than-lovingly called him.)

“Hi, Molly,” Jack said; he came around into her aisle and stood next to her.

“I should be your girlfriend,” Molly told him. “I know you love your sister, and she’s ugly. Well, I’m ugly, too.”

“You’re not ugly, Molly.”

“Yes, I am,” she said. She was demented, clearly. She also had a cold; the rims of her nostrils were red and her nose was running. Molly whatever-her-name-was leaned back against the stacks and closed her eyes. “Take me,” she whispered.

Jack didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. He did neither. On an impulse largely meant to do her minimal harm, he fell to his knees and lifted her skirt. He pushed his face into her panties; with both his hands on her buttocks, he pulled the waistband of her panties down.

Jack Burns actually licked a tenth-grade girl, a sixteen-year-old, in the stacks on the third floor of the Exeter library! From Mrs. Machado and Mrs. Stackpole, he knew exactly how to do it; the difference was, this time he initiated it. He could feel Molly’s fingers in his hair; she was pulling his head into her. He could feel her slumping against the stacks as she came on his face—not one’s usual library experience. And the worst of it was that he didn’t know her last name; he couldn’t even write her a letter of explanation.

Jack left her standing in the stacks, or barely standing. Unlike Michele Maher, Molly was short enough that he could kiss her on her forehead—as if she were a little girl. When he left her, with nothing to say for himself except that he had to cram for a history final, it seemed to him that her knees were buckling.

Jack found a drinking fountain, in which he washed his face. When he returned to his carrel on the second floor, he was aware he’d been away for what may have struck Madame Delacorte as a long time—not to mention that he’d suffered a major distraction. Maybe he was a little wild-eyed, or there was something in the aftermath of impromptu cunnilingus that caught Madame Delacorte’s eye.

“My word, Jack Burns,” she said. “What on earth have you been reading? Not Roman law, clearly.”

The lilt in her voice was more mischievous than scientific. Was Madame Delacorte flirting with him? He finally got up the nerve to look at her, but Madame Delacorte was as unreadable as Jack’s future. He knew only that the rest of his life had begun, and that he would begin it without Michele Maher—his first, maybe his last, true love.

18. Enter Claudia; Exit Mrs. McQuat

Jack Burns saw his college years through a telescope, the way you do when the object of your desire is not of the moment—the way you do when you’re biding your time. The University of New Hampshire was like a layover in an airport—a stop on Jack’s journey elsewhere. He got good grades, the kind he never could have gotten at Exeter—he even graduated cum laude— but he was detached the whole time.

In the student theater, Jack got every part he auditioned for, but there weren’t many he wanted. And he saw all the foreign films that came to Durham in those years, sometimes but not usually by himself; if he took a girl with him, she had to be someone who would hold his penis. There were only a couple of girls like that.

It was most often Claudia, who was a theater major. There was also a Japanese girl named Midori; she was in one of Jack’s life-drawing classes. He was the only male model for all of the life- drawing classes. As Mr. Ramsey would have said, it was an acting opportunity—and Jack got paid for it. Modeling for life drawing was not an occasion when he thought so fixedly of his audience of one, as Miss Wurtz had instructed him; rather it was an exercise in imagining the close-ups he was preparing for. He hoped there would be many.

Modeling for life drawing was an exercise in mind-over-matter, too, because Jack willed himself not to get an erection; what was more tricky, but he got pretty good at it, was allowing a hard-on to start and then stopping it. (It might have been that exercise that made a moviegoer out of Midori.)

“Set us free, O God, from the bondage of our sins,” Lottie used to pray. But Jack had stopped hearing from Lottie, even by postcard. He never learned what happened to her on Prince Edward Island—maybe nothing.

Emma had taught Jack how to drive—illegally, in keeping with her nature, but at least Jack got his driver’s license at the earliest opportunity. He didn’t own a car; hence he developed a possessive fondness for Claudia’s Volvo. He liked Claudia, but he loved her car.

Claudia was an aspiring actress—she and Jack were in several student plays together—and her willingness as a penis-holder was for the most part unshakable. Yes, he had sex with her, too, which made the penis-holding