Until I Find You

In Bruno’s brilliantly choreographed scene where Jack-as-the-transvestite-Esmeralda reveals to Captain Phoebus that he is, below the waist, a man, Jack is singing his heart out to the captain while Phoebus both acquiesces and retreats. (The captain is attracted to Jack, but the idiot still thinks Jack is a girl— hence his reluctance.)

Jack seizes one of the captain’s hands and holds it to one of his falsies; Phoebus looks underwhelmed. Jack seizes the captain’s other hand and holds it to his crotch; Phoebus gives the audience an astonished look while Jack whispers in his ear. Then they both sing the song Bruno Litkins wrote for his gay version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame—“Same As Me, Babe,” to the tune of Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me, Babe.” (Jack knew his Bob; he sang it well.)

But the night of the performance after Jack learned he had gonorrhea—and Claudia confessed where it came from—Jack had something real to whisper in Captain Phoebus’s ear while he held the captain’s hand against his pecker. “Thanks for the clap, babe,” Jack whispered.

It was quite a good look Phoebus gave the audience every night—it usually brought the house down. Such a look of recognition—Esmeralda has a penis! Of course the audience already knows. Jack-as-Esmeralda had earlier shown Father Frollo, thinking it would make Frollo stop hitting on him—never realizing that Frollo is such an overreactor that he’ll insist on having Esmeralda hanged!

But that memorable night Captain Phoebus held Esmeralda’s penis and Jack-as-Esmeralda thanked Phoebus for giving him the clap was a showstopper for the handsome soldier. The look he gave the audience that night interrupted the performance for a full minute or more; the audience spontaneously rose as one and gave Captain Phoebus a standing ovation.

“Maybe take a little something off the look, Phoebus,” Bruno Litkins told the actor after that performance.

Jack just gave the captain his best Esmeralda-as-a-transvestite smile. Phoebus knew Jack could kick the crap out of him if he wanted to.

In truth, Jack was grateful to Captain Phoebus for making Claudia feel guilty; Phoebus had made Jack feel a little less guilty about the fact that he and Claudia were drifting apart.

The summer following their graduation from the University of New Hampshire, Claudia and Jack finally went their separate ways. She was going the graduate-student route—an MFA theater program at one of the Big Ten universities. (Jack would make a point of forgetting which one.) It seemed sensible for them to apply to different summer-stock playhouses that summer. Claudia was at a Shakespeare festival in New Jersey. Jack did a Beauty and the Beast and a Peter Pan and Wendy at a children’s theater workshop in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

He might have been feeling nostalgic about his lost friend Noah Rosen—or Noah’s more irrevocably lost sister, Leah—but Jack fondly recalled those foreign films in the movie theaters around Harvard Square. A summer of subtitles—and audiences of children, and their young mothers—somehow suited him.

Claudia said—and if these weren’t truly her last spoken words to him, they were the last words he would remember—“What do you want to perform for children for? You don’t want any.”

Jack played the Beast to an older-woman Belle; she was also one of the founders of the children’s theater workshop, and she’d hired him. Yes, he slept with her—they had a summer-long affair, not a day longer. She was way too old to play Wendy to Jack’s Peter Pan, but she was a reasonably youthful-looking Mrs. Darling—Wendy’s mom. (Imagine Peter Pan screwing Wendy’s mother, if only for a summer.)

Jack needed to go to graduate school, to continue to be a student, or else get a real job—hence a green card—if he didn’t want to go back to Canada, and he didn’t. Emma, once again, would save him. She’d been out of Iowa for two years, living in Los Angeles and writing her first novel, which sounded like a contradiction in terms. Who went to L.A. to write a novel? But being an outsider had always suited Emma.

She’d found a job reading scripts at one of the studios; like Jack, she was still a Canadian citizen and had only a Canadian passport, but Emma also had a green card. The script-reading job was more the result of her year as a comedy writer for New York television than it was anything she’d prepared herself to do at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She was writing her novel, which Emma said was to be her revenge on the time she’d wasted as a film major—and all the while she was, as she put it, “working for the enemy and getting paid for it.”

Why didn’t he come live with her? Emma asked Jack. She’d find him a job in the movie business. “There are some good-looking guys out here, baby cakes—it’s tougher competition than you’d have in Toronto. But there aren’t that many good-looking guys who can act as well as you.”

So that was Jack’s plan, to the extent that he had one. He’d had it with the theater—and no wonder, when you consider the preponderance of musicals. It was fine with him if his last onstage performance was as Peter Pan, taking Wendy Darling and her brothers off to Neverland—while in the wee hours of the morning, long after the curtain fell, he was banging Wendy’s mom, Mrs. Darling.

“What would J. M. Barrie say?” Claudia might have asked, had she known. It made Jack sad to think about her.

The thing about Los Angeles, Jack would learn, is that it’s unimpressed by you—no matter who you are. Eventually, the city tells you, your comeuppance will come; exclusivity fades. But Jack Burns wasn’t moving in exclusive circles when he first went to L.A.—he wasn’t famous yet. In the fall of 1987, when he moved in with Emma, the nearest landmark representing the sundry entertainments that the future held in store was that garish playground of possibilities, the Santa Monica Pier.

All that Jack and Emma really cared about was that they were bathed in the warm Pacific air; it didn’t matter that they were breathing in an ocean spiked with smog. They were living together again—not in Toronto, and not with their mothers.

Emma, who was twenty-nine, looked considerably older. Her struggles with her weight were apparent to anyone who knew her, but a different, interior battle had been more costly to her; her shifting ambitions were at war with her obdurate determination. That Emma was a restless soul was obvious, but not even Jack (not even Emma) was aware that something was seriously wrong with her.

Numbers were never Jack’s strong suit. Living with Emma in L.A., he couldn’t remember how much their rent was, or what day of the month they were supposed to pay it.

“Your math sucks, honey pie, but what do you need to know math for? You’re gonna be an actor!”

At St. Hilda’s, Jack had needed Miss Wurtz bending over him—as if breathing her in were a substitute for learning his numbers. And while it’s true that Mrs. McQuat had helped him, even more than Miss Wurtz, he had never mastered math.

Mrs. Adkins had assisted him with his algebra at Redding—she who’d dressed him in her old clothes, she who’d made love to him with such a morbid air of resignation. (It was as if Mrs. Adkins were undressing to drown herself in the Nezinscot, or at least practicing for that loneliest of moments in her future.)

“You shouldn’t trust yourself to count past ten,” Noah Rosen had once cautioned Jack.

Mr. Warren, Jack’s faculty adviser at Exeter, had been more kind but no less pessimistic. “I would advise you, Jack, never to rely on your numerical evaluation of a situation.”

Jack Burns would live in Los Angeles for sixteen years. He liked all the driving. He and Emma first shared one half of a rat-eaten duplex in Venice. It was on Windward Avenue, downwind of a sushi place on the corner of Windward and Main—more to the point, downwind of the restaurant’s Dumpster. Hama Sushi was good. Emma and Jack ate there a lot. The fish was really fresh—less fresh, alas, was whatever ended up in the Dumpster.

Jack’s first girlfriend in L.A. was a waitress he met at Hama Sushi. She shared an overused house with some other girls on one of those small streets off Ocean Front Walk—Eighteenth, Nineteenth, or Twentieth Avenue. He could never remember the number. He went one night to the wrong house, possibly on the wrong avenue. There were a bunch of girls who welcomed him inside when he pushed the buzzer, but his waitress friend was not among them. By the time Jack realized it was the wrong bunch of girls, he’d met someone who interested him more than the sushi waitress. Numbers, once again, had misled him.

“You oughta carry a calculator,” Emma told him, “or at least write everything down.”

He liked Venice—the beach, the gyms, the underlying grubbiness of it. After Emma had a bad experience at Gold’s Gym—she’d met a bodybuilder there who had beaten her up—she got Jack and herself a membership at World Gym; she said she liked the gorilla on the World Gym T-shirts and tank tops. A big gorilla standing on the