Nevertheless he had a thrilling Saturday night and Sunday morning with Emma and her film-major friends. They went to an all-night cinema that was playing Billy Wilder movies. Jack wasn't that familiar with Wilder, although he'd seen Some Like It Hot in Toronto with his mother; he must have been nine or ten. When Marilyn Monroe sang "I Wanna Be Loved by You" in that sequined dress, Jack got a boner and made the mistake of showing it to his mom. (Alice's sarcasm toward her son's penis could be brutal. She didn't say, "Just like your father," but the look she gave Jack said it for her.)
In New York, the first film Emma and her friends and Jack saw was Five Graves to Cairo, but Jack would remember only the beginning: that ghost tank transporting dead soldiers through the desert. After the tank, he forgot everything that happened to Franchot Tone--largely because Emma put her hand in his lap and held his penis for the rest of the movie. It was not until years later that Jack realized Erich von Stroheim had been Rommel.
There was more penis-holding through The Lost Weekend, during which Jack got the idea that Ray Milland looked like his father--or like what he imagined his dad might look like if William were drunk.
Jack had fallen asleep on Emma's shoulder for the whole of Sunset Blvd.; then he woke up and although he had to pee, he watched every minute of Ace in the Hole. On Sunday morning, over breakfast, Emma's film-major friends said Jack should have slept through Ace in the Hole and stayed awake for Sunset Blvd.
"That's what I love about you, honey pie--don't listen to them," Emma said. Jack didn't like her friends very much, but being with Emma was worth every minute of that long trip.
He would never be a Billy Wilder fan, although Wilder was born in Vienna and Jack could see what was European about even the most American of his films. It was the European filmmakers who first interested Jack, and it was Emma Oastler who introduced him to them. Whether with Emma on weekends in New York, or with Noah on weekends in Cambridge--when they would see all the foreign films in Harvard Square--Jack became a fan of films with subtitles. With the exception of Westerns, he didn't like American movies at all.
On the subject of not being like his father, it would occur to Jack that if William had met Emma when he was a young man, he probably would have had sex with her--and from everything she'd heard about Jack's father, Emma agreed that she would have submitted to his charms.
"That's one reason you can be happy that we haven't had sex," Emma told Jack. As to how she felt about not having sex with Jack, Emma didn't say.
Every winter term at Exeter, Jack's weekends were taken up by wrestling. Emma would often rent a car and come to see his matches; she herself had stopped wrestling and was once again struggling with her weight. Emma was a binge eater, but she was a binge weightlifter, too. She would take up smoking, quit smoking, start overeating, stop, and then go kill herself in the gym. When the cycle began again, Emma seemed powerless to interrupt its predictable course.
What she needed was Chenko, her favorite workout partner, but Chenko was not only far away in Toronto--he was waiting for a hip replacement. Boris had gone back to Belarus. "A family matter," was all Pavel, who had moved to Vancouver, would say. He'd married a woman from British Columbia--someone he met in his cab.
Jack's second year at Exeter, when he was fifteen going on sixteen, Emma was twenty-two. After the wrestling matches, most Saturdays, Emma took Jack to the movie theater in Durham, New Hampshire. Durham was an easy drive from Exeter, and it was a university town; they had an art-house kind of cinema, where they showed both old and current foreign films. At Exeter, they showed only the old ones.
Jack loved Fellini's La Strada, which he saw (more than once) with Emma holding his penis. They both believed that Chenko could have kicked the crap out of the Anthony Quinn character, but only in those days before Chenko needed a new hip. Jack wasn't as crazy about La Dolce Vita. The Marcello Mastroianni character was the playboy Jack imagined his father to be--the sex-seeker Jack feared he would become. And he didn't like 81/2 at all--Mastroianni again.
Fellini won Jack Burns back with Amarcord. Emma had already seen the film in New York, but she made a point of taking Jack to Durham to see it. She wanted to witness his response to the tobacconist with the huge hooters. With her hand in Jack's lap, Emma knew the little guy's reaction almost before Jack knew it. "How's that for an older woman, baby cakes?"
They committed to memory the little-known name of the actress who played the big-breasted tobacconist from Rimini. When Emma called Jack in his dorm at Exeter, she would occasionally adopt an Italian accent and say to whoever answered the phone: "Pleeze tell-a Jack Burns--eet's Maria Antonietta Beluzzi on da fon-a!"
More often, when Emma phoned, she just said she was Jack's sister. Jack had stopped calling Emma his stepsister; he referred to her as his older sister instead.
No one at Exeter was insensitive enough to comment on the lack of a family resemblance--with the exception of Ed McCarthy, Jack's wrestling teammate, who was hit-and-miss in his attention to details. At wrestling practice, McCarthy once forgot to wear a jock; his penis slipped out of his shorts and lay like a slug on the mat, where his workout partner, a fellow one-hundred-and-seventy-seven-pounder, stepped on it.
Jack felt like stepping on McCarthy's penis the day he made an unkind remark about Emma. "It's too bad you got all the good looks in your family, Burns. Your sister looks more like a wrestler than you do."
They were in the locker room--wooden benches, metal lockers, cement floors--getting dressed for practice. Jack underhooked one of McCarthy's arms and collared the bigger boy's neck with his right hand, snapping him forward. When McCarthy pulled away, his weight shifting to the heel of his right foot, Jack caught him with a foot-sweep and McCarthy fell on his bare ass on the cement floor--hitting his back on an open locker door and giving his elbow a whack on the bench on his way down.
Jack assumed that McCarthy would get to his feet and beat the shit out of him, but McCarth
y just sat there. "I could kick the crap out of you, Burns," he said.
"Do it then," Jack told him.
Even in his senior year, Jack never once wrestled above one-forty-five. After he stopped growing, he was five-eight, but only if he stood on his toes--and he competed better at one-thirty-five than he did at one-forty.
Jack was one of Exeter's better wrestlers in his final two years at the academy. Ed McCarthy would never be better than unexceptional as a wrestler. Jack might have beaten McCarthy in a wrestling match, but not in a fight. Even a mediocre one-seventy-seven-pounder can take a halfway decent one-thirty-five-pounder, and McCarthy knew it. He got to his feet, rubbing his back and his sore elbow.
As Mr. Ramsey had advised Jack, although this time it was unintentional, he had an audience. "You shouldn't call anyone's sister ugly, Ed," one of the lightweights said.
"Jack's sister is ugly," McCarthy replied.
That's what saved Jack--not McCarthy's belligerence but his insistence on the word ugly. While there were no rules regarding niceness at Exeter, no points off for saying something derogatory or dismissive--in fact, the intellectual fashion at the school favored everything negative and derisive--it was true that, for a few sentimental souls, sisters were sacred, especially if they weren't good-looking. And with Emma, who had just missed being pretty, there was also the problem with her weight.
"Who got all the good looks in your family, McCarthy?" the team's heavyweight asked. His name was Herman Castro; he was a scholarship kid from El Paso, Texas, and while he was a halfway decent wrestler, he might have stolen a few matches by frightening his opponents. He was so scary-looking that one was ill advised to use the word ugly within his hearing.
"I wasn't speaking to you, Herman," Ed McCarthy said.
"You are now," Herman Castro told him, and that was the end of it. Or it would have been, if Jack had let it be the end of it. His loyalty to Emma was fierce.
Ed McCarthy wasn't ugly--although his penis was, especially after that guy had stepped on it--but he wasn't at all handsome, either. He didn't have a girlfriend till his senior year, and the best he could do was a startled-looking girl with red hair and freckles who was only in grade ten. The redhead had just turned sixteen; McCarthy was eighteen. It was almost certainly not a sexual relationship, but it was probably the first relationship of any kind for both of them.