"That's me," he told her. "I'm a starving heart of darkness."
"Where's your hump, Dick?" she asked. It was a Richard III joke--everyone in the Dramat kept asking him.
"It's in the costume closet, and it's just a football," Jack said, for maybe the hundredth time.
"Why don't you have a girlfriend, Jack?" Michele asked. She was just kidding around, or so he thought.
"Because I get the feeling you're not available," Jack told her.
It was just a line. Jack was still acting--he didn't mean it. He saw at once he'd made a mistake, but he couldn't think fast enough to correct it. All that iced tea on an empty stomach was giving him a buzz.
Michele Maher lowered her eyes, as if the salad bar had consumed her interest. Her posture, which was generally excellent, crumpled; for a moment, Jack was almost as tall as she was.
Hey, it was just a line, he almost said--he should have said. But Michele was faster. "I had no idea you were interested in me, Jack. I didn't think you were interested in anyone."
The problem was, Jack liked her; he didn't want to hurt her feelings. And the truth is, if he'd told Michele Maher he was banging Mrs. Stackpole, Michele wouldn't have believed him. Mrs. Stackpole was so ugly, to use McCarthy's word--so unfortunate-looking in the world of women, even in the world of much older women--that the dishwasher herself had expressed disbelief that Jack Burns was banging her.
"Why me?" Mrs. Stackpole had asked him once, with all her weight crushing the breath out of him. He couldn't speak, not that he knew the answer. There was an urgency about Mrs. Stackpole's need to be with him; boys like Jack Burns had never even looked at her. How could Jack have been forthcoming about that to a beauty like Michele Maher?
"How can anyone not be interested in you, Michele?" Jack asked.
Maybe if he'd made that his end line, and walked away, it would have been all right. But he was too hungry to take a step away from the salad bar. When someone grabbed him, Jack first thought it was Michele. He hoped it was Michele.
"What the fuck did you say to Molly, asshole?" McCarthy asked him.
"Just the truth," Jack replied. "You said my sister is ugly--isn't that what you said?"
Jack hadn't meant to make Michele Maher fall for him, but she was standing next to him. And what could Ed McCarthy do? Jack was a Redding boy. McCarthy knew that Jack could take a beating. And what would Coach Hudson do to McCarthy if he hurt Jack, and one of the Exeter wrestling team's best lightweights missed several matches at the end of the season?
Also, Herman Castro would have kicked the crap out of Ed McCarthy if McCarthy had laid a hand on Jack. Jack had made a friend for life of Herman Castro, just by standing up for ugliness.
"Ed thinks my older sister, Emma, is ugly," Jack explained to Michele Maher. He saw that it was hopeless to bring her back; she was too far gone already. "Naturally, I don't see Emma that way, because I love her."
Ed McCarthy's best move--under the circumstances, perhaps his only move--was to walk away; even so, Jack was a little surprised when McCarthy did so. McCarthy had just lost his pathetic girlfriend--and the only way, for the rest of his life, he would ever breathe the same air as the Michele Mahers of this world was if he were standing beside the likes of Jack Burns. It was the Jack Burnses of this world who got the Michele Mahers--in Jack's case, without half trying.
One weekend, in the spring of their senior year, Michele took Jack home with her to New York. It was the first time Jack felt he was being unfaithful to Emma, not because he was with Michele but because he didn't tell Emma he was going to be in the city. Michele was so pretty, Jack was afraid it would hurt Emma's feelings to meet her--or that Emma would treat Michele badly. (The whole Maher family was beautiful, even the dog.)
Besides, Jack rationalized, would it really matter to Emma if he was in town and didn't tell her? Emma had graduated from NYU and was a fledgling comedy writer for a late-night New York TV show. She hated it. She'd come to the conclusion that, at least in her case, the hallway to making movies did not pass through television; she wasn't even sure she still wanted to make movies.
"I'm going to be a writer, honey pie--I mean novels, not screenplays. I mean literature, not journalism."
"When are you going to write?" he'd asked her.
"On the weekends."
Thus Jack gave himself the impression that he might disturb Emma's writing if he bothered her on a weekend.
Michele's parents had an apartment on Park Avenue; it took up half a building and was bigger than Jack's fifth-grade dorm at Redding. He'd not known that people had apartments with "fine art" that they actually owned. He didn't even know that people could privately own fine art. Maybe that was a particularly Canadian underestimation of the power of the private sector, or else he'd been in Maine and New Hampshire long enough to have been deprived of his city sensibilities.
There was a small Picasso in the guest-room bathroom; it was low on the wall, beside the toilet, where you could see it best when you were sitting down. Jack was so impressed by it, he almost peed on it when he was standing up. For some reason, his penis produced an errant stream.
He thought there was something wrong with his penis--a little gonorrhea, maybe. Jack knew it was entirely possible that he'd caught the clap from Mrs. Stackpole. (Who knew who else she was fucking, or who else her husband was fucking?) Now, after almost pissing on the knee-high Picasso, Jack convinced himself that he had a venereal disease--something he might pass on to Michele Maher. Not that he imagined Michele would have sex with him. It was their first time away from Exeter together. Yes, he had kissed her--but he hadn't once felt what Ed McCarthy crudely called her "high, hard ones."
Just Jack's luck--Michele's beautiful parents went off to some black-tie event, leaving Jack and Michele in the vast Park Avenue apartment with the beautiful dog. They began by watching the TV in Michele's bedroom, after her mom and dad had left. "They'll be gone all evening," Michele said.
Jack was prepared to make out, but he'd never imagined that Michele Maher was the kind of girl who would "go all the way"--to use one of Alice's prehippie expressions. "I just hope you don't know any girls who go all the way, Jack," was what his mom had said when he was back in Toronto, in the snow, for his last so-called spring break.
Michele Maher wasn't the kind of girl who went all the way, but she wanted to talk about it. Perhaps she'd been wrong not to do it.