"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. 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.