Jack

Saturday, October 22 (After Chapter 21 of Triptych)

aroslav: Welcome, Jack. It's good to see you again.

JACK: Hey ya old goat. What's new?

aroslav: More of the same.

JACK: So you want to interview me for your story?

aroslav: Might have a bigger role for you someplace along the line. Do you mind?

JACK: Can't hurt.

aroslav: So, name, age, and birthday.

JACK: John Daniel Wade, also known as Jack. Born March 13, I'm 59 years old.

aroslav: How did Jack ever become a nickname for John?

JACK: I have no idea. [laughs] I guess John was just too long and they had to shorten it. In college, I tried to change it to my initials, J.D., but before I was a year out of school it was back to Jack.

aroslav: Well, that takes us back a ways, doesn't it? Tell me about college and the early years of Jack Wade.

JACK: That's ancient history. Let me see. I was an only child, named after my grandfather on my mother's side. Born in Angola, Indiana and lived there until I went to college. Didn't go far for that. I graduated from Notre Dame and can proudly claim to be one of the fighting Irish.

aroslav: You're Irish?

JACK: No. But I was raised Catholic and back in those days Notre Dame was the place to go. As far as I was concerned. And the image of Fighting Irish was pretty much wasted on me. I played some intramural basketball, but no varsity sports.

aroslav: What did you study?

JACK: I majored in marketing with a business finance minor. I was a dull boy even then.

aroslav: Not too dull, though. Didn't you meet Jane in college?

JACK: Not exactly in college. I met her at a ... uh ... charity auction. I bought her.

aroslav: That sounds a little kinky even for this story.

JACK: One of the fraternities held a charity auction. I don't even remember what it was supposed to support. They rounded up a lot of women, though, and guys on campus bid for the opportunity to take them on a date. There were hard and fast rules about acceptable behavior on the date, and even a list of acceptable activities. For some reason, she was auctioned late in the program and I had been outbid for every woman I bid on. I was determined not to let it happen with this one. She was a knock-out. Two inches taller than me and a professional runway model. We're talking the post-Twiggy era here, but models were still incredibly thin.

aroslav: How much did you pay?

JACK: $600. My opening bid was $500. The room kind of went quiet and Jane's eyes got huge. We were college students, after all. Some guy laughed and bid $510 just to see what I'd do. I bid $600 and everyone shut up.

aroslav: How to impress your date, huh?

JACK: The date was nice. We went to a local dinner club in South Bend with two other couples from the auction. We danced and I spent the night looking at her chin.

aroslav: Her chin?

JACK: I mentioned she was two inches taller than me. Well, in high-heels you had to add another three or four inches. She wrote home the next morning to tell her parents she'd fallen in love and knew it had to be love because I was shorter than she was.

aroslav: Did she continue modeling?

JACK: Yes. For quite some time. That's how I got into the business. After we'd been dating for a few months, she introduced me to her agency. Graduation was just around the corner for me and I was looking for a job. I hit it off with the owner of the talent agency and she suggested that I would be perfect. I worked for her for several years placing talent, models, actors, and singers. Jane joined me when she decided she'd had enough running around on stages and we opened our own modeling agency.

aroslav: I take it Jane was as beautiful as Lissa.

JACK: Let's say that Lissa came by her looks naturally. Her father, Damon, was Jane's brother and both of them were model quality. Damon never modeled. He was too busy doing engineering things. But Jane ruled the runway.

It was her idea to have Lissa model. That first gig was just a few months before Lissa's parents were killed. God! That just about killed us all. Alice, Lissa's mother, impressed on me in no uncertain terms that her daughter's safety and well-being was in my hands and she would personally hunt me down and eviscerate me if any harm came to her daughter. I have to tell you, I still think she would do that, even though she's been gone fifteen years now.

aroslav: You suffered a lot of loss around that time.

[sigh]

JACK: Jane and I never had children. It wasn't for lack of trying. We'd always doted on Lissa. When Alice and Damon were killed there was never a question about whether we would take Lissa into our home and our lives. The poor kid was twelve years old. But it was less than a year later that we found out Jane had cancer. It was so fast. We scarcely had time to say goodbye. And then there were Lissa and me. Her parents and aunt, my wife and in-laws were all gone.

But, having each other is what kept us going. I was a certified legal guardian and we just supported each other. Lissa said she wanted to do more modeling, so I went to work getting her jobs. In two years, we were on the road almost all the time and I had her tutored. She was seventeen when she got her GED. The friends she had in school growing up were a year behind her. And she was in demand. She had that look, you know? Stéphane Rolland loved her. That was before he started his private label. She was the only blonde model he would use.

aroslav: Jack, tell me honestly. Did you plan to marry Lissa? I mean, she was your ward.

JACK: I understand where your question is coming from, but it still pisses me off. No. I never intended to become involved with Lissa. Even now ... shit ... we've had children together and I still think of her as my little girl.

I recognized that she had a crush on me by the time she was sixteen. I'd read every parenting book I could get my hands on. I understood how girls became attached to fathers and father-figures. I recognized when she was flirting with me and I carefully channeled her affections in appropriate ways. We talked about how she was growing up and changing, and especially about the unrealistic world she was living in. There is nothing in any way normal about a model's life. You wouldn't believe how they are treated. They are manikins. Half the time they don't even know who it is that's stripping the clothes off their body, blotting away their sweat, touching up their makeup, dressing them, and pushing them back on stage. It's a brutal life and models develop a quirky image of themselves.