Until I Find You

by John Irving

  "Ha!" Mrs. Machado cried. "You can't keed me, dahleen."

  He didn't try to persuade her. When a hundred-and-fifty-pound woman is sitting on you, and you weigh only seventy-five pounds, you don't argue. Besides, Jack was fascinated to watch Mrs. Machado dress herself. She did such a leisurely job of it, especially when you consider how quickly she had undressed. Mrs. Machado continued to sit on him while she put on her bra and tank top; finally she had to get off him when she put on her panties and the powder-blue gym shorts.

  There was a wet spot on the bed, which Mrs. Machado wiped away with the towel. She put the towel in the laundry hamper and filled the bathtub only half full, instructing Jack to wash himself--Mister Penis in particular. Jack was aware of a strong, unfamiliar smell, which went away in the bath. What was strange about the smell was that he couldn't decide if he liked it.

  The wet spot was still damp when Jack got back in bed, but Mrs. Machado had fetched a pair of clean boxers, which she told him to put on. He lay down--not on the wet spot, but near enough to it that he could touch it with his hand. The spot was cold, and Jack felt a chill--as if he were kneeling on the stone floor of the chapel with his back turned to God, or maybe one of those women attending to Jesus in the stained glass above the altar had slipped into bed with him.

  He knew that the stained-glass woman was a saint, because she was invisible. Mrs. Machado couldn't see her, but Jack could feel the coldness coming off her unseen body, which was as hard as the stone floor of the chapel and as forbidden to touch as the stained glass above the altar, where she had come from.

  "Don't go," he whispered to Mrs. Machado.

  "Eet's time to sleep, my dahleen."

  "Please don't go!" the boy begged her.

  Jack was somehow sure that the stained-glass saint was waiting for Mrs. Machado to leave. He didn't know what plans the saint had for him. He touched the cold, damp spot in the bed again, but he didn't dare reach beyond it, not knowing what he might feel.

  "Tomorrow we'll wrestle like crazy," Mrs. Machado was saying. "No more keecking, just wrestling!"

  "I'm afraid," Jack told her.

  "Does eet hurt, dahleen?"

  "Does what hurt?"

  "Meester Penis."

  "No, but it feels different," he said.

  "Eet ees different! Meester Penis has a secret."

  "What secret?"

  "What happened to Meester Penis is our secret, dahleen."

  "Oh."

  Had he agreed to share Mrs. Machado's secret? He felt the saint slip away, or maybe it was Jack himself who slipped away. Had the saint turned back into stained glass? (Or was it Jack's childhood he felt slip away?)

  "Boa noite," Mrs. Machado whispered in Portuguese.

  "What?"

  "Good night, leetle one."

  "Good night, Mrs. Machado."

  From the bedroom doorway, she was backlit by the light at the far end of the guest-wing hall. Seeing her squat, thick silhouette made Jack remember Chenko's observation of Mrs. Machado's stance as a wrestler--namely, that she stood like a bear on its hind legs, as if Mrs. Machado might have felt more at home on all fours.

  From the hall, as if to remind him of their secret, Mrs. Machado whispered one more time: "Boa noite, Meester Penis."

  Jack didn't sleep well; he had dreams, of course. Was he worried that the stained-glass saint would slip back into his bed while he slept--or more worried that she had turned her back on him, as he feared he had turned his back on God?

  Jack was aware that his mother and Mrs. Oastler had come home, not because he woke up when his mom came into his bedroom and kissed him--at least his mom said she came into his room and kissed him, every night--but because the lights in the hall had changed. No longer was there a light on at the far end of the corridor, but the door to his mother's room was ajar and the light from her bathroom glowed dimly in the hall. The light in Jack's bathroom was also on, and it cast a thin, bright line of light under the door.

  Jack was aware of his wet dream, too, because the cold, damp area of his bed had dried--but near it was a wetter spot, still warm, where the little guy had shed a few more tears of joy. Maybe he'd been dreaming about Mrs. Machado. He wondered if he would tell Emma about his wet dream, which Emma had anticipated for so long. (Jack Burns wondered if he would ever tell anyone about Mrs. Machado.)

  He got out of bed and crossed the hall to his mother's room, but his mom wasn't there; her bed wasn't even turned down. Jack went looking for his mother in the dark mansion. Mrs. Machado must have gone home, because the downstairs lights were off. The boy wandered from the guest wing into the hallway that led past Emma's empty bedroom. There was a flickering light; it came from under Leslie Oastler's bedroom door.

  Maybe Mrs. Oastler and his mom were watching television, Jack was thinking. He knocked on the door, but they didn't hear him. Or maybe he forgot to knock and just opened the door. The TV was off--it was a candle on the night table that was flickering.

  He thought at first that Mrs. Oastler was dead. Her body was arched as if her spine were broken, and her head was hanging off the side of the bed so that her face was turned toward Jack--but her face was upside down. The boy could tell that she didn't see him. She was naked and her eyes were wide and staring, as if the dim light from the hall had made Jack invisible--or else he was the one who was dead and Mrs. Oastler was looking right through him. Maybe he'd died during his wet dream, Jack imagined. (It would not have surprised him to learn that the experience with Mrs. Machado had killed him--not just the high-groin kick, but all the rest of it.)

  Alice sat up suddenly and covered her breasts with both hands. She was naked, too, but Jack had not seen her in the bed until she moved. She sat bolt-upright with Leslie Oastler's legs wrapped around her. Mrs. Oastler hadn't moved, but Jack saw that her eyes had regained their focus; he was greatly relieved that she saw him.

  "I didn't die, but I had a dream," Jack told them.

  "Go back to your room, Jack--I'll be right there," his mom told him.

  Alice was looking for her nightgown, which she found tangled in the sheets at the foot of the bed. Leslie Oastler just lay there naked, staring at Jack. In the candlelight, the rose-red, rose-pink petals of her Rose of Jericho looked like two shades of black--black and blacker.

  Jack was in the hall, going back to his room, when he heard Mrs. Oastler say: "You shouldn't still be sleeping in the same bed with him, Alice--he's too old."

  "I only do it when he's had a bad dream," Alice told her.

  "You do it whenever Jack wants to do it," Mrs. Oastler said.

  "I'm sorry, Leslie," Jack heard his mother say.

  The boy lay in his bed, not knowing quite what he should do or say about the wet spot. Maybe nothing. But when his mother got into bed with him, it didn't take her long to discover it. "Oh, it was that kind of dream," she said, as if this hardly counted as a nightmare.

  "It's not blood, it's not pee," the boy elaborated.

  "Of course it isn't, Jack--it's semen."

  Jack was thoroughly confused. (He failed to see how a wet dream could have anything to do with sailors!) "I didn't mean to do it," he explained. "I don't even remember doing it."

  "It's not your fault, Jackie--a boy's wet dreams just happen."

  "Oh."

  He wanted her to hold him; he wanted to snuggle against her, the way he used to snuggle against her after bad dreams when he was smaller. But when he tried to get closer to her, he unintentionally touched her breasts and she pushed him away. "I think you're too old to be in bed with me," she said.

  "I'm not too old!" Jack told her. How could he go from being not old enough to being too old in such a hurry? He felt like crying, but he didn't. His mom must have sensed it.

  "Don't cry, Jack--you're almost too old to cry," she said. "When you go away to school, you can't cry. If you cry, the boys will tease you."

  "Why am I going away to school?" he asked her.

  "It's better for everyone," his mother sai
d. "Under the circumstances, it's just better."

  "What circumstances?"

  "It's just better," she repeated.

  "It's not better for me!" Jack cried. She put her arms around him and let him snuggle against her. It was the way he used to fall asleep when he was four and they were in Europe.

  Jack should have told his mom about Mrs. Machado. (If he'd told his mother about Mrs. Machado, maybe Alice would have realized that he was still not old enough--that there was nothing too old about him.) But Jack didn't tell her. He fell asleep in her arms, like the old days--or almost like the old days. Something about her smell was different; his mother's face had a funny odor. Jack realized it was the same strong smell he had noticed in his bath. Maybe the odor had come from Mrs. Machado. As before, it was strange not knowing if he liked the smell. Even in his sleep, the smell persisted.

  How long had Leslie Oastler been there in Jack's bedroom with them, just sitting on Alice's side of the bed? When Jack woke up and saw her, he didn't know at first that it was Mrs. Oastler. Jack thought it was the stained-glass saint. She'd come back to claim him! (Maybe that was how a woman saint took possession of you, by taking all her clothes off first.)

  Leslie Oastler was naked, and she was rubbing Alice on that spot between her shoulder blades where Boris had a tattoo of the Chinese character for luck and Pavel had a tattoo of a tenaculum.

  Jack must have woken up only a split second before his mom did. "You should put some clothes on, Leslie," Alice was saying.

  "I had a dream," Mrs. Oastler replied. "A bad one."

  "Go back to your room, Leslie--I'll be right there," Alice said. Jack watched Mrs. Oastler leave his room; she was awfully proud of her body, the boy thought. His mother kissed him on the forehead. There was that smell again; he shut his eyes, still trying to decide if he liked it. His mom kissed him on his eyelids. It was a hard smell to like; nevertheless, he thought he liked it.

  "I'm sorry, Jack," his mom said. He kept his eyes closed and listened to her bare feet padding down the hall after Leslie Oastler.

  He couldn't wait for Emma to get back from the fat farm in California. Surely Emma would help him understand these new and troubling "circumstances"--to use his mother's word for her relationship with Mrs. Oastler.

  With Mrs. Machado as his regular workout partner, Jack's wrestling noticeably improved--although not as noticeably as hers. She was a feisty competitor--even Chenko was impressed--and she was twice his weight, an advantage he couldn't overcome. Jack still managed to hold her down with a cross-body ride, but he had trouble taking her down in the first place; she controlled their tie-ups on the feet, to the degree that he couldn't ankle-pick her anymore. An arm-drag to an outside single-leg was the only offensive takedown he occasionally got on her, and Mrs. Machado was impossible to pin unless he caught her in a cross-face cradle. She was just too strong for him, especially in the area of hand control. But Jack knew he was getting better.

  Mrs. Machado knew it, too, and she encouraged him. Two thirds of the points they scored were hers, but she was the one who needed to rest. He wasn't the one who got tired.

  Wrestling was a weight-class sport, Chenko kept reminding him. If or when he ever got the opportunity to wrestle a kid his own size, both Boris and Pavel agreed that Jack would pound him. But there was no one Jack's size in his life, at least not for the remainder of that summer.

  When Emma came home from the fat farm, she'd lost ten pounds--but neither her disposition nor her eating habits had improved. "They just fucking starved me," was how she put it.

  Emma still outweighed Mrs. Machado, whom Emma briefly replaced as Jack's nanny. Emma was in Toronto less than a week before she had to leave for her father's cottage in Georgian Bay for all of July. Still, in the few nights they were alone together, Jack could have told Emma about Mrs. Machado. He didn't. It was upsetting enough that he told her about her mom and his, about discovering them in bed together. What upset Jack most was that Emma was unsurprised. "Well, I've seen them do everything but lick each other," she said with disgust. "It's no wonder they're sending you to fucking Maine and making me a goddamn boarder!"

  "Lick what?"

  "Forget it, Jack. They're lovers, okay? They like each other in the way girls usually like boys, and vice versa."

  "Oh."

  "I don't care what they're doing!" Emma cried. "What pisses me off, baby cakes, is that they won't talk to us about it. They're just getting rid of us instead!"

  Jack decided that he had a right to be pissed off about the issue of not talking about it, too. It seemed a further injustice that there were photographs of Emma and Jack, often together, all over the Oastler house. Surely these pictures were evidence that they were a family, that Emma and Jack belonged there--yet they were being sent away!

  And if Jack's mother wouldn't talk to him about her lover, why should he tell his mom about Mrs. Machado? It was Emma he should have talked to about Mrs. Machado--that is, sooner than he did. But before Jack knew it, it was July. Emma was off in Georgian Bay, and Mrs. Machado was once again his sparring-partner nanny.

  15

  Friends for Life

  If what Mrs. Machado did to Jack qualified as "abuse," why didn't he feel abused at the time? It wouldn't be long before Jack had other relationships that he knew were sexual; the things he did and the things that were done to him only then registered as experiences he'd previously had with Mrs. Machado. But at the time it was happening, he had no frame of reference to understand how inappropriate she was with him.

  She sometimes physically hurt him, but never intentionally. And he was repulsed by her, but many times--on occasion, simultaneously to being repulsed--Jack was also attracted to her. He was often frightened, too. Or at least Jack didn't understand what she was doing to him, and why--or what she wanted him to do to her, and how he was supposed to do it.

  One thing was certain: she cared for him. He felt it at the time; no later reconstruction of his pliable memory could convince Jack that she didn't, in her heart, adore him. In fact, however confusingly, Mrs. Machado made him feel loved--at a time when his mother was sending him to Maine!

  Interestingly, it was only when Jack asked Mrs. Machado about her children that she was ever short-tempered with him. He presumed that they had simply grown up--that this was why they'd moved "away"--but it was a sore point with her.

  It was Mrs. Machado's fondest hope, or so she said, that Mister Penis would never be taken advantage of. But by whom? By willful girls and venal women?

  Jack was an adult when he saw his first psychiatrist, who told him that many women who sexually molest children believe that they are protecting them--that what the rest of us might call abuse is for these women a form of mothering. ("Too weird," as a girl Jack hadn't yet met would say.)

  What he noticed most of all, at the time, was that he changed overnight from someone who could keep nothing from his mother to someone who was determined to keep everything from her. Even more than he submitted to having sex with Mrs. Machado, he absolutely embraced the secrecy of it--most of all, the idea of keeping Mrs. Machado a secret from his mom.

  Alice was so involved with Leslie Oastler, which was a parallel pursuit to Alice distancing herself from Jack, that the boy could have kept anything a secret from her. That Mrs. Machado was obsessed with doing the laundry--not only Jack's sheets and towels and underwear, and his workout clothes, but also Alice's and Mrs. Oastler's laundry--was nothing Alice or Leslie appeared to notice. (If he'd gotten Mrs. Machado pregnant--if he actually could have--it's doubtful that Alice or Mrs. Oastler would have noticed that!)

  When Emma came home from Georgian Bay in August--with her body all tanned, and the dark hair on her arms bleached blond by the sun--Emma noticed that something had changed in him, and not only because her mom and Jack's were lovers. "What's wrong with you, baby cakes?" Emma asked. "What's with all the wrestling? Anyone would think you were fucking Mrs. Machado!"

  In retrospect, Jack would wonder why Chenko--
or Boris, or Pavel--didn't suspect something. They certainly observed that many of the women in Krung's kickboxing classes were inordinately interested in watching him wrestle with Mrs. Machado. And after Emma returned from Georgian Bay, she once again became Jack's nighttime nanny. Surely Chenko and Boris and Pavel were aware that he regularly left the gym in Mrs. Machado's company--for an hour or two almost every day, in either the late morning or the early afternoon.

  "Thees ees a growing boy, and eet's August in the ceety! He needs to breathe some fresh air!" Mrs. Machado announced.

  They went to her apartment, which was within walking distance on St. Clair--a dirty, dark-brown building, in which Mrs. Machado barely maintained a sparsely furnished walk-up on the third floor. There was a partial view of the ravine that ran behind Sir Winston Churchill Park and the St. Clair reservoir, and in the building's small courtyard, where the grass had died, were an unused jungle gym and swing set and slide--as if all the children in Mrs. Machado's apartment building had grown up and moved "away," and no more children had been born to replace them.

  The air was no fresher in Mrs. Machado's small apartment than in the Bathurst Street gym, and Jack was struck by the absence of family photographs. Well, it was no surprise that pictures of Mrs. Machado's ex-husband were absent--because he was alleged to assault her periodically. Why would she want a picture of him? But of her two children there were only two photographs--she had one photo of each boy. In the photographs, they were both about Jack's age, although Mrs. Machado said they were born four years apart and they were "all grown up now." (She wouldn't tell Jack their present ages--as if the numbers themselves were unlucky, or she was simply too upset to acknowledge that they were no longer children.)

  It was a one-bedroom apartment, to be kind, with only a chest of drawers and a queen-size mattress on the floor of the bedroom. There was a combination kitchen and dining room, with no living room--and not even a hutch or sideboard for dishes. There was little evidence of kitchenware, which suggested to Jack that Mrs. Machado, if she ate at all, ate out. As to how she might have fed her family, when she'd had a family, he had no clue; there wasn't even a dining-room table, or chairs, and there was only one stool at the strikingly uncluttered kitchen counter.