Until I Find You

by John Irving

  In later years, Queen Street would be too trendy to stand, with stores with cute names and an overabundance of bistros. Daughter Alice was located west of that, where Queen Street began to get a little seedy--and, in Emma's opinion, "a lot Chinese."

  From the moment Alice moved in, her clientele was "way young"--to use Emma's description. But Jack never knew if the young people came because of his mom or because Queen Street was full of young people most of the time. Emma said it was chiefly young men who went to Daughter Alice. Occasionally they went with their girlfriends, who got tattooed, too, but Jack already knew that young men liked his mother, and that she was attracted to them.

  Emma also said that Leslie Oastler was "not a Queen Street person." Mrs. Oastler didn't much care for the atmosphere or the clientele in Daughter Alice. But after all her years as someone's apprentice, Alice loved working for herself. The tattoo parlor was always full; people were happy to wait their turn, or just watch Alice work. She had her flash on the walls, nobody else's; she had her notebooks full of her stencils, which her customers could look through while they waited. She made tea and coffee, and always had music playing. She had tropical fish in brightly lit aquariums; she'd even arranged some of her flash underwater, with the fish, so that the fish appeared to be swimming in a tattoo world.

  "That shop is a happening," Emma told Claudia.

  Jack knew that, but the emphasis on the young men had escaped him--or he just hadn't wanted to think about it. The thought of his mother with boys his age, or younger, was disturbing. Jack was much happier imagining his mom in Leslie Oastler's arms, where she'd looked safe to him--if not exactly happy.

  "And what do you suppose your mom thinks of my mom's young men, if there are any?" Jack asked Emma.

  "For the most part--" Emma said; she stopped herself and then resumed, speaking more to Claudia than to Jack. "For the most part, I think my mom is glad Jack's mom isn't a man."

  It was always hard for Jack to dispute Emma's authority, especially on the subject of his mother and Mrs. Oastler. Since '75, when he'd gone off to Redding, Emma had spent more time with their moms than Jack had. Toronto wasn't his city, not anymore.

  All he'd really known of Toronto was Mrs. Wicksteed's old house on Spadina and Lowther, and the St. Hilda's area of Forest Hill. Well, okay--there was the Bathurst Street gym, and what little he could see of the ravine near Sir Winston Churchill Park from Mrs. Machado's apartment on St. Clair. But Jack had never known downtown Toronto very well, especially not that area of Jarvis and Dundas, where the Chinaman's tattoo parlor was--and he was a virtual stranger to Queen Street West and his mom's happening, as Emma called it, at Daughter Alice.

  Between Emma and Jack, Emma was the true Torontonian--even when she was in Iowa City, and later, when she was living in Los Angeles.

  Alice had finally tattooed Emma. Jack couldn't imagine the negotiations this had entailed, not only with his mother but with Mrs. Oastler. The butterfly Emma had once wanted was replaced by her latest heart's desire, a smaller version of Alice's famous Rose of Jericho.

  "Don't give me any shit about it," Emma told Jack she had said to her mom. "If you'd let me get a stupid butterfly on my ankle when I wanted one, you wouldn't be faced with a vagina today."

  The problem was that Emma didn't want to conceal the vagina. This was no flower hidden in a rose--this was just the petals of that most recognizable flower. Granted it was small, but it was clearly a vagina. (Oh, Jack thought--to have been a fly on the wall for these mother-daughter discussions!)

  Alice had smoothed the way for the tattoo to happen. "It's a question of where it is, Emma," Alice said. "I refuse to tattoo a vagina on your ankle."

  Naturally, Emma was "way beyond" (as she put it) wanting a tattoo on her ankle--and Alice would no longer put a tattoo on a woman's coccyx. She'd read in a tattoo magazine that an anesthesiologist wouldn't give you an epidural if you were tattooed there. (Possibly this had something to do with the ink getting into the spinal column, although the danger of that happening sounded unlikely.)

  "What if you have a child and you need an epidural?" Alice asked Emma.

  "I'm not ever going to have children, Alice," Emma told her.

  "You don't know that," Alice replied.

  "Yeah, I know that, Alice."

  "I'm not giving you a vagina on your coccyx, Emma."

  Even Emma had to admit that her coccyx would have been a confusing place for a vagina. Alice finally agreed to put the tattoo on Emma's hip, just below the panty line; that way, Emma could see it without looking in a mirror and she could see it in a mirror as well. "Which hip?" Alice asked her.

  Emma considered this, but not for long. "My right one," she replied.

  According to Emma, the tattoo was already a vagina-in-progress when Alice asked her: "Why the right hip?"

  "I generally sleep on my left side," Emma told her. "If I'm sleeping with a guy, I want to be sure he can see the vagina--the tattoo, I mean."

  Emma said she appreciated Alice's thoughtful reply, although she had to wait for it. Jack could imagine this exactly: his mother never taking her foot off the foot-switch, the needles in the tattoo machine going nonstop, the flow of ink and pain as steady as hard rain. At first, Emma was vague about the music that was playing at the time. "It might have been 'Mr. Tambourine Man,' " she said.

  Though I know that evenin's empire has returned into sand,

  Vanished from my hand,

  Left me blindly here to stand but still not sleeping.

  My weariness amazes me, I'm branded on my feet,

  I have no one to meet

  And the ancient empty street's too dead for dreaming.

  "There were the usual creepy guys hanging around the tattoo parlor," as Emma remembered her experience. Jack felt certain these guys would have had more than a passing interest in the expanse of Emma's hip that was exposed, not to mention her tattooin-progress.

  "Come to think of it, it was Dylan, but it was 'Just Like a Woman,' " Emma suddenly recalled. Jack could imagine this, too.

  Ah, you fake just like a woman, yes, you do

  You make love just like a woman, yes, you do

  Then you ache just like a woman

  But you break just like a little girl.

  "Let me be sure I understand you, Emma," Alice said, after a lengthy pause. "If you're sleeping with a guy, you want him to be able to see this tattoo--even when you're asleep?"

  "He may forget me, but he'll remember my tattoo," Emma said.

  "Lucky fella," Alice said. It seemed to Emma that Alice was keeping time to Bob Dylan with the foot-switch as she tattooed on.

  "My mom's a bitch, but you're gonna love Alice," Emma told Claudia. "Everyone loves Alice."

  "I used to," Jack said.

  He walked outside to have a look at the Iowa farmland. It was stretched out flat, as far as he could see--nothing like the tree-dense hills of Maine and New Hampshire. Emma followed him outside.

  "Okay, so I lied--not quite everyone loves your mother," Emma said.

  "I used to," Jack said again.

  "Let's go see a movie, baby cakes. Let's take Claudia to the picture show."

  "Sure," Jack said.

  If he'd had half a brain, he might have anticipated the problem inherent in watching a movie with Emma and Claudia. It was most unlike him not to remember the movie; he even remembered bad movies. But from the moment Jack sat down in the theater, with Claudia seated to his left and Emma to his right, the problem--namely, which of them would hold his penis--presented itself. Any thoughts he might have had about the film vanished.

  Emma, who was left-handed, put her hand in Jack's lap first; she had no sooner unzipped his fly than Claudia, who was right-handed, made contact with his penis, which Emma already held in her hand. No heads turned; the three of them stared unblinkingly at the screen. Claudia politely withdrew her hand, but no farther than the inside of Jack's left thigh. Emma, in a conciliatory gesture, prodded his penis in Claudia's direction
until the tip touched the back of Claudia's hand. Claudia put her hand back in his lap, holding both his penis and Emma's hand. Watching the film in this fashion gave Jack a two-hour erection.

  After the movie, they went out and drank some beer. Jack didn't really like to drink. Emma bought the beer, but either Claudia or Jack could have. No one ever carded Claudia; although she was only nineteen, she looked like an older woman, not a college student. And ever since Jack had seen Yojimbo, no one had carded him. He was nineteen, almost twenty, but he'd adopted Toshiro Mifune's disapproving scowl, and he used a fair amount of gel in his hair. Emma approved of the look, the scowl especially, but Claudia occasionally complained about his shaving only every third day.

  It was Toshiro Mifune's indignation that Jack chose to imitate--particularly in the beginning of Yojimbo, when the samurai comes to town and sees the dog trot by with a human hand in its mouth. Jack loved that outraged look Mifune gives the dog.

  Emma had too much to drink, and Jack drove her car back to the farmhouse, with Emma and Claudia holding hands and making out in the backseat. "If you were back here, honey pie, we'd make out with you, too," Emma said.

  Jack was used to Emma's lawlessness, her willingness to bend the rules, but Claudia's seeming complicity unnerved him. Though Emma was complicated--and she could be difficult--it was Claudia Jack couldn't figure out. Like him, she seemed to be biding her time; she held herself back, she seemed detached, she was always a little hard to read. Or was Claudia merely holding a mirror up to Jack, stymieing him in the same ways he stymied her?

  Back at the farmhouse, after Emma had passed out, Claudia helped Jack carry Emma to her bedroom, where they undressed her and put her to bed. Emma was already snoring, but this failed to distract Claudia and Jack; they couldn't help noticing the perfect vagina tattooed on Emma's right hip.

  "Exactly what is your relationship with Emma?" Claudia asked.

  "I don't really know," Jack replied honestly.

  "Boy, I'll say you don't!" Claudia said, laughing.

  When they were in bed, Claudia asked him: "When did the penis-holding start? I mean with Emma. I know when it started with me."

  Jack pretended not to remember exactly. "When I was eight or nine," he said. "Emma would have been fifteen or sixteen. Or maybe it was a little earlier. I might have been seven. Emma was maybe fourteen."

  Claudia went on holding his penis, not saying anything. When he was almost asleep, she asked him: "Do you have any idea how weird that is, Jack?"

  Michele Maher had made him sensitive to his alleged weirdness--as in too weird. Jack harbored no illusion that Claudia had mistaken him for the love of her life; surely Claudia was too smart to imagine for a moment that Jack thought she was the love of his life. But it hurt him that Claudia thought he was weird.

  "Too weird?" Jack asked her.

  "That depends, Jack."

  He didn't like this game. Depends on what? he knew she wanted him to ask her. But he wouldn't ask--he already knew the answer. He held her breasts, he nuzzled her neck, but just as his penis was coming to life in her hand, Claudia let it go. "Why doesn't Emma want to have children?" she asked.

  Well, Jack Burns was an actor--he knew a loaded question when he heard one. "Maybe she doesn't think she'll be a good mother," Jack ventured, still holding Claudia's breasts. The question was really about him, of course. Why didn't he want children? Because, if he turned out to be like his father, he would leave, he had told Claudia once. He didn't want to be the kind of father who left.

  But this answer hadn't satisfied Claudia. Jack was well aware she wanted to have children. As an actress, Claudia hated her body; that she had "a body designed to have children" was the only positive thing she ever said about herself. She said this as if she meant it, too. To Jack, it didn't sound like an act. Clearly, in her mind, the kind of father Jack would turn out to be was Jack's problem.

  "It depends on whether or not you want children, Jack," Claudia said.

  Jack let go of her breasts and rolled over, turning his back to her in the bed. Claudia rolled toward him, wrapping her arm around his waist and once more holding his penis.

  "We don't graduate from college for another two years," Jack pointed out to her.

  "I don't mean I want children now, Jack."

  He'd already told Claudia that he never wanted children. "Not till the day I discover that my dad has been a loving father to a child, or children, he didn't leave." That was how Jack had put it to her.

  Was it any wonder Claudia held herself back from him?

  Yet they had fun together--in summer stock, especially. The previous summer, they'd done Romeo and Juliet in a playhouse in the Berkshires. The older, veteran actors got all the main parts. Claudia was Juliet's understudy. The dull, flat-chested robot they cast as Juliet never missed a night's performance--not even a matinee. Jack had wanted to be Romeo--or, failing that, Mercutio--but because he'd been a wrestler and looked confrontational, they made him Tybalt, that cocky asshole.

  Claudia was always taking their picture; maybe she thought that if there were sufficient photographic evidence of them as a couple, they might stay together. She had a camera with a delayed-shutter mechanism; she would set the timer and then run to get in the photo. (The obsessive picture-taking sometimes made Jack wonder if Claudia just might have mistaken him for the love of her life.)

  After their visit to Emma, Claudia and Jack did a Garcia Lorca play--The House of Bernarda Alba--at a summer playhouse in Connecticut. The setting was Spain, 1936. Claudia and Jack both played women. Jack had eaten some bad clams and was food-poisoned for one evening performance. There was no intermission. The director, who was also a woman, told him to "suck it up and wear a longer skirt." His understudy had a yeast infection, and the director was more sympathetic to her ailment than she was to Jack's. (There were nine women in the cast, plus Jack.)

  He had terrible stomach cramps and diarrhea. In the grip of an alarmingly explosive episode, he flinched so violently that one of his falsies slipped out of his bra; he managed to trap it against his ribs with his elbow. Claudia later told him that he looked as if he were mocking the moment of the playwright's assassination in the Spanish Civil War; Jack was thankful Garcia Lorca was not alive to suffer through his performance.

  "What a learning experience!" Mr. Ramsey responded, when Jack wrote him about the long night of the bad clams.

  Miss Wurtz would have been proud of him; never had he concentrated with such pinpoint accuracy on his audience of one. He could almost see his father in the audience. (It was the perfect play for William, Jack was thinking--all women!)

  Claudia and Jack were both understudies that summer in Cabaret, their first musical. He was the understudy to the Emcee, a Brit who told Jack pointedly on opening night not to get his hopes up; he'd never been sick a day in his life. Jack's heart wasn't in the Emcee role, anyway. He would have been a better Sally Bowles than the woman who was cast as Sally--even better than Claudia, who was her understudy.

  But it would have been too aggressive a moment in their relationship--had Jack auditioned for the Sally Bowles character and beaten out Claudia for the part. They spent a month singing "Tomorrow Belongs to Me" and "Maybe This Time" to each other--in the privacy of their boudoir, where all understudies shine.

  But he and Claudia were cast as Kit Kat Girls in Cabaret, so they got to strut their stuff to an audience. Given the scant costume, not to mention the period--Berlin, 1929-30--Jack was a somewhat transparent transvestite, but the audience loved him. Claudia said she was jealous because he looked hotter than she did.

  "You better be careful, Jack," Claudia warned him. It was the summer they were both twenty. "If you get any better in drag, no one's going to cast you as a guy anymore." (Under the circumstances, Jack thought it was better not to tell her how badly he had wanted the Sally Bowles part.)

  How well he would remember that summer in Connecticut. When Sally Bowles and the Kit Kat Girls sang "Don't Tell Mama" and "Mein Herr,"
Jack was looking right at the audience; he saw their faces. They were staring at him, the transvestite Kit Kat Girl--not at Sally. They couldn't take their eyes off him. Every man in that audience made his skin crawl.

  Both Claudia and Jack were good enough students to skip a few classes in order to attend the film festival in Toronto that September. Their teachers permitted them to write about the movies they saw, in place of the work they would miss--Jack's first and last adventure in film criticism, except at small dinner parties.

  When he took Claudia to Daughter Alice to meet his mother for the first time, Jack was questioning Claudia's claim that she had seen Raul Julia coming out of a men's room at the Park Plaza. Alice immediately took Claudia's side. Jack knew that film festivals were full of such real or imagined sightings, but he wanted his mom and Claudia to like each other; he held his tongue.

  Alice was tattooing a small scorpion on a young woman's abdomen. The scorpion's narrow, segmented tail was curled up over its back. The venomous stinger, at the tip of the tail, was directly under the girl's navel; the arachnid's pincers were poised above her pubic hair. The young woman was obviously disturbed--she would be a handful under the best of circumstances, Jack thought, although he held his tongue about that, too. He could see that Claudia was enthralled with the atmosphere of the tattoo parlor; he didn't want to be the voice of disbelief, about either the Raul Julia sighting or the forbidding location of the scorpion tattoo.

  The film festival was good for Daughter Alice's business. Alice told them she'd been tattooing a guy who was a die-hard moviegoer when she saw Glenn Close walk by on the Queen Street sidewalk. Jack seriously doubted it. He didn't think Queen and Palmerston was a Glenn Close part of town, but all he said was: "I'm surprised Glenn didn't stop in for a Rose of Jericho."

  Claudia, who was instantly fond of Alice--as Emma had said she would be--was angry at Jack for what she called his disrespectful tone of voice. This created some tension between Claudia and Jack, and they had different reactions to My Beautiful Laundrette, which Alice and Mrs. Oastler and Claudia loved. Jack didn't hate the film. All he said was: "I was expecting the laundrette to be a beautiful woman."