Until I Find You

by John Irving

  "Like the pigment of a tattoo," Alice said, "Bob Dylan gets under your skin."

  While Claudia was getting her scepter, Alice was playing "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue." Gritting her teeth, Claudia probably didn't notice; to Jack, a part of her mystery was that Claudia had not let Bob (or anyone else) get under her skin.

  Some pothead was putting honey in his coffee; maybe he thought it was tea. His head was bobbing up and down like one of those distracting dashboard toys. He was from "somewhere in the Maritimes," he told Jack--as if the exact city or town had disowned him, or he'd banished it from what was left of his drugged memory. He had a tattoo of a green-and-red lobster on one forearm. The creature looked half cooked--therefore inadvisable to eat.

  Bob wailed away.

  Yonder stands your orphan with his gun,

  Crying like a fire in the sun.

  The sign in the Queen Street window that advertised Daughter Alice was painted wood. "As cheerful as sunny Leith, where the sun never shines," Alice said of the colorful sign. It had a seaside feeling to it, as if Daughter Alice were the name of a ship or a port of call. "Daughter Alice is a maritime name," Alice always said--coming, as it did, from Copenhagen and Tattoo Ole.

  "All your seasick sailors, they are rowing home," Bob Dylan sang.

  Or they're rowing here, Jack thought. He went to have a look at Claudia behind the curtain; she smiled at him, clenching her fists to her sides. "The scepter is a Buddhist symbol," Alice was saying softly, while the tattoo needles danced on Claudia's thigh and she winced in pain. (Jack knew that the inner side of limbs hurt more than the outer.) "The shape of the scepter is modeled on the magic fungus of immortality," Alice went on.

  A mushroom of immortality! What next? Jack turned away. The rubber gloves really bothered him. He preferred to watch the pothead from the Maritimes; the guy looked as if he were getting high on the honey in his coffee. This was the trip to Toronto that would convince Jack Burns it would never be his true home.

  "Forget the dead you've left, they will not follow you," Bob sang--as always, with the utmost authority. Bob got a lot right, but he was wrong about that. As Jack would discover, everything followed you.

  The scepter high on her inner thigh made lovemaking uncomfortable for Claudia during their remaining days in Toronto, but Jack was increasingly aware of Claudia holding him in disfavor; even without the new tattoo, Claudia might have been disinclined to make love to him. (That they were sleeping in Emma's bed didn't help.) They left Toronto before the film festival's closing night.

  Jack could tell that Claudia was disheartened; the pettiness of their bickering had worn them both down. And her new tattoo chafed when she walked. With Mrs. Oastler's permission, Claudia had borrowed one of Emma's skirts; it was way too big for her, but she could walk in it with her legs wide apart, as if she were wearing a diaper.

  Looking back, Jack found the retrospective material at the film festival more interesting than most of the featured competition. The one movie that Claudia and Jack had seen alone was Fassbinder's The Marriage of Maria Braun. Jack loved that film.

  Hanna Schygulla is the soldier's wife who makes such a success of herself in postwar Germany. There are worse things than watching Hanna Schygulla while a woman holds your penis. The problem was, although this was the first and only occasion at the film festival when Claudia held his penis, Jack had seen The Marriage of Maria Braun with Emma when he was fourteen. (They were in the cinema in Durham; it was his first year at Exeter.)

  The comparison was disconcerting, and it was a premonition of a life-changing experience: Jack realized that he liked the way Emma held his penis better than he liked the way anyone else held it. (Of course he still had hopes for Michele Maher one day.)

  "Is it me or Hanna?" Claudia had whispered in his ear, noting the little guy's enthusiastic response. But Jack knew it was neither Claudia nor Fraulein Schygulla who provoked such an uplifting of the little guy's spirits. It was his memory of Emma holding his penis when he was all of fourteen.

  Jack knew from that moment in The Marriage of Maria Braun that he and Claudia were merely marking time; they were just going through the paces, like a married couple who knew the divorce was pending.

  His parting of the ways with Claudia had been set in motion by that trip to Iowa to visit Emma the previous spring. "The children conversation," as Claudia called it. They had continued on a downward path at the Toronto film festival. And when they drove back from Toronto, things got even worse.

  They went home a different route than they'd come; it wasn't the best way to go, but it was a boring drive no matter how you did it. They drove to Kingston, Ontario, and crossed the St. Lawrence at Gananoque; the bridge took them into New York State at Alexandria Bay. At U.S. Customs, Jack presented his student visa and his Canadian passport. Claudia handed the customs guy her American passport. Jack was driving the Volvo. Claudia's new tattoo was bothering her; she didn't want to drive.

  She was still wearing Emma's overlarge skirt, which Mrs. Oastler had insisted she take with her. "Emma will be several sizes too big for it the next time she's home, anyway," Leslie had said pessimistically. "You look better in it than Emma does, Claudia--even though it's enormous on you."

  For most of the ride, Claudia sat with the skirt pulled up to her waist--airing the Chinese scepter, which she kept rubbing with moisturizer. Her skin was a little red around the edges of the tattoo, and she was tired of hearing that the inner skin of limbs is tender.

  When Jack stopped the car at the border crossing, Claudia properly lowered Emma's skirt. The customs agent looked them over. "We were visiting my mother, who lives in Toronto," Jack told him, unasked. "We saw some movies at the film festival."

  "Are you bringing anything back from Canada?" the customs agent inquired.

  "Nope," Claudia said.

  "Not even some Canadian beer?" the guy asked Claudia; he smiled at her. She was fantastic-looking, really.

  "I don't usually drink beer, and Jack is always watching his weight," Claudia told him.

  "So you've got nothing to declare?" the customs agent asked Jack, more sternly.

  Jack didn't know what got into him. ("I just felt like fooling around," he would tell Claudia later, but there was more to it than that.)

  It was a close-up opportunity--Jack gave the guy his furtive look. He did furtive pretty well; it was a look he'd acquired from observing certain kinds of dogs, especially craven and sneaky dogs. "Well--" Jack started to say, interrupting himself by looking furtively at Claudia. "We don't have to declare the Chinese scepter, do we?" he asked her. Oh, what a look she gave him!

  "The what?" the customs agent said.

  "A royal mace, or sometimes it's a staff--in this case, a short sword," Jack went on. "It's a ceremonial emblem of authority."

  "It's Chinese?" the guy asked. "Is it very old?"

  "Yes, very--it's Buddhist, actually," Jack told him.

  "I better have a look at it," the customs agent said.

  "It's a tattoo," Claudia told him. "I don't have to declare a tattoo, do I?"

  Why had Jack done this to her? He loved Claudia--well, he liked her, anyway. Jack had not seen Claudia look so disappointed in him since she discovered the photographs of Emma naked; these were the old photos Emma sent to him when he was regularly beating off at Redding. They were photos of Emma at seventeen. Charlotte Barford had taken them. Claudia made Jack throw them away, but he kept one.

  "Let me be sure it's just a tattoo," the customs guy said to Claudia. "I've never seen a Chinese scepter."

  "Do you have a female colleague?" Claudia asked the guy. "She can see it."

  "It's in a rather intimate location," Jack pointed out.

  "Just a minute," the customs agent said. He left them sitting in the car and went off to find a female colleague; there was a building with what looked like offices, where the agent momentarily disappeared.

  "You are so immature, Jack," Claudia said. He remembered that evening in the Oast
ler mansion when his mom had made a similar point.

  "Penis, penis, penis--" Jack started to say, but he stopped. The customs guy was returning with a stout black woman. Claudia got out of the car and went into the office building with the female customs agent while Jack waited in the car.

  "What did you do that for?" the customs guy asked him.

  "We haven't been getting along lately," Jack admitted.

  "Well, this'll really help," the guy said.

  When Claudia came back to the car, she gave Jack her violated look and they drove on. For those first few miles, when they were back in the United States, Jack felt exhilarated without knowing why.

  Canada was Jack's homeland, his country of origin, yet he was elated to be back in America, where he felt more at home. Why was that? he wondered. Wasn't he Canadian? Was it Jack's rejection of his mother and her tattoo world that made him turn his back on his native land?

  Claudia wouldn't speak to him for about three hundred miles. She had once again hiked Emma's skirt to her waist, exposing the tattoo of the Chinese scepter on her right inner thigh, where Jack could see it with a downcast, sideways glance at her lap. It was one of very few tattoos he ever saw that he was tempted to get himself, but not on his inner thigh. He was thinking about where on his body he might one day get a tattoo of that very same Chinese scepter, when Claudia, finally, spoke.

  By that time, they were in Vermont--about a hundred miles from where they were going, in New Hampshire. When Claudia saw Jack glance at her crotch--at her brand-new Chinese scepter, specifically--she said: "I got the damn tattoo for you, you know."

  "I know," Jack said. "I like it. I really do." Claudia knew that he liked the tattoo and the special place she put it. "I'm sorry about what I did at the border," Jack told her. "I really am."

  "I'm over it, Jack. It took a while, but I'm over it. I'm sorrier about other things," she said.

  "Oh."

  "Is that all you can say?"

  "I'm sorry," he repeated.

  "It's not just that you'll never have children," she told him. "You'll go on blaming your father's genes for the fact that you'll never stay with the same woman--not for long, anyway."

  It was Jack's turn to say nothing for the next hundred miles. And to make a point of not responding to someone is another acting opportunity.

  Jack soon would make a point of not responding to The Gray Ghost, too. A letter came from her not long after he and Claudia were back in New Hampshire. The Gray Ghost made merely a passing reference to Claudia's "extraordinary beauty"--Mrs. McQuat also referred to Claudia as his "reluctant bride." But neither Claudia herself nor Jack's reluctance to have children was the true subject of The Gray Ghost's letter. Mrs. McQuat was writing to remind him that he must pay closer attention to his mother, whom she felt certain he was neglecting.

  "Don't neglect her, Jack," The Gray Ghost said.

  Well, hadn't she told him before? Jack threw her letter away without answering it. Later, when he learned that Mrs. McQuat had died, he wondered if he'd had a premonition of her death. Not only would he not pay closer attention to his mother; by not answering The Gray Ghost's letter, it was as if he'd sensed that Mrs. McQuat was already dying--a death-in-progress, so to speak--and that when she was gone, the voice of Jack's conscience would leave him, too.

  They were just a few miles outside Durham, not far from Claudia's apartment in Newmarket, before Claudia broke the silence. "God damn you, Jack," she said. "After I die, I'm going to haunt you--I promise you I will--I might even haunt you before I die."

  Well, Jack Burns was an actor--he should have known an end line when he heard one. He should have committed Claudia's warning to memory more deeply than he did.

  20

  Two Canadians in the City of Angels

  Despite their growing estrangement, Jack and Claudia would live together their final two years at UNH. It was more than inertia that bound them; they were actors-in-training, learning the tricks of concealment. By what they managed to hide of themselves, they instructed each other. They became keen but sullen observers of their innermost secrets, their hidden characters.

  The summer following their Toronto trip, they again did summer stock, this time at a playhouse on Cape Cod. The artistic director was a gay guy whom Jack liked a lot. Bruno Litkins was a tall, graceful man who swooped onstage; waving his long arms, he looked like a heron making an exaggerated if misguided effort to teach other, smaller birds to fly.

  To Bruno Litkins, a musical based on a play or a novel was something to be tampered with--to be reinvented in a shockingly different way with each new production. The original text might be sacred to Bruno, but once someone had made a musical out of the material, there were no limits regarding how the story and the characters could be altered further.

  Announcing auditions for The Hunchback of Notre Dame--in which Claudia had her heart set on the role of the beautiful Gypsy girl, Esmeralda--Bruno Litkins said that his Esmeralda was a beautiful transvestite who would liberate the reluctant homosexuality that flickered in the heart of Captain Phoebus like a flame in need of air. Esmeralda, the Gypsy drag queen of Paris, would wrestle the gay captain out of his closet. She was the oxygen Captain Phoebus needed in order to awaken his homosexual self!

  The wicked Father Frollo, who first imagines he is in love with Esmeralda, ultimately wants her to be put to death--not only because Esmeralda doesn't love him but because Esmeralda is a guy. (Father Frollo is a French homophobe.) Quasimodo, who also falls in love with Esmeralda, is in the end relieved that Esmeralda is in love with Captain Phoebus.

  "It's a better story," Bruno Litkins told the shocked ensemble, "because Quasimodo isn't sad to give up Esmeralda to the soldier." (His hunchback notwithstanding, Quasimodo is straight.)

  "What would Victor Hugo say?" Claudia asked. Poor Claudia saw that her cherished role was gone; at least onstage, Jack Burns was born to be a transvestite Esmeralda.

  "Keep the audience guessing!" Bruno Litkins, flapping his long arms, liked to say. "Is Esmeralda a woman? Is she a man? Make them guess!"

  There was, of course, another beautiful Gypsy girl in the play--Quasimodo's murdered mother, who has a brief but moving part. And there were other plays in that Cape Cod summer season--not all of them musicals that opened themselves to new, gay interpretations. Claudia would have bigger and better roles. She was the eponymous Salome in Bruno Litkins's production of the Oscar Wilde play--Bruno revered Wilde and wouldn't change a purple word he'd written. Claudia was one hot Salome. Her absurd dance of the seven veils was Wilde's fault, not Claudia's--although the Chinese scepter on her inner right thigh required a lot of makeup to conceal. (Without the makeup, the scepter might have been confusing to the audience--possibly mistaken for a birthmark, or a wound.)

  Jack had the smaller part in Salome--the prophet Jokanaan, good old John the Baptist, whose decapitated head Salome kisses. That was some kiss. (Jack was kneeling under a table with a hole cut in the top for his head; the tablecloth hid not only his hard-on, but all the rest of him.) Yet the damage to his relationship with Claudia had already been done; not even that kiss could undo their drifting apart.

  The gay version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame merely served to further the distance between them. In retrospect, Jack didn't blame Claudia for her one-night stand with the handsome actor who played the gay Captain Phoebus, but he blamed her at the time. (Jack knew that Claudia had every right to repay him for cheating on her with a tango teacher that previous spring.)

  Claudia's luck was bad. The actor who played Captain Phoebus gave her and Jack the clap. Jack would never have found out about the affair otherwise, unless Claudia eventually told him--and given her unrepentant lies about her age, Jack had no reason to think that she ever would have let him in on her little secret. It was the captain's gonorrhea that gave her away.

  Naturally, Jack pretended it was much more painful than it was, dropping to his knees and screaming upon every act of urination--while Claudia called f
rom the bedroom, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry!"

  In Bruno's brilliantly choreographed scene where Jack-as-the-transvestite-Esmeralda reveals to Captain Phoebus that he is, below the waist, a man, Jack is singing his heart out to the captain while Phoebus both acquiesces and retreats. (The captain is attracted to Jack, but the idiot still thinks Jack is a girl--hence his reluctance.)

  Jack seizes one of the captain's hands and holds it to one of his falsies; Phoebus looks underwhelmed. Jack seizes the captain's other hand and holds it to his crotch; Phoebus gives the audience an astonished look while Jack whispers in his ear. Then they both sing the song Bruno Litkins wrote for his gay version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame--"Same As Me, Babe," to the tune of Dylan's "It Ain't Me, Babe." (Jack knew his Bob; he sang it well.)

  But the night of the performance after Jack learned he had gonorrhea--and Claudia confessed where it came from--Jack had something real to whisper in Captain Phoebus's ear while he held the captain's hand against his pecker. "Thanks for the clap, babe," Jack whispered.

  It was quite a good look Phoebus gave the audience every night--it usually brought the house down. Such a look of recognition--Esmeralda has a penis! Of course the audience already knows. Jack-as-Esmeralda had earlier shown Father Frollo, thinking it would make Frollo stop hitting on him--never realizing that Frollo is such an overreactor that he'll insist on having Esmeralda hanged!

  But that memorable night Captain Phoebus held Esmeralda's penis and Jack-as-Esmeralda thanked Phoebus for giving him the clap was a showstopper for the handsome soldier. The look he gave the audience that night interrupted the performance for a full minute or more; the audience spontaneously rose as one and gave Captain Phoebus a standing ovation.

  "Maybe take a little something off the look, Phoebus," Bruno Litkins told the actor after that performance.

  Jack just gave the captain his best Esmeralda-as-a-transvestite smile. Phoebus knew Jack could kick the crap out of him if he wanted to.

  In truth, Jack was grateful to Captain Phoebus for making Claudia feel guilty; Phoebus had made Jack feel a little less guilty about the fact that he and Claudia were drifting apart.