Until I Find You

by John Irving

  Yes, Jack observed, there was a stingray tattooed on his Skretkowicz sister's undulating hip. The tentacles of the octopus (on her ass) appeared to be reaching for the ray, as if the tattoo artist's body were a map of the ocean's floor.

  Jack had to arch his back to reach for the remote, which he still couldn't quite reach; it was not the response to her hips that his biker friend had expected. "Don't go," she whispered hoarsely, still half asleep. "Where are you going?"

  "Copenhagen," Jack repeated.

  "Is it raining there?" she asked him groggily.

  It would be April before he could get there, Jack was thinking; there was a good chance it would be raining. "Probably," he answered.

  "Don't go," she whispered again, as if she were falling back to sleep--or at least she wanted to.

  "I have to go," he told her.

  "Who's in Copenhagen?" his Skretkowicz sister asked. Jack could tell she was wide awake now. "What's her name?" she said, her biker's thigh gripping him tighter.

  It was a he, not a she, who primarily interested Jack. Since Jack didn't know his name, it would be hard to find him. But there could be little doubt who Jack was thinking of--the littlest soldier who saved him. Not to diminish the importance of Ladies' Man Madsen; it's just that Lars would be easier to find. At least Jack knew his name.

  27

  The Commandant's Daughter; Her Little Brother

  Jack slipped away from Toronto without telling Miss Wurtz his plans; he never even said good-bye. He was afraid that Caroline would be disappointed in his decision not to go looking for his father straightaway.

  He took only his winter clothes with him; Jack thought they'd be suitable for April in the North Sea. His Toronto clothes, Mrs. Oastler called them. Leslie had helped him pack. After all, she'd shopped for Jack's clothes--she'd even paid for most of them, during the winter Alice was dying--and Mrs. Oastler had her own opinions regarding how he should dress in those European ports of call.

  "I hope you know, Jack--you don't wear the same clothes to a tattoo parlor that you would wear in a church, and vice versa."

  He left Leslie with the responsibility of sending his screenplay of The Slush-Pile Reader to Bob Bookman at C.A.A. in Beverly Hills. In the long Canadian winter, Leslie had become Jack's partner in the project; a couple of times, he'd come close to telling her that Emma had left him more than her notes for a screenplay. But that wouldn't have been faithful to what Emma had wanted.

  In the months he'd spent with his mom in Toronto, Jack's mail had been forwarded from California. Like her late daughter, Mrs. Oastler invariably read Jack's mail before giving it to him. She didn't give all his mail to him, either; she was more censorial than Emma. The fan mail from female admirers was not worthy of Jack's interest, Mrs. Oastler said. She refused to show him the photographs of his she-male tormentors, too.

  It must have been February when Jack asked Leslie: "Didn't I get any Christmas cards this year?"

  "Yeah, you got a ton of Christmas cards," Mrs. Oastler answered. "I threw them away."

  "You don't like Christmas cards, Leslie?"

  "Who needs them, Jack? You're a busy guy."

  Somehow the letter from Michele Maher escaped the censor in Mrs. Oastler and made it into Jack's hands, although it was a month or more after Leslie had first read Michele's letter. "This one's interesting," Mrs. Oastler said. "Some doctor in Massachusetts with the name of Emma's character."

  Jack must have looked stricken, or overeager to see the letter, because Leslie didn't immediately hand it over. "Someone you know?" she asked him.

  "Someone I knew," he corrected her, holding out his hand. Mrs. Oastler looked the letter over--more carefully than she had the first time. "Emma knew that I knew her," Jack explained. "Emma knew she was using a real person's name."

  "Sort of an inside joke--is that what you're saying, Jack?" She still wouldn't give him the letter.

  "Sort of," he said.

  "Would you like me to read it to you?" Leslie asked. Jack was still holding out his hand. " 'Dear Jack--' " Mrs. Oastler began, promptly interrupting herself. "Well, even your fans address you as 'Jack'--you can see why I never guessed that she actually knew you."

  "Perfectly understandable," Jack said, his voice remaining calm.

  "Dr. Maher--she's a dermatologist, of all things--goes on," Leslie continued. " 'I know you were close to Emma Oastler, and I've read that you're adapting her novel, The Slush-Pile Reader, as a film. Good luck with the screenplay, and your other projects. That novel is one of my favorites, not only because of the main character's name. With my best wishes, and congratulations on your considerable success as an actor.' Well, that's it," Mrs. Oastler said with a sigh. "It's a typed letter--probably someone else typed it. She just signed her name, 'Michele.' It's her office letterhead--some sort of doctors' office building at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts. On second thought, it's not that interesting a letter; there's nothing personal in it, really. No one reading this would dream that she ever knew you."

  Leslie held the letter at arm's length in her hand--not quite as if it were dirty laundry, but something potentially worse, something she sensed Jack wanted. "May I see the letter, please?" he asked her.

  "It's not the sort of letter one has to answer, Jack."

  "Give me the fucking letter, Leslie!"

  "I guess it wasn't a funny inside joke--Emma using Michele Maher's name," Mrs. Oastler said. She made him reach and take the letter from her hand.

  The stationery was off-white, almost cream-colored--high quality. The sky-blue letterhead was printed in a large, clear font--Letter Gothic. Nothing personal about it, as Leslie had observed. "With my best wishes" didn't exactly convey a lot of warmth or affection.

  "Now that I think of it, it's more of a note than a letter," Mrs. Oastler was saying, while Jack searched Michele's scrawled, almost illegible signature for some clue of her true feelings for him. "Personally, I don't like to touch anything a dermatologist has touched," Leslie went on. "But her letter's been around here so long--you don't suppose it could still be contaminated, do you?"

  "No, I don't suppose so," Jack said.

  That letter was coming to the North Sea with him; Jack would read it every day. He believed he would keep that distant, uncommitted, even loveless letter forever--knowing that it might be the only contact he would ever have with Michele Maher.

  Jack couldn't get a direct flight to Copenhagen. He had an early-morning KLM connection out of Amsterdam, following an early-evening departure from Toronto. When it was time for him to go to the airport, Mrs. Oastler was taking a bath. Jack thought he might leave her a note on the kitchen table, but Leslie had other ideas.

  "Don't you dare slip away without kissing me good-bye, Jack!" he heard her call from her bath. She always left the door to her bathroom open--usually the door to her bedroom, too.

  They'd been alone together in the house for more than a week, after the bikers had left. But there'd been no nighttime visits, not a single trip down the hall. Not only had there been no penis-holding; there'd been no nakedness or near-nakedness in each other's company, either. Maybe Alice had wanted Leslie and Jack to sleep together a little too much. Despite the spell of attraction that existed between them, Jack believed that he and Mrs. Oastler were still resisting his mother; perhaps, he thought, the Skretkowicz sisters had broken the spell.

  Anyway, a good-bye kiss was clearly in order. Jack dutifully traipsed upstairs. He tried not to notice the black bikini-cut underwear tossed on Mrs. Oastler's unmade bed. In the bathtub, Leslie's watchful, feral face was all that was visible above the suds of bubble bath. Under the circumstances, Jack imagined, this might turn out to be a fairly innocent good-bye kiss.

  "You're not getting away from me, Jack," Mrs. Oastler said. "Emma and Alice have left me. You're not going to leave me, too, are you?"

  "No, I won't leave you," he answered as neutrally as possible. She puckered up her small mouth and closed her dark eyes.
r />   Jack knelt beside the bathtub and kissed her very lightly on the lips. Her eyes snapped open, her tongue slipping into his mouth. Leslie grabbed his wrist with her soapy hand and pulled his hand into the bathwater, soaking the sleeve of his shirt. If Jack had to guess where his fingers touched her underwater, he would say he made contact with Mrs. Oastler's Rose of Jericho before he could pull his hand away.

  The kiss lingered a little longer. After all they'd been through, Jack didn't want to hurt her feelings. He tried not to let Leslie sense his impatience with her, but he was irritated that he would have to change his shirt.

  Mrs. Oastler had never had the greatest esteem for Jack as an actor; probably because she'd known him as a child, she could always read his face. "Come on, Jack. I may not be Michele Maher, but it wasn't that bad a kiss, was it?"

  "I have to change my shirt," Jack said, hoping she wouldn't notice his erection. Keeping his back turned to her, as he went out the open bathroom door, he added: "No, it wasn't bad at all."

  "Just remember!" Leslie called after him. "It was what your mom wanted!"

  Jack Burns carried that thought to Copenhagen; it felt heavier than his suitcase of winter clothes. He checked into the Hotel D'Angleterre--this time not the chambermaids' quarters but a room overlooking the statue in the square. Both the statue and the arch that stood over it were smaller than he remembered them, but Nyhavn was familiar--the boats slapping on the choppy water of the gray canal, the wind blowing off the Baltic. As for what he'd told his Skretkowicz sister, Jack had guessed right: it was raining.

  When he unpacked, he found the photos of his mother's tattooed breast. Mrs. Oastler had carefully placed them on top of his clothes; she'd kept two for herself and had given him two, which seemed fair. Jack was happy to have them--not only for the purpose of verification. His mom had lied to him about so many things; maybe her Until I find you wasn't a Tattoo Ole, although Jack was pretty sure it was.

  The tattoo parlor at Nyhavn 17 was still called Tattoo Ole. Some of the flash on the walls was Ole's, and the little shop still smelled of smoke and apples, alcohol and witch hazel; some of the pigments had special odors, too, although Jack couldn't identify them.

  Bimbo was the man in charge; he'd come in 1975 and had trained with Tattoo Ole. Bimbo was short and powerfully built; he wore a navy watch cap. His flash was a lot like Ole's. A maritime man--an old-timer, Sailor Jerry would have said. Like Ole, Bimbo would never have called himself a tattoo artist. He was a tattooist or a tattooer of the old school, a man after Daughter Alice's heart.

  Bimbo was working on a broken heart when Jack walked in. Nothing really changes, Jack was thinking. Bimbo didn't look up from his tattoo-in-progress. "Jack Burns," he said, as if he'd been expecting him; it wasn't the enthusiastic way Mr. Ramsey said Jack's name, but it wasn't unfriendly, either. "When I heard your mom died, I kind of figured you'd be coming," Bimbo said.

  The boy getting the broken heart looked frightened. On his reddened chest, you could see his actual heart beating. The zigzag crack across his tattooed heart was horizontal; the wounded organ lay on a single rose, a real beauty. It was a very good tattoo. There was a banner unfurled across the bottom half of the heart--just a banner with no name on it. If the boy was smart, he would wait and add the name when he met someone who could heal him.

  "Why did you think I'd be coming?" Jack asked Bimbo.

  "Ole always said you'd be coming, with lots of questions," Bimbo explained. "Ole said you were pumped full of more misinformation than most magazines and newspapers, and that's saying something." Jack was beginning to guess that this was true. "Ole said, 'If that kid turns out to be crazy, I won't be surprised!' But you look like you turned out okay."

  "I guess you didn't know my mother," Jack said.

  "I never met the lady--that's true," Bimbo answered, choosing his words very carefully.

  "Or my dad?" Jack asked.

  "Everybody loved your dad, but I never met him, either."

  That everybody loved his father came as something of a surprise to Jack. "I don't mean that nobody loved your mom," Bimbo added. "She just did some things that were hard to love."

  "What things?" Jack asked him.

  Bimbo exhaled softly--so did the boy getting the broken-heart tattoo. The boy's lips were dry and parted; he was gritting his teeth. "Well, you should talk to someone who really knew her," Bimbo told Jack. "I just know what I heard."

  "Ole had another apprentice--at the same time my mom worked here," Jack said.

  "Sure--I know him," Bimbo said.

  " 'Ladies' Man,' Ole called him. We also called him 'Ladies' Man Lars' or 'Ladies' Man Madsen,' " Jack said.

  "You mean the Fish Man," Bimbo corrected him. "He's no Ladies' Man anymore. He's in the fish business--not that there's anything wrong with that."

  Jack remembered that the Madsen family's fish business was not an enterprise the Ladies' Man longed to join. Jack recalled how Lars had rinsed his hair with fresh-squeezed lemon juice.

  Kirsten had been the tattoo on Ladies' Man Madsen's left ankle, the one entwined with hearts and thorns; in Jack's cover-up, he'd left Lars's left ankle with a confused bouquet. (It looked as if many small animals had been butchered, their hearts scattered in an unruly garden--a shrub of body parts.)

  "So Lars went back to the fish business?" Jack asked.

  "I wouldn't have let him tattoo me," Bimbo said. "Not even the shading."

  "My mom tattooed him," Jack told Bimbo. A blushing-red heart, as Jack recalled; where the heart was torn in two, the jagged edges of the tear left a bare band of skin, wide enough for a name. There'd been some dispute about it, but Jack's mom had given Lars her signature on the white skin between the pieces of his torn heart--her very own Daughter Alice.

  Jack began to describe the tattoo to Bimbo, but Bimbo cut him off. "I know the tattoo," the old maritimer said. "I covered up the Daughter Alice part."

  So what were the things Alice did that were hard to love? Clearly Fish Man Madsen knew something about them; it seemed that the Ladies' Man had stopped loving Alice for some pretty good reason.

  Bimbo said, "Tattoo Ole told me, 'If Jack comes back, tell him not to be too angry.' "

  Jack thanked Bimbo for telling him this; Bimbo was also nice enough to interrupt his tattoo-in-progress to draw Jack a little map. Where they were on Nyhavn wasn't far from the Fiskehuset Hojbro--the fish shop where Lars Madsen worked, at Hojbro Plads 19. There was a statue of Bishop Absalon in the square, which was close to the Christiansborg Slot--the castle now occupied by the Danish Parliament. (Bishop Absalon was the founder of Copenhagen.) Jack could actually see the old castle from the fish market, Bimbo told him. According to Bimbo, the area was quite a popular meeting place nowadays--cafes and restaurants all around.

  Jack almost forgot to show Bimbo the photographs, but he remembered as he was leaving. "Have a look at these," Jack said, handing Bimbo the two photos. "Does the tattoo look familiar?"

  "I would know Tattoo Ole's work anywhere," Bimbo said, handing the photos back. "Ole told me he tattooed your mom." That was all the verification Jack needed.

  Almost everything about the little shop seemed unchanged; even the radio was playing, if not the same radio. But that wasn't the way Bimbo saw things. As Jack was reaching for the door, Bimbo said: "It's all different now. In the late sixties and early seventies, you could recognize everyone's work. Your work was a kind of a signature. But not anymore; there are too many scratchers." Jack nodded. (He'd heard his mom say this--all the maritime tattooers said it.) "Twenty years ago," Bimbo said, "we had two ships a day in here. Now there's one a day," he said, as if that defined absolutely everything that was different.

  "Thank you again," Jack told him.

  It was a wet, windy afternoon. The restaurants on Nyhavn were already cooking. Jack could still distinguish the smells: the rabbit, the leg of deer, the wild duck, the roasted turbot, the grilled salmon, even the delicate veal. He could smell the stewed fruit in the sauces for
the game, and those strong Danish cheeses. But he couldn't identify the restaurant where Ole and the Ladies' Man had taken him and his mom for their farewell dinner in Copenhagen. There'd been an open fireplace, and Jack thought he'd had the rabbit.

  A place called Cap Horn at Nyhavn 21 looked vaguely familiar, but Jack didn't go inside. He wasn't hungry, and he couldn't wait to find Fish Man Madsen. Like Bimbo--even more than Bimbo, Jack imagined--the Ladies' Man was sure to be expecting him. And if Lars Madsen had covered up the Daughter Alice on his broken heart, he knew something Jack didn't know, and it must have hurt him.

  Ladies' Man Madsen was still blond and blue-eyed; he had the same gap-toothed smile and busted nose, too. Jack was happy to see that Lars had lost the pathetic facial hair and had put on a little weight. The Fish Man was pushing fifty, but he looked younger. It seemed that the fish business had agreed with him, despite his earlier apprehensions--as if Alice's rejection had served Lars better than he'd expected, and his failure in the tattoo world had somehow preserved his innocence.

  The Ladies' Man was married now; he and his wife had three kids. "You remember Elise?" he asked Jack, sheepishly.

  "I remember covering up her name," Jack said.

  Elise was the name he'd covered up on Lars's right ankle; she had formerly been attached to a chain-link fence, which Jack had mangled with his signature sprig of holly. (The result had called to mind a destroyed Christmas decoration--"anti-Christmas propaganda," Ole had called it.)

  "Well, she came back, Jack," Ladies' Man Madsen said, smiling. "You couldn't cover Elise up for good."

  Although the rain had stopped, it was still too damp and windy to sit outside at the sidewalk tables, but the view across the wet cobblestones--the gray castle, now the Parliament building--was just fine from the fish shop.

  "Sometimes you were my babysitter," Jack began.

  "I thought she was working late, Jack. I didn't know she was seeing the kid--I swear."