Until I Find You

by John Irving

  Jack didn't like him; Breivik seemed smug, even a little cruel. "What about your marriage?" Jack asked him. "Or didn't you get married?"

  Andreas shrugged. "I became an organist," he said, as if that were all that mattered. "I'm grateful to your mother, if you really want to know. She saved me from getting married at a time when I was far too young to be married, anyway. I would have had a time-consuming personal life, when what I needed was to be completely focused on my music. As for Ingrid, in all likelihood, she would have chosen a personal life over a career--whether she married me or someone else. And I don't think her personal life would have worked out any better, or differently, if she'd been married to me. With Ingrid, things just wouldn't have worked out--they just didn't."

  Like some other successful people Jack had known, Andreas Breivik had all the answers. The more Breivik said, the more Jack wanted to talk with Ingrid Moe. "There's one other thing," Jack said. "I remember a cleaning woman in the church--an older woman, well-spoken, imperious--"

  "That's impossible," Breivik said. "Cleaning women aren't well-spoken. Are you telling me this one spoke English?"

  "Yes, she did," Jack replied. "Her English was quite good."

  "She couldn't have been a cleaning woman," Andreas said with irritation. "I don't suppose you remember her name."

  "She had a mop--she leaned on it, she pointed with it, she waved it around," Jack went on. "Her name was Else-Marie Lothe."

  Breivik laughed scornfully. "That was Ingrid's mother! I'll say she was imperious! You got that right. But Else-Marie wasn't that well-spoken; her English was only okay."

  "Her last name was Lothe. She had a mop," Jack repeated.

  "She was divorced from Ingrid's father. She'd remarried," Andreas said. "She had a cane, not a mop. She broke her ankle getting off the streetcar right in front of the cathedral. She caught her shoe in the trolley tracks. The ankle never healed properly--hence the cane."

  "She had dry hands, like a cleaning woman," Jack mentioned lamely.

  "She was a potter--the artistic type. Potters have dry hands," Breivik said.

  Needless to say, Else-Marie Lothe had hated Alice; she'd ended up hating Andreas Breivik, too. (Jack could easily see how that could happen.)

  Jack asked Breivik for Ingrid Moe's married name and her address.

  "It's so unnecessary for you to see her," Andreas said. "You won't find her any easier to understand this time." But, after some complaining, Breivik gave Jack her name and address.

  Under the circumstances, it turned out that Andreas Breivik knew more about Ingrid Moe than Jack would have thought. Her name was Ingrid Amundsen now. "After her divorce," Breivik said, "she moved into a third-floor apartment on Theresesgate--on the left side of the street, looking north. You can walk from there to the center of Oslo in twenty-five minutes." Breivik said this with the dispassion of a man who had timed the aforementioned walk, more than once. "The blue tram line goes by," Andreas continued, as slowly as if he were waiting for the tram. "Since the new Rikshospitalet was built, there are three different lines passing. The noise might have bothered Ingrid to begin with, but she probably doesn't hear it any longer."

  Ingrid Amundsen was a piano teacher; she gave private lessons in her apartment.

  "Theresesgate is quite a nice street," Andreas said, closing his eyes, as if he could walk the street in his sleep--of course he had. "Down at the south end, toward Bislett Stadium, which is only a five-minute walk from Ingrid's, there are a few cafes, a decent bookstore--even an antiquarian bookstore--and the usual 7-Eleven. Closer to Ingrid, on her side of the street, is a large grocery store called Rimi. There's a nice vegetable store next to the Stensgate tram stop, too. It's run by immigrants--Turkish, I think. You can buy some imported specialties--marinated olives, some cheeses. It's all very modest, but nice." Breivik's voice trailed away.

  "You've never been inside her apartment?" Jack asked him.

  Breivik shook his head sadly. "It's an old building, four stories, built around 1875. It's a bit shabby, I suppose. Knowing Ingrid, she probably would have kept the original wooden floors. She would have done some of the renovating herself. I'm sure her children would have helped her."

  "How old are her children?" Jack asked.

  "The daughter is the older one," Breivik told Jack. "She's living with a guy she met in university, but they don't have children. She lives in an area called Sofienberg. It's a very popular and hip place for young people to live. The daughter can get on a tram in Trondheimsveien and be at her mother's in about twenty minutes; by bicycle, it would take her ten or fifteen. I imagine, if she had children, she'd want to move out of central Oslo--maybe Holmlia, an affordable area, where there are still almost as many Norwegians as there are immigrants."

  "And Ingrid has a son?" Jack asked.

  "The boy is studying at the university in Bergen," Andreas Breivik said. "He visits his mother only during vacations."

  Jack liked Breivik a little better after this conversation. Jack nearly told Andreas that he would come see him after he visited with Ingrid--and that he would describe the interior of her apartment to him so that the organist could imagine the interior part of Ingrid's life as obsessively as he'd imagined the rest of it. But that would have been cruel. Andreas was probably unaware of what an investigation he'd made of his former girlfriend.

  Ingrid Moe had been sixteen when Jack had covered the tattoo on her heart-side breast with a piece of gauze with Vaseline on it. He remembered that he'd had some difficulty getting the adhesive tape to stick to her skin, because she was still sweating from the pain.

  "Have you done this before?" Ingrid had asked.

  "Sure," Jack had lied.

  "No, you haven't," she'd said. "Not on a breast."

  When he'd held the gauze against her skin, Jack could feel the heat of her tattoo--her hot heart burning his hand through the bandage.

  Like Andreas Breivik, Ingrid Amundsen would be about forty-five now.

  "What a waste!" Andreas cried out suddenly, startling Jack. "She had such long fingers--perfect for playing the organ. The piano," Breivik said contemptuously. "What a waste!"

  Jack remembered her long arms and long fingers. He remembered her thick blond braid, too--how it hung down her perfectly straight back, reaching almost to the base of her spine. And her small breasts--especially the left one, which Jack had touched with the tattoo bandage.

  When Ingrid Moe (now Amundsen) spoke, she curled back her lips and bared her clenched teeth; the muscles of her neck were tensed, thrusting her lower jaw forward, as if she were about to spit. It was tragic, he'd thought, that such a beautiful girl could be so instantly transformed--that the not-so-simple act of speaking could make her ugly.

  Jack was a little afraid of seeing her again. "That girl is a heart-stopper," his mother had said twenty-eight years before.

  "You have your father's eyes, his mouth," Ingrid had whispered to Jack, but her speech impediment had made a mess of her whisper. (She'd said "mouth" in such a way that the mangled word had rhymed with "roof.") And Jack had thought he would faint when she kissed him. When her lips opened, her teeth had clicked against his; he remembered wondering if her speech impediment was contagious.

  Was there a problem with her tongue? Of course there might have been nothing the matter with Ingrid's tongue. Jack had not asked Andreas Breivik about the source of Ingrid's speech impediment; naturally, he had no intention of asking Ingrid.

  When Jack called her, from the Bristol, he was afraid she wouldn't see him. Why would she want to be reminded of what had happened? But it was stupid to try to deceive her, and Jack didn't do a very good job of it. ("Some actor you are!" Emma would have told him.)

  When Ingrid Amundsen answered the phone, Jack was completely flustered that she said something in Norwegian. Well, what else would the poor woman speak in Norway?

  "Hello? I'm an American who finds himself in Oslo for an indefinite period of time!" Jack blurted out, as if there were worse things
the matter with him than a speech impediment. "I want to keep up my piano lessons."

  "Jack Burns," Ingrid said; the way she spoke, Jack could hardly recognize his own name. "When you speak the way I do," she continued, "you listen very closely to other people's voices. I would know your voice anywhere, Jack Burns. About the only thing I have in common with people who can talk normally is that I've seen all your movies."

  "Oh," Jack said, as if he were four years old.

  "And if you play the piano, Jack, you probably play better than I do. I doubt I can teach you anything."

  "I don't play the piano," he confessed. "My mother's dead and I don't know my father. I wanted to talk with you about him."

  Jack could hear her crying; it wasn't pretty. She couldn't even cry normally. "I'm glad your mother's dead!" she said. "I think I'll have a party! I would love to talk to you about your father, Jack. Please come talk with me, and we'll have a little party."

  He remembered watching her walk away from him--down the long, carpeted hall of the Bristol. She'd been sixteen going on thirty, as he recalled. From behind, she didn't look like a child; she'd walked away from him like a woman. And what a voice--that voice had always been sixteen going on forty-five.

  Although it was raining, Jack stood for fifteen minutes outside her building on the Theresesgate--fortunately, under an umbrella. The taxi had brought him sooner than he'd expected. Ingrid had invited him at five in the afternoon, which was when her last piano student of the day would be leaving. Jack looked up from his watch and saw a boy about twelve or thirteen coming out of Ingrid's building. He looked like a piano student, Jack thought--a little dreamy, a little delicate, a little like it wasn't entirely his idea to be doing this.

  "Excuse me," Jack said to the boy. "Do you play the piano?" The kid was terrified; he looked as if he were sizing up which way to run. "Forgive me for being curious," Jack said, hoping to sound reassuring. "I just thought you looked very musical. Anyway, if you are a piano player, keep doing it. Never stop! I can't tell you how much I regret that I stopped."

  "Bugger off!" the boy said, walking backward away from him. To Jack's surprise, the boy had an English accent. "You look like that creep Jack Burns. Just bugger off!"

  Jack watched him run; the boy went in the direction of the Stensgate tram stop. Jack imagined that the piano student was about the age of Niels Ringhof when Niels had slept with Jack's mother. He rang the buzzer for AMUNDSEN--no first name, no initial.

  It was a third-floor walk-up, but even a snob like Andreas Breivik might have enjoyed the view. The kitchen and the two smaller bedrooms overlooked the Stensparken--a clean-looking park situated on a hill. At the south end of the park, Ingrid pointed out the Fagerborg Kirke--the church where she went every Sunday. On Sunday mornings, she told Jack, you could hear the church bells in the whole area.

  "The organist at the Fagerborg Church isn't in the same league as your father or Andreas Breivik," Ingrid said, "but he's more than good enough for a simple piano teacher like me."

  She'd learned to conceal her mouth with her long fingers when she spoke, or to always speak when her face was turned slightly away. The constant movement of her long arms, as if she were conducting music only she could hear, was very graceful; she was a head taller than Jack, even in her white athletic socks. (She made him take off his shoes at the door.)

  Breivik had been right about the floors--she'd saved the original wood. Her son had helped her remove the old layers of lacquer. The kitchen was the best room in the apartment; it had been remodeled in the early nineties. "With cupboards and all the rest from IKEA--nothing fancy," Ingrid said. It was a blue-and-white kitchen with a wooden workbench, and a kitchen table with three chairs around it; there was no dining room.

  In the living room, which faced the street, there was an old fireplace, and the original stucco work was intact. The piano faced a wall of photographs--family pictures, for the most part. The biggest of the three bedrooms, which was Ingrid's, also faced the street--not the park.

  "I think the park is rather lonely at night," she told Jack, "and besides, my children wanted views of the park from their bedrooms. There have been no difficult decisions in this apartment." She had an interesting way of speaking--that is, in addition to her speech impediment.

  The thick braid that had hung to her waist was gone; her hair was slightly shorter than shoulder-length now, but still blond with only hints of silver in it. She wore jeans, and what may have been her favorite among her son's left-behind shirts--a man's flannel shirt, untucked, like Miss Wurtz had once worn.

  "I wore this for you, because it's so American," Ingrid said, plucking at the shirt with her long fingers. "I never dress up or wear any makeup in this apartment." (Another not-difficult decision, Jack imagined.) "If I dressed up and wore makeup, it might make my pupils nervous."

  Jack said that he thought he'd met one of her pupils, and that he'd probably made him nervous--without meaning to. "An English boy, about twelve or thirteen?" Jack asked.

  She nodded and smiled. Many of her students were from diplomats' families; the parents wanted their children to be occupied with cultural things. "To keep them from being at loose ends," Ingrid said. "Not a bad reason for playing the piano."

  Jack asked her if she would play for him, but she shook her head. The apartment wasn't soundproofed, she explained. In the old building, her neighbors could hear the piano through the walls. She stopped playing after five in the afternoon, and the first of her students never came to the apartment before nine--more often ten--in the morning.

  She and Jack sat in the kitchen, where Ingrid made some tea. Her cheeks were a little sunken in, but she was still beautiful; nothing of what had been baby-faced about her remained, and her long limbs and broad hips had always given her a womanly appearance. She was more handsome than pretty, befitting the mother of two grown children--the children's photos were all over the apartment, not just on the wall behind the piano.

  Jack had spotted a nice-looking man with the children, when the kids were younger; he was a sailor in some of the pictures, a skier in others. The children's father, Ingrid's ex-husband, Jack assumed; the man looked nice in the way Emma had once defined the word, meaning that he looked normal. Everything about Ingrid seemed normal, too--in the best sense of the word.

  "I shouldn't have said I was glad your mother was dead. That's an awful thing to say about a mother to her son!" she exclaimed. "I'm sorry."

  "No, don't be sorry," Jack said. "I understand."

  "I hated her twice," Ingrid told him. "For what she did to me, for seducing Andreas--of course I hated her for that. But when I had children of my own--when they were the age you were when I met you--I hated your mother all over again. I hated her for what she did to you. First I hated her as a woman, then as a mother. No woman can have children and continue to think of herself first, but she did. Alice wasn't thinking of you--of you not having a father. She was thinking only about herself."

  Jack couldn't say anything; everything Ingrid said sounded true. He couldn't argue with her, but he also couldn't agree with her--not with any authority. What did Jack Burns know about having children, and how having children changed you? He finally said: "You have a third reason to hate her--for your tattoo. I remember that it wasn't what you asked for."

  Ingrid laughed; her laughter was more natural-sounding than the way she had cried on the telephone. She was moving gracefully around the kitchen--opening the refrigerator, putting food on the table. Jack realized that she'd prepared a cold supper--gravlaks with a mustard sauce, a potato salad with cucumber and dill, and slices of very dark rye bread.

  "Well, it was just a tattoo--it wasn't life-changing," she was saying. "But I was proud of myself for telling her what I wanted. I knew she would hate the idea. 'A whole heart, a perfectly unbroken one,' I told her. 'A heart my babies will one day love to touch,' I said. 'There's not a thing the matter with my heart,' I told your mother. 'Maybe just make it a little smaller than average,' I to
ld her, 'because my breast is a little smaller than average, too.' I thought I was so brave to tell her this, when all the while my heart was broken. Andreas and your mother had broken it, but I wasn't going to let her know that."

  "What did you say?" Jack asked her. It wasn't the speech impediment; he was pretty sure he had understood her. "You didn't ask for a broken heart, Ingrid?"

  "Ask? Who would want one?" she exclaimed. "I asked your mother for the kind of heart I had before she fucked Andreas!" Ingrid was lighting a candle; she'd already arranged the place settings. She hadn't turned a light on in the kitchen, preferring the dusk and the view of the Stensparken. "And the bitch gave me a broken heart!" Ingrid said. "As ugly a heart as one could imagine. Well, you put the bandage on it, Jack. You remember."

  "I remember it the other way around," he told her. She was pouring herself a glass of wine. (Somehow she knew Jack didn't drink; she told him later that she'd read about his being a teetotaler in an interview.) "I remember you asking for a heart ripped in two, and my mom gave you a good one."

  "She gave me a good one, all right," Ingrid said. She stood next to Jack's chair and unbuttoned the flannel shirt; she wasn't wearing a bra. (He thought of Miss Wurtz in a shirt like that, without a bra--unbuttoning her shirt for his father.)

  Even at dusk, in the dim candlelight, the tattoo of Ingrid Amundsen's torn heart looked like a fresh wound--the jagged tear cut the heart diagonally in two. The blood-red edges of the tear were darker than the shading of the heart, and more sharply defined than the outline. Jack had not seen his mother do an uglier tattoo, but Ingrid seemed accepting of it.

  "Well, guess what?" she said, buttoning her shirt back up. "My babies loved it! They loved to touch it! And I came to realize that your mother had given me the heart I had--not the heart I used to have. How much more cruel it would have been to walk around wearing the heart I used to have. Not that Alice was consciously doing me a favor." She sat down at the table and served him. "Bon appetit, Jack," she said. "When I see you in the movies, I think of how proud you must make your father--and how it must have hurt your mother to see you."

  "Hurt her? How?" he asked.