Until I Find You

by John Irving

  Jack didn't say anything. By their imploring glances and gestures, Femke's sons were urging him to be patient. If he just waited the old woman out, Jack would get what he'd come for--or so Femke's sons seemed to be saying.

  "Hamburg," Femke said. "What organist doesn't want to play in one of those German churches--maybe even somewhere Bach himself once played? It was inevitable that William would go to Germany, but there was something special about Hamburg. I can't remember now. He said he wanted to get his hands on a Herbert Hoffmann--a famous organ, probably."

  Jack took some small pleasure in correcting her; she was that kind of woman. "A famous tattooist, not an organ," he told Femke.

  "I never saw your dad's tattoos, thank God," Femke said dismissively. "I just liked to listen to him play."

  Jack thanked Femke and her sons for taking the time to see him. He took a passing look at the prostitutes in their windows and doorways on the Bergstraat and the Korsjespoortsteeg before he walked back to the Grand, this time avoiding the red-light district. Jack was glad he had the videocassette of Wild Bill Vanvleck's homicide series to look at, because he didn't feel like leaving the hotel.

  There was more than one episode from the television series on the videocassette. Jack's favorite one was about a former member of the homicide team, an older man who goes back to police school at fifty-three. His name is Christiaan Winter, and he's just been divorced. He's estranged from his only child--a daughter in university--and he's taking a training course for policemen on new methods of dealing with domestic violence. The police used to be too lenient with the perpetrators; now they arrested them.

  Of course the dialogue was all in Dutch; Jack had to guess what they were saying. But it was a character-driven story--Jack knew Christiaan Winter from an earlier episode, when the policeman's marriage was deteriorating. In the episode about domestic violence, Winter becomes obsessed with how much of it children see. The statistics all point to the fact that children of wife-beaters end up beating their wives, and children who are beaten become child-beaters.

  The social message wasn't new to Jack, but Vanvleck had connected it to the cop's personal life. While Winter never beat his wife, the verbal abuse--Winter's and his wife's--no doubt damaged the daughter. One of the first cases of domestic violence that Christiaan Winter becomes involved in ends in a homicide--his old business. In the end, he is reunited with his former team.

  Vanvleck's homicide series was more in the vein of understated realism than anything on American television; there was less visible violence, and the sexual content was more frank. Nor did happy endings find their unlikely way into any of the episodes--Christiaan Winter is not reunited with his family. The best he can manage is a civil conversation with his daughter in a coffeehouse, where he is introduced to her new boyfriend. We can tell that the veteran policeman doesn't care for the boyfriend, but he keeps his thoughts to himself. In the last shot, after his daughter gives him a kiss on the cheek, Winter realizes that the boyfriend has left some money on the table for the coffee.

  This was noir warm, which was Wild Bill at his best--at least this is what Jack said to Nico Oudejans when Nico called and asked Jack his opinion of Vanvleck's series. Nico liked the series, too. Nico didn't ask Jack how the meeting with Femke had gone. Nico knew Femke; as a good cop, he knew every detail of Daughter Alice's story, too. Jack told Nico about Herbert Hoffmann being a tattoo artist, not an organ. Naturally, Nico asked if Jack was going to Hamburg.

  He wasn't. Jack knew actors may be more highly skilled at lying than other people, but they are no more adept at lying to themselves--and even actors should know better than to lie to cops.

  "What more do I need to know?" Jack asked Nico, who didn't answer him. The policeman just kept looking at Jack's eyes--then at his hands, then at his eyes again. Jack began to speak more rapidly; to Nico, Jack's thoughts were more run-on than consecutive, but the cop didn't question him.

  Jack said that he hoped, for his father's sake, that William had another family. Jack wouldn't invade his father's privacy; after all, William hadn't invaded Jack's. Besides, Jack knew that Herbert Hoffmann had retired. Alice had revered Hoffmann, but Jack would leave Herbert Hoffmann in peace, too. So what if Hoffmann had almost surely met William Burns?

  "Now that you're getting close, maybe you're afraid to find him, Jack," Nico said.

  It was Jack's turn not to say anything; he just tried to look unafraid.

  "Maybe you're afraid that you'll cause your father pain, or that he won't want to see you," the policeman said.

  "Don't you mean that I'll cause him more pain?" Jack asked.

  "Now that you're getting close, maybe you don't want to get any closer--that's all I'm saying, Jack."

  "Maybe," Jack said. He didn't feel like much of an actor anymore. Jack Burns was a boy who'd never known his father, a boy whose father had been kept from him; maybe what Jack was really afraid of was losing his missing father as an excuse. That's what Claudia would have told him, but Nico said nothing more.

  If William had wanted a Herbert Hoffmann, Jack thought he knew which kind. He imagined it was one of Hoffmann's sailing ships--often seen sailing out of port, or in the open sea on a long voyage. Sometimes there was a dark lighthouse and the ship was headed for rocks. Herbert Hoffmann's Sailor's Grave was among his most famous; there were his Last Port and his Letzte Reise or Last Trip, too. In most cases, Hoffmann's ships were sailing into danger or unknown adventures; the feeling the tattoos gave you was one of farewell, although Herbert Hoffmann had done his share of homeward-bound tattoos as well.

  A Homeward Bound would not have been his father's choice, Jack was thinking. On the ship that had carried Jack away from his dad, Jack sensed there would have been more of a Sailor's Grave or a farewell feeling--at least from William's point of view. A ship leaving harbor conveys an uncertain future.

  Or else William Burns had stuck to music on his skin. Jack could imagine that, too.

  There was a nonstop flight from Los Angeles to Amsterdam--a little more than ten hours in the air. Richard Gladstein was going to be tired. He would leave L.A. at 4:10 in the afternoon and land in Amsterdam at 11:40 in the morning, the next day. Jack assumed that Richard would want to take a nap before they met Vanvleck for dinner that evening.

  For two days, Jack didn't leave his hotel room except to go to the gym on the Rokin. He lived on room service; he wrote pages and pages to Michele Maher. He came up with nothing he would send to her, but the stationery at the Grand was both more plentiful and more attractive than that at the Hotel Torni.

  Jack did manage to come up with a clever way of asking Michele Maher the full-body tattoo question--that is, dermatologically speaking.

  Dear Michele,

  As a dermatologist, can you think of any reason why a person with a full-body tattoo might feel cold?

  Please return the stamped, self-addressed postcard--checking the appropriate box.

  Yours,

  Jack

  On a postcard of the Oudezijds Voorburgwal canal, he gave Michele the following options.

  o No.

  o Yes. Let's talk about it!

  Love,

  Michele

  Of course he didn't send that letter or the postcard. For one thing, he didn't have a U.S. stamp for the return delivery; for another, the "Love, Michele" was taking a lot for granted after fifteen years.

  His second day alone, Jack almost went to see Els again in her apartment on the Sint Jacobsstraat. He didn't want to sleep with a prostitute in her seventies--he just liked Els.

  Mainly Jack would lie awake at night--imagining his little face on the ship's deck, where his mother had lifted him above the rail. Jack was just smiling, and waving to beat the band, while the damage was being done around him--especially to his dad.

  In Hamburg, maybe William had met someone; that might have helped him to forget Jack, if he'd ever managed to forget his son. After all, he'd had a correspondence with Miss Wurtz when Jack was attending S
t. Hilda's. It wasn't as if William had stopped thinking about Jack, cold.

  When Richard arrived, he went straight to bed and Jack went back to the gym. Jack was eating more carbs and had changed his weightlifting routine; he'd managed to put on a few pounds, but Jack was still no Jimmy Stronach. (Not that there was anything he could have done to acquire Jimmy's penis.)

  In the gym on the Rokin, possibly in a failing effort to drown out the awful music in the weight room, Jack tried singing that ditty his mother had sung only when she was drunk or stoned--the one that seemed to resurrect her Scottish accent.

  Oh, I'll never be a kittie

  or a cookie

  or a tail.

  The one place worse than

  Dock Place

  is the Port o' Leith jail.

  No, I'll never be a kittie,

  of one true thing I'm sure--

  I won't end up on Dock Place

  and I'll never be a hure.

  How funny that it had once been Alice's mantra to never be a whore.

  Jack thought of their nightly prayer, which--when he was a child--they usually said together. He remembered one night in Amsterdam when she fell asleep before he did, and he said the prayer by himself. Jack had spoken a little louder than usual, because he had to pray for the two of them. "The day Thou gavest, Lord, is ended. Thank You for it." (Of course that had probably happened more than once.)

  Jack took a footbridge across the canal on his way back to the Grand. He stood on the bridge and watched a sightseeing boat drift by. In the stern, a small boy sat looking up at the footbridge--his face pressed to the glass. Jack waved, but the boy didn't wave back.

  It was already dark when Jack walked with Richard Gladstein to the Herengracht, to a restaurant called Zuid Zeeland, where they were meeting William Vanvleck. Jack was in no mood for the meeting. He kept thinking about the other William--the one he would have loved but was afraid to meet.

  V

  Dr. Garcia

  31

  Therapy

  Five years later--as if striking the match that would set fire to Jack's life in Los Angeles, strip his character bare, and ultimately lead him to seek his father--a young woman (younger than he realized at the time) sat not quite fully clothed on Jack's living-room couch in that forlorn dump he still lived in on Entrada Drive. She was thumbing through his address book, which she'd picked up off his desk, and reading aloud the women's names. In an insinuating tone of voice, she would first say the name and then guess what relationship Jack might have had, or still had, with the woman.

  This juvenile behavior should have alerted him to the fact that she was clearly younger than she'd told him she was--not that Jack shouldn't have guessed her real age for other reasons. But he did have difficulties with math.

  She got into the G's before Jack said, "That's enough," and took his address book away from her; that's when the trouble really started.

  "Elena Garcia," the girl had just said. "Your cleaning lady, or former cleaning lady? You definitely fucked her."

  Elena Garcia--Dr. Garcia--was Jack's psychiatrist. He had never had sex with her. For five years, Dr. Garcia had not once been a love interest--but Jack had never depended on anyone to the degree that he depended on her. Elena Garcia knew more about Jack Burns than anyone had ever known--including Emma Oastler.

  Jack had often called Dr. Garcia in tears, not always but sometimes in the middle of the night. He'd called her from Cannes--once when he was at a party at the Hotel du Cap. That same day Jack had pushed a female photographer, a stalker paparazzo, off a chartered yacht; he'd had to pay an outrageous fine.

  Another time, he banged some bimbo on the beach of the Hotel Martinez. She said she was an actress, but she turned out to be one of those Croisette dog-walkers; she'd been arrested for fucking on the beach before. And Jack should have won the Palme d'Or for bad behavior for the fracas he got into in that glass-and-concrete eyesore, the Palais des Festivals. This happened after the evening's red-carpet promenade. Jack was on a narrow staircase leading to one of the Palais's upstairs rooms. Some journalist shoved him into one of those thugs who comprise the festival's security staff; the security guy thought that Jack had purposely shoved him, which led to Jack's impromptu lateral drop. Chenko would have been proud of Jack for the perfect execution of his move--Coaches Clum, Hudson, and Shapiro, too--but the incident was in all the papers. The security thug broke his collarbone, and Jack got another stiff fine. The weaselly French!

  Lastly, from his ocean-front suite at the Carlton, Jack poured a whole bottle of Taittinger (chilled) onto that former agent Lawrence. The fink was giving Jack the finger from the terrace. Lawrence was just the kind of asshole you ran into at Cannes. Jack hated Cannes.

  From Dr. Garcia's point of view, Jack's behavior was only marginally better in Venice, Deauville, and Toronto--the three film festivals where Richard Gladstein, Wild Bill Vanvleck, Lucia Delvecchio, and Jack promoted The Slush-Pile Reader. (A recent headline in Variety--LOTS OF LIBIDO ON THE LIDO--could have been written about Jack Burns.)

  They had a very good run with what Jack would usually call Emma's movie; careerwise, it may have been Jack's best year. They shot the film in the fall of '98 and took it to those festivals in August and September of '99--before the premieres in New York and London near the end of that year.

  There was the unfortunate incident with Lucia Delvecchio in the Hotel des Bains in Venice; she'd had too much to drink, and bitterly regretted having slept with Jack. But no one knew--not even Richard or Wild Bill. And no one except Lucia's husband, who was not in Venice, would have cared. Bad things happened in that languid lagoon.

  "Don't be so hard on yourself," Jack told Lucia. "The whole city is sinking. Visconti shot Death in Venice in the Hotel des Bains. I think he knew what he was doing."

  But it was mostly Jack's fault. Lucia had been drunk; he knew she was married. That precipitated another call to Dr. Garcia. He called her from the Hotel Normandie in Deauville, too. (It wasn't Lucia that time; worse, it was an older member of the jury.)

  "The older-woman thing again?" Dr. Garcia had asked Jack on the phone.

  "I guess so," he'd told her.

  Jack was with Mrs. Oastler at the Toronto film festival when they screened The Slush-Pile Reader in Roy Thomson Hall--a packed house, a triumphant night. It was gratifying to show the film in Emma's hometown. But Leslie had a new girlfriend, a blonde, who didn't like Jack. The blonde wanted him to remove all his clothes from Mrs. Oastler's house. Jack didn't think Leslie cared whether he left his clothes in her house or not, but the blonde wanted him (and his things) gone.

  Jack was in Mrs. Oastler's familiar kitchen when the blonde handed him the two photographs of his mother's naked torso and the Until I find you tattoo. "Those are Leslie's," he explained. "I have two photos; she has the other two."

  "Take them," the blonde told him. "Your mother's dead, Jack. Leslie doesn't want to look at her breasts anymore."

  "I don't want to look at them anymore, either," Jack said, but he took the photos. Now he had all four--these in addition to that photograph of Emma naked at seventeen.

  Mrs. Oastler's mansion, as Jack used to think of it, was different with the blonde there. Leslie's bedroom door was usually closed; it was hard to imagine Mrs. Oastler closing her bathroom door, too, but maybe the blonde had taught her how to do it.

  That trip to Toronto, Jack resisted sleeping with Bonnie Hamilton. She wanted to sell him an apartment in a new condo being built in Rosedale. "For when you tire of Los Angeles," Bonnie told him. But Toronto wasn't his town, notwithstanding that he had long been tired of L.A.

  When he was in Toronto, Jack had a less than heart-to-heart talk with Caroline Wurtz. She was disappointed in him; she thought he should be looking for his father. Jack couldn't tell her half of what he'd learned on his return trip to the North Sea. He was in no shape to talk about it. It was all he could do to tell the story to Dr. Garcia, and too often he couldn't talk to her, either. He tried
, but the words wouldn't come--or he would start to shout or cry.

  It was Dr. Garcia's opinion that Jack shouted and cried too much. "Especially the crying--it's simply indecent for a man," she said. "You really should work on that." To that end, she encouraged Jack to tell her what had happened to him in chronological order. "Begin with that awful trip you took with your mother," Dr. Garcia instructed him. "Don't tell me what you now know about that trip. Tell me what you thought happened at the time. Begin with what you first imagined were your memories. And try not to jump ahead more than is absolutely necessary. In other words, go easy on the foreshadowing, Jack." Later, after he began--with Copenhagen, when he was four--Dr. Garcia would frequently say: "Try not to interject so much. I know you're not a writer, but just try to stick to the story."

  It hurt Jack's feelings to hear her say that he wasn't a writer; it felt especially unfair after his not-inconsiderable contributions to Emma's screenplay of The Slush-Pile Reader.

  And to recite out loud the story of his life--that is, coherently and in chronological order--would take years! Dr. Garcia knew that; she was in no hurry. She took one look at what a mess Jack was and knew only that she had to find a way to make him stop shouting and crying.

  "It's woefully apparent that you can't tell me your life story without everyone in the waiting room hearing you," she said. "Believe me, it's only tolerable to listen to you if you calm down."

  "Where does it end?" Jack asked Dr. Garcia, when he'd been spilling his life story aloud for four, going on five, years.

  "Well, it ends with looking for your father--or at least finding out what happened to him," Dr. Garcia said. "But you're not ready for that part, not until you can spit out all the rest of it. The end of it, Jack, is where you find him--that's the last place you have to go. You're not through with traveling."

  Jack too hastily concluded that if his retelling of his life were a book, for example, his finding his father would be the last chapter.

  "I doubt it," Dr. Garcia said. "Maybe your penultimate chapter, if you're lucky. When you find him, Jack, you're going to learn something you didn't know before, aren't you? I trust that the learning part will take an additional chapter."