(2005) Until I Find You

by John Irving

  Ingrid Moe bit her lip and stared at her long fingers. A thick blond braid hung down her perfectly straight back, reaching almost to the base of her spine. When she spoke, her exquisite prettiness was marred by what an obvious strain it was for her to speak; she clenched her teeth together when she talked, as if she were afraid or unable to show her tongue.

  Jack thought with a shiver of what an agony it might be for her to kiss someone, or to kiss her. Years later, he imagined his father thinking this upon first meeting her—and Jack felt ashamed.

  “I want a tattoo,” Ingrid Moe told Alice. “He said you knew how to do it.” Her speech impediment made her almost impossible to understand, at least in English.

  “You’re too young to get a tattoo,” Alice said.

  “I wasn’t too young for him,” Ingrid replied.

  When she said the him, 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 that such a beautiful girl could be so instantly transformed; the not-so-simple act of speaking made her ugly.

  “I would advise you not to get one,” Alice said.

  “If you won’t do it, Trond Halvorsen will,” Ingrid struggled to say. “He’s not very good—he gave William an infection. He gives everyone an infection, I think.”

  Perhaps hearing the girl say William made Alice flinch—more than the news that he’d been infected by dirty needles or a bad tattooist. But Ingrid Moe misunderstood Alice’s reaction.

  “He got over it,” the girl blurted out. “He just needed an antibiotic.”

  “I don’t want to tattoo you,” Alice told her.

  “I know what I want and where I want it,” Ingrid answered. “It’s on a part of me I don’t want Trond Halvorsen seeing,” she added. The way she contorted her mouth to say the name Trond Halvorsen made him sound like a kind of inedible fish. Ingrid spread the long fingers of her right hand on the side of her left breast, near her heart. “Here,” she said. Her hand cupped her small breast, her fingertips reaching to her ribs.

  “It will hurt there,” Alice informed her.

  “I want it to hurt,” Ingrid replied.

  “I suppose it’s a heart you want,” Alice said.

  Maybe a broken one, Jack was thinking. He was playing with his silverware—his attention had wandered off again.

  Alice shrugged. A broken heart was such a common sailor tattoo that she could have done one with her eyes closed. “I won’t do his name,” she said to Ingrid.

  “I don’t want his name,” the girl answered. Just a heart, ripped in two, Jack was thinking. (It was something Ladies’ Man Madsen used to say.)

  “One day you’ll meet someone and have to explain everything,” Alice warned Ingrid.

  “If I meet someone, he’ll have to know everything about me eventually,” the girl responded.

  “How will you pay for it?” Alice asked.

  “I’ll tell you where to find him,” the girl said. But Jack wasn’t listening; Ingrid’s speech impediment disturbed the boy. The girl might have said, “I’ll tell you where he wants to go.”

  So much for rules. Ingrid Moe was not too young to be tattooed after all. She was no child; she just looked like one. Despite her baby face, even Jack knew that. If he’d had to guess, Jack would have said she was sixteen going on thirty. He didn’t know that a world of older women awaited him.

  At midday, the amber light that suffused the hotel room made Ingrid Moe’s pale skin seem more golden than it was. She sat stripped to her waist on one of the twin beds, Alice beside her. Jack sat on the other twin bed, staring at the tall girl’s breasts.

  “He’s just a child—I don’t mind if he watches,” was how Ingrid had put it.

  “Maybe I mind,” Alice said.

  “Please, I’d like to have Jack here while you do it,” Ingrid told her. “He’s going to look just like William. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I know,” Alice answered.

  Possibly Ingrid didn’t mind the boy seeing her because she had no breasts to speak of; even so, Jack couldn’t take his eyes off her. She sat very straight with her long fingers gripping her knees. The blue veins in her forearms stood out against the gold of her skin. Another blue vein, which began at her throat, ran down between her small breasts; that vein seemed to have a pulse in it, as if an animal lived under her skin.

  Alice had outlined the whole heart, which touched both the side of Ingrid Moe’s left breast and her rib cage, before Jack got the idea that it was not a broken heart—not a heart ripped in two, as he’d thought Ingrid had requested—but an unbroken one. (Without a mirror, Ingrid couldn’t see the tattoo-in-progress; besides, she kept staring straight at Jack, who was paying more attention to her breasts than to the tattoo.)

  Even when Alice did the outlining on Ingrid’s rib cage, the girl sat completely still and didn’t make a sound, although tears flowed freely down her cheeks. Alice ignored Ingrid’s tears, except when they fell on the girl’s left breast; these errant tears she wiped away, as perfunctorily (with a dab of Vaseline on a paper towel) as she wiped away the fine spatter of black ink from the outlining.

  It wasn’t until Alice began to shade the heart red that the strangeness of it became apparent. Given the slight contour of Ingrid’s breast, the plump little heart seemed capable of beating. The rise and fall of Ingrid’s breathing gave the tattoo a visible pulse; it looked real enough to bleed. Jack had seen his mother tattoo a heart in a bed of flowers, or frame one with roses, but this heart stood alone. It was smaller than her other hearts, and something else was different about it. The tattoo held the side of Ingrid Moe’s left breast and touched her heart—the way, one day, an infant’s hand would touch her there.

  When Alice was finished, she went into the bathroom to wash her hands. Ingrid leaned forward and put her long hands on Jack’s thighs.

  “You have your father’s eyes, his mouth,” she whispered, but her speech impediment made a mess of her whisper. (She said “mouth” in such a way that the mangled word rhymed with “roof.”) And while Alice was still in the bathroom, Ingrid leaned farther forward and kissed Jack on the mouth. The boy shivered as though he might faint. Her lips had opened so that her teeth clicked against his. Naturally, he wondered if her speech impediment was contagious.

  When Alice came back from the bathroom, she brought her hand mirror with her. She sat beside Jack on the twin bed while they watched Ingrid Moe have her first look at her finished heart. Ingrid took a good, long look at it before she said anything. Jack didn’t really hear what she said, anyway. He’d gone into the bathroom, where he put a gob of toothpaste in his mouth and rinsed it out in the sink.

  Maybe Ingrid was saying, “It’s not broken—I said a heart ripped in two.”

  “There’s nothing the matter with your heart,” Alice might have said.

  “It’s ripped in two!” Ingrid declared. Jack heard that and came out of the bathroom.

  “You only think it is,” his mom was saying.

  “You didn’t give me what I wanted!” Ingrid blurted out.

  “I gave you what you have, an actual heart—a small one,” Alice added.

  “Fuck you!” Ingrid Moe shouted.

  “Not around Jack,” Alice told her.

  “I’m not telling you anything,” the girl said. She held the hand mirror close to her tattooed breast. It might not have been the heart she wanted, but she couldn’t stop looking at the tattoo.

  Alice got up from the twin bed and went into the bathroom. Before she closed the door, she said: “When you meet someone, Ingrid—and you will—you’ll have a heart he’ll want to put his hand on. Your children will want to touch it, too.”

  Alice turned on the water in the sink; she didn’t want Ingrid and Jack to hear her crying. “You didn’t bandage her,” Jack said—to the closed bathroom door.

  “You bandage her, Jackie,” his mother said over the running water. “I don’t w
ant to touch her.”

  Jack put some Vaseline on a piece of gauze about as big as Ingrid Moe’s hand; it completely covered the heart on the side of her breast. He taped the gauze to her skin, being careful not to touch her nipple. Ingrid was sweating slightly and he had a little trouble making the tape stick.

  “Have you done this before?” the girl asked.

  “Sure,” Jack said.

  “No, you haven’t,” she said. “Not on a breast.”

  Jack repeated the usual instructions; after all, he was pretty familiar with the routine.

  “Just keep it covered for a day,” the boy told Ingrid. She was buttoning up her shirt—she didn’t bother with her skimpy bra. “It will feel like a sunburn.”

  “How do you know what it feels like?” the girl asked. When she stood up, she was so tall that Jack barely came to her waist.

  “Better put a little moisturizer on it,” he told her.

  She bent over him, as if she were going to kiss him again. Jack clamped his lips tight together and held his breath. He must have been trembling, because Ingrid put her big hands on his shoulders and said: “Don’t be afraid—I’m not going to hurt you.” Then, instead of kissing him, she whispered in his ear: “Sibelius.”

  “What?”

  “Tell your mom he said, ‘Sibelius.’ It’s all he thinks about. I mean going there,” she added.

  She opened the door to the hall, just a crack. She peered out as if she had a recent history of being careful about how she left hotel rooms.

  “Sibelius?” Jack said, testing the word. (He thought it must be Norwegian.)

  “I’m only telling you because of you, not her,” Ingrid Moe said. “Tell your mom.”

  Jack watched her walk down the hall. From behind, she didn’t look like a child; she walked like a woman.

  Back in the hotel room, the boy cleaned up the little paper cups of pigment. He made sure the caps on the glycerine and alcohol and witch hazel were tight. He put away the bandages. On a paper towel, Jack laid out the needles from the two tattoo machines—what his mom called the “Jonesy roundback,” which she used for outlining, and the Rodgers, which she used for shading. Jack knew his mother would want to clean the needles.

  When Alice finally came out of the bathroom, she couldn’t hide the fact that she’d been crying. While Jack had always thought of his mother as a beautiful woman—and the way most men looked at her did nothing to discourage his prejudice—she was perhaps undone to have tattooed the breast and golden skin of a baby-faced girl as young and pretty as Ingrid Moe.

  “That girl is a heart-stopper, Jack,” was all she said.

  “She said, ‘Sibelius,’ ” Jack told his mom.

  “What?”

  “Sibelius.”

  At first the word was as puzzling to Alice as it had been to Jack, but she kept thinking about it. “Maybe it’s where he’s gone,” the boy guessed. “Where we can find him.”

  Alice shook her head. Jack took this to mean that Sibelius was another city not on their itinerary; he didn’t even know what country it was in.

  “Where is it?” Jack asked his mother.

  She shook her head again. “It’s a he, not an it,” she told him. “Sibelius is a composer—he’s Finnish.”

  Jack thought she’d said, “He’s finished”—meaning that the composer was dead.

  “He’s from Finland,” Alice explained. “That means your father has gone to Helsinki, Jack.”

  Helsinki was definitely not on their itinerary. Jack didn’t like the sound of it one bit. Not a city with Hell in it!

  Before leaving for Finland, Alice wanted to have a word with Trond Halvorsen, the bad tattooer who’d given William an infection. Halvorsen was what Tattoo Ole would have called a “scratcher.” He worked out of a ground-floor apartment in Gamlebyen, in the eastern part of Oslo; what passed for a tattoo shop was his kitchen.

  Trond Halvorsen was an old sailor. He’d been tattooed “by hand” in Borneo, and—again without the benefit of a tattoo machine—in Japan. He had a Tattoo Jack (Tattoo Ole’s teacher) on his right forearm and one of Ole’s naked ladies on his left. He had some simply awful tattoos, mostly on his thighs and stomach; he’d done them on himself. “When I was learning,” he said, showing Alice and Jack his myriad mistakes.

  “Tell me about The Music Man,” Alice began.

  “I just gave him some notes he asked for,” Halvorsen said. “I don’t know what the music sounds like.”

  “I understand you gave him an infection, too,” Alice said.

  Trond Halvorsen smiled; he was missing both an upper and a lower canine. “Infections happen.”

  “Do you clean your needles?” Alice asked.

  “Who has the time?” Halvorsen replied.

  A pot was bubbling on the stove, something with a fish head in it. The kitchen smelled of fish and tobacco in more or less equal parts.

  Alice couldn’t hide her disgust; even Halvorsen’s flash was dirty, his stencils smudged with cooking grease and smoke. Some pigments had hardened in the open paper cups on the kitchen table; you couldn’t tell what their true colors had been.

  “I’m Aberdeen Bill’s daughter, Alice.” She suddenly seemed uninterested in her own story. “I once worked with Tattoo Ole.” Her voice trailed away.

  “I’ve heard of your dad, and everyone knows Ole,” Halvorsen said; he seemed unembarrassed by her evident disapproval.

  Jack was wondering why they’d come.

  “The Music Man,” Alice said, for the second time. “I don’t suppose he told you where he was going.”

  “He was angry about the infection,” Trond Halvorsen admitted. “When he came back, he wasn’t in a mood to talk about his travels.”

  “He’s gone to Helsinki,” Alice said. Halvorsen just listened. If she already knew where William had gone, why was she bothering Halvorsen? “Do you know any tattoo artists in Helsinki?” Alice asked.

  “There’s nobody good there,” he answered.

  “There’s nobody good here,” Alice said.

  Trond Halvorsen winked at Jack, as if acknowledging that the boy’s mother must be hard to live with. He stirred the pot on the stove, briefly holding up the fish head for Jack to see. “In Helsinki,” Halvorsen said, as if he were talking to the fish, “you can get a tattoo from an old sailor like me.”

  “A scratcher, you mean?” Alice asked.

  “Someone working at home, like me,” Halvorsen told her; he was sounding a little defensive now, even irritated.

  “And would you know such a person as that in Finland, good or not?” Alice asked.

  “There’s a restaurant in Helsinki where the sailors go,” Trond Halvorsen said. “You get yourself to the harbor, you look for a restaurant called Salve. Someone will know it—it’s very popular.”

  “Then what?” Alice said.

  “Ask one of the waitresses where you can get a tattoo,” Halvorsen told her. “One of the older ones will know.”

  “Thank you very much, Mr. Halvorsen,” Alice said. She held out her hand to him, but he didn’t shake it. Even scratchers have their pride.

  “You got a boyfriend?” Halvorsen asked her; he smiled, showing his missing teeth again.

  Jack’s mother rumpled the boy’s hair and pulled him against her hip. “What do you think Jack here is?” she said to Halvorsen.

  Trond Halvorsen never did shake Alice’s hand. “I think Jack here looks just like him,” the scratcher said.

  Back at the Bristol, they packed in silence. The clerk at the front desk was happy they were checking out. The lobby was overcrowded with foreign sportswriters and skating fans. The world championships in speed skating were due to take place at Bislett Stadium in the center of Oslo in mid-February, but the journalists and fans had arrived early. Jack was sorry they were leaving; he’d been hoping to see the skaters.

  That February, the temperature in Oslo was eight degrees below average. The cold weather meant fast ice, the front-desk clerk said. Jack asked
his mom if speed skaters skated in the dark, or were there lights at Bislett Stadium? She didn’t know.

  He didn’t ask his mother what Helsinki would be like, because he was afraid she might say, “Darker.” In the pale midday light, their hotel room again had an amber hue, but without the golden glow of Ingrid Moe’s skin, Oslo seemed plunged in an eternal darkness.

  In his dreams, Jack still saw that girl’s inflamed ribs and the throbbing heart on the side of her breast. When he’d held the gauze against her skin, he could feel the heat of her tattoo; her hot heart had burned his hand through the bandage.

  When Jack and Alice made their way down the carpeted hall where he’d watched Ingrid Moe walk away—like a woman—the boy was thinking that their search for his father was also a dream, only it was neverending.

  One day or night, they would walk into a restaurant—a popular place called Salve, where the sailors in Helsinki went—and they would meet a waitress who’d already met William Burns. She would tell them what she’d told him—namely, where to go to be tattooed—but by the time they went there, William would have acquired another piece of music on his skin. According to Jack’s mother, his father also would have seduced some woman or girl he’d first met in a church—and no amount of sacred music could persuade a single member of that church’s congregation to help Jack and Alice find him.

  Once again William would have vanished, the way the greatest music from the best organ in the most magnificent cathedral can drown out any choir and displace all other human sounds—even laughter, even grief, even sorrow of the kind Jack heard his mother give in to when she believed he was fast asleep.

  “Good-bye, Oslo,” Jack whispered in the hall, where he believed that Ingrid Moe had walked away with a whole heart—not one ripped in two.

  His mom bent down and kissed the back of his neck. “Hello, Helsinki!” she whispered in his ear.

  Once again, Jack reached for her hand. It was the one thing he knew how to do. As it would turn out, it was about the only thing he really knew.