(2005) Until I Find You

by John Irving

  No sooner had he spoken than a gay bodybuilder appeared; he must have been a fashion model. He gave Claudia the most cursory once-over and flirted shamelessly with Jack. “I just stopped in for a little alteration, Alice,” the bodybuilder said, smiling at Jack. “But if I knew in advance when your handsome son was going to be here, I would come by and be altered every day.”

  His name was Edgar; Alice and Claudia thought he was charming and amusing, but Jack made a point of looking away. Tattooed on one of the bodybuilder’s shoulder blades was the photographic likeness of the cowboy Clint Eastwood with his signature thin cigar. On Edgar’s other shoulder blade was the tattoo in need of altering—an evidently Satanic rendition of Christ’s crucifixion, in which Jesus is chained in figure-four fashion to a motorcycle wheel. The alteration Edgar required was some indication that Christ had been “roughed up”—a scratch and a drop of blood on one cheek, perhaps, or a wound in the area of the rib cage.

  “Maybe both,” Alice said.

  “You don’t think that would be too vulgar?” Edgar asked.

  “It’s your tattoo, Edgar,” Alice replied.

  Possibly it was Claudia’s love of all things theatrical that enamored her to Daughter Alice’s world. To Jack, if Edgar wasn’t ugly, his tattoos were—and Edgar himself was certainly vulgar. To Jack, almost everything at Daughter Alice was uglier than ugly, and the ugliness was intentional—your skin not merely marked for life but maimed.

  “You’re just a snob,” Claudia told him.

  Well, yes and no. The tattoo world, which had not once frightened Jack when he was four, terrified him at twenty. Here was Jack Burns, affecting Toshiro Mifune’s scowl—the samurai’s condemning look at a dog trotting past with a human hand in its mouth—while the tattoo scene at Daughter Alice reflected far worse behavior than that dog’s.

  Once upon a time, the maritime world had been the gateway to all that was foreign and new; but this was no longer true. Now tattoos were drug-induced—psychedelic gibberish and hallucinogenic horror. The new tattoos radiated sexual anarchy; they worshiped death.

  “May you stay forever young,” Bob Dylan sang, and Alice had more than sung along with Bob; she’d embraced this philosophy without realizing that the young people around her were not the hippies and flower children of her day.

  Of course there were the collectors, the sad ink addicts with their bodies-in-progress—the old crazies, like William Burns, on the road to discovering the full-body chill—but Jack chiefly detested his generation, now in their late teens or early twenties. He hated the pierced-lip guys—sometimes with pierced eyelids and tongues. He loathed the girls with their pierced nipples and navels—even their labia! The people Jack’s age who hung out at Daughter Alice were certifiable freaks and losers.

  But Alice made them tea and coffee, and she played her favorite music for them; some of them brought their own music, which was harsher than hers. Daughter Alice was a hangout. Not everyone was there to get a tattoo, but you had to have been tattooed to feel comfortable hanging around there.

  Jack saw Krung once—he stopped in for a cup of tea. The Bathurst Street gym was gone; it had become a health-food store.

  “Gym rats always gotta find a new ship, Jackie,” Krung said. He sized up Claudia with a lingering glance; he told Jack that he thought she had the hips to be a formidable kickboxer.

  Another day, Chenko came by; he walked with a cane, but Jack was happy to see him and wished he’d stayed longer. Even with the cane, Chenko was more protection to Alice than she had most of the time.

  Chenko was courteous to Claudia, but he made no mention to Jack of her potential as a wrestler. He would never get over Emma, Chenko said sadly—meaning more than the fact that his separated sternum had not entirely recovered from her lateral drop.

  The lost kids with no money came to Daughter Alice and watched Alice work; they were trying to find the cash and making up their minds about which tattoo they would get next. The old ink addicts dropped in to show themselves off; some of them appeared to be rationing what remained of their bodies, because they had little skin left for another tattoo. (It drove Jack crazy that Claudia called them “romantics.”)

  “The saddest cases,” Alice said, “are the almost full-bodies.”

  But were they almost cold? Jack wondered. He couldn’t look at them without imagining his dad. Did William Burns have any skin left for that one last note?

  Jack could have predicted that Claudia would get a tattoo, but he pretended to be surprised when she announced her decision. “Just don’t get one where it will show onstage,” he said.

  There was a movable curtain Alice rolled around on casters; like those enclosures for hospital beds in recovery rooms, this curtain sealed off the customer who was being intimately tattooed. Claudia wanted her tattoo high up—on the inside of her right thigh, where she chose the Chinaman’s signature scepter. It was Jack’s personal favorite, Claudia knew, symbolizing “everything as you wish.”

  “Forget about it,” his mom had told him, when he’d said it was the best of the tattoos she’d learned from the Chinaman. But Alice raised no objection to giving one to Claudia.

  When Jack was at Redding, he’d briefly benefited from the exotic impression he gave his fellow schoolboys of his mother—the famous tattoo artist. (As if, if she weren’t famous, there could be little that was exotic about her profession.) Now his mom was famous—in her small, Queen Street way—and Jack was embarrassed by Daughter Alice and the general seediness, the depraved fringe, that tattooing represented to him.

  But what else could his mother have done? She had tried to protect Jack from the tattoo world. She’d made it clear that he wasn’t welcome at the Chinaman’s, and it hadn’t been Alice’s fault that Jack became her virtual apprentice when she tattooed her way through those North Sea ports in search of William—excepting those nights when Ladies’ Man Lars tucked the boy into bed in Copenhagen.

  Now, ironically, at the same time Alice seemed to be proud of her work—and of being her own boss in her own shop—Jack was growing ashamed of her. Claudia was right to criticize Jack for this, but Claudia hadn’t been there in those years when his mother was turning her back on him.

  Jack made matters worse by objecting to his mom’s apprentice observing Claudia’s tattoo-in-progress. What was the curtain for, if this guy was permitted to see the scepter? The tattoo almost touched Claudia’s pubes!

  He was a young guy from New Zealand. “Alice’s kiwi boy,” Mrs. Oastler called him. Leslie didn’t like him, nor did he appeal to Jack. He was from Wellington, and he taught Alice some Maori stuff. Like her other young apprentices, he wouldn’t stay long—a couple of months, at most. Then another apprentice would come; he was always someone who could teach her one or two things, while she had much more to teach him. (That was how the tattoo business worked; that part hadn’t changed.)

  Well before the end of the 1980s, because of AIDS, every knowledgeable tattoo artist in Canada and the United States was wearing rubber gloves. Jack could never get used to his mom in those gloves. Her shop was not an especially sanitary-looking place, yet here she was with her hands resembling a doctor’s or a nurse’s. When everything went right, tattooing wasn’t exactly blood work.

  But at Daughter Alice, some things stayed the same: the pigment in those little paper cups, the many uses of Vaseline, the strangely dental sound the needles made in the electric machine, the smell of penetrated skin—and the coffee, and the tea, and the honey in that sticky jar. And over it all, Bob, still howling—still complaining about this or that, prophesying doom or the next new thing.

  “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 hi
s 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 Fräulein 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 Oastler 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.”