(2005) Until I Find You

by John Irving

  “Sweet dreams, assholes!” Badger Schultz and his wife, Little Chicken Wing, called from the laundry room, where they were sleeping on the floor on an antique quilt.

  “Great party, huh?” Jack whispered to the Skretkowicz sister he was sleeping with in Emma’s bed.

  “Yeah, your mom woulda loved it!” Ms. Skretkowicz said. She was, alas, the one who’d been married to Flattop Tom. She also had a fabulous octopus tattooed on her ass; it completely covered both cheeks. “Flattop Tom’s work,” she admitted a little sadly. “Not to take nothin’ away from the octopus.”

  Down the hall, Leslie was in bed with the other Skretkowicz sister. “She was a real sweetie,” Mrs. Oastler would tell Jack later. It was no surprise to Leslie that the other Skretkowicz sister had never been married—not to Flattop Tom or to anybody else. (Her biting Jack’s earlobe had been insincere.)

  Jack was awake for a long time, not only because of the tender ministrations of the former Mrs. Flattop Tom. Emma used to say that Jack’s more than occasional sleeplessness was the plight of a nondrinker in a world of drinkers. (Jack doubted this.) It is fair to say that what the heterosexual Skretkowicz sister could do with the octopus on her ass would keep anyone awake for a long time, but Jack had more on his mind than that interesting octopus.

  He regretted, again, his bad behavior with Robbie de Wit, who had come all the way from Rotterdam out of his love for Alice. Understandably, Robbie would never betray her—to use his word for it. If Jack wanted to know those things his mom had kept from him, or how she’d distorted his dad’s story in her telling of the tale, Jack needed to do his own homework—to make his own discoveries.

  Jack needed to take that trip he’d threatened to take when his mother was still alive. Not to find William, as Miss Wurtz had urged him—at least not yet. Not that trip, but the trip Jack had taken with his mom when he was four.

  Allegedly, when Jack was three, his capacity for consecutive memory was comparable to that of a nine-year-old. At four, his retention of detail and understanding of linear time were equal to an eleven-year-old’s—or so he’d been told. But what if that wasn’t true? What if he’d actually been a normal little boy? A four-year-old whose memory was as easy to manipulate as that of any four-year-old, a four-year-old like any other, whose retention of detail and understanding of linear time were completely unreliable.

  That was why Jack was wide awake. He suddenly knew it was a joke for him to even imagine he could remember what had happened to him in those North Sea ports when he was four, almost thirty years ago! That was the trip Jack needed to take—alone, or certainly not with Leslie Oastler. It was not only a trip he’d already taken; it was possibly a trip he’d largely imagined, or it had been under his mother’s management and she’d imagined it for him.

  It was not the time to look for his father; it was the time to discover if William was worth looking for.

  They’d gone to Copenhagen first. His mother hadn’t manipulated that; at least Jack knew where their trip had started, and where he would soon be returning. “Copenhagen,” he said aloud—not meaning to. As unlikely as this may seem, Jack had forgotten about the Skretkowicz sister, whose strong thigh gripped his waist.

  She’d kicked the covers off; maybe the word Copenhagen had triggered something, because her hips were moving. Long-distance motorcyclists have a certain authority in their hips—in the case of Jack’s Skretkowicz sister, even in her sleep. A green, somewhat startled-looking sea horse was tattooed on her forearm, which was flung across Jack’s chest. The sea horse stared unblinkingly into the flickering light from the weather channel on Emma’s small TV, which was on mute. The Skretkowicz sisters had a long ride ahead of them in the morning; the former Mrs. Flattop Tom had wanted to know the forecast for Ohio.

  There was a storm story on the weather channel. Palm trees were snapped in half, docks had been swept away in high seas, a small boat was smashed on some rocks, breakers were pounding—all without a sound. The blue-green light from the television illuminated the tattoo on Ms. Skretkowicz’s hip; the light threw into relief the barbed dorsal spines near the base of a stingray’s whiplike tail.

  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.

  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 explai
ned. “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.