(2005) Until I Find You

by John Irving

  Jack talked to the band members between sets. The young Finns in the pub were shy about speaking to Jack, although they did their share of staring. When the Irish folksingers went back to work, a couple of Finnish girls started talking to Jack. They didn’t seem all that brave; in fact, they were very tentative. He couldn’t tell what they expected, or what they wanted to happen. First one of them began to flirt with him; then she stopped flirting and the other one started.

  “You can’t dance to this music,” the one who’d stopped flirting remarked.

  “You look like you don’t need music to dance,” the one who’d started flirting said to Jack.

  “That’s right,” he told her.

  “I suppose you think I was suggesting something,” she said.

  Jack wasn’t about to mess up his memory of Ingrid Moe by sleeping with either of the Finns, or with both of them. He thought he was hungry enough to eat a little something. But when he said good night to the Finnish girls, one of them remarked: “I guess we’re not what you’re looking for.”

  “Actually,” Jack told them, “I’m looking for a couple of lesbians.” What a waste of a good end line—in O’Malley’s Irish pub in Helsinki, of all places!

  He went to the lobby of the Torni and asked the concierge if there was still a restaurant called Salve. “It used to be popular with sailors,” Jack said.

  “Not anymore,” the concierge told him. “And I’m not sure it’s the right place for Jack Burns to walk into. It’s a local place.” (Given the moviegoing crowd in O’Malley’s Irish pub, Jack was glad he’d registered at the Torni as Jimmy Stronach.)

  Jack went up to his room and changed into what Leslie Oastler called his “tattoo-parlor clothes”—jeans and a black turtleneck. Mrs. Oastler had also packed Emma’s bomber jacket; the sleeves were way too long on Jack, but he loved it.

  It still felt cold enough to snow when he walked into Salve—an old-fashioned restaurant, the kind of place where you got fairly ordinary but home-cooked meals. If, as he’d once imagined, Helsinki was a tough town in which to be afflicted with self-doubts, Jack could see what the concierge had meant about a movie star showing up at Salve. Surely some of the locals were moviegoers; maybe they just hadn’t liked Jack Burns’s movies.

  The waitresses were as he’d remembered them—hard-worked and fairly long-of-tooth. Jack was thinking about the tough waitress who’d been married to Sami Salo, the scratcher; she would have fit right in twenty-eight years later. She’d been tough enough to call Alice “dearie,” Jack recalled—although he wondered if the bad feelings between them had really been about his mom putting Sami out of business.

  Jack remembered Mrs. Sami Salo, if that’s who she was, as a short, stout woman whose clothes were too tight. She’d squinted whenever she took a step, as though her feet hurt her; her fat arms had jiggled.

  He was trying not to look at anybody too closely—certainly not to meet anyone’s eye—when the waitress came up to his table, which needed wiping. She used a wet dishcloth. Jack tried not to look too hard at her, either. She was as thin as Mrs. Sami Salo had been fat, or maybe only Mrs. Salo’s arms had been fat. He couldn’t remember. The thin waitress had hunched shoulders and a coarse complexion, but there was a kind of tired prettiness in her long face and catlike eyes; when she stood facing Jack at his table, she cocked one hip to the side as if her legs were tired, too.

  “I hope you’re meeting someone,” she said. “You didn’t come here alone, did you?”

  “Isn’t it all right to come here alone?” he asked.

  “It’s not all right for you to come here alone,” she told him. “It might be safer for you to come here as a girl.”

  “I was hoping you could tell me where to get a tattoo,” Jack said. “This used to be the place to ask.”

  “I’m the one to ask,” the waitress said. “Seriously—if you aren’t meeting someone here, you better be sure you leave with someone.”

  “What about the tattoo?” he asked.

  “Movie stars shouldn’t get tattooed,” she told him. “It ruins you for the nude scenes.”

  “There’s makeup for that,” Jack said.

  “You probably shouldn’t get tattooed alone, either,” the waitress said. “Are you here making a movie?”

  “Actually, I’m looking for a couple of lesbians. But I’ll start with where to get a tattoo,” he told her. She smiled for the first time; she was missing an eyetooth, which was probably why she was disinclined to smile.

  “If you’re alone, I’ll go home with you,” the waitress said. “You can’t do much with a couple of lesbians.” She could tell he was thinking about it—another close-up opportunity. But Jack was suddenly tired, and he wanted to hold on to the memory of Ingrid Moe a little longer. “I’m not really old enough to be your mother,” the waitress added. “I just look it.”

  “It’s not that. I’m just too tired,” he told her. “I’ve been traveling.”

  “If you end up here, you’ve been traveling, all right,” she said.

  “I’ll have the Arctic char, please,” Jack said.

  “What are you drinking?”

  “I don’t drink,” he told her.

  “I’ll bring you a beer,” the waitress said. “You can just pretend you’re drinking it.”

  She was wise to do that, because the locals kept toasting him—all through his dinner. The toasts were somehow sinister, even hostile—more challenging than friendly. Jack would raise his beer glass and pretend to swallow. They didn’t seem to notice that his glass stayed full, or they didn’t care. If there were Jack Burns fans in Finland, they had a way of masking their affection.

  Jack didn’t go home with the waitress. She was nice about it. She made him wait at the table while she called him a taxi. Only when the cab was parked outside would she release him; she even walked him to the door, holding his arm the whole way.

  “My name is Marianne. There are much more difficult names in Finland,” she said.

  “I’ll bet there are, Marianne.”

  She gave him a black-and-white business card; it was a little scary. The place was called The Duck’s Tattoo. There was an excellent drawing of Donald Duck, but he was smoking a blunt—a cigar filled with marijuana. His eyes were fried and he looked raving mad. Someone had wrapped a snake around the reefer-smoking duck, more in the manner of a straitjacket than a shawl.

  There was a phone number written on the back of the business card. “That’s my number,” Marianne told Jack. “I’ve got a couple of tattoos I could show you, if you’re ever not too tired.”

  “Thank you, Marianne.”

  “The tattooist you want to see is Diego,” she said.

  “Not a Finnish name, I guess.”

  “Diego’s Italian, but he was born in Finland,” Marianne said. “He’s been in business here for fifteen years.”

  The Duck’s Tattoo was on Kalevankatu—about a ten-minute walk from the Torni, the concierge said the next morning. The concierge also sent Jack to a gym near the hotel, Kuntokeskus Motivus. (“Call it Motivus for short,” the concierge had recommended.) It was clean, with lots of free weights, but Jack was distracted during his workout by a pregnancy-aerobics class. The bouncing women were doing dangerous-looking things.

  On his way to The Duck’s Tattoo, Jack passed a porn shop. One of the magazines in the window was a German one called Schwangere Girls. All the women were pregnant; more bouncing women doing dangerous-looking things. Pregnancy seemed to have made itself the unwanted theme of Jack’s day.

  Helsinki struck him as a warren of construction sites. He found himself in a part of the city that had been built by the Russians a hundred years before. The Duck’s Tattoo was opposite the former Russian Army Hospital. It had been a sailors’ neighborhood, with lots of sailors’ pubs and restaurants—like Salve used to be—but the neighborhood was growing trendier by the day, Diego later told Jack.

  Diego was a small man with friendly eyes and a goatee; his forearms wer
e completely covered with tattoos. One was a rather formal portrait of a woman, almost like a photograph. Another was an entirely less formal-looking woman, who was naked; in fact, she was naked with a duck. Diego had other tattoos, but the naked woman with the duck was the one Jack would remember best.

  He liked Diego, who’d never met Daughter Alice but had heard of her. Diego had three children and was not a regular participant at the tattoo conventions. He’d studied with Verber in Berlin; he’d worked in Cape Town, South Africa. He was planning a trip to Thailand to get a handmade tattoo by a monk in a monastery. “A chest tattoo,” he called it. He was inclined to “big works,” Diego said—both getting them and doing them. He’d recently copied a whole movie poster onto someone’s back.

  Diego had two apprentices working with him. One of them was a muscleman in camouflage pants and a black Jack Daniel’s T-shirt. The other was a blond woman named Taru. Evidently Taru did the piercing; she had a silver stud in her tongue. There was another guy in The Duck’s Tattoo—a friend of Diego’s named Nipa, who told Jack a fairly involved story about accidentally dropping a paperback novel in a toilet. It was his favorite novel, Nipa said, and he was trying to figure out a way to dry it.

  Jack talked to Diego about the relationship between sailors and tattooing. Diego had his first boat when he was just fourteen. The flash in The Duck’s Tattoo was impressive: Indian chiefs, dragons, skulls, birds, Harley engines, and many cartoon characters, like The Joker—and ducks, of course, lots of edgy ducks.

  Diego admitted he wasn’t much of a moviegoer—he mentioned his three children again—but Taru, the piercer, and the muscleman in the Jack Daniel’s T-shirt had seen all of Jack’s films. (Nipa told Jack he was more of a book person than a movie person, as one might surmise from the toilet accident.)

  “I don’t suppose you ever tattooed an organist named William Burns,” Jack said to Diego. “Tattoo artists call him The Music Man. I guess most of his tattoos are music. He might be a full-body.”

  “Might be!” Diego said, laughing. “I never tattooed him—I never met the guy—but from what I hear, The Music Man hasn’t got a whole lot of skin left!”

  When Jack got back to his room at the Hotel Torni, he tried to write a letter to Michele Maher. As a dermatologist, maybe she would know why some people with full-body tattoos felt cold. It was a strange way to start a letter to someone he’d not written or spoken to for fifteen years, and quite possibly the full-body people only thought they felt cold. What if the part about feeling cold was all in their minds and had nothing to do with their skin?

  Tattoo artists themselves didn’t agree about the full-body types; Alice had believed that most full-bodies felt cold, but some of the tattooists Jack met at his mom’s memorial service told him that many full-bodies felt normal.

  “The ones who feel cold were either cold or crazy to begin with,” North Dakota Dan had said.

  But how else could Jack begin a letter to Michele Maher after fifteen years of silence?

  Dear Michele,

  Here I am in Helsinki, looking for a couple of lesbians. What’s up with you?

  How was that for too weird? Jack crumpled up the piece of stationery. Perhaps a more general beginning would be better.

  Dear Michele,

  Guess what? My mother died. It turns out she lied to me about my father—maybe about a lot of other things. I’m in Europe, where I once believed my dad had slept with just about everyone he met, but it turns out that my mom was the one who was sleeping with everybody—among them a twelve- or thirteen-year-old boy and a couple of lesbians.

  Interesting, huh? The things you think you know!

  Jack crumpled up another page. He was beginning to believe that the only way he could communicate with Michele Maher was if he developed a skin problem. But wait! Hadn’t she written to him to wish him luck on his adaptation of The Slush-Pile Reader? Michele was an Emma Oastler fan! Perhaps a more literary approach would impress her.

  Dear Michele,

  Thank you for your letter. Yes, I was close to Emma Oastler, although we never actually had sex. Emma just held my penis. And of course, as with any adaptation, I have had to take some liberties with her novel. The name of the porn star, for example—I don’t exactly look like a Miguel Santiago, do I? And please don’t think there will be any actual porn-film footage in The Slush-Pile Reader; it won’t be that kind of movie. The pornography will be sort of implied. Besides, I have what I’m told is a rather small (or smallish) penis.

  Jack couldn’t write a letter to Michele Maher. He was too weird for Michele, or for anyone else who wasn’t desperately lonely or crazy or a kid or grief-stricken (or otherwise depressed) or cheating on her husband or tattooed (with an octopus on her ass) or an old lady!

  Besides, he had used up what pathetically little stationery the Hotel Torni provided for guests. Jack blamed the day on the agitation the pregnancy-aerobics class had caused him—not to mention the added stress of seeing Schwangere Girls. He was even tempted to go buy the magazine, but what he really wanted—and this truly disturbed him—was to have sex with a nice pregnant woman. (Like a wife, Jack was thinking; like someone who was going to have his baby; like Michele Maher, he kept hoping.)

  More realistically, because he wasn’t hungry or too tired, Jack could try his luck with whomever he might pick up downstairs—in O’Malley’s—or he could call the waitress at Salve. But by the time Marianne got off work, Jack probably would be too tired. And the very idea of looking for a brave girl in O’Malley’s Irish pub was humiliating.

  There was still some daylight left in the sky when Jack called Sibelius Academy, the music college, and asked if there was anyone who might be able to tell him the whereabouts of two of their graduates in the early 1970s. The matter was complicated. Not only did it take the college a little time to connect him with someone who spoke English; Jack didn’t even know the last names of the graduates. (Talk about taking a stab in the dark!)

  “I know it sounds crazy,” Jack said, “but Hannele was a cellist and Ritva was an organist, and I think they were a couple.”

  “A couple?” the woman who spoke English said on the phone. She had the doubting tone of voice of a knowledgeable bookseller who’s convinced that the title of the book you’re asking for is not the correct one.

  “Yes, I mean a lesbian couple,” he said.

  The woman sighed. “I suppose you’re a journalist,” she said. Her tone of voice was worse than doubting now; she couldn’t have made journalist sound any nastier if she’d said rapist.

  “No, I’m Jack Burns—the actor,” he told her. “I believe these women were students of my father, William Burns—the organist. I met them when I was a child. They also knew my mother.”

  “Well, well,” the woman said. “Am I truly speaking with the Jack Burns—I mean really?”

  “Yes, really.”

  “Well, well,” she said again. “Hannele and Ritva aren’t as famous as you are, Mr. Burns, but they’re rather famous in Finland.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really,” the woman said. “It would be hard for them to hide in Helsinki. Practically anyone could tell you where to find them.” Jack waited while the woman sighed again; she was taking the time to choose her next words very carefully. “It’s an awful temptation, Jack Burns, but I’ll refrain from asking you what you’re wearing.”

  Later Jack called room service and ordered something to eat; he also called the front desk and requested more Hotel Torni stationery. He resisted both the faint impulse to explore O’Malley’s and the slightly stronger desire to call Marianne the waitress and ask to see her tattoos.

  The next morning he got up early again and went to the Motivus gym.

  He wasn’t at all sure how to approach Hannele and Ritva. The un-pronounceable church where the two musicians practiced every midday was called Temppeliaukion kirkko. The Church in the Rock, as it was also called, was more famous in Helsinki than Hannele and Ritva. It was underground
, buried under a dome of rock—an ultramodern design, presumably done for the acoustics. There were numerous concerts there—these in addition to the Sunday services, which were Lutheran. (“Very Lutheran,” the woman from Sibelius Academy had told Jack—whatever that meant.)

  Ritva was the regular organist at the principal Sunday service, but Hannele often accompanied her. Jack had inquired if much music had been written for organ and cello—he certainly hadn’t heard any—but the woman from Sibelius Academy said that Ritva and Hannele were famous for being “improvisational.” They were a most improvisational couple, Jack had already imagined. Indeed, if they’d both slept with Alice—yet they’d managed to stay a couple, as Ingrid Moe had told Jack—Hannele and Ritva were no strangers to successful experimentation.

  Even their rehearsals were famous. People often went to the Church in the Rock during their lunch break just to hear Hannele and Ritva practice. Jack imagined that it wouldn’t be easy to speak with them in such an atmosphere; in those surroundings, Hannele and Ritva and Jack were too well known to be afforded any privacy. Maybe he should just show up at the church in the early afternoon and invite them to dinner.

  Jack was finishing his workout on the ab machine in the gym when his thoughts were interrupted. About half a dozen sweaty women from the pregnancy-aerobics class had surrounded him; Jack guessed that their workout, their dangerous-looking bouncing, was over. Given his Michele Maher state of mind—not to mention his disturbing memories of the Schwangere Girls magazine—these pregnant women were an intimidating presence.

  “Hi,” he said, from flat on his back.

  “Hi,” the aerobics instructor replied. She was a dark-haired young woman with an arresting oval face and almond-shaped eyes. Because her back had been turned to him during the aerobics class, Jack hadn’t noticed that she was pregnant, too; he’d watched her lead the leaping women from behind.

  “You look like Jack Burns, that actor,” the most pregnant-looking of the women said. Jack wouldn’t have been surprised to learn, later, that these were her last words before going into labor.