(2005) Until I Find You

by John Irving

  Richard talked about the difficulty of bringing Miramax around to the idea of hiring William Vanvleck to direct The Slush-Pile Reader—that is, assuming Richard and Jack had a good meeting with The Mad Dutchman. But the idea, Gladstein and Jack agreed, had possibilities. (Bob Bookman had already overnighted Jack’s screenplay to Wild Bill.)

  Richard and Jack also talked about the idea of Lucia Delvecchio in the Michele Maher role. “She’d have to lose about twenty pounds,” Jack told Richard.

  “She’d love to!” Gladstein said. There was little doubt of that, Jack thought. There were a lot of women in Hollywood who wanted to lose twenty pounds—they just needed a reason.

  The more he thought about Wild Bill Vanvleck, the better Jack liked the idea. What had always been wrong with The Remake Monster’s material was the material itself—namely, Wild Bill’s screenplays. Not only how he’d ripped them off from other, better material, but how he went too far; he always pushed the parody past reasonable limits. If you’re irreverent about everything, the audience is left with nothing or no one to like. Conversely, there was sympathy in Emma’s story—both for the too-small slush-pile reader and for the porn star and bad screenwriter with the big penis. Vanvleck had never directed a sympathetic script before.

  Jack wished he could ask Emma what she thought of the idea, but he didn’t think that his working with Wild Bill Vanvleck as a director would necessarily make Emma roll over in her grave.

  Jack went back out in the rain. He passed the Casa Rosso, where they showed porn films and had live-sex shows—more advice-giving, Jack had once believed. He wasn’t tempted to see a show, not even as research for The Slush-Pile Reader.

  He walked once more to the Warmoesstraat police station, but Nico was out working in the red-light district. A couple of young cops, both in uniform, told Jack that they thought William Vanvleck’s TV series about homicide policemen was reasonably authentic. Wild Bill had spent time in the Warmoesstraat station; he’d gone out in the district with real cops on the beat. It was a favorable sign that real policemen actually liked a TV series about cops.

  Jack worked out at a gym on the Rokin. It was a good gym, but the music was too loud and relentless; it made him feel he was rushing, though he was taking his time. His appointment with Femke, which Nico had arranged, wasn’t until four o’clock that afternoon. He was in no hurry. When Jack returned to the Grand from the gym, Nico Oudejans had left a package at the reception desk—a videocassette of Vanvleck’s homicide series.

  Jack showered and shaved, put on some decent clothes, and went out again. The address of Marinus and Jacob Poortvliet’s law firm was on the Singel. Femke, their mother, was retired. Jack saw at once how easy it had been for his mom to confuse him into thinking that Femke occupied a prostitute’s room on the Bergstraat. The Poortvliets’ law office was roughly halfway between the Bergstraat and the Korsjespoortsteeg—virtually around the corner from those streets where the more upscale prostitutes were in business.

  Some small details about the office were familiar; both the cars on the Singel and the pedestrians on the sidewalk were visible from the leather reading chair and the big leather couch. On the walls of the office, a few of the landscapes were also familiar. Jack even remembered the rug, an Oriental.

  Femke was late; Jack talked with her sons. Conservatively dressed gentlemen in their fifties, they’d been university students in 1970. But even people of their generation remembered the controversial organist, William Burns, who’d played for the prostitutes in the Oude Kerk in the early-morning hours. University students had made the organ concerts in the Old Church a favorite among their late-night outings.

  “Some of us considered your father an activist, a social reformer. After all, he expressed a profound sympathy for the prostitutes’ plight,” Marinus told Jack.

  “Others took a view that was common among some of the prostitutes—I’m referring to those women who were not in William’s audience at the Old Church. William was a Holy Roller in their eyes; converting the prostitutes meant nothing less than steering them away from prostitution,” Jacob explained.

  “But he played great,” Marinus said. “No matter what you thought of William, he was a terrific organist.”

  The Poortvliets had a family-law practice; they not only took divorce and child-custody cases, but they also settled inheritance disputes and were engaged in estate planning. What had made William Burns’s case difficult was that he was still a citizen of Scotland, although he had a visa that permitted him to work in Holland for a limited period of time. Alice, who was a Canadian citizen, had no such visa—but in the case of foreigners who were apprenticed to Dutch tattoo artists, the police allowed them several months to earn a tax-free living. After that, they were pressured to leave or pay Dutch taxes.

  There could be no child-custody case in the Dutch courts, because Jack’s mom and dad weren’t Dutch citizens. As outrageously as his mother was exposing Jack to her new life as a prostitute, his father had no means to claim custody of the boy. Alice, however, could be made to leave the country—chiefly on the grounds that, as a prostitute, she had repeatedly engaged in sex with underage boys. And she was a magnet for more widespread condemnation within the prostitute community. (As if the hymn-singing and prayer-chanting in her window and doorway weren’t inflammatory enough, Alice had dragged her four-year-old through the district.)

  “You were carried, day and night, in the arms of that giantess among the whores,” Marinus Poortvliet told Jack.

  “Half the time you were asleep, or as inert as groceries,” his brother, Jacob, said.

  “The prostitutes called you ‘the whole week’s shopping,’ because in that woman’s arms you looked like a bag of groceries that could feed a family for a week,” Marinus explained.

  “So Dutch law had the means to deport my mom, but not to gain custody of me for my dad,” Jack said, just to be sure. The two sons nodded.

  That was when Femke arrived, and Jack once again felt intimidated by her—not because she was a fearsome and different kind of prostitute, but because she struck him as a great initiator. (No matter what experience you thought you’d had, Femke could initiate you into something you’d never known or even imagined.)

  “When I look at you in your movies,” she said to Jack, without bothering to say hello, “I see someone as pretty and talented as your father, but not half so open—so utterly unguarded. You’re very much guarded, aren’t you, Jack Burns?” she asked, seating herself in the leather reading chair. And Jack had once thought she’d taken up that position in her sidewalk window to attract customers off the street!

  “Thank you for seeing me,” Jack said to her.

  “Very much guarded, isn’t he?” she asked her sons, not expecting so much as a nod or a shake of the head from either of them. It wasn’t a real question; Femke had already decided upon the answer.

  At seventy-eight, only a couple of years older than Els, Femke was still shapely without being fat. Her elegance of dress, which she had seemingly been born with, made it abundantly clear to Jack that only an idiot (or a four-year-old) could ever have mistaken her for a whore. Her skin was as unwrinkled as the skin of a well-cared-for woman in her fifties; her hair, which was her own, was a pure snow-white.

  “If only you’d been Dutch, I would have got your dad custody of you in a heartbeat, Jack. I would have happily sent your mother back to Canada childless,” Femke said. “The problem was, your father forgave her. He would forgive her anything, if she just promised to do the right thing by you.”

  “Meaning good schools, a safe neighborhood, and some vestige of stability?” Jack asked.

  “Those aren’t bad things, are they?” Femke said. “You seem to be both educated and alive. I daresay, in the direction your mom was headed, that wouldn’t have happened here. Besides, she was at least beginning to accept that William would never come back to her—that began to happen in Helsinki. But that William would accept the pain of losing all contact with yo
u—if Alice would just take you back to Canada and look after you, as a mother should—well, what a surprise that was! To your mother and to me. We didn’t expect him to agree to it! But we’d both underestimated what a good Christian William was.” Femke did not say Christian in an approving way. “I was just the negotiator, Jack. I wanted to drive a harder bargain for your dad. But what can you do when the warring parties agree? Is a deal not a deal?”

  “You drove him to the docks, in Rotterdam?” Jack asked her. “They both went along with it, right till the end?”

  Femke looked out the window at the slowly passing traffic on the Singel. “Your little face on the ship’s deck was the only smiling face I saw, Jack. Your mother had to hold you up, so you could see over the rail. You were waving to that giant whore. The way your dad dropped to the ground, I thought he’d had a heart attack. I thought I’d be taking a body back to Amsterdam—in all likelihood, in the backseat of my Mercedes. The big prostitute picked him up and carried him to my car; she carried him as easily as she used to carry you! Mind you, I still thought your dad was dead. I didn’t want William in the front seat, but that’s where the huge whore put him. I could see then that he was alive, but barely. ‘What have I done? How could I? What am I, Femke?’ your father asked me. ‘You’re a flaming Christian, William. You forgive too much,’ I told him. But the deal was done, and your dad was the only man on earth who would stick to his side of a bargain like that. From the look of you, Jack, your mom stuck to her side of the bargain, too—sort of.”

  At that moment, Jack hated them both—his mother and his father. In his mom’s case, the reasons were pretty obvious. In his dad’s case, Jack suddenly saw him as a quitter. William Burns had given up on his son! Jack was furious. Femke, a retired lawyer but a good one, could see the fury on Jack’s face.

  “Oh, get over it. Don’t be a baby!” she told him. “What’s a grown man in good health doing wallowing around in the past? Just move on, Jack. Get married, try being a good husband—and be a good father to your children. With any luck, you’ll see how hard it is. Stop judging them—I mean William and your mother!”

  From the way her two grown sons fussed over her, Jack could tell that they adored her. Femke once more looked out the window; there was something final about the way she turned her face in profile to Jack, as if their meeting were over and she had nothing more to say. Nico Oudejans had asked her to see Jack, and she probably had a fair amount of respect for Nico—more than she had for Jack. She’d done her duty, her face in profile said; Femke wasn’t freely going to offer Jack more information.

  “If I could just ask you if you know what happened to him—starting with where he went,” Jack said to her. “I assume he didn’t stay in Am-sterdam.”

  “Of course William didn’t stay,” she said. “Not when he could imagine you on every street corner—not when your mother’s image was engraved in the lewd posture of every prostitute, in every gaudy window and dirty doorway in the district!”

  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?