(2005) Until I Find You

by John Irving

  Please return the stamped, self-addressed postcard—checking the appropriate box.

  Yours,

  Jack

  On a postcard of the Oudezijds Voorburgwal canal, he gave Michele the following options.

  o No.

  o Yes. Let’s talk about it!

  Love,

  Michele

  Of course he didn’t send that letter or the postcard. For one thing, he didn’t have a U.S. stamp for the return delivery; for another, the “Love, Michele” was taking a lot for granted after fifteen years.

  His second day alone, Jack almost went to see Els again in her apartment on the Sint Jacobsstraat. He didn’t want to sleep with a prostitute in her seventies—he just liked Els.

  Mainly Jack would lie awake at night—imagining his little face on the ship’s deck, where his mother had lifted him above the rail. Jack was just smiling, and waving to beat the band, while the damage was being done around him—especially to his dad.

  In Hamburg, maybe William had met someone; that might have helped him to forget Jack, if he’d ever managed to forget his son. After all, he’d had a correspondence with Miss Wurtz when Jack was attending St. Hilda’s. It wasn’t as if William had stopped thinking about Jack, cold.

  When Richard arrived, he went straight to bed and Jack went back to the gym. Jack was eating more carbs and had changed his weightlifting routine; he’d managed to put on a few pounds, but Jack was still no Jimmy Stronach. (Not that there was anything he could have done to acquire Jimmy’s penis.)

  In the gym on the Rokin, possibly in a failing effort to drown out the awful music in the weight room, Jack tried singing that ditty his mother had sung only when she was drunk or stoned—the one that seemed to resurrect her Scottish accent.

  Oh, I’ll never be a kittie

  or a cookie

  or a tail.

  The one place worse than

  Dock Place

  is the Port o’ Leith jail.

  No, I’ll never be a kittie,

  of one true thing I’m sure—

  I won’t end up on Dock Place

  and I’ll never be a hure.

  How funny that it had once been Alice’s mantra to never be a whore.

  Jack thought of their nightly prayer, which—when he was a child—they usually said together. He remembered one night in Amsterdam when she fell asleep before he did, and he said the prayer by himself. Jack had spoken a little louder than usual, because he had to pray for the two of them. “The day Thou gavest, Lord, is ended. Thank You for it.” (Of course that had probably happened more than once.)

  Jack took a footbridge across the canal on his way back to the Grand. He stood on the bridge and watched a sightseeing boat drift by. In the stern, a small boy sat looking up at the footbridge—his face pressed to the glass. Jack waved, but the boy didn’t wave back.

  It was already dark when Jack walked with Richard Gladstein to the Herengracht, to a restaurant called Zuid Zeeland, where they were meeting William Vanvleck. Jack was in no mood for the meeting. He kept thinking about the other William—the one he would have loved but was afraid to meet.

  V

  Dr. García

  31

  Therapy

  Five years later—as if striking the match that would set fire to Jack’s life in Los Angeles, strip his character bare, and ultimately lead him to seek his father—a young woman (younger than he realized at the time) sat not quite fully clothed on Jack’s living-room couch in that forlorn dump he still lived in on Entrada Drive. She was thumbing through his address book, which she’d picked up off his desk, and reading aloud the women’s names. In an insinuating tone of voice, she would first say the name and then guess what relationship Jack might have had, or still had, with the woman.

  This juvenile behavior should have alerted him to the fact that she was clearly younger than she’d told him she was—not that Jack shouldn’t have guessed her real age for other reasons. But he did have difficulties with math.

  She got into the G’s before Jack said, “That’s enough,” and took his address book away from her; that’s when the trouble really started.

  “Elena García,” the girl had just said. “Your cleaning lady, or former cleaning lady? You definitely fucked her.”

  Elena García—Dr. García—was Jack’s psychiatrist. He had never had sex with her. For five years, Dr. García had not once been a love interest—but Jack had never depended on anyone to the degree that he depended on her. Elena García knew more about Jack Burns than anyone had ever known—including Emma Oastler.

  Jack had often called Dr. García in tears, not always but sometimes in the middle of the night. He’d called her from Cannes—once when he was at a party at the Hôtel du Cap. That same day Jack had pushed a female photographer, a stalker paparazzo, off a chartered yacht; he’d had to pay an outrageous fine.

  Another time, he banged some bimbo on the beach of the Hotel Martinez. She said she was an actress, but she turned out to be one of those Croisette dog-walkers; she’d been arrested for fucking on the beach before. And Jack should have won the Palme d’Or for bad behavior for the fracas he got into in that glass-and-concrete eyesore, the Palais des Festivals. This happened after the evening’s red-carpet promenade. Jack was on a narrow staircase leading to one of the Palais’s upstairs rooms. Some journalist shoved him into one of those thugs who comprise the festival’s security staff; the security guy thought that Jack had purposely shoved him, which led to Jack’s impromptu lateral drop. Chenko would have been proud of Jack for the perfect execution of his move—Coaches Clum, Hudson, and Shapiro, too—but the incident was in all the papers. The security thug broke his collarbone, and Jack got another stiff fine. The weaselly French!

  Lastly, from his ocean-front suite at the Carlton, Jack poured a whole bottle of Taittinger (chilled) onto that former agent Lawrence. The fink was giving Jack the finger from the terrace. Lawrence was just the kind of asshole you ran into at Cannes. Jack hated Cannes.

  From Dr. García’s point of view, Jack’s behavior was only marginally better in Venice, Deauville, and Toronto—the three film festivals where Richard Gladstein, Wild Bill Vanvleck, Lucia Delvecchio, and Jack promoted The Slush-Pile Reader. (A recent headline in Variety—LOTS OF LIBIDO ON THE LIDO—could have been written about Jack Burns.)

  They had a very good run with what Jack would usually call Emma’s movie; careerwise, it may have been Jack’s best year. They shot the film in the fall of ’98 and took it to those festivals in August and September of ’99—before the premieres in New York and London near the end of that year.

  There was the unfortunate incident with Lucia Delvecchio in the Hotel des Bains in Venice; she’d had too much to drink, and bitterly regretted having slept with Jack. But no one knew—not even Richard or Wild Bill. And no one except Lucia’s husband, who was not in Venice, would have cared. Bad things happened in that languid lagoon.

  “Don’t be so hard on yourself,” Jack told Lucia. “The whole city is sinking. Visconti shot Death in Venice in the Hotel des Bains. I think he knew what he was doing.”

  But it was mostly Jack’s fault. Lucia had been drunk; he knew she was married. That precipitated another call to Dr. García. He called her from the Hotel Normandie in Deauville, too. (It wasn’t Lucia that time; worse, it was an older member of the jury.)

  “The older-woman thing again?” Dr. García had asked Jack on the phone.

  “I guess so,” he’d told her.

  Jack was with Mrs. Oastler at the Toronto film festival when they screened The Slush-Pile Reader in Roy Thomson Hall—a packed house, a triumphant night. It was gratifying to show the film in Emma’s hometown. But Leslie had a new girlfriend, a blonde, who didn’t like Jack. The blonde wanted him to remove all his clothes from Mrs. Oastler’s house. Jack didn’t think Leslie cared whether he left his clothes in her house or not, but the blonde wanted him (and his things) gone.

  Jack was in Mrs. Oastler’s familiar kitchen when the blo
nde handed him the two photographs of his mother’s naked torso and the Until I find you tattoo. “Those are Leslie’s,” he explained. “I have two photos; she has the other two.”

  “Take them,” the blonde told him. “Your mother’s dead, Jack. Leslie doesn’t want to look at her breasts anymore.”

  “I don’t want to look at them anymore, either,” Jack said, but he took the photos. Now he had all four—these in addition to that photograph of Emma naked at seventeen.

  Mrs. Oastler’s mansion, as Jack used to think of it, was different with the blonde there. Leslie’s bedroom door was usually closed; it was hard to imagine Mrs. Oastler closing her bathroom door, too, but maybe the blonde had taught her how to do it.

  That trip to Toronto, Jack resisted sleeping with Bonnie Hamilton. She wanted to sell him an apartment in a new condo being built in Rosedale. “For when you tire of Los Angeles,” Bonnie told him. But Toronto wasn’t his town, notwithstanding that he had long been tired of L.A.

  When he was in Toronto, Jack had a less than heart-to-heart talk with Caroline Wurtz. She was disappointed in him; she thought he should be looking for his father. Jack couldn’t tell her half of what he’d learned on his return trip to the North Sea. He was in no shape to talk about it. It was all he could do to tell the story to Dr. García, and too often he couldn’t talk to her, either. He tried, but the words wouldn’t come—or he would start to shout or cry.

  It was Dr. García’s opinion that Jack shouted and cried too much. “Especially the crying—it’s simply indecent for a man,” she said. “You really should work on that.” To that end, she encouraged Jack to tell her what had happened to him in chronological order. “Begin with that awful trip you took with your mother,” Dr. García instructed him. “Don’t tell me what you now know about that trip. Tell me what you thought happened at the time. Begin with what you first imagined were your memories. And try not to jump ahead more than is absolutely necessary. In other words, go easy on the foreshadowing, Jack.” Later, after he began—with Copenhagen, when he was four—Dr. García would frequently say: “Try not to interject so much. I know you’re not a writer, but just try to stick to the story.”

  It hurt Jack’s feelings to hear her say that he wasn’t a writer; it felt especially unfair after his not-inconsiderable contributions to Emma’s screenplay of The Slush-Pile Reader.

  And to recite out loud the story of his life—that is, coherently and in chronological order—would take years! Dr. García knew that; she was in no hurry. She took one look at what a mess Jack was and knew only that she had to find a way to make him stop shouting and crying.

  “It’s woefully apparent that you can’t tell me your life story without everyone in the waiting room hearing you,” she said. “Believe me, it’s only tolerable to listen to you if you calm down.”

  “Where does it end?” Jack asked Dr. García, when he’d been spilling his life story aloud for four, going on five, years.

  “Well, it ends with looking for your father—or at least finding out what happened to him,” Dr. García said. “But you’re not ready for that part, not until you can spit out all the rest of it. The end of it, Jack, is where you find him—that’s the last place you have to go. You’re not through with traveling.”

  Jack too hastily concluded that if his retelling of his life were a book, for example, his finding his father would be the last chapter.

  “I doubt it,” Dr. García said. “Maybe your penultimate chapter, if you’re lucky. When you find him, Jack, you’re going to learn something you didn’t know before, aren’t you? I trust that the learning part will take an additional chapter.”

  And the whole thing had to have a name, too, didn’t it? There had to be a title to the story of his life, which Jack was reciting—with such restraint and in chronological order—to his psychiatrist. But Jack knew the name of his life story before he started telling it; the first day he went to see Dr. García, when he’d been unable to tell her anything without shouting or crying, Jack knew that his mother’s Until I find you tattoo had been her crowning deception. Certainly she’d been proudest of it; why else, if only after her death, had Alice wanted Leslie Oastler to show Jack the photographs?

  “Why show me at all?” he’d asked his mom.

  “I was beautiful once!” Alice had cried—meaning her breasts, when she was younger, he’d thought at the time, but the tattoo was what interested Jack.

  She’d been so proud of keeping the tattoo from him that, even after everything, Alice had wanted him to see it! From the time he was four, that Until I find you tattoo said everything there was to say about Jack Burns.

  As a psychiatrist, Dr. García was the opposite of an editor. Jack was not supposed to delete anything—he was instructed to leave nothing out. And not infrequently, Dr. García wanted more. She required “corroborating details.” Instances of what Dr. García had identified, early on, as Jack’s older-woman thing could not be overemphasized; in his boyhood, the seemingly unmotivated cruelty and aggressiveness he encountered in older girls was “an underlying problem.” What was it about Jack that had provoked those older girls?

  Ditto the penis-holding. Most surprising in Jack’s case, in Dr. García’s experience, was how this didn’t necessarily lead to having sex. Then there was the closeness he’d felt to his mom as a child, but how swiftly and absolutely they had grown estranged; it was almost as if Jack knew that Alice’s lies were lies before he actually found out.

  Dr. García was further puzzled by the Emma relationship, which stood in contrast (but bore certain similarities) to Jack’s relationship with Leslie Oastler. Did he still want to sleep with Leslie? Dr. García wanted to know. If so, why? If not, why not?

  Dr. García was a stickler for thoroughness. “I think I’m done with the St. Hilda’s part,” Jack had told her on several occasions.

  “Oh, no—you’re not,” Dr. García had said. “A boy with looks like yours in an all-girls’ school? Are you kidding? You’re not only not done with St. Hilda’s, Jack—you may never be done with it!”

  Jack got tired of all the contradictions—his inglorious return to the North Sea, especially. But not Dr. García; there couldn’t be too many contradictions for her. “How long’s it been since you thought about dressing as a girl?” she asked him. “I don’t mean in a movie!” (He must have hesitated.) “You see?” she said. “Give me more contradictions—give me all you’ve got, Jack.”

  Jack sometimes felt he wasn’t seeing a psychiatrist—it was more like taking a creative writing class, but with nothing on paper to show for it. And when Dr. García gave him an actual writing assignment, he almost stopped the therapy altogether. She wanted him to write letters to Michele Maher—not to send to Michele, but to read out loud at their therapy sessions.

  “There’s no way I can explain myself to Michele,” Jack told his psychiatrist. At the time, it had been more than a year—closer to two years—since Michele had written him. He still hadn’t answered her letter.

  “But explaining yourself to Michele is what you want to do, isn’t it?” Dr. García asked him. He couldn’t deny that.

  It was further unnerving that Dr. García’s office was on Montana Avenue in Santa Monica, within walking distance of that breakfast place where he’d first met Myra Ascheim—another older woman who had changed his life.

  “Fascinating,” Dr. García said. “But don’t tell me about it now. Please keep everything in chronological order, Jack.”

  In 2000, when Jack won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, Dr. García found it “illuminating” that he referred to the award (and the statuette itself) as Emma’s Oscar. But Dr. García wouldn’t allow him to tell her his feelings. Even the Oscar had to be rendered in chronological order.

  And Dr. García disapproved of his first actual communication with Michele Maher, for several reasons. In the first place, Jack hadn’t shown the doctor the letter he wrote Michele before he mailed it; in the second place, it was a ridiculous
letter to have sent Michele after almost eighteen years of nothing between them.

  But when Jack was nominated for two Academy Awards (one for Best Supporting Actor and the other for the screenplay), he felt he had a golden opportunity to make contact with Michele Maher—while at the same time sounding casual about getting together.

  Dear Michele,

  I don’t know if you’re married, or otherwise attached to someone, but—if you’re not—would you be my date at the Academy Awards? This would mean coming to Los Angeles—Sunday, March 26. Naturally, I would take care of your travel expenses and hotel accommodations.

  Yours truly,

  Jack Burns

  What was wrong with that? Wasn’t it polite, and to the point? (Michele’s answer, which was prompt, was a little wishy-washy.)

  Dear Jack,

  Gosh, I would love to! But I have a boyfriend, sort of. I don’t live with anyone, but I’m seeing someone—as they say. Of course I’m very flattered that you thought of me—after all these years! I’ll make a point of actually staying up to watch the awards this year, and I’ll keep my fingers crossed for you.

  Best regards,

  Michele

  “It’s hard to tell if she really wanted to go, isn’t it?” Jack asked Dr. García, which prompted his psychiatrist’s third reason for disapproving of his letter to Michele.

  “Jack, you are very fortunate that Michele turned you down,” Dr. García said. “What a wreck you would have been if she’d said yes! If she’d been your date, you would have blown it.”

  Jack didn’t think this was fair. He could have had a ball with the media—just telling them that his date for the Academy Awards was his dermatologist! But Dr. García was not amused; she considered his faux pas of inviting Michele Maher to the Oscars to be “in the denial category.” Dr. García said that Jack was completely unaware of how far removed he was from the normal world, of normal people and normal relationships.