by John Irving
Then there was a breakfast party in another area of the Beverly Hills Hotel. They went to that, too. It must have started at three or four in the morning. Roger Ebert was there; he was eating his breakfast on a bed, which Jack found peculiar. Jack was nice to him, although Roger had savaged The Slush-Pile Reader. Roger’s wife and daughter were very nice; they informed Miss Wurtz that they’d liked the movie. It pleased Jack to think that he and Emma might have caused an argument in the Ebert family.
It was about 5:00 A.M. when Jack told Miss Wurtz that he was tired and wanted to go to bed. “We can go back to our hotel, Jack,” she told him, “but you can’t go to bed. Not until you tell me about the second time in Amsterdam.” She’d had it on her mind the whole night, The Wurtz went on to say. She knew she couldn’t sleep until she heard the story.
Jack told Erica that they had to leave, and she rode with them in the limo back to the Four Seasons. On a side street in Beverly Hills, they got stuck behind a garbage truck—the only traffic they encountered at that time on a Monday morning. The smell of the garbage wafted over them in their limousine, as if to remind Jack—even with his newly won Oscar in hand—that there are some things you can’t escape, and they will find you.
Jack was okay telling Miss Wurtz about the Amsterdam business; only the end of the story was difficult. Dr. García would have been proud of him—no tears, no shouting. When Jack told Caroline how his heart wasn’t in that first meeting with Richard Gladstein and William Vanvleck—that he kept thinking about the other William—the southern California sun was streaming in the open windows of the living room of the two-bedroom suite at the Four Seasons. Miss Wurtz and Jack were seated on the couch in their matching white terry-cloth bathrobes—their bare feet on the glass-topped coffee table, where the Oscar gleamed. Caroline’s toenails were painted a rose-pink color. The sunlight seemed especially bright on her toenails, and on the Oscar—and on the lustrous black piano, which was shining like a pool of oil.
“Don’t look at my feet, Jack,” Miss Wurtz said. “My feet are the oldest part of me. I must have been born feet first.”
But Jack Burns was miles away, in the dark of night—the streetlights reflecting in the Herengracht canal. Richard Gladstein and Wild Bill Vanvleck and Jack had been talking in the restaurant called Zuid Zeeland, and Wild Bill’s much younger girlfriend—Anneke, the anchorwoman—was looking restless and bored. (How much fun is it to be young and green-eyed and beautiful, and have three men talking to one another and ignoring you—especially when they’re talking about how to make a movie from a novel you haven’t read?)
As little as Jack’s heart was in it, he saw that he and Richard and Wild Bill were all on the same page; they seemed to agree about what needed tweaking in the script, and about the tone the film must have. Richard’s eyes kept closing—he was falling asleep because of his jet lag. Wild Bill was teasing him, to the effect that Richard was not allowed to fall asleep before he signed the check. “Producers pay the bills!” Vanvleck was chanting; he was a man who loved his red wine.
Out on the Herengracht, Richard woke up a little in the damp night air. It seemed inevitable to Jack now that Wild Bill would suggest a stroll through the red-light district, but it took him by surprise at the time. When they walked past the first few girls in their windows and doorways, Jack could tell that Richard was wide awake. Anneke was still bored. Jack had the feeling that Wild Bill took all his out-of-town friends on a tour of the red-light district; after all, it was the homicide territory of his TV series and he knew the district well. (Almost as well as Jack knew it, but Jack didn’t let on that he’d ever been there before.)
Anneke livened up a little, most noticeably when she observed how the prostitutes in their windows and doorways recognized Jack Burns as frequently as they recognized her. As an attractive anchorwoman, she was a famous fixture on Dutch television—but no more famous than Jack was. And not only was Jack a movie star; he had the added advantage of Nico Oudejans telling all the whores in the district to be on the lookout for him.
“You cocktease, Jack!” one of the transvestite prostitutes called out; she was Brazilian, probably. (Those chicks with dicks were out to get him.) This captured Anneke’s attention, but Wild Bill had downed a couple of bottles of red wine; he didn’t notice. The Mad Dutchman was lecturing Richard nonstop.
Suddenly Jack was irritated by it. Vanvleck was showing off the red-light district as if he’d invented it, as if he’d hired all the girls himself. Poor Richard was fighting off his jet lag and the overwhelming seediness of the place. By all counts, it had been a forgettable night for Anneke.
Well, Jack thought—I’ll show them something they’ll all remember! “This is nothing,” Jack announced as they circled the Oudekerksplein. He began to lead them across the Warmoesstraat, out of the red-light district. “You haven’t seen anything until you’ve seen Els.”
“Els?” Vanvleck said.
“Where are we going?” Richard asked. (They were walking away from the hotel; that was all he knew.)
“Els is the oldest working prostitute in Amsterdam,” Jack told them. “She’s an old friend.”
“She is?” Wild Bill said, stumbling along.
Jack led them across the Damrak. It was now late at night. He was sure that Els would have gone to bed. Petra, her colleague who was only sixty-one, might be sitting in the second-floor window. Or maybe Petra would have gone home and gone to bed, too. In either case, Jack would wake up Els—just to show Wild Bill and Richard and Anneke that he had a history in Amsterdam that ran a little deeper than a Dutch TV series.
When they came into the narrow Sint Jacobsstraat, Wild Bill was staggering. The street could seem a little menacing at night. Jack saw Richard look over his shoulder a couple of times, and Anneke took Jack’s arm and walked close beside him.
To Jack’s surprise, Els—not Petra—was in the window. (“Some drunk woke me up shouting,” she would tell Jack later. “Petra had gone home, and I felt like staying up. Call it my intuition, Jackie.”)
When Jack spotted her, he started waving. “Els is in her seventies,” he said to Wild Bill, who was staring up at Els in her red-lit window as if he had seen one of Hell’s own avenging spirits—a harpy from the netherworld, an infernal Fury.
“She’s how old?” Richard asked.
“Think of your grandmother,” Jack told him.
“Jackie!” Els shouted, blowing kisses. “My little boy has come back again!” she once more announced to the Sint Jacobsstraat.
Jack blew kisses to her; he waved and waved. That was when he lost it—when Els started waving back to him.
It is impossible that Jack could have “remembered” his mother lifting him above the ship’s rail as they sailed from the dock in Rotterdam; impossible that he actually recalled waving to Els, twenty-eight years before, or that (when Jack was four) he truly saw his father fall to the ground with both hands holding his broken heart.
“Don’t cry, Jackie—don’t cry!” Els called to him from her second-floor window, but Jack had dropped to his knees on the Sint Jacobsstraat. He was still waving good-bye, and Els kept waving back to him.
Richard and Wild Bill were struggling to get Jack to his feet, but Wild Bill was drunk. Richard, in addition to his jet lag, had been knocking back the red wine, too.
“You’re her little boy?” Richard was asking, but Jack was waving good-bye to his dad and couldn’t answer; Jack’s heart was in his throat.
“You actually know this lady?” Wild Bill asked, losing his balance and sitting down in the street. Richard was holding Jack under one arm, but he let go. Jack just lay in the street beside Wild Bill; Jack was still waving.
“Jackie, Jackie—your mother loved you!” Els was calling. “As best she could!”
It was Wild Bill’s pretty anchorwoman who finally helped Jack to his feet; she’d laid off the red wine, Jack had noticed. “For God’s sake, stop waving to that old hooker!” Anneke said. “Stop encouraging her!”
“She was his what?” Wild Bill asked Richard.
“His babysitter,” Richard explained.
“Marvelous!” Wild Bill exclaimed.
“Oh, shut up, Bill! Can’t you see he’s crying?” Anneke asked The Mad Dutchman.
“Jack, why are you crying?” Wild Bill asked.
“She looked after me while my mother was working,” Jack told them.
“Working where? Working here?” Richard asked.
“My mom worked in a window, in one of those doorways—back there,” Jack said, pointing in the general direction of the red-light district. “My mother was a prostitute,” he told them.
“I thought his mom was a tattoo artist!” Wild Bill said to Richard.
“She was a tattoo artist, too,” Jack said. “She wasn’t a prostitute for very long, but she was one.”
Jack began to wave good-bye to Els again, but Anneke wrapped her arms around him; she pinned his arms to his sides. “For God’s sake, stop!” the anchorwoman said.
“Come back and see me before I die, Jackie!” Els was calling.
Wild Bill was still sitting in the street. He had begun to wave good-bye to Els, too, but Anneke kicked him. “What a great idea, Bill!” she said. “You give a tour of the red-light district to a guy whose mom was a whore!”
“Well, I didn’t know!” Wild Bill shouted. Richard helped him to his feet; Anneke removed a candy-bar wrapper from Vanvleck’s long, gray ponytail.
They were walking away from Els in her window, toward the red-light district; that was the most direct way back to the Grand. Richard, who was walking beside Jack, put his arm around him. “Are you all right, Jack?” Richard asked.
“I’ll be fine,” Jack told him.
But Richard was sober enough to be worried about Jack, and they were fast becoming friends. “When you get back to L.A., I know someone you could see,” Richard said.
“Do you mean a psychiatrist?” Jack asked.
“Dr. García knows actors,” Richard said. “You wouldn’t be her first movie star.”
The waving good-bye had stopped, but Jack could still see Els lifting his dad off the pavement and carrying him like a child to Femke’s Mercedes. (In all probability, Alice had put Jack down on the deck and the boy could no longer see over the ship’s rail.) The damp night air blew into Jack’s face, like ocean air—like the air blowing all the way from Rotterdam to Montreal, which was where the ship was heading.
Jack heard the women and girls in their windows and doorways calling out his name, but he just kept walking. “Brilliant!” Jack heard Richard say once, for no apparent reason.
Anneke was holding Jack’s arm again—this time as if to shield him from the greetings of the prostitutes. “When you get back to the hotel, just go straight to bed and try to forget about it,” Anneke whispered to him.
“Good night, my dears!” Wild Bill was calling to the red-light women.
Jack would forever feel the movement of the ship pulling out of the harbor—the deck rolling under his four-year-old feet, Rotterdam receding. How he wanted to see his father’s Herbert Hoffmann—the tattoo William got in Hamburg, if he got one. A sailing ship seen from the stern; the ship would be pulling away from shore. Hoffmann’s Sailor’s Grave or his Last Port—a tattoo like that was what William would have wanted. Jack felt pretty sure about it. That was when Jack knew he would have to find him.
In Beverly Hills, the sun was now high enough in the sky that the slanted rays of light no longer came in the open windows. Miss Wurtz’s painted toenails were a less-bright shade of rose-pink. The black piano had taken on a more somber tone—less like a pool of oil, more like a coffin. But even without direct sunlight, the Oscar standing beside their bare feet on the glass-topped table was no less gold—no less dazzling.
“I know that William saw you last night, Jack,” Miss Wurtz was saying. “I don’t care what time of night or early morning it was in Europe, if that’s where he is. I just know that he wouldn’t have missed seeing you.”
Caroline got up from the couch and kissed Jack on the forehead; holding her bathrobe tightly to her throat, she bent over and kissed Oscar on the top of his gleaming head. “I’m going to go to sleep, you two,” she said.
Jack watched her walk across the living room, her hand trailing lightly for a moment on the keys of the black piano; there was just the tinkling of those soft notes before she went into her bedroom and closed the door behind her.
Jack got up and went into his bedroom and closed the door; he left the curtains closed, but he opened the windows. Some light came into the bedroom when the breeze stirred the curtains, and he could hear the sound of a hose; below him, in the garden, someone was watering the flowers. Oscar lay down beside Jack. The statuette had its own pillow. Jack looked at Oscar lying there, holding his alleged sword. In the dim light, Oscar looked like a dead soldier; maybe his comrades had found him on the battlefield and laid his body to rest in a dignified pose.
Jack slept until the phone woke him that Monday afternoon. It was Richard. Jack had forgotten that he and Vanvleck and Richard had agreed to go to a sound studio to record the commentary track for the DVD of their film. They had to screen the entire movie, pausing it occasionally, while they talked about the intention behind this shot or that scene—how a particular moment had come about, or how this line of dialogue or voice-over had actually been moved from somewhere else.
Jack took a shower and got dressed. He put the Oscar on the piano, on top of a note of explanation to Miss Wurtz; she was still sleeping. They would have dinner together—maybe with Richard and Wild Bill, Jack said in the note. So that no one would steal the Oscar or wake up Miss Wurtz, Jack left the DO NOT DISTURB card on the door to the suite; at the front desk, he told them not to put through any calls.
Then he walked out into the harsh sunlight, and joined Richard and Wild Bill in the limo for the ride to the sound studio. Wild Bill had a bad hangover, which had not been improved by Anneke getting sick in the middle of the night. “Something she ate,” Wild Bill told them. “I wish I’d eaten it, too. I wish it had killed me.”
Richard told Jack that no hangover was as bad as not winning the Oscar.
It seemed to take hours to record the DVD commentary. As when Jack first met with Richard and Wild Bill in Amsterdam, his heart wasn’t in it. But Jack liked the movie they had made together, and when he watched the film, he remembered how it had all come about.
“Whose idea was this?” Wild Bill would say, from time to time.
“Yours, I think,” Richard would tell him.
It went pretty well, all things considered. Wild Bill’s hangover seemed to go away, or else he rose to the occasion. In a short while, Vanvleck was doing most of the talking. There was almost a half hour when Wild Bill just talked nonstop; it was amazing what he could remember. But hearing the Dutchman’s voice like that was oddly dislocating. Jack could almost hear him asking, “You actually know this lady?”
Or when Jack had explained (that night in the Sint Jacobsstraat) that Els had been his nanny, how Wild Bill had asked Richard: “She was his what?”
“Jack, why are you crying?” The Mad Dutchman had also asked.
Here they were in Hollywood, in a sound studio, and Wild Bill Vanvleck was going on about how they’d made Emma’s movie. But in the drone of the Dutchman’s voice, his actual words were lost. Jack saw Wild Bill sitting drunk in the street, shouting to his girlfriend: “Well, I didn’t know!” And later, as they made their way through the red-light district, Jack could still hear Vanvleck calling, “Good night, my dears!”
Well, they had a job to do—Richard, Wild Bill, and Jack—and they did it. Later that afternoon, when Jack got back to the Four Seasons, he found Miss Wurtz in the living room of their suite playing the piano. Jack sat on the couch for a while and just listened.
The Wurtz began to talk to him, but—at the same time—she kept playing. “I want to thank
you, Jack—I had the best time! It was quite a night for an old lady!”
Jack’s neck was stiff and his toes hurt—something he’d done in the gym, he was thinking.
“But I must enlighten you, Jack,” Miss Wurtz went on. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but not even a night like last night is as special to me as every night I spent with your father. If I never got to go to the Oscars, I would still have had William in my life—that’s all that matters.”
And that was when Jack knew why his neck was stiff and his toes hurt. In those few hours of that early Monday morning, following the Academy Awards—when he actually got to sleep—Jack knew what he’d been dreaming. He was standing on the deck of that ship, leaving Rotterdam, and he was straining to see over the rail. Jack was standing on his toes and stretching his neck; for the few hours he slept, Jack must have maintained this uncomfortable position. No matter how hard he tried, of course, he couldn’t see the shore.
Jack Burns may not have been a big believer in so-called recovered memory, but here is what Jack remembered, listening to Miss Wurtz play the piano, and he was sure it really happened—he knew it was true.
“Lift me up!” Jack had said to his mother on the deck of that ship. The docks were still in sight, but Jack couldn’t see them. “Lift me up!” he’d begged his mom. “I want to see!” But she wouldn’t do it.
“You’ve seen enough, Jack,” his mom had said. She took his hand. “We’re going below deck now,” she’d told him.
“Lift me up! I want to see!” Jack had demanded.
But Alice was in no mood to be bossed around. “You’ve seen enough of Holland to last you a lifetime, Jackie boy,” she’d said.
Under the circumstances, Jack had seen enough of Canada to last him a lifetime, too. Because the next country Jack saw was Canada, where his mother took him—where he would never see his dad.
33
Signs of Trouble
