(2005) Until I Find You

by John Irving

  Oh, when I was in love with you,

  Then I was clean and brave,

  And miles around the wonder grew

  How well did I behave.

  Shame on Jack Burns—that month in New York, he was not as well behaved as Harry Mocco. He met a transvestite dancer at a downtown club. Jack was distracted by her strong-looking hands and her prominent Adam’s apple. He knew she was a man. Still, he went along with the seduction-in-progress—up to a point. Jack let her wheel him through the lobby of the Trump, and into the hotel’s bar. She sat in his lap in the wheelchair and they sang a Beatles song together, the bar crowd joining in.

  When I get older losing my hair,

  Many years from now.

  Will you still be sending me a Valentine,

  Birthday greetings bottle of wine?

  Jack tried to say good night to the transvestite dancer at the elevator, but she insisted on coming to his room with him. All the way up on the elevator, they kept singing. (She sat in his lap in the elevator, too.)

  If I’d been out till quarter to three

  Would you lock the door,

  Will you still need me, will you still feed me,

  When I’m sixty-four?

  The transvestite wheeled him down the hall to his hotel room. At the door, Jack tried again to say good night to her.

  “Don’t be silly, Jack,” she said, wheeling him inside the room.

  “I’m not going to have sex with you,” Jack told her.

  “Yes, you are,” the pretty dancer said.

  Jack soon had a fight on his hands. When a transvestite wants to have sex, she feels as strongly about it as a guy—because she is a guy! Jack had a battle on his hands. The room got trashed a little—one lamp, especially. Yes, Jack was aroused—but even he knew the difference between wanting to have sex and actually having it. Not even he would submit to every desire.

  “Look, it’s obvious you want me,” the dancer said. “Stop fighting it.” She’d taken off all her clothes and had managed to destroy most of Jack’s. “You have a hard-on,” she kept pointing out, as if Jack didn’t know.

  “I get a hard-on in my sleep,” he told her.

  “Look at me!” she screamed. “I have a hard-on!”

  “I can see that you do,” Jack said. “And you have breasts.” (They were as hard as apples; Jack knew, because he was trying to push them out of his face.)

  This time, he saw the left hook coming—and the right uppercut, and the head-butt, too. She may have been a dancer, but she was not without some other training; this wasn’t her first fight.

  Naturally, the phone was ringing—the front-desk clerk, Jack assumed. There had probably been calls to the front desk from those rooms adjacent to Jack’s, within hearing distance of the destroyed lamp and all the rest. Well, wouldn’t Donald Trump love this! Jack was thinking. (The Trump’s fabulous view of Central Park—for the time being, utterly ignored.)

  He heard the security guys picking at the lock on his hotel-room door, but Jack had a Russian front headlock on the dancer and he wasn’t letting go—not even to open the door. Her fingernails were like claws, and he had to give up the front headlock when she bit him in the forearm.

  “You fight like a girl,” Jack told her.

  He knew that would really piss her off. When she came at him, Jack hit a pretty good duck-under and got behind her. He held her chest-down on the rug with a double-armbar, where she couldn’t bite him. The security guys finally got the door open; there were two of them, plus the night manager.

  “We’re here to help you, Mr. Burns—I mean Mr. Mocco,” the night manager said.

  “I have a distraught dancer on my hands,” Jack told them.

  “He had a hard-on. I saw it,” the transvestite said.

  One of the security guys had thought that Jack really was a cripple. He’d never seen Jack out of the wheelchair—not even in the movies. (He wasn’t a moviegoer, clearly.) From the other security guy’s reaction when the three of them were forcibly dressing the dancer, chicks with dicks were new to him.

  Jack never went to bed; he stayed up, rehearsing how he would tell this part of the story of his life to Dr. García. He knew this episode wouldn’t wait for chronological order. Jack kept a cold washcloth on his forearm, where the transvestite dancer had bitten him. She hadn’t broken the skin, but the bite marks were sore and ugly-looking.

  In the late morning, when Jack talked to Dr. García from the set of The Love Poet, he told her that the unfortunate incident was out of character for Harry Mocco but sadly typical of Jack Burns. (Jack thought he might preempt her criticism by criticizing himself.)

  “You acquiesce too much, Jack,” Dr. García said. “You should never have let the transvestite into the elevator—you should have had the fight in the lobby, where it would have been a shorter fight. For that matter, you should never have let her sit in your lap in the bar.”

  “It wouldn’t have been a good idea to have had that fight in the bar,” he assured Dr. García.

  “But why did you leave the nightclub with her in the first place?” Dr. García asked him.

  “She turned me on. I was aroused,” he admitted.

  “I’m sure you were, Jack. That’s what transvestites do, isn’t it? They go to great lengths to turn men on. But what does that lead to, Jack? Every time, where does that go?”

  He couldn’t think of what to say.

  “You keep getting in trouble,” Dr. García was saying. “It’s always just a little trouble, but you know what that leads to—don’t you, Jack? Don’t you know where that goes?”

  It was July 2003 when they had the wrap party for The Love Poet in New York, and Jack flew back to L.A. He’d succumbed to Harry Mocco’s habit of reciting fragments of love poems to total strangers, but in the case of the attractive stewardess on his flight from New York to Los Angeles, this wasn’t entirely Jack’s fault. She’d asked him to tell her about his next movie, and Jack began by explaining to her that Harry Mocco compulsively memorizes love poems and recites them at the drop of a hat.

  “For example, do you know the poem ‘Talking in Bed’ by Philip Larkin?” he asked her. (She was probably Jack’s age.)

  “Do I want to know it?” she asked him warily. “I’m married.”

  But he kept trying. (Jack hadn’t slept with a stewardess in years.) “Or ‘In Bertram’s Garden’ by Donald Justice,” he went on, as if the flight attendant were encouraging him. “ ‘Jane looks down at her organdy skirt / As if it somehow were the thing disgraced—’ ”

  “Whoa!” the stewardess said, cutting him off. “I don’t want to hear about it.”

  That’s what happens when you ask an actor to tell you about his next movie.

  When Jack walked into his place on Entrada Drive, he immediately called a real estate agent and asked to have the house put on the market. (Sell the fucker! Jack was thinking; maybe that would force me to live a little differently.)

  He headed off for his appointment with Dr. García—his first in two months—feeling like a new man.

  “But you haven’t really made a decision about where you want to live, Jack,” Dr. García pointed out. “Aren’t you pulling the rug out from under your feet, so to speak?”

  But if Jack couldn’t make up his mind about his life, he had at least decided to make something happen.

  “Is it the house itself that let Lucy come inside?” Dr. García asked him. “Is it because of your mother’s lies to you, or your missing father, that you are an unanchored ship—in danger of drifting wherever the wind or the currents, or the next sexual encounter, will take you?”

  Jack didn’t say anything.

  “Think about Claudia,” Dr. García said. “If you want to make something meaningful happen—if you really want to live differently—think about finding a woman like that. Think about committing yourself to a relationship; it doesn’t even have to last four years. Think about being with a woman you could live with for one year! Start small, but st
art something.”

  “You asked me not to mistake you for a dating service,” Jack reminded her.

  “I’m recommending that you stop dating, Jack. I’m suggesting that, if you tried to live with someone, you would have to live a lot differently. You don’t need a new house. You need to find someone you can live with,” Dr. García said.

  “Someone like Claudia? She wanted children, Dr. García.”

  “I don’t mean someone like Claudia in that respect, but a relationship like that—one that has a chance of lasting, Jack.”

  “Claudia is probably very fat now,” he told Dr. García. “She had an epic battle with her weight ahead of her.”

  “I don’t necessarily mean someone like Claudia in that respect, either, Jack.”

  “Claudia wanted children so badly—she’s probably a grandmother now!” he said to Dr. García.

  “You never could count, Jack,” she told him.

  Jack didn’t blame Dr. García. He would take full responsibility for what happened. But the very idea of Claudia—the reason she was recently on his mind—surely came from the Claudia conversation in his therapy session with Dr. García. Jack was thinking about her—that’s all he would say in his own defense—when he drove back home to Santa Monica from a dinner party one warm night that summer.

  Jack was remembering the first time Claudia let him borrow her Volvo—the incredible feeling of independence that comes from being young and alone and driving a car.

  He pulled into his driveway on Entrada—his headlights illuminating the arrestingly beautiful, incontestably Slavic-looking young woman who sat on her battered but familiar suitcase on Jack’s absurdly small lawn. She sat so serenely still, as if she were placidly posing for a photograph beside the FOR SALE sign, that for a moment Jack forgot what was for sale. He thought she was for sale, before he remembered he was selling his house—and that thought would come back to haunt him, because she was more for sale than Jack could possibly have imagined.

  He knew who she was—Claudia, or her ghost. It was a wonder he didn’t lose control of the Audi and drive over her—either killing Claudia on the spot, or killing her ghost again. But how can it be Claudia? Jack was thinking. The young woman on his lawn was as young as Claudia had been when he’d known her, or younger. (Besides, Claudia had always looked older than she was, and she had the habit of lying about her age.)

  “God damn you, Jack,” Claudia had said. “After I die, I’m going to haunt you—I promise you I will—I might even haunt you before I die.”

  Since Claudia had promised that she would haunt him, wasn’t it forgivable that Jack assumed the apparition sitting beside his FOR SALE sign was Claudia’s ghost? A ghost doesn’t usually travel with a suitcase, but maybe Heaven or Hell had kicked her out—or her mission to haunt Jack had required her to have several changes of clothes. After all, Claudia was (or had been) an actress—and she’d loved the theater, more than Jack had. In the case of Claudia’s ghost, the suitcase could have been a prop.

  Jack somehow managed to get out of the Audi and walk up to her, although his legs had turned to stone. He knew that driving away, or running away, wasn’t an option—you can’t get away from a ghost. But he left the Audi’s headlights on. When approaching a ghost, you at least want to see her clearly. Who wants to walk up to a ghost in the dark?

  “Claudia?” Jack said, his voice trembling.

  “Oh, Jack, it’s been too long,” she said. “It’s been forever since I’ve seen you!”

  She was the same old Claudia, only younger. The same stage presence, the same projection of her voice—as if, even one-on-one, she was making sure that those poor souls in the worst seats in the uppermost balcony could hear her perfectly.

  “But you’re so young,” he said.

  “I died young, Jack.”

  “How young, Claudia? You look even younger than you were! How is that possible?”

  “Death becomes me, I guess,” she said. “Aren’t you going to ask me inside? I’ve been dying to see you, Jack. I’ve been sitting on this freakin’ lawn for an eternity.”

  The word freakin’ was new, and not at all like Claudia. But who knew where she’d been—and, among the dead, with whom? She held out her hands and Jack helped her to her feet. He was surprised that he could feel her not-inconsiderable weight. Who would have guessed that ghosts weighed anything at all? But from the look of her—even in Heaven, or that other place—Claudia still had to watch her weight.

  She was still self-conscious about her hips, too. She wore the same type of long, full skirt that she’d always liked to wear—even in the summer. She was as heavy-breasted as Jack remembered her; in fact, given what people who believed in ghosts were generally inclined to believe, she was disarmingly full-figured for a spirit.

  Jack ran to the car and turned off the Audi’s headlights, half expecting Claudia’s ghost to disappear. But she waited for him, smiling; she let him carry her old leather suitcase inside. She went straight to Jack’s bedroom, as if they were still a couple and she’d been living with him all these years—even though Claudia had never been in that house. He waited in shock while she used his bathroom. (The things ghosts had to do!)

  Jack was deeply conflicted. He both believed her and suspected her. She had the same creamy-smooth skin, the same prominent jaw and cheekbones—a face made for close-ups, he’d always said. Claudia should have been in the movies, despite the problem with her weight; she had a face that was wasted in the theater, Jack had always told her.

  When Claudia’s ghost emerged from the bathroom, she came up to Jack and nuzzled his neck. “I’ve even missed your smell,” she said.

  “Ghosts have a sense of smell?” he asked.

  Jack held her by the shoulders, at arm’s length, and looked into her eyes; they were the same yellowish brown they’d always been, like polished wood, like a lioness’s eyes. But there was something about her that wasn’t quite the same; the resemblance was striking but inexact. It wasn’t only that she seemed too young to be the Claudia he’d known—even if she’d died the day after they parted company, even if death (as the ghost had said) did become her.

  “A thought occurs to me, Claudia,” he said. Holding her, even at arm’s length, Jack could feel her body’s heat. And all this time, he’d thought that ghosts (if you could feel them at all) would feel cold. “Since my mother died, I’ve been wondering about this,” he told her. “If ghosts get to keep the tattoos they had in life—I mean in the hereafter.”

  Again, the smile—but even her smile wasn’t exactly as Jack remembered it. He didn’t think that Claudia’s teeth had ever been quite this white. She slowly lifted the long, full skirt. The seductiveness in her eyes was unchanged, and there, high up on her inner thigh, which was even a little plumper than he remembered it, was the tattoo of the Chinese scepter—the short sword symbolizing everything as you wish.

  “It took long enough, but it finally healed,” she told him.

  It was a pretty good Chinese scepter, Jack thought, but it was not as perfect as the one his mom had learned from Paul Harper.

  “It’s real,” the young woman said. “It won’t rub off on your hand. See for yourself, Jack—go on and touch it.”

  The voice, her projection, may have been the same, but the language lacked Claudia’s exactness—her correctness of speech, her good education. The “go on and touch it”—the casual use of the word and—was no more like Claudia than the word freakin’ that had caught Jack’s attention earlier.

  He touched the young woman’s tattoo, high up on her inner thigh—her imitation Chinese scepter, as Jack thought of it.

  “Who are you?” he asked her.

  She took his hand and made him touch her, higher up. She wasn’t wearing any panties, not even a thong. “Doesn’t it feel familiar, Jack? Don’t you want to be back there—to be young again?”

  “You’re not Claudia,” Jack told her. “Claudia was never crude.” And ghosts, he could have said, not only don’t
have body heat; female ghosts don’t get wet. (Or do they?)

  “You have a hard-on, Jack,” the girl said, touching him.

  “I get a hard-on in my sleep,” he told her, as if the episode with that transvestite dancer at the Trump had been a dress rehearsal. “It’s no big deal.”

  “It’s big enough,” the young woman said, kissing him on the mouth; she didn’t come close to kissing like Claudia. But it took no small amount of will power on Jack’s part to stop touching her. To make her stop, he had to let her know that he knew who she was.

  “What would your mother say about this?” Jack asked Claudia’s daughter. “The very idea of you having sex with me! That wouldn’t make your mom happy, would it?”

  “My mom’s dead,” the girl told him. “I’m here to haunt you—it’s what she would have wanted.”

  “I’m sorry your mother’s dead,” he replied. “But what would she have wanted?”

  “I don’t believe in ghosts,” Claudia’s daughter said. “I’m here to haunt you because I don’t believe that Mom can do it.”

  “What’s your name?” Jack asked her.

  “Sally,” the girl said. “After Sally Bowles, the part in Cabaret Mom always wanted—the part she told me you wanted, too. Only you probably would have been better at it, Mom said.”

  “What did your mom die of, Sally? When did she die?”

  “Cancer, a couple of years ago,” Sally said. “I had to wait till I was eighteen—so it would be legal to haunt you.”

  She looked like a woman in her early twenties, but then her mother had always looked older than she was, too.

  “Are you really eighteen, Sally?”

  “Just like Lucy. Wasn’t Lucy eighteen?” Sally asked him.

  “I guess everyone knows about Lucy,” Jack said.

  “The Lucy business was the last thing my mom knew about you—it happened just before she died. Maybe it made it easier for her to die without you,” Sally said.

  Like Lucy, Sally was walking around in Jack’s house as if she owned it. He noticed she had kicked off her shoes; she walked barefoot on the wrestling mat in his gym. Her beige, sleeveless blouse was a gauzy, fabric; her bra, which Jack could see through the blouse, was the same beige or light-tan color. Sally’s skirt made a swishing sound as she walked. She paused at his desk, reading the title page of a screenplay lying there. (That was when she picked up Jack’s address book.)