(2005) Until I Find You

by John Irving

  “My mom never stopped loving you,” Sally said. “She always wondered what might have happened if she’d stayed with you—if you ever would have given her a child, or children. She regretted breaking up with you, but she had to have children.”

  The way Sally said children, Jack got the feeling that she didn’t like kids—or that the need to have them wasn’t as urgent an issue to her as it had been to Claudia.

  Sally plopped herself down on Jack’s living-room couch and opened his address book. He sat down beside her.

  “Do you have siblings, Sally?”

  “Are you kidding? Mom popped out four kids, one right after the other. Lucky me—I was the first. I got to be the babysitter.”

  “And your dad?” Jack asked her.

  “He means no harm,” Sally said. “Mom would have married the first guy she met after she split up with you. He just had to promise to give her children. My dad was the first guy she met, the pathetic loser.”

  “Why is he a pathetic loser, Sally?”

  “He got to go to all your movies with Mom. What a kick that had to be for him, if you know what I mean,” Sally said. “Of course, when I was old enough, I got to watch all your movies, too—with Mom and Dad. There wasn’t anything she didn’t tell Dad about you. There wasn’t anything she didn’t tell me about you, too. That trip you took to the Toronto film festival; how your mother tattooed her. How you made Mom show her tattoo to the customs agent—that was a good one. How she gave you the clap she caught from Captain Phoebus, when you were a gay Esmeralda in The Hunchback of Notre Dame; how you were such a prick about it, as if you’d never fooled around yourself.”

  “But your dad loved her?” Jack asked Sally.

  “Oh, he worshiped her!” Sally said. “Mom got as big as a cow—she completely let herself go—and it was painfully evident that she never got over you. But Dad adored her.”

  “You’re very beautiful, Sally,” he told the girl. “You look so much like your mom, I almost believed you. For a moment, I thought you were Claudia’s ghost.”

  “I can haunt you as good as any ghost—believe me, Jack.” She wasn’t looking at him; she just kept thumbing through the pages of his address book, as if she were searching for someone. Suddenly she flipped to the front of the book; she began with the A’s. In her mother’s stage voice, she read aloud the first woman’s name.

  “Mildred (‘Milly’) Ascheim,” Sally said; then her tone of voice became insinuating. “Did you screw her, Jack? Are you still screwing her?”

  “No, never,” he replied.

  “Uh-oh. Here’s another Ascheim—Myra. You crossed her name out. That’s a pretty clear indication that you fucked her. Then you dumped her, I suppose.”

  “I never had sex with her. I crossed out her name because she died. Sally, let’s not play this game,” Jack said.

  But she kept reading; she became very excited when she got to Lucia Delvecchio’s name. “Even Mom said you must have slept with her,” Sally said. “Mom said she could tell you were going to sleep with her when she saw you with her in the movie.”

  Jack let it go on too long. Sally was into the G’s when the trouble really started. (Jack knew what Dr. García would say—namely, that he shouldn’t have been sitting next to Sally on the couch in the first place.)

  “Elena García,” Sally said. This must have registered on Jack’s face; he clearly found this disrespectful to Dr. García, whom he never called by her first name. Dr. García was the most important person in this stage of Jack’s life, and Sally saw it. “Your cleaning lady, or former cleaning lady?” Sally asked, more disrespectfully. “You definitely fucked her.”

  “She’s my doctor—my psychiatrist,” Jack said. “I don’t even call her by her first name.”

  “Oh, yes—she’s Lucy’s shrink, too, isn’t she? How could I forget that!” Sally said. “I’ll bet Lucy’s mom is stalking you now.”

  The girl was good; she had her mother’s talent, if not half her training. And at that moment, when she was teasing him, she reminded Jack more of Claudia than at any time when he’d imagined she was Claudia’s ghost.

  “Please don’t be angry with me, Jack,” Sally said, very much the way her mother would have said it. “I just miss my mom, and I thought that being with you might bring her back to me.”

  Jack couldn’t move; he just sat there. In his experience, women, even young women, knew when they had frozen you. Claudia had known those moments when Jack couldn’t resist her. Sally knew, too. She pressed herself against him on the couch; she started unbuttoning his shirt. He didn’t stop her. “Remember when you were John the Baptist?” Sally asked him.

  “I was just his head—a small part,” he answered her. “His severed head—that’s all I was.”

  “His decapitated head, on a table,” Sally reminded him, slipping off his shirt. Jack didn’t know when she’d unbuttoned her blouse; he noticed only that it was unbuttoned. “Mom was Salomé, wasn’t she?” Claudia’s daughter asked him.

  “Yes,” Jack answered; he could barely talk. The girl had undressed him and herself. Naked, she was more like Claudia than Claudia—Chinese scepter and all.

  “Mom said that was the best kiss she ever gave you.”

  That was some kiss, he remembered. Yet the damage to Claudia and Jack’s relationship had already been done; not even that kiss could undo their drifting apart.

  Jack recognized the blue foil wrapper of his favorite brand of Japanese condom. Sally was tearing the wrapper with her teeth. It seemed entirely too strange that Claudia’s daughter would know, in advance, his preference for Kimono MicroThins. Then he remembered that the girl had used his bathroom, where she’d no doubt discovered his condoms in the medicine cabinet.

  Jack looked into her dark-gold eyes and saw Claudia, as if she were alive and young again. The same wide mouth, but whiter teeth; the same full breasts and broad hips of a girl who would wage her own war with her weight one day. Like her mother, Sally was the kind of woman you sank into.

  There would be no need to explain the problem to Dr. García—anyone but Jack could have done the math. If he’d last seen Claudia in June 1987, even if she’d met Sally’s dad immediately—and married him, and gotten pregnant, all in that same month—Sally couldn’t have been born before March 1988. In that case, in July 2003, Sally was fifteen. In order for her to be eighteen, she would (in all likelihood) have to have been Jack’s daughter! As Dr. García had reminded him, he never could count.

  As it happened, as Sally explained to him—this was after they had sex, unfortunately—in June 1987, Claudia went off to some Shakespeare festival in New Jersey, where she met a young director and Shakespearean scholar. They were married that August, and Claudia got pregnant in September; Sally was born in June 1988. When she and Jack had sex in his house on Entrada Drive, Sally had been fifteen for all of one month. But she looked a lot older!

  Sally quickly ran a bath and sat in it, with the bathroom door open. She hated to have sex and run, she said, but she was in a hurry. She had a curfew; she had to get back to The Georgian Hotel in Santa Monica, where she was staying with her mom and dad and the rest of her family.

  “Your mom is alive?”

  “She’s as big as a barn, but she’s very healthy,” Sally said. “You wouldn’t have slept with me if you thought Mom was alive, would you?”

  Jack didn’t say anything; he just sat on the bathroom floor with his back against a towel rack, watching Claudia’s near-perfect likeness in the tub.

  “My parents are the happiest couple I know,” Sally was saying. “My mother gets embarrassed when we tease her about being your ex-girlfriend. But my sisters and I, and my dad, think it’s the funniest thing in the world. We order a pizza and watch one of your movies—we all just howl! Mom sometimes has to leave the room. We make her laugh so hard she has to pee! ‘Pause it—I’ll be right back,’ Mom says. When you won the Oscar, I thought we were all going to wet our pants.”

  “You’re how
old?” he asked her.

  “Your math is ridiculous—Mom wasn’t kidding,” Sally said. “For your self-protection, Jack, you ought to look up the California Penal Code—the part about unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor. You’re over twenty-one, I’m under sixteen—that’s really all that matters. You’re guilty of either a misdemeanor or a felony. You could go to jail for one, two, three, or four years—and you’re liable for a civil penalty, not to exceed twenty-five thousand dollars. That is, if I tell anybody.”

  She stood up in the tub and hastily dried herself off, throwing the towel on the bathroom floor. He followed her through his bedroom and into the living room, where her clothes were scattered everywhere; while Sally got dressed, Jack searched for her shoes.

  “This is kind of my summer job,” she was explaining to him.

  “What is?” (Seducing Jack Burns? Extortion?)

  Sally further explained that her dad—who was hardly a pathetic loser, in Sally’s fond opinion—managed a small, community-operated theater in Vermont. It was called The Nuts & Bolts Playhouse. They did summer-stock productions; they ran workshops in acting, directing, and playwriting during the school months. A nonprofit foundation funded everything. When Claudia and her Shakespearean husband weren’t engaged in their theater productions and workshops, they were full-time fund-raisers.

  “We’re a big family—four girls,” Sally elaborated. “We all have to go to college one day. My parents’ whole life is by example. We love the theater, we learn to be independent, we don’t care about money, but we always need money. Do you get it?”

  “How much do you want?” Jack asked Claudia’s daughter.

  “It would kill my mom to know that I slept with you,” she said.

  “How much, Sally?”

  She grabbed his wrist and looked at his watch. “Shit! You have to drop me off at The Georgian, or near it. I supposedly went to a movie screening, where I had an opportunity to meet you. Damn curfew!”

  “Your mom and dad knew you were meeting me?” he asked her.

  “Yes, but not to have sex!” Sally cried, laughing. “They’re really terrific parents—I told you.”

  She gave him a brochure of The Nuts & Bolts Playhouse—there were pictures of Claudia and her husband, and the other daughters. The check was to be made payable to The Nuts & Bolts Foundation; it being a nonprofit meant that Jack’s “donation” was tax-deductible, Sally told him.

  For years, the children had asked their mother why she didn’t ask Jack Burns for money for their theater enterprise. Jack was a movie star and Claudia knew him; surely he would give something.

  “Why didn’t you just ask me for a donation?” he asked Sally.

  “Would you have given me this much?” Sally asked. (He’d written out a check to The Nuts & Bolts Foundation for $100,000. Compared to what the California Penal Code could cost him, it was a bargain.)

  Jack drove the girl and Claudia’s old suitcase back to Ocean Avenue. At least he’d been right about the suitcase; it had been a prop.

  Sally’s parents were night people. After they put the younger daughters to bed, Claudia and her husband went downstairs to have a drink in the bar; that’s where they would be waiting for Sally to come back from the “screening.” They’d agreed to let her go out and meet Jack Burns, solely for the purpose of asking Jack to make a donation to their efforts on behalf of Claudia’s first and most enduring love—the theater. (This must have been what Sally meant by learning to be independent.) As for Claudia’s old suitcase, Sally had stuffed it full of brochures of The Nuts & Bolts Playhouse—just in case she met other rich and famous movie stars at the alleged screening.

  Sally and Jack discussed whether it was a good idea or not for him to come into the lobby of The Georgian with her. Meet her dad—say hello to Claudia, for old times’ sake. Sally could announce the extraordinary generosity of Jack’s donation. Gifts of $100,000 were rare; gifts of that size constituted “naming opportunities,” Sally told him. A fellowship for a young student-actor, director, or playwright in Jack Burns’s name; there was a capital campaign for a new six-hundred-seat theater, too. (Lots of naming opportunities, apparently.)

  “Or you could choose to remain anonymous,” Sally said.

  Jack opted to remain anonymous. He told Sally that he thought he wouldn’t go meet her dad and renew his acquaintance with her mom in the bar of The Georgian Hotel.

  “That’s probably best,” Sally said. “Frankly, I could pull it off. I’ve rehearsed this for freakin’ forever. But I honestly don’t know if you’re a good enough actor to just walk in there and pretend that you haven’t fucked my brains out.”

  “I’m probably not that good,” he admitted.

  “Jack, I think you’re very sweet,” Claudia’s daughter said, kissing his cheek. “Mom and Dad are going to write you—I know they will. A big thank-you letter, at the very least. For the rest of your life, you’ll be on their mailing list; they’ll probably ask you for money every year. I don’t mean another hundred-thou or anything, but they’ll ask you for something. I always thought they should ask you.”

  In the Nuts & Bolts Playhouse brochure, Claudia was wearing a tent-shaped dress and looked bigger than Kathy Bates climbing into that hot tub with Jack Nicholson in whatever that movie was. Her husband was a tall, bearded man who looked as if he were always cast as a betrayed king. The younger daughters were as big-boned and pretty as Sally.

  When Jack pulled up to the curb at The Georgian Hotel on Ocean Avenue, Sally kissed him on his forehead. “You seem like a good guy, Jack—just a sad one,” she said.

  “Please give your mother my fondest regards,” he told the fifteen-year-old.

  “Thanks for the money, Jack. It means a lot—I’m not kidding.”

  “How does this constitute haunting me?” he asked her. “I mean, it was a sting. A pretty good one—I’ll give you that, Sally. But how have you haunted me, exactly?”

  “Oh, you’ll see,” Sally said. “This will haunt you, Jack—and I don’t mean the money.”

  He went back to Entrada Drive—the scene of the crime, so to speak. It was a crime, not only according to the California Penal Code; it felt very much like a crime to Jack Burns. He’d had sex with a fifteen-year-old girl, and it had cost him only $100,000.

  Jack stayed up late reading every word of the brochure Sally had left with him; he looked at all the pictures, over and over again. The Nuts & Bolts Playhouse was dedicated to that noble idea of theater as a public service. A neighbor who was an electrician had installed the new stage lights for free; a couple of local carpenters had built the sets for three Shakespearean productions, also at no charge. In a small southern Vermont town, virtually everyone had contributed something to the community playhouse.

  The area schoolchildren performed their school plays in the theater; a women’s book club staged dramatizations of scenes from their favorite novels. A New York City opera company rehearsed there for the month of January, before going on tour; some local children with good voices were taught to sing by professional opera singers. Poets gave readings; there were concerts, too. The summer-stock productions, while pandering to tourists’ fondness for popular entertainment, included at least two “serious” plays every summer. Jack recognized a few of the guest performers in the summer casts—actors and actresses from New York.

  There were two pictures of Claudia; in both she looked radiant and joyful, and fat. Her daughters were most photogenic—self-confident girls who’d been taught to perform. Certainly Claudia could be proud of Sally for possessing both poise and determination beyond her years. Did Claudia and her husband know that Sally was a model of self-assurance and independent thinking? Probably. Did her parents also know that Sally was as sexually active (on her family’s behalf) as she was? Probably not.

  Claudia had made the theater her family’s business—perhaps more successfully than she knew. But no matter how hard Jack tried to understand the financing, he couldn’t grasp how a so-calle
d nonprofit foundation worked. (His math let him down again.) All Jack knew was that he would be writing out checks to The Nuts & Bolts Foundation for the rest of his life; regular donations of $100,000, or more, seemed a small price to pay for what he had done.

  He wanted to call Dr. García, but it was by now two or three in the morning and he knew what she would say. “Tell me in chronological order, Jack. I’m not a priest. I don’t hear confessions.” What she meant was that she didn’t give absolution, not that there was any forgiveness for his having had sex with Claudia’s daughter—not even if Jack could have convinced himself that Sally really was Claudia’s ghost.

  Jack was turning out the lights in the kitchen, before he finally went to bed, when he saw the rudimentary grocery list he had fastened to the refrigerator with one of his mom’s Japanese-tattoo magnets.

  COFFEE BEANS

  MILK

  CRANBERRY JUICE

  It didn’t add up to much of a life. He was already beginning to see how Claudia had kept her promise to haunt him.

  Jack discovered that when you’re ashamed, your life becomes a what-if world. Claudia’s daughter Sally was fifteen; it wasn’t hard to imagine a girl of that age having some sort of falling-out with her mom. Teenage girls didn’t need legitimate provocation to hate their mothers. What if, for some stupid reason, Sally wanted to hurt her mom? What if Sally told Claudia that she’d slept with Jack?

  Or what if, later in her life, Sally came to the illogical conclusion that Jack had taken advantage of her? What if—for a host of reasons, possibly having nothing to do with what had inspired Sally to seduce Jack in the first place—the wayward girl simply decided that he deserved to pay for his crime, or that Jack Burns should at least be publicly exposed?