John Irving - Until I Find You

Probably they were staring; that would explain why Torsten Lindberg began to stare at them. He said later that he couldn’t help but notice how much they were eating—just not the herring. As a shrewd accountant, he might have guessed that they were trying to keep their expenses down.

Jack had carefully removed the mushrooms from his three-egg omelet; he’d saved them for his mom. She’d finished her crêpes and had saved her melon balls for him. Lindberg plowed on, devouring his archipelago of herring.

Whoever thinks accountants are penny-pinchers and emotional misers, not to mention joyless in the presence of children, never met Torsten Lindberg. When his great meal was finished—before Jack and Alice were through with their breakfast, because they were still scouting the café for potential tattoo clients—Lindberg paused at their table and smiled benevolently at Jack. He said something in Swedish, and the boy looked to his mom for help.

“I’m sorry—he speaks only English,” Alice said.

“Excellent!” Lindberg cried, as if English-speaking children were in special need of cheering up. “Have you ever seen a fish swim without water?” he asked Jack.

“No,” the boy replied.

While his dress was formal—a dark-blue suit and necktie—his manner was that of a clown. Lindberg may have looked like a man attending a funeral—worse, like a skeleton dressed for an overlong coffin—but in presenting himself to a child, he took on the magical promise of a circus performer.

Mr. Lindberg removed his suit jacket, which he handed to Alice—both politely and presumptuously, as if she were his wife. He ceremoniously unbuttoned one sleeve of his white dress shirt and rolled it up above his elbow. On his forearm was the aforementioned fish without water; actually, it was an excellent tattoo, and the fish looked very much as if it belonged there. The fish’s head curled around Lindberg’s wrist, the tail extending to the bend at his elbow; the tattoo covered most of his forearm. It was almost certainly of Japanese origin, though not a carp. The colors alternated between an iridescent blue and a vibrant yellow, blending to an iridescent green, which turned to midnight black and Shanghai red. As Torsten Lindberg tightened the muscles of his forearm, and slightly rotated his wrist and lower arm, the fish began to swim—undulating in a downward spiral, like a fantail diving for the palm of Lindberg’s hand.

“Well, now you have,” Mr. Lindberg said to Jack, who looked at his mother.

“That’s a pretty good tattoo,” she told Lindberg, “but I’ll bet it’s no Doc Forest.”

He replied calmly, but without hesitation: “It would be awkward to show you my Doc Forest in a public place.”

“You know Doc Forest!” Alice said.

“Of course. I thought you did!”

“I only know his work,” Alice answered.

“You obviously know something about tattoos!” Lindberg said, with mounting excitement.

“Put your fish away,” Alice told him. “I have the room and the equipment, if you have the time.” (In retrospect, it disappointed Jack that he and his mom never learned the Swedish for “Put your fish away.”)

They took Torsten Lindberg to their hotel room, where Alice showed him her flash and set up her outlining machine. The latter action was premature, as it turned out. Torsten Lindberg was a connoisseur; he wouldn’t get any tattoo on the spot.

First of all, he insisted on showing Alice his other tattoos—including the ones on his bum. “Not around Jack,” Alice said, but he assured her that the tattoos were safe for children to see.

It was no doubt the crack in Lindberg’s ass that Jack’s mom hadn’t wanted him to see. But a thin man’s bum is only a mild shock, and Lindberg had nothing more offensive than an eyeball on the left-side cheek and a pair of pursed lips on the right. The eye appeared to be glancing sideways at the crack in his scrawny ass, and the lips looked like a kiss that had been newly planted there—when the lipstick was still wet.

“Very nice,” Alice said, in a way that let Mr. Lindberg know she disapproved of his display. He quickly pulled up his pants.

But he had other tattoos—in fact, many. The public life of an accountant is generally conducted in clothes. Possibly none of Mr. Lindberg’s business associates knew that he was tattooed—certainly not that he had an eyeball on his ass! He also had a Tattoo Ole, which Alice recognized right away; it was Ole’s naked lady with her oddly upturned eyebrow of pubic hair. There was something a little different about this naked lady, however. (Jack couldn’t tell what was different about it, because his mother wouldn’t let him have a closer look.) And Torsten Lindberg had a Tattoo Peter from Amsterdam and a Herbert Hoffmann from Hamburg as well. But even among this august company, it was the Doc Forest that most impressed Alice.

On Mr. Lindberg’s narrow, sunken chest was a tall clipper ship in full sail—a three-masted type with a fast hull and a lofty rig. Under its bow, a sea monster was cresting. The serpent’s head was as big as the ship’s mainsail; the beast rose out of the sea on the port side of the bow, but the tip of its tail broke water off the starboard side of the stern. The doomed ship was clearly no match for this monster.

Alice announced that Doc Forest had to have been a sailor. In her view, the sailing ship on Torsten Lindberg’s chest was better than that HOMEWARD BOUND vessel on the breastbone of the late Charlie Snow. Torsten Lindberg knew where Doc Forest lived—he promised to take Jack and Alice to meet him. And the following day Lindberg would make up his mind about what kind of tattoo to get from Alice.

“I am inclining toward a personalized version of your Rose of Jericho,” he confessed.

“Every tattooed man should have one,” Alice told him.

Mr. Lindberg didn’t seem convinced. He was a worrier; it was the worrying, more than his metabolism, that kept him thin. He was worried about Alice’s situation at the Grand, and about Jack’s well-being in particular.

“Even in the Swedish winter, a boy must have exercise!” Did Jack know how to skate? Lindberg asked Alice.

Learning to skate had not been part of Jack’s Canadian experience, Alice informed him.

Torsten Lindberg knew the remedy for that. His wife skated every morning on Lake Mälaren. She would teach Jack!

If Alice was at all alarmed at how readily Mr. Lindberg offered his wife’s skating services, she didn’t say—not that Jack would have heard what his mother said. The boy was in the bathroom. He had a stomachache, having eaten too much for breakfast. He missed the entire skating conversation. By the time Jack came out of the bathroom, his winter exercise had been arranged for him.

And it didn’t strike the four-year-old as odd that his mother spoke of Lindberg’s wife as if she’d already met the woman. “She’s as robust as Lindberg is lean,” Jack’s mom told him. “She could keep a beer hall singing with her relentless good cheer.”

Alice further explained to Jack that Mrs. Lindberg had no desire to be tattooed herself, although she liked them well enough on Lindberg. A big, broad-shouldered woman who wore a sweater capable of containing two women the size of Alice, Mrs. Lindberg took Jack skating on Lake Mälaren as her husband had promised. Jack noted that Agneta Lindberg seemed to prefer her maiden name, which was Nilsson.

“Who wouldn’t agree that Agneta goes better with Nilsson than it does with Lindberg?” Alice said to her son, putting an end to that conversation.

What most impressed Jack was how well the large woman could skate, but that Agneta became so quickly out of breath bothered him. For someone who skated every morning, she got winded in a hurry.