John Irving - Until I Find You

Jack had been right to ask Emma if her vaginismus had a cause— of course it did, not that Emma could ever have told him. She’d been sexually abused when she was nine or ten—one of her mother’s bad boyfriends had done it. He would be Mrs. Oastler’s last boyfriend. Emma had been so traumatized that she’d missed a year of school. “Some problem at home” was all Jack remembered hearing about it; he’d assumed that this had something to do with Leslie’s divorce.

Mrs. Oastler’s final boyfriend gave new meaning to Emma’s saga of the squeezed child; at twelve, perhaps this had been her first attempt to fictionalize her personal grievances. “Of course there were any number of traumatic visits to doctors’ offices, beginning with Emma’s first gynecological examination,” Leslie told Jack. “And she hated her father—naturally, he was a doctor.”

Jack didn’t know that Emma’s dad had been a doctor. Whenever Emma or her mother mentioned him, the word asshole was dominant. The word doctor, if Jack had ever heard it, had been drummed out of his memory by asshole.

“Let me take you to dinner, Leslie,” Jack repeated. “Let’s go someplace Emma liked.”

“I hate to eat,” Mrs. Oastler reminded him.

“Well, I usually have just a salad,” Jack said. “Let’s go somewhere and have a salad.”

“Which one of you liked the Japanese condoms?” Leslie asked. (She’d even found Jack’s Kimono MicroThins!)

“Those are mine,” he told her. “They have great salads at One Pico.” His old boss—Carlos, from American Pacific—was now working as a waiter there. Jack called and asked Carlos for a table with a view of the ocean and the promenade.

There were a lot of messages on the answering machine, but Mrs. Oastler assured Jack they were not worth listening to—she’d already done so. Condolences from friends—even Wild Bill Vanvleck had called. (The Mad Dutchman hadn’t made a movie in years. Jack had worried that he might be dead.)

The only thing even mildly interesting, Leslie said, was the call from Alan Hergott—informing Jack that he’d been named literary executor in Emma’s will. (Alan was also Emma’s lawyer.) And Bob Bookman, their agent, had called; it was important, Bookman said, that he and Jack meet with Alan to discuss Emma’s will. (Jack had only recently learned—from his last, unpleasant conversation with Emma—that she had a will, and that she’d supposedly taken good care of him in it.)

“I’ll bet she’s left you everything, ” Mrs. Oastler remarked, with an encompassing wave of her thin arm—indicating the ransacked ruin of the wretched house on Entrada Drive. “Lucky you.”

While Leslie had a shower and changed her clothes, Jack played the messages on the answering machine at low volume. Both Bob Bookman and Alan Hergott made him think that his role as “literary executor” was a bigger deal than he might be anticipating; their voices had an unexpected urgency, which Mrs. Oastler had missed or chosen to ignore.

Leslie had changed into a sexy backless dress with a halter-type neckline. Only nine years older than Alice, Mrs. Oastler had just turned sixty, but she was so sleek and unwrinkled that she looked ten years younger—and she knew it. Her dark, boyish pixie was dyed to its roots, her small breasts didn’t droop, her small bottom looked firm. Only the veins on the backs of her hands betrayed her, and her hands were never at rest—as if to deny you a lingering look at them.

Leslie announced that Emma’s bedroom had the ambience of a crime scene, and that she wouldn’t sleep there. Jack offered her his bedroom, or the guest room, but Mrs. Oastler told him that she had reserved a room for them at Shutters. After all, they were going to eat at the restaurant there. “We might as well spend the night,” she said.

“ We? ” he asked her.

“I shouldn’t be left alone,” she told him. “If you slept with Emma and didn’t do it, I guess you can sleep with me and not do it, too, Jack.”

He put her small carry-on bag in the backseat of the Audi and drove her to Shutters. The sun had set, but a faded-pink glow served as a backlight to the Santa Monica Pier; the lights on the Ferris wheel were on. On the promenade below One Pico, people on Rollerblades swept past incessantly. Leslie drank a bottle of red wine with her salad; Jack had about a gallon of iced tea with his.

“I wonder what you’re the literary executor of, ” Mrs. Oastler remarked. (Carlos had told him, while she’d gone off to register in the hotel, that Leslie was the best-looking date he’d seen Jack with in a long time.)

“Her novel, maybe,” Jack said.

“In which case, what would you do with it, Jack?”

“Maybe Emma wanted me to decide if it was fit to publish or not,” he replied.

“It doesn’t exist, Jack. There is no third novel. It wasn’t her novel that was growing too long—it was the period of time in which she’d written nothing, ” Leslie said.

“Emma told you that?” he asked, because it suddenly sounded true.

Mrs. Oastler shrugged. “Emma never told me anything, Jack. Did she talk to you?”

“Not about her third novel,” he admitted.

“There is no third novel,” Leslie repeated.

It turned out that Mrs. Oastler had called Alan Hergott. Alan said something vague to her: the proceedings were “of a literary nature”; in fact, Emma had specified that her mother be excluded from the process. Even the reading of the will was a private matter, Alan told Mrs. Oastler; only Bob Bookman and Jack were allowed to hear what Emma wanted done with her estate.

“But are you guessing, or do you know there’s no third novel—not even a work-in-progress?” Jack asked Leslie.

“I’m only guessing,” Mrs. Oastler admitted. “With Emma, I was always guessing.”

“Me, too,” he said.

Surprisingly, Mrs. Oastler held his hand. He looked at her pretty face—her bright, dark eyes, her thin-lipped mouth with that seductive smile, her perfectly straight little nose—and wondered how a creature of Emma’s outsize dimensions could ever have come forth from such a lean, taut body.

What Mrs. Oastler said surprised him. “Emma’s death was not your fault, Jack. You were the only person she cared about. She told me once that taking care of you was all that mattered to her.”

“She never told me that,” he admitted. It would have been a good time to cry, but he still couldn’t. And if, in his mother’s estimation, Leslie Oastler would eventually break down, now was apparently not her moment to fall apart, either.

“Let’s get the check,” Leslie said. “I can’t wait to see what sleeping with you and not doing it is like.”

Jack thought they should tell his mother where they were spending the night. Alice would be worried about Leslie—and about Jack, to a lesser degree. What if his mom called the house on Entrada and got only the answering machine? Alice would be calling him on his cell phone all night.

“I’ll call her while you use the bathroom,” Mrs. Oastler said.

He’d forgotten to bring a toothbrush. For a host of historical reasons, Jack was disinclined to use Leslie’s toothbrush, but he took a dab of her toothpaste and smeared it on his teeth with his index finger.

“Please feel free to use my toothbrush, Jack,” Mrs. Oastler said through the closed bathroom door. “In fact, if you have any expectations of kissing me, please do use it.”

He had no expectations of kissing Leslie Oastler—that is, not until she brought it up. Against his better judgment, Jack used her toothbrush to brush his teeth.