John Irving - Until I Find You

He would have forgone the toenail polish if he could have worn his shoes, but the model had used them to weigh down his suit jacket, which was under about four inches of water in the bathtub.

It was just a musicians’ party—Jack didn’t expect that the dress code would be very severe. He thought it was adequate that he’d used a gob of the model’s extra-body conditioner and then blow-dried his hair. He looked like a slightly pregnant former field-hockey player (now a hooker) who’d been struck by lightning, but compared to the girls who were the usual groupies with the rock-’n’-rollers at the Sunset Marquis, Jack was head and shoulders above the competition.

Except for the model—she was hot. She’d stripped off Jack’s suit pants and the white dress shirt; she was dancing up a storm in his boxers and her bra. The musicians and their entourage were so wasted that Jack could have been Toshiro Mifune in drag, and no one would have noticed him. All but one guy, who appeared to be giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to his harmonica. He stopped playing and stared at Jack—well, at Jack’s tennis ball in two halves, specifically.

“Did you come with her?” he asked Jack, nodding to the dancing model.

“I recognize the boxers and the bra,” Jack said. It was a Jack Burns kind of line—it gave him away.

“You could pass for Jack Burns,” the harmonica player said. “I’m not shitting you.”

“Really?” Jack asked him. “Any idea where the honey in the boxers ditched the rest of her clothes?”

The harmonica player pointed to a couch, where a tall young woman was stretched out; she was asleep or passed out or dead. (Unmindful of the din, whichever the case.) She’d covered herself with Jack’s white dress shirt, which either she or the model had used to blot her lipstick. Jack found his suit pants and took the wallet out of the left-front pocket. There was no point in keeping the pants—not with the suit jacket under water in the model’s bathtub—and he had a hundred white dress shirts. It was the kind of night when you cut your losses and left.

The model was still dancing. “Tell her she can keep the boxers, but I want my bra back,” Jack said to the harmonica player, who was yowling away on his instrument like a runover cat; he barely nodded in Jack’s direction.

There was a bouncer-type who’d not seen Jack come in. The bouncer followed Jack out, into the semidark grounds, where there were other villas—some lit, some not. There was already dew on the grass. “Hey,” the bouncer said. “Someone said you were that weirdo Jack Burns.”

Jack’s face came up to the broad chest of the bouncer’s Hawaiian shirt; he was blocking Jack’s way. Ordinarily Jack would have sidestepped him; he could have easily outrun him to the lineup at the velvet rope out in front of the bar. The bouncer wouldn’t have messed with Jack in a crowd. But Jack’s skirt was so tight that his knees were brushing together when he walked; he couldn’t have run anywhere.

“Is that you, honey pie?” he heard Emma say. The bouncer stepped aside and let him pass. “Just look at you—you’re half unzipped!” Emma said to Jack. She threw her big arm around his hip, pulling him to her. She kissed Jack on the mouth, smearing his lipstick. “What happened to your shoes, baby cakes?” she asked.

“Under water,” Jack explained.

“They better not have been your Manolo Blahniks, you bad girl,” Emma said, putting her big hand on Jack’s ass.

“Dykes!” the bouncer called after them.

“I’ve got a dildo that would make you cry like a little baby!” Emma yelled at the bouncer, who looked suddenly pale in the bad light.

A tall, floppy guy, like a scarecrow, had fallen on the velvet rope in front of the bar; he was draped over it like a coat over a clothesline.

“I think it’s illegal to drive barefoot in California,” Emma was telling Jack.

“I promise I won’t sleep with your mother,” he whispered to her.

Jack was almost asleep, with his penis still stiff in Mrs. Oastler’s hand, when Leslie spoke to him. “I had to promise your mom I wouldn’t sleep with you, Jack. Of course, we’re not really sleeping together—not the way Alice meant—are we?”

“Of course not,” Jack told her.

One of Mrs. Oastler’s fingernails nicked the tip of his penis, and he flinched against her. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I haven’t played with anyone’s penis in quite some time.”

“It’s okay,” he said.

“You gotta talk to your mom, Jack,” Leslie said, the way Emma might have said it.

“Why’s that?” he asked.

“Talk to her while there’s still time, Jack.”

“Still time for what?”

“Emma and I didn’t talk enough,” Mrs. Oastler said. “Now we’re out of time.”

“Talk to my mom about what ?”

“You must have questions, Jack.”

“She never answered them!” he told her.

“Well, maybe now’s the time,” Mrs. Oastler said. “Ask her again. ”

“Do you know something I don’t, Leslie?”

“Definitely,” she said. “But I’m not telling you. Ask your mom.”

Outside, someone was screaming—probably in the parking lot near the hotel, but at Shutters on the Beach you could hear someone screaming all the way from the Santa Monica Pier. Perhaps it was the screaming that did it, but Jack’s erection finally subsided.

“Oh, cute !” Mrs. Oastler said. (She was making a considerable effort to bring his penis back to life.) “It’s like it’s going away !”

“Maybe it’s sad,” he suggested.

“Remember that line, Jack,” Emma had told him. “You can use it.” And to think he hadn’t been able to imagine under what circumstances an admission of your penis’s sadness would be of any possible use!

But the word sad affected Leslie Oastler in a way Jack wouldn’t have predicted. She let go of his penis and rolled over, turning her back to him. He didn’t know she was crying until he felt the bed tremble; she was crying without making a sound. Jack guessed that this was the eventually his mother had meant when she’d said that Leslie would break down, but—even in the act of falling apart—Mrs. Oastler was contained. Her small body shook, her face was wet with tears, her breasts were cool to his touch, but she never said a word.

When Jack woke up, he could hear Mrs. Oastler in the shower; room service had come and gone, unbeknownst to him. The pot of coffee, which was all that Leslie had ordered, was lukewarm. She’d already packed her small suitcase, and had laid flat (at the foot of the bed) the clothes she would wear on the plane—a black pantsuit, her bikini-cut panties, the little push-up bra. On her pillow, Mrs. Oastler had left a surprise for Jack: that photograph of Emma, naked, the one he’d kept. Leslie must have found it in the Entrada house; she wanted him to know she’d seen it.

The photo regarded Jack critically—Emma at seventeen, when Jack was ten and heading off to Redding. She had never been fitter. There was evidence of a matburn on one of her cheeks; probably Chenko, or one of the Minskies, had given it to her.

When Leslie Oastler came out of the bathroom, she was wearing a Shutters bathrobe and her hair was still wet. “Cute picture, huh?” Mrs. Oastler asked.

“Charlotte Barford took it,” he said.

“Then she probably took more than one—didn’t she, Jack?”

“An ex-girlfriend made me throw them away,” he told her.

“She probably thought you threw all of them away, Jack.”

“Right,” he said.

“A famous guy like you shouldn’t have pictures like that lying around,” Mrs. Oastler told him. “But I’m not going to throw it away for you. I’m not likely to throw any photographs of Emma away—not now.”