John Irving - Until I Find You

“No, of course not,” he said.

Jack went and stood naked at the window, overlooking the parking lot; there was a partial view of the dead, motionless Ferris wheel, which resembled the skeleton of a dinosaur in the bleached-gray light. Santa Monica wasn’t an early-morning town.

Mrs. Oastler came and stood behind him, holding his penis in both her hands; he had a hard-on in a matter of seconds. It seemed like such a betrayal of Emma—all of it. That was when Jack began to cry. He could tell that Leslie was naked because she was rubbing herself against his bare back. If she’d wanted to make love, he would have; that was probably why he was crying. The promises he’d made to Emma and his mother meant nothing.

“Poor Jack,” Leslie Oastler said sarcastically. She let him go and dressed herself; her hair was so short, she could dry it easily with a towel. “You’re going to have a busy day, I’m sure,” she told him, “doing whatever literary executors do.” Jack could have cried all day, but not in front of her. He stopped. He found his clothes and started to get dressed, putting Emma’s photo in his right-front pocket. “Your mother will no doubt call you before I’m back in Toronto,” Mrs. Oastler was telling him. “She’ll want to know all about our night together—how we didn’t sleep together, and all of that.”

“I know what to say,” he told her.

“Just be sure you talk to her, Jack. Ask her everything, while there’s still time.”

Jack finished dressing without saying anything. He went into the bathroom and shut the door. He tried to do something about his hair; he washed his face. He was grateful to Mrs. Oastler for leaving him her tube of toothpaste, if not her toothbrush, which he presumed she’d packed. He smeared a dab of toothpaste on his teeth with his index finger and rinsed his mouth in the sink. Jack heard the hotel-room door close before he was finished in the bathroom; when he came back out into the room, Leslie was gone.

He had some trouble leaving Shutters. Mrs. Oastler had paid the bill, but the paparazzi were waiting for him. Thankfully, they’d missed Mrs. Oastler. Someone had spotted Jack Burns having dinner with a good-looking older woman at One Pico; someone had figured out that they’d spent the night at Shutters.

“Who was the woman, Jack?” one of the photographers kept asking.

There were a few more paparazzi waiting for him at Entrada Drive, but that was to be expected. Jack wondered why they hadn’t been there the night before; they could have followed him and Leslie to Shutters. He stripped Emma’s bed and put her linens and towels in the washing machine; he straightened up the place a little. His mom called before he’d managed to make himself any breakfast. He told her that Leslie was already on the plane, and that they’d had a comforting night together.

“ Comforting? You didn’t sleep with her—did you, Jack?”

“Of course not!” he said with indignation.

“Well, Leslie can be a little lawless, ” Alice said.

Jack could only imagine how Mrs. Oastler might have reacted to that. He would have guessed that, in their relationship, his mom was the more lawless of the two. But he didn’t say anything. Jack knew he was supposed to talk to his mother, but he didn’t know what to say.

“Leslie said I should talk to you, Mom. She said I should ask you everything, while there’s still time.”

“Goodness, what a morbid night you two must have had!” Alice said.

“Mom, talk to me.”

“We are talking, dear.”

She was being coy. Jack simply turned against her. There was a time when he’d tried to ask her everything, and she’d wanted no part of it. Now he didn’t want to give her the opportunity to unburden herself. What did Jack care about any of it now—what did it matter? When he was a kid, when it would have mattered, she was silent. Jack was the one who was silent now.

“If there’s anything you want to ask me, dear, ask away!” his mother said.

“Are you faithful to Leslie?” he asked. “Isn’t she more faithful to you than you are to her?” That wasn’t what Jack really cared about—he was just testing his mother’s willingness to give him a straight answer.

“Jackie—what a question!”

“What kind of guy was my dad? Was he a good guy or a bad one?”

“Jack, I think you should come home to Toronto for a few days—so we can talk.”

“We are talking, Mom.”

“You’re just being argumentative, dear.”

“Please tell Leslie that I tried to talk to you,” Jack said.

“You didn’t sleep with her, really ?” his mom asked.

Jack almost regretted that he hadn’t really slept with Leslie Oastler, but all he said was: “No, Mom, I did not.”

After that, their conversation (such as it was) slipped away. When Jack told his mother that he’d thanked Mrs. Oastler for all she’d done for him—for them, he meant—his mom responded with her usual “That’s nice, dear.”

He also should have said that Leslie was funny about his thanking her, but he didn’t.

Jack was on the cordless phone, looking out the window at a TV crew in his driveway. They were filming the exterior of the Entrada Drive house, which really pissed Jack off. He was distracted and didn’t understand what his mom was saying about some tattoo convention in Woodstock, New York.

Out of the blue, Jack asked her: “Do you remember when I was at Redding? One year, you were going to come see me in Maine, but something happened and you couldn’t come. I was at Redding for four years, but you never came to see me.”

“Well, that’s quite some story—why I didn’t come to Redding. Of course I remember! I’ll have to tell you that story sometime, Jack. It’s a good one.”

Somehow this didn’t strike him as what Mrs. Oastler meant by talking to his mother. They were talking in circles. Jack had lived with Emma for ten years; now Emma was gone, and he and his mom couldn’t talk to each other. They never had. It was pretty clear that she didn’t want to tell him anything, ever.

Alice wanted to know what was entailed in being a literary executor—not that Jack knew. “I guess I’ll find out what’s involved,” was all he could say.

Jack was surprised to see that there was only one message on the answering machine, which he played while his mom was still on the phone. It was Mildred (“Milly”) Ascheim, the porn producer, calling with her condolences. Her voice was so much like Myra’s that, for a moment, Jack thought that Myra was summoning him from the grave. “Dear Jack Burns,” Milly Ascheim said, as if she were dictating a letter to him. “I’m sorry you’ve lost your friend.”

She didn’t leave her number or say her name, but she must have known that he knew the Ascheim sisters spoke with one voice. He was touched that she’d called, but once again he was distracted from what his mom was saying—something about Mrs. Oastler, again.

“Jack, are you alone?”

“Yes, I’m alone, Mom.”

“I heard a woman’s voice.”

“It was someone on television,” he lied.

“I asked you if Leslie kept her clothes on, Jack.”

“Well, I think I would have noticed if she’d taken them off,” he told her.

“Actor,” Alice said.

“Mom, I gotta go.” (It was the way Emma would have said gotta, they both noticed.)

“Good-bye, Billy Rainbow,” his mother said, hanging up the phone.

ASt. Hilda’s Old Girl, like Leslie Oastler, would often choose to have her funeral or memorial service in the school’s chapel, where the Old Girls had both fond and traumatizing memories of their younger days, many of which had not been spent in the contaminating presence of boys—except for those little boys, who were neither a threat nor a temptation to the much more grown-up girls. (Except for Jack Burns.)