John Irving - Until I Find You

Jack knew then that he knew nothing, and that the only questions she would ever answer were direct ones—and he would have to guess which direct questions were the right ones to ask. A hopeless task.

“You should talk to Leslie,” his mother told him. “Leslie likes to talk. Tell her I don’t care what she tells you, Jack.”

“Mom, Leslie wasn’t there.”

He meant in Europe. But his mom wasn’t paying attention; she was pushing buttons on her new CD player, seeking to drown him out with the usual music.

“I want to send your MRI to Maureen Yap,” Jack told her. “She’s an oncologist.”

“Tell Leslie. She’ll arrange it, Jack.” The door to their conversation was closing once again—not that she’d ever opened it an inch more than she had to.

Jack tried one last time. “Maybe I should take a trip,” he said. “I’ll start with Copenhagen, where we began.”

“Why not take Leslie with you, Jack? That’ll keep her out of my hair.”

“I think I’ll go alone,” Jack said.

His mom’s exasperation with the CD player was growing. “Where’s the remote?” he asked her. “You should use the remote, Mom.”

Alice found the remote, pointing it at Jack—then at the CD player—like a gun. “Just do me a favor, Jackie boy, ” she said. “If you’re going to go find him, do it after I’m gone.”

The CD player was new, but Bob Dylan was familiar—albeit a lot louder than they expected.

The guilty undertaker sighs,

The lonesome organ grinder cries,

The silver saxophones say I should refuse you.

“Jesus, turn it down!” Jack said, but his mother pushed the wrong button—not the volume. The song started over, at the beginning.

“Go find him after I’m gone,” Alice said, pointing the remote at Jack—not at the stupid CD player.

“I want to know what really happened ! I’ve been asking you about the past, Mom. I don’t know enough about him to know if I want to find him!”

“Well, if that’s the trip you want to take, go on and take it,” his mother told him, pointing the remote in the right direction and turning down the volume, though it was still too loud.

The cracked bells and washed-out horns

Blow into my face with scorn,

But it’s not that way,

I wasn’t born to lose you.

Thanks to Bob, they didn’t hear the little tinkle of the bell as the door to the tattoo parlor swung open. It was warm and stuffy in the shop, but even after he closed the door, the gray-faced man in the doorway kept shivering; he had white shoulder-length hair, like an old hippie. There was a rising sun sewn on his jeans jacket, just above his heart, and he wore a red bandanna around his throat—Richard Harris as a cowboy, or perhaps an over-the-hill rodeo rider.

“Would you like a cup of tea?” Alice asked him.

The man was still too cold to talk, but he nodded. He wore tight black jeans and black-and-purple cowboy boots with a diamondback-rattlesnake pattern; he walked stiff-legged to the couch, which Jack knew was a sofa bed. (His mom occasionally slept there, Mrs. Oastler had told him—probably when Alice and Leslie had been quarreling.) The old cowboy sat down on the couch, as gingerly as you might imagine him settling himself on a bronco.

“ I want you, I want you,/I want you so bad, ” Bob Dylan was wailing. “Honey, I want you.”

“You’re a full-body, aren’t you?” Alice asked the cowboy, who was still shivering.

“Almost,” he told her. You couldn’t see a tattoo on him—only a relentless chill.

The cowboy was at least a decade older than William Burns would be, Jack thought; yet Jack felt an instant pang, as if his dad were shivering with cold. The old hippie, whose hands were shaking, was having trouble removing one of his cowboy boots. Jack knelt down and helped him get the boot off; the boot was so tight, the cowboy’s sock came off with it. His bare foot was startlingly white. Descending below the pant leg of his jeans, the skull of a long-horned steer completely covered the cowboy’s ankle; the fire-breathing flames from the skeleton’s open mouth licked the top of his unmarked foot.

The cowboy made no effort to remove his other boot. (Jack surmised that the other foot was tattooed, like all the rest of him.)

“I got one thing left that’s clean,” the cowboy hippie said to Alice. “You’re lookin’ at it.”

“Your hands and face are clean,” Alice told the cowboy.

“I gotta keep my hands and face clean, lady, if I wanna find any interestin’ work.”

As Jack had done so often in the past, he just slipped away. He poured his cup of tea down the sink, edging his way to the door.

“I’ll see you at home, Mom,” he said softly. Jack was pretty sure that their little talk was over; he was enough of a fool to think their dance was done.

“Lie down—let’s make you comfortable,” Alice told the cowboy, not looking at Jack. The old hippie stretched out on the couch, where Alice covered him with a blanket.

Bob was moaning his way through the refrain again; it’s a relentless song, over which Jack could nonetheless hear the cowboy’s teeth chattering.

I want you, I want you,

I want you so bad,

Honey, I want you.

“Take Leslie with you, dear,” his mother said, as Jack was going out the door; she was still not looking at him, preferring to fuss over the old cowboy. The door was closing when Alice called after her son: “It doesn’t matter anymore, Jack. I don’t even care if you sleep with her!”

Jack carried his mom’s little morsel of anticipation and horror with him as he walked along the south side of Queen Street until he caught a cab heading east, bringing him back to the Four Seasons. There was a small flurry of excitement among Jack’s fans at the front desk when he checked out of the hotel for the second time that day. Jack didn’t like chaos; it bothered him that he must have appeared disorganized, even directionless, but he had a plan.

He would move into the guest wing in what he had once thought of as Mrs. Oastler’s “mansion” in Forest Hill. Jack would sleep in Emma’s bedroom, of which—of the bed, in particular—he had mostly fond memories. Jack would move Emma’s desk, which was a big one, into what had been his bedroom, where Mrs. Machado had molested him; that room, charged as it was with the loss of Jack’s innocence, would become his office. Add his dying mother and Leslie Oastler to the package, as Alice might have put it, and he had chosen a terrific climate for completing his (or Emma’s) adaptation of The Slush-Pile Reader.

The screenplay, and Emma’s notes, had already been transcribed in Jack’s handwriting. He’d brought the script with him—to work on. All he needed was a little more writing paper and some extra pens. As it would turn out—and this was no surprise, given what a veteran shopper she was—Leslie rushed right out and got the writing supplies for him. (She even bought him a new lamp for Emma’s desk.)

Leslie was grateful to Jack for not leaving her alone with his mother, especially with Alice’s changes of mood and personality.

At first, it gave Jack pause that he was alone with Mrs. Oastler for the duration of the workday. He had some anxiety that she would throw herself at him in a state of undress. After all, his mother had not only given Jack permission to sleep with Leslie—she also repeatedly encouraged Leslie to sleep with Jack. (When Mrs. Oastler was doing the dishes after dinner, for example—when Jack was listening to music in the living room, while his mom was stretched out on the couch.)