John Irving - Until I Find You

“Leslie, why don’t you sleep with Jack tonight?” Alice would call out to the kitchen.

“Mom, for Christ’s sake—”

“No, thank you, Alice!” Mrs. Oastler would call into the living room.

“You should try it—you might like it,” Alice told them over supper one night. “You don’t snore, do you, Jack? He won’t keep you awake, Leslie—well, not like I do, anyway. He won’t keep you awake all night, I mean.”

“Please stop, Alice,” Leslie said.

“How much longer do you realistically expect me to sleep with you?” Alice snapped at Mrs. Oastler. “You won’t sleep with me when I’m in a coma, I hope!”

“Mom, Leslie and I don’t want to sleep together,” Jack said.

“Yes, you do, dear,” his mother said. “Don’t you want to sleep with Jack, Leslie? Well, of course you do!” she said cheerfully, before Mrs. Oastler could respond one way or another.

Jack could only imagine what a dysfunctional stew Emma would have made of their threesome—a relationship as challenging as that of a too-small slush-pile reader and a too-big porn-star screenwriter! Jack was indeed living, as he had hoped, in the perfect atmosphere in which to finish his (or Emma’s) screenplay.

The script itself was becoming an intense marriage of plagiarism and rightful ownership; a partnership of wily commerce with those near-blinding shafts of light in which familiar but nonetheless amazing dust motes float. (“These ordinary but well-illuminated things are what we remember best about a good film,” Emma had said.)

Perhaps because Jack was devoted to the task of making Emma’s best book into a movie, but also because he and Mrs. Oastler were both victims of his mother’s escalating abuse, Jack lost his fear of Leslie throwing herself at him in a state of undress. For the most part, she left him alone.

When he would venture downstairs into the kitchen, either to make himself a cup of tea or to eat an apple or a banana, Mrs. Oastler would often be sitting at the kitchen table—as if Alice had only recently left the house or was, at any minute, expected to return. Then, in the briefest possible conversation, Mrs. Oastler would convey to Jack some new detail or missing information she remembered about his father.

Mrs. Oastler struck Jack as exhausted most of the time. Her memory of what Alice had concealed from Jack about his dad returned to her unexpectedly and at unplanned moments, which made Jack extremely jumpy in her company—largely because he never knew what secret she might suddenly divulge. Sadly, this had the effect on Leslie of making her appear as if she had slept with Jack, which Alice never failed to notice.

“You slept with him, Leslie, didn’t you?” his mom would regularly ask, upon coming home from Daughter Alice.

“No, I did not,” Mrs. Oastler would say, still sitting—as if she had taken root—at the kitchen table.

“Well, you look as if you did,” Alice would tell her. “You look as if someone’s been banging your brains out, Leslie.”

It was too easy to say that this was the tumor talking—too convenient to call Alice’s outrageous behavior the cancer’s fault. But even her language was changing. Not her diction or enunciation, which were the unstumbling examples of Miss Wurtz’s determined eradication of Alice’s Scottish accent, but Alice was increasingly vulgar-tongued—as Emma had always been, as Leslie could be, as Alice unwaveringly criticized Jack for being. (“Since California,” as his mother put it.)

But Jack’s work went on. He even showed a draft of the screenplay to Mrs. Oastler; she’d said she was dying to read it. To Jack’s surprise, Leslie was much moved by the script; she found it extremely faithful to the novel. She even took the time to compose a list of the things that were different from what they’d been in the book. These weren’t offered as criticisms—Mrs. Oastler merely wanted Jack to appreciate that she’d noticed. Among the many differences, of course, were those things Emma herself had changed—or else she’d suggested that Jack change them. And some of the changes were entirely his.

“But you like it?” he asked Leslie.

“I love it, Jack,” she said, with tears in her eyes.

Jack Burns was a first-time writer; he’d never encountered literary approval. Something in his relationship with Mrs. Oastler changed because of it. They were united by more than his mother’s dying; they were joined by Emma’s giving him the opportunity to make a movie of The Slush-Pile Reader, and by his bringing Leslie into the process.

They were brought together, too, by Alice’s refusal to talk to Jack about his dad—and the consequent burden of what Mrs. Oastler knew of that subject, which she was now under pressure to tell Jack. Worst—but, in the long run, maybe this was best—Leslie Oastler and Jack were drawn to each other by Alice’s relentless and incomprehensible efforts to virtually force them to sleep together, which both Leslie and Jack were determined not to do, at least not while Alice was alive and she so thoroughly and insensitively wanted them to do it. (And of course what made this last part so difficult was that Alice, even in her madness, was right about one thing: increasingly, Leslie and Jack did want to sleep together.)

Alice was inarguably crazy, but how much of her craziness was the result of the breast-cancer cells in her brain—or was, more simply, her undying anger at William Burns—Mrs. Oastler and Jack would never know.

There was the night Jack discovered his mother naked and asleep in Emma’s bed—in his bed, under the new circumstances—and when he woke her, she told him she was staying where she was so that he could sleep with Leslie. Jack went to bed in his old bedroom (his new office) that night, in the bed where Mrs. Machado had so roughly educated him.

This episode was not repeated, but there were other episodes. The police called Mrs. Oastler one day to say that Daughter Alice was “evidently closed”—meaning all the lights were off and the venetian blinds were shut. Yet, inside the shop, Bob Dylan was singing up a storm—even passersby, on the Queen Street sidewalk, were complaining. This was how Leslie and Jack learned that Alice now routinely closed the tattoo parlor almost as soon as she’d opened it; she took an all-day nap on the sofa bed. Lately there were sounds in her brain that kept her awake at night, Alice explained to them. (According to Mrs. Oastler, Alice was either wide awake or snoring.)

“What sounds, Alice?” Leslie asked her.

“Nothing I can understand,” Alice answered. “Voices, maybe—not yours, not Jack’s. No one I want to listen to.” (Hence Bob, at high volume; thus the complaints.)

“If there’s a bend in the road to your dying, Alice, you may have gone around it,” Mrs. Oastler told her.

“Suddenly she’s a writer !” Alice cried, hitting Jack’s shoulder but pointing derisively at Leslie. “Here I am, living with a pair of writers!”

Jack saw in his mind’s eye what he’d tried to overlook when he’d found his mother naked and snoring in his (formerly Emma’s) bed: the slackness of her breasts in sleep, and how the tattoo of her broken heart had shifted slightly from its perfect placement on her younger left breast and the heart side of her rib cage. It was now a lopsided broken-heart tattoo, as if there’d been something irreparably wrong with Daughter Alice’s heart before William Burns had broken it. Even in her sleep, there were still faint creases where the underwire of her bra had marked both breasts, and in the light cast from the bathroom—the door was ajar—the scar from Alice’s lumpectomy shone an unnatural white, as did the scar in that same-side armpit, where the lymph node had been removed. (Jack had never seen that scar before.)