John Irving - Until I Find You

“If you’d only just fuck each other!” his mother shouted one night, making a fist and pounding the kitchen table, which made Jack and Mrs. Oastler jump. “If you fucked each other all day, I’ll bet you two writers wouldn’t be so poetic !”

Although the screenplay kept getting better, Jack rarely felt he was poetic. It was no surprise, but it hurt nonetheless, that his mother refused to read the script. (“I’ll be dead by the time you make the movie, dear,” she’d told him.)

If there were a poetic presence in the house in his mother’s final days, Jack would have said that it was Leslie, who appeared early one afternoon in the doorway of his makeshift office—an unprecedented interruption. She was naked. By her reddened skin, in the area of her Rose of Jericho, he saw that she’d been scratching at her tattoo. She was sobbing.

“I regret ever getting this tattoo,” she said. Her appearance did not have that unmistakable aura of seduction.

“I’m sorry, Leslie.”

“Life forces enough final decisions on us,” Mrs. Oastler continued. “We should have the sense to avoid as many of the unnecessary ones as we can.”

Jack just sat at Emma’s old desk while Mrs. Oastler turned away from him and went down the hall. “Can I use that, Leslie?” he called after her. (He was missing some essential voice-over for the Michele Maher character, and there it was.) “What you just said—can I use it?”

“Sure,” Mrs. Oastler said, so softly that Jack almost didn’t hear her.

When they eventually signed Lucia Delvecchio for the Michele Maher role, Lucia would say it was the voice-over that made her want the part—that and the fact that she knew she’d have to lose twenty pounds to play Michele. Miramax would put that voice-over on the movie poster, and in all the ads for the film: “Life forces enough final decisions on us. We should have the sense to avoid as many of the unnecessary ones as we can.”

“Bingo!” Jack shouted down the hall, after Mrs. Oastler. But she’d gone into her bedroom and had uncharacteristically closed the door.

There was also the night when Leslie came to his bedroom, where Jack was sleeping—but there was scarcely an aura of seduction about this visit, either. By now, the remembered bits of information—the lost details of his missing father—were waking Mrs. Oastler at all hours of the night. This happened as regularly as Alice’s alternating sleeplessness and snoring would wake Mrs. Oastler, or the more violent occurrences when Alice would beat Leslie’s back with her fists—this for no better reason than that Alice had woken up and discovered that Leslie had turned her back on her, which was apparently forbidden in their relationship.

Neither Alice nor Mrs. Oastler could remember when this rule had been established, or even if it had ever been observed, but this didn’t deter Alice from attacking Leslie, who was at least grateful that Alice didn’t insist on Bob Dylan blaring through the house all night—not the way Bob belted it out all day at Daughter Alice, or so the police duly reported.

“When I start to go, Jack—you take me there,” his mom had told him. He knew she meant her tattoo shop. “When I start to go, I’m sleeping in the needles—nowhere else, dear.”

It was in this largely sleepless context that Mrs. Oastler crawled into Jack’s bed one night; she took hold of his penis so suddenly, but without any indication of seeking more intimate contact, that he at first thought Emma’s ghost had grabbed him. (After all, it was Emma’s bed.)

“I’m here to talk, Jack,” Leslie said. “I don’t care if your mother thinks we’re fucking. I’m just here to tell you something.”

“Go ahead,” he said.

She’d already told him that his father had paid the lion’s share of Jack’s tuition at St. Hilda’s; it was Mrs. Wicksteed who had only, to use his mother’s words, “occasionally helped.” And the clothes he’d believed Mrs. Oastler had bought for him, both for Redding and for Exeter—not to mention the tuition at both schools? “I was just the shopper,” Leslie had told him. “The money came from William.”

“Even for college—those years in Durham?” he’d asked her.

“Even your first couple of years in L.A.,” she’d said. “He didn’t stop sending money until you were famous, Jack.”

“And what about Daughter Alice? I mean the tattoo parlor, Leslie.”

“William bought her the fucking shop.”

This was a portrait of a very different dad from the one Jack had imagined—when last heard of, playing the piano on a cruise ship to Australia, on his way to be tattooed by the famous Cindy Ray! Not so, maybe. Mrs. Oastler remembered Alice saying that William had never gone to Australia. Leslie had further surprised Jack by telling him she was sure his father was still in Amsterdam when Jack and his mother left. “I think he watched you leave,” Mrs. Oastler had said.

Thus, when Leslie slipped into his bed and took hold of his penis—this was almost, in his half-sleep, like old times—Jack was eager to learn which new tidbit of information about his father might have surfaced in Mrs. Oastler’s fitful sleep. “It’s about her tattoo—I mean the you in Until I find you, ” Leslie whispered in his ear. “It’s not necessarily William.”

“What?” he whispered back.

“Think about it, Jack. She wasn’t looking for him—she’d already found him! It’s not like William was lost or something.”

“Where is he now?” Jack asked her.

“I have no idea where he is now. Alice doesn’t know, either.”

“Stop whispering !” Alice cried; she was calling from Mrs. Oastler’s bedroom, down the hall, although her voice was so loud that she could have been in Emma’s bed with Leslie and Jack. “ Talking is better than whispering!” his mother shouted.

Jack whispered to Leslie: “Who else could the you in Until I find you be?”

“The love of her life, possibly. That certain someone who would heal the heart your dad broke. Obviously she never found him. It’s certainly not me !” Mrs. Oastler declared, as Jack’s mom called out to them again.

“ Fucking is better than talking!” Alice yelled.

“You mean it’s a nonspecific you ?” Jack asked Leslie.

“For Christ’s sake, Jack. It’s not me, and maybe it’s not William—that’s all I’m saying.”

“I want to go home!” Alice called to them.

“For Christ’s sake, Alice—you are home!” Mrs. Oastler called back.

Jack lay there having his penis held, his thoughts entirely on the you in Until I find you. (As if there were anyone who could have healed his mother’s heart—as if she could conceivably have met the man, or woman, who had a snowball’s chance in hell of healing her!)

“Miss Wurtz!” Leslie whispered, so suddenly that Jack’s penis jumped in her hand. “He wrote to Miss Wurtz! Caroline had some kind of correspondence with your dad.”

“The Wurtz?” Jack whispered.

“Miss Wurtz herself told me,” Leslie whispered back. “I don’t think your mom ever knew about it.”

Something blocked the light from the bathroom, where the door was ajar—a sudden appearance of the kind The Gray Ghost was once the master of, as if Mrs. McQuat, who had tried to save him, were reaching out to Jack again. Or maybe Mrs. Machado, or her ghost, was coming to get him! But it was his mother, naked; she was as close to entering the next world as any ghost.

“I want to go home,” Alice whispered. “If you insist on whispering, I’m going to whisper, too,” she said, climbing into Emma’s bed.