John Irving - Until I Find You

“Still listening to der Zimmerman, Jackie?” Robbie said.

Bob’s refrain wailed around them.

But I would not feel so all alone,

Everybody must get stoned.

“Still listening to den Zimmerman, Robbie.”

“I’m really not in the same league with these guys,” Robbie de Wit told Jack, gesturing unsteadily toward the rest of the gym. “It didn’t work out for me in Amsterdam.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Jack told him.

“I’m in Rotterdam now. Got my own shop, but I’m still an apprentice—if you know what I mean. I’m doing okay,” he said, his head bobbing. The receding hairline had fooled Jack at first—as had the egg-shaped forehead and the deep crow’s-feet at the corners of Robbie’s pale, watery eyes.

“What happened in Amsterdam, Robbie? What happened to Mom ? What made her leave?”

“Oh, Jackie—don’t go there. Let dying dogs die.” (Robbie meant “Let sleeping dogs lie,” but Jack understood him.)

“I remember the night she was a prostitute. At least she acted like one,” Jack said to him. “Saskia and Els looked after me. You brought Mom a little something to smoke, I think.”

“Don’t, Jackie,” Robbie said. “Let it go.”

“My dad didn’t go to Australia, did he?” Jack asked Robbie de Wit. “He was in Amsterdam the whole time, wasn’t he?”

“Your father had a following, Jackie. Your mom couldn’t help herself.”

“Help herself how ?” Jack asked.

Robbie tripped forward, almost falling; he offered Jack the faded Daughter Alice on his upper right arm as if he were daring Jack to punch him on his mom’s tattoo. “I won’t betray her, Jack,” Robbie said. “Don’t ask me.”

“I apologize, Robbie.” Jack was ashamed of himself for being even a little aggressive with him.

Robbie put his hand on the back of Jack’s neck; bowing, off-balance, he touched his egg-shaped forehead to the tip of Jack’s nose. “Your mom loved you, Jackie. She just didn’t love anybody, not even you, like she loved William. ”

The Old Girls, not counting Leslie Oastler, had gone home. The single ones—especially those Old Girls who were divorced, and proud of it—took some of the tattoo artists with them. Mr. Ramsey, bidding Jack his usual adieu—“Jack Burns!”—had taken a tattoo artist home with him, too. (Night-Shift Mike from Sailors’ Friend Tattoo in Norfolk, Virginia. Mike was indeed a friend of sailors!)

Even Miss Wong, at last in touch with the hurricane she was born in, danced up a storm—most memorably losing control of herself on the gym floor, jitterbugging with both Fronhofer brothers to “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again.” (Miss Wong went home with the better-looking brother.)

Remarkably, the Malcolms stayed late—Mrs. Malcolm being unusually cheered by the presence of Marvin “Mekong Delta” Jones from Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Marvin had lost both legs, and part of his nose, in the Vietnam War; he’d parked his wheelchair alongside Mrs. Malcolm’s and had entertained both her and Mr. Malcolm with his hilarious stories, perhaps apocryphal, of trying to get laid when he was wheelchair-bound and had half a nose. (“Not everyone is sympathetic,” one story began; he had Wheelchair Jane in stitches.)

Miss Wurtz, who went home at a proper hour—needless to say, The Wurtz went home alone— brought the house down by singing along with Bob. Her renditions of “All I Really Want to Do” and “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” were haunting. Flattop Tom told Jack there was nobody like her in Cleveland; North Dakota Dan said there was no one like Miss Wurtz in Bismarck, either. (How, Jack wondered, had Edmonton been so blessed?)

The Oastler mansion was a motel that night, the motorcycles stationed like sentinels on the lawn—some of them lurking close to the house, as if they were intruders seeking access through a window.

Lucky Pierre passed out on the living-room couch, where he was covered by so many of the bikers’ leathers that no one knew where he was in the morning—that is, until Joe Ink sat on him.

Flipper Volkmann and Wolverine Wally had to be separated—that old Michigan matter again. They put Flipper to bed in Jack’s former bedroom and made the Wolverine spend the night in the kitchen, where the less-good-looking of the Fronhofer brothers watched over him—the one who hadn’t gone home with Miss Wong and the hurricane she carried inside her.

Bad Bill Letters and Slick Eddie Esposito slept head-to-toe on the dining-room table, where their conversation about Night-Shift Mike, the sailors’ friend, was overheard throughout the house. “You’d have to have your eyes in your asshole, Bill, to not know Night-Shift was a fag,” Slick Eddie said.

“Eddie, if you had your eyes in your asshole, you’d be the first to know Night-Shift was a fag,” Bad Bill told him.

“You’re an asshole, Bill,” Slick Eddie said.

“Of course I’m an asshole!” Bad Bill replied. “Tell me somethin’ I don’t know.” But Slick Eddie was fast asleep; he was already snoring. “Sweet dreams, assholes!” Bad Bill cried, as if he were addressing everyone in the house.

“Sweet dreams, assholes!” Badger Schultz and his wife, Little Chicken Wing, called from the laundry room, where they were sleeping on the floor on an antique quilt.

“Great party, huh?” Jack whispered to the Skretkowicz sister he was sleeping with in Emma’s bed.

“Yeah, your mom woulda loved it!” Ms. Skretkowicz said. She was, alas, the one who’d been married to Flattop Tom. She also had a fabulous octopus tattooed on her ass; it completely covered both cheeks. “Flattop Tom’s work,” she admitted a little sadly. “Not to take nothin’ away from the octopus.”

Down the hall, Leslie was in bed with the other Skretkowicz sister. “She was a real sweetie,” Mrs. Oastler would tell Jack later. It was no surprise to Leslie that the other Skretkowicz sister had never been married—not to Flattop Tom or to anybody else. (Her biting Jack’s earlobe had been insincere.)

Jack was awake for a long time, not only because of the tender ministrations of the former Mrs. Flattop Tom. Emma used to say that Jack’s more than occasional sleeplessness was the plight of a nondrinker in a world of drinkers. (Jack doubted this.) It is fair to say that what the heterosexual Skretkowicz sister could do with the octopus on her ass would keep anyone awake for a long time, but Jack had more on his mind than that interesting octopus.

He regretted, again, his bad behavior with Robbie de Wit, who had come all the way from Rotterdam out of his love for Alice. Understandably, Robbie would never betray her—to use his word for it. If Jack wanted to know those things his mom had kept from him, or how she’d distorted his dad’s story in her telling of the tale, Jack needed to do his own homework—to make his own discoveries.

Jack needed to take that trip he’d threatened to take when his mother was still alive. Not to find William, as Miss Wurtz had urged him—at least not yet. Not that trip, but the trip Jack had taken with his mom when he was four.

Allegedly, when Jack was three, his capacity for consecutive memory was comparable to that of a nine-year-old. At four, his retention of detail and understanding of linear time were equal to an eleven-year-old’s—or so he’d been told. But what if that wasn’t true? What if he’d actually been a normal little boy? A four-year-old whose memory was as easy to manipulate as that of any four-year-old, a four-year-old like any other, whose retention of detail and understanding of linear time were completely unreliable.