John Irving - Until I Find You

He remembered watching her walk away from him—down the long, carpeted hall of the Bristol. She’d been sixteen going on thirty, as he recalled. From behind, she didn’t look like a child; she’d walked away from him like a woman. And what a voice—that voice had always been sixteen going on forty-five.

Although it was raining, Jack stood for fifteen minutes outside her building on the Theresesgate—fortunately, under an umbrella. The taxi had brought him sooner than he’d expected. Ingrid had invited him at five in the afternoon, which was when her last piano student of the day would be leaving. Jack looked up from his watch and saw a boy about twelve or thirteen coming out of Ingrid’s building. He looked like a piano student, Jack thought—a little dreamy, a little delicate, a little like it wasn’t entirely his idea to be doing this.

“Excuse me,” Jack said to the boy. “Do you play the piano?” The kid was terrified; he looked as if he were sizing up which way to run. “Forgive me for being curious,” Jack said, hoping to sound reassuring. “I just thought you looked very musical. Anyway, if you are a piano player, keep doing it. Never stop! I can’t tell you how much I regret that I stopped.”

“Bugger off!” the boy said, walking backward away from him. To Jack’s surprise, the boy had an English accent. “You look like that creep Jack Burns. Just bugger off!”

Jack watched him run; the boy went in the direction of the Stensgate tram stop. Jack imagined that the piano student was about the age of Niels Ringhof when Niels had slept with Jack’s mother. He rang the buzzer for AMUNDSEN—no first name, no initial.

It was a third-floor walk-up, but even a snob like Andreas Breivik might have enjoyed the view. The kitchen and the two smaller bedrooms overlooked the Stensparken—a clean-looking park situated on a hill. At the south end of the park, Ingrid pointed out the Fagerborg Kirke—the church where she went every Sunday. On Sunday mornings, she told Jack, you could hear the church bells in the whole area.

“The organist at the Fagerborg Church isn’t in the same league as your father or Andreas Breivik,” Ingrid said, “but he’s more than good enough for a simple piano teacher like me.”

She’d learned to conceal her mouth with her long fingers when she spoke, or to always speak when her face was turned slightly away. The constant movement of her long arms, as if she were conducting music only she could hear, was very graceful; she was a head taller than Jack, even in her white athletic socks. (She made him take off his shoes at the door.)

Breivik had been right about the floors—she’d saved the original wood. Her son had helped her remove the old layers of lacquer. The kitchen was the best room in the apartment; it had been remodeled in the early nineties. “With cupboards and all the rest from IKEA—nothing fancy,” Ingrid said. It was a blue-and-white kitchen with a wooden workbench, and a kitchen table with three chairs around it; there was no dining room.

In the living room, which faced the street, there was an old fireplace, and the original stucco work was intact. The piano faced a wall of photographs—family pictures, for the most part. The biggest of the three bedrooms, which was Ingrid’s, also faced the street—not the park.

“I think the park is rather lonely at night,” she told Jack, “and besides, my children wanted views of the park from their bedrooms. There have been no difficult decisions in this apartment.” She had an interesting way of speaking—that is, in addition to her speech impediment.

The thick braid that had hung to her waist was gone; her hair was slightly shorter than shoulder-length now, but still blond with only hints of silver in it. She wore jeans, and what may have been her favorite among her son’s left-behind shirts—a man’s flannel shirt, untucked, like Miss Wurtz had once worn.

“I wore this for you, because it’s so American,” Ingrid said, plucking at the shirt with her long fingers. “I never dress up or wear any makeup in this apartment.” (Another not-difficult decision, Jack imagined.) “If I dressed up and wore makeup, it might make my pupils nervous.”

Jack said that he thought he’d met one of her pupils, and that he’d probably made him nervous—without meaning to. “An English boy, about twelve or thirteen?” Jack asked.

She nodded and smiled. Many of her students were from diplomats’ families; the parents wanted their children to be occupied with cultural things. “To keep them from being at loose ends,” Ingrid said. “Not a bad reason for playing the piano.”

Jack asked her if she would play for him, but she shook her head. The apartment wasn’t soundproofed, she explained. In the old building, her neighbors could hear the piano through the walls. She stopped playing after five in the afternoon, and the first of her students never came to the apartment before nine—more often ten—in the morning.

She and Jack sat in the kitchen, where Ingrid made some tea. Her cheeks were a little sunken in, but she was still beautiful; nothing of what had been baby-faced about her remained, and her long limbs and broad hips had always given her a womanly appearance. She was more handsome than pretty, befitting the mother of two grown children—the children’s photos were all over the apartment, not just on the wall behind the piano.

Jack had spotted a nice-looking man with the children, when the kids were younger; he was a sailor in some of the pictures, a skier in others. The children’s father, Ingrid’s ex-husband, Jack assumed; the man looked nice in the way Emma had once defined the word, meaning that he looked normal. Everything about Ingrid seemed normal, too—in the best sense of the word.

“I shouldn’t have said I was glad your mother was dead. That’s an awful thing to say about a mother to her son!” she exclaimed. “I’m sorry.”

“No, don’t be sorry,” Jack said. “I understand.”

“I hated her twice,” Ingrid told him. “For what she did to me, for seducing Andreas—of course I hated her for that. But when I had children of my own—when they were the age you were when I met you—I hated your mother all over again. I hated her for what she did to you. First I hated her as a woman, then as a mother. No woman can have children and continue to think of herself first, but she did. Alice wasn’t thinking of you—of you not having a father. She was thinking only about herself.”

Jack couldn’t say anything; everything Ingrid said sounded true. He couldn’t argue with her, but he also couldn’t agree with her—not with any authority. What did Jack Burns know about having children, and how having children changed you? He finally said: “You have a third reason to hate her—for your tattoo. I remember that it wasn’t what you asked for.”

Ingrid laughed; her laughter was more natural-sounding than the way she had cried on the telephone. She was moving gracefully around the kitchen—opening the refrigerator, putting food on the table. Jack realized that she’d prepared a cold supper—gravlaks with a mustard sauce, a potato salad with cucumber and dill, and slices of very dark rye bread.

“Well, it was just a tattoo—it wasn’t life-changing,” she was saying. “But I was proud of myself for telling her what I wanted. I knew she would hate the idea. ‘A whole heart, a perfectly un broken one,’ I told her. ‘A heart my babies will one day love to touch,’ I said. ‘There’s not a thing the matter with my heart,’ I told your mother. ‘Maybe just make it a little smaller than average,’ I told her, ‘because my breast is a little smaller than average, too.’ I thought I was so brave to tell her this, when all the while my heart was broken. Andreas and your mother had broken it, but I wasn’t going to let her know that.”