John Irving - Until I Find You

“What did you say?” Jack asked her. It wasn’t the speech impediment; he was pretty sure he had understood her. “You didn’t ask for a broken heart, Ingrid?”

“ Ask? Who would want one?” she exclaimed. “I asked your mother for the kind of heart I had before she fucked Andreas!” Ingrid was lighting a candle; she’d already arranged the place settings. She hadn’t turned a light on in the kitchen, preferring the dusk and the view of the Stensparken. “And the bitch gave me a broken heart!” Ingrid said. “As ugly a heart as one could imagine. Well, you put the bandage on it, Jack. You remember.”

“I remember it the other way around,” he told her. She was pouring herself a glass of wine. (Somehow she knew Jack didn’t drink; she told him later that she’d read about his being a teetotaler in an interview.) “I remember you asking for a heart ripped in two, and my mom gave you a good one.”

“She gave me a good one, all right,” Ingrid said. She stood next to Jack’s chair and unbuttoned the flannel shirt; she wasn’t wearing a bra. (He thought of Miss Wurtz in a shirt like that, without a bra—unbuttoning her shirt for his father.)

Even at dusk, in the dim candlelight, the tattoo of Ingrid Amundsen’s torn heart looked like a fresh wound—the jagged tear cut the heart diagonally in two. The blood-red edges of the tear were darker than the shading of the heart, and more sharply defined than the outline. Jack had not seen his mother do an uglier tattoo, but Ingrid seemed accepting of it.

“Well, guess what?” she said, buttoning her shirt back up. “My babies loved it! They loved to touch it! And I came to realize that your mother had given me the heart I had—not the heart I used to have. How much more cruel it would have been to walk around wearing the heart I used to have. Not that Alice was consciously doing me a favor.” She sat down at the table and served him. “ Bon appétit, Jack,” she said. “When I see you in the movies, I think of how proud you must make your father—and how it must have hurt your mother to see you.”

“ Hurt her? How?” he asked.

“Because she finally had to share you,” Ingrid said. “She never knew how to share you, Jack.”

The food was very good, and Jack was hungry; it seemed strange that there wasn’t any music, but music is never background music to musicians.

“Your father was very religious,” Ingrid told him when he was helping her do the dishes. “It’s hard to play church music in a church and not be, although I wasn’t. I became more religious when I went back to playing the piano—that is, not in a church.”

“How was he very religious ?” Jack asked.

“When Andreas and your mother hurt me, William told me something. He said, ‘Find someone; devote yourself to that person; have a child, or children; praise God.’ Not that it ever worked out that way for me! But that’s what William told me; that’s what he believed in. Well, I got the children, and I praise God. That’s been good enough.”

“So you’re religious, too?” he asked.

“Yes—but not like your father, Jack.”

“Tell me more about the religious part,” he said.

“Take your mother, for example,” Ingrid said a little impatiently. “Your father forgave her. I didn’t.”

“He forgave her?”

“He fought back once, but it backfired. I don’t think he fought back again,” she told him. It was as if her speech impediment had almost gone away, or he’d forgotten it; she was such a healthy person, Jack was thinking.

She’d gone into the living room and had come back to the kitchen with a photograph. “A pretty young woman, don’t you think?” she asked, showing him the picture. Jack recognized the beautiful girl in the photograph; it was the woman William had brought with him to the restaurant in the Hotel Bristol.

“I asked her if she had a tattoo,” Jack said.

“That was what backfired,” Ingrid told him. “Your dad didn’t expect you would speak to them. He felt awful.”

“Who was the girl?” Jack asked.

“My sister, an actress,” Ingrid said. “She’s not a movie star, like you—but in Norway she’s a little bit famous, in the theater. I convinced your father to take her with him. I thought it would serve your mother right. Alice was always telling him how and when he could get a look at you. In Copenhagen, and in Stockholm, she even told him who to have with him!”

“Yes, I know,” Jack said.

“So I told him to take my sister, the actress, and I told my sister to fall all over him. I said to them both, ‘Make the bitch think you’re in love with each other. Make her think that all the lies she tells Jack have come true!’ But then you went up to them, and they didn’t know what to do. Naturally, your mom fell apart, and she took you away again. She was always taking you away.”

“Yes,” he said.

“Your father told me: ‘Maybe forgiveness would have worked better, Ingrid.’ But I told him that nothing would work with Alice. Nothing worked—did it, Jack?”

“No, nothing worked,” he answered.

“Your father said: ‘God wants us to forgive each other, Ingrid.’ That’s all I know about the religious part, Jack.”

It was dark outside—the lonely time of night in the Stensparken—and the candle on the kitchen table was the only light in the darkening apartment. “Look how dark it is, Jack Burns,” Ingrid whispered, bending down to touch his ear with her clenched teeth. “You’re still a little boy to me. I can’t let you go home in the dark.”

Even with her speech impediment, she made it sound as if this were another not-difficult decision in her fabulous apartment, where there’d been no difficult decisions—not ever.

Kissing Ingrid Amundsen was almost normal; there was an unnatural sound she made when she swallowed, when she was kissing him, but it wasn’t unpleasant. Jack held his mom’s ripped-heart tattoo on Ingrid’s small left breast—exactly where her babies had been delighted to touch her.

Ingrid had no breasts to speak of, and the blue veins in her forearms stood out against the gold of her skin—just as he’d remembered. Another blue vein, which began at her throat, ran down between her small breasts; that vein seemed to have a pulse in it, as if an animal lived under her skin. Maybe the animal affected her speech. At least he’d remembered her veins correctly.

“I used to think about which of us was the more damaged, but we’re all right, aren’t we?” Ingrid asked him; her poor voice sounded awful at that moment.

“Yes, I think so,” Jack said, but he didn’t really feel that he was all right—and he couldn’t tell about Ingrid. She had the aura of an accepted sadness about her. Jack hated to think of her meeting people for the first time, and what that did to her. He was even angry at her son, who’d gone off to the university in Bergen. Couldn’t the kid have stayed in Oslo and seen more of his mother?

Yet Ingrid’s life, her seeming wholeness, impressed Jack as more likable than whatever life Andreas Breivik was living. Breivik’s opinion—namely, that Ingrid had not had much success at anything—struck Jack as arrogant and wrong. But Andreas had known her better than Jack did. She was such a beautiful yet flawed woman; it hadn’t been hard for Jack’s mom to make the boy believe that Ingrid and William had been lovers. (Who wouldn’t have been her lover?)

“It couldn’t have been as bad for your father anywhere as it was in Copenhagen,” Ingrid told Jack, “but I don’t think that the problems with your mother ever got better. Not in Helsinki, anyway. Alice was perfectly awful to him there. But she didn’t achieve her desired effect. I think your mom started running out of steam in Helsinki, Jack.” (That had always been Jack’s impression.)