John Irving - Until I Find You

“What happened in Helsinki?” he asked her.

“I don’t know everything, Jack. I just know that Alice tried to break up a lesbian couple, but she couldn’t manage it. They both slept with her—and had a good time, or not—but they went right on being a couple!”

“Who were they?” Jack asked.

“Music students—your dad’s two best, like Andreas and me. Only one of them was an organist; the other one was a cellist.”

“Ritva and Hannele were gay ?” Jack asked.

“Their names sound familiar,” Ingrid said. “The point is, Jack—your mother, once again, didn’t get what she wanted. But neither did your father.”

“You stayed in touch with him?” Jack asked.

“Till he left for Amsterdam,” Ingrid told him. “Whatever happened there, he didn’t write me about it. I lost touch with him when he left Helsinki.”

The kissing had become more interesting; it was principally her speech that was damaged. There was something detectably but indefinably strange about her mouth—if not actual damage, a kind of involuntary tremor that felt like damage. Jack didn’t know what it was, but it was very arousing.

It seemed the wrong time to ask her, but the thought had occurred to Jack—when she implied she’d had some limited correspondence with his father, if only when William was in Finland. Jack just had to ask her: “Was there anything romantic between you and my dad, Ingrid?”

“What a thing to ask me—you naughty boy!” she said, laughing. “He was a lovely man, but he wasn’t my type. For one thing, he was too short.”

“Shorter than I am?” Jack asked.

“A little shorter, maybe—not much. Of course I was never with him when I was lying down!” she added, laughing again. Ingrid grabbed Jack’s penis, which in his experience implied an impatience with the particular conversation—whatever it was.

“So I’m not your type, either?” he asked.

She kept laughing; it was the most natural sound she was capable of making. (Except, perhaps, on the piano.) “I have other reasons for wanting to sleep with you, Jack,” was all she told him.

“What other reasons, Ingrid?”

“When you’ve made love to me again and again, I’ll tell you,” she said. “I’ll tell you later—I promise.” There was an urgency about her speech impediment now, something more than impatience. He began by kissing her broken-heart tattoo, which seemed to make her happy.

In the morning, Jack woke her by kissing the tattoo again; it looked as if it were still bleeding. She smiled before she opened her eyes. “Yes, keep doing that,” Ingrid said, with her eyes still closed. He kept kissing her wounded-heart tattoo. “If you keep doing that, I’ll tell you what I believe about Hell.” Her eyes were wide open now—Hell being an eye-opening subject. He kept kissing her, of course.

“If you hurt people, if you know you’re hurting them, you go to Hell,” Ingrid said. “In Hell you have to watch the people you hurt, the ones who are still alive. If two people you hurt ever get together, you have to watch everything they do very closely. But you can’t hear them. Everyone in Hell is deaf. You just have to watch the people you hurt without knowing what they’re talking about. Of course, Hell being Hell, you think they’re talking about you—it’s all you ever imagine, while you’re just watching and watching. Kiss me everywhere, Jack—not just the tattoo.” He kissed her everywhere; they made love again. “What a bad night’s sleep your mother’s had, Jack,” Ingrid said. “She’s been up all night, just watching. ”

Jack had fallen back to sleep when he heard the piano. There was the smell of coffee in the apartment. He got out of bed and went into the living room, where Ingrid was sitting naked at the piano, playing softly. “Nice way to wake up, isn’t it?” she asked, with her back turned to him.

“Yes, it is,” he told her.

“We both have to get dressed, and you have to go,” she said. “My first pupil is coming.”

“Okay,” Jack said, turning to go back to her bedroom.

“But come kiss me first,” she said, “while the bitch is watching.”

There was a lot Jack didn’t know about religion. His dad, apparently, was a forgiver. Ingrid Moe (now Amundsen) wasn’t; she hadn’t forgiven Andreas Breivik or Alice. As Jack kissed Ingrid on her damaged mouth, he was thinking that he wasn’t much of a forgiver, either.

In Hell, where his mother was watching, Alice might have regretted giving Ingrid the wrong tattoo—or so Jack Burns was also thinking.

Jack never saw what the rest of Finland looked like. It was dark all the way from the airport into Helsinki. Although it was April, it was almost snowing; one or two degrees colder, and the rain would have turned to snow.

He checked into the Hotel Torni, marveling at the large, round room on the first floor, which served the hotel as a lobby. Jack remembered it as the American Bar—a hangout for the young and wild, some brave girls among them. The old iron-grate elevator, which had been “temporarily out of service” for the duration of Jack’s time in the Torni with his mom, was now working.

But although the American Bar was gone, the Torni was still a hangout for young people. On the ground floor was an Irish pub called O’Malley’s; shamrocks all over the place, Guinness on draft. It was an unwise choice for the Jack Burnses of this world—it was packed with more moviegoers than Coconut Teaszer. But Jack wasn’t hungry, and he’d slept on the plane. He didn’t feel like eating or going to sleep.

A not-bad band of Irish folksingers was playing to the pubcrowd—a fiddler, a guitarist, and a lead singer who said he loved Yeats. He’d left Ireland for Finland fifteen years ago.

Jack talked to the band members between sets. The young Finns in the pub were shy about speaking to Jack, although they did their share of staring. When the Irish folksingers went back to work, a couple of Finnish girls started talking to Jack. They didn’t seem all that brave; in fact, they were very tentative. He couldn’t tell what they expected, or what they wanted to happen. First one of them began to flirt with him; then she stopped flirting and the other one started.

“You can’t dance to this music,” the one who’d stopped flirting remarked.

“You look like you don’t need music to dance,” the one who’d started flirting said to Jack.

“That’s right,” he told her.

“I suppose you think I was suggesting something,” she said.

Jack wasn’t about to mess up his memory of Ingrid Moe by sleeping with either of the Finns, or with both of them. He thought he was hungry enough to eat a little something. But when he said good night to the Finnish girls, one of them remarked: “I guess we’re not what you’re looking for.”

“Actually,” Jack told them, “I’m looking for a couple of lesbians.” What a waste of a good end line—in O’Malley’s Irish pub in Helsinki, of all places!

He went to the lobby of the Torni and asked the concierge if there was still a restaurant called Salve. “It used to be popular with sailors,” Jack said.

“Not anymore,” the concierge told him. “And I’m not sure it’s the right place for Jack Burns to walk into. It’s a local place.” (Given the moviegoing crowd in O’Malley’s Irish pub, Jack was glad he’d registered at the Torni as Jimmy Stronach.)

Jack went up to his room and changed into what Leslie Oastler called his “tattoo-parlor clothes”—jeans and a black turtleneck. Mrs. Oastler had also packed Emma’s bomber jacket; the sleeves were way too long on Jack, but he loved it.