John Irving - Until I Find You

The minister put his hand on her wrist, and, shaking his head, said: “God bless you and your son.” Then he left.

Jack concluded that, since even the cleaning lady had blessed him, they were big on God-bless-yous in Norway. Certainly Lazarus, leaving his grave, seemed predisposed to offer a blessing.

Back at the Bristol, Alice sipped her soup. (That was their lunch—just the soup.) But if Alice had lost her enthusiasm for spotting future tattoo clients, Jack thought he saw one. A young girl stared at them from the entrance to the dining room; she had a child’s face on an overlong body, and she refused to let the maître d’ show her to a table. Jack doubted that his mother would tattoo her. Alice had her rules. You had to be a certain age, and this baby-faced girl looked too young to be tattooed.

The instant Alice saw her, she knew it was Ingrid Moe. Alice told the waiter to bring another chair to the table, where the tall, awkward-looking girl reluctantly joined them. She sat on the edge of her chair with her hands on the table, as if the silverware were organ stops and she were preparing to play; her arms and fingers were absurdly long for her age.

“I’m sorry he hurt you. I’m sorry for you that you ever met him,” Alice told the young girl. (Jack assumed his mom meant his dad. Who else could she have meant?)

Ingrid Moe bit her lip and stared at her long fingers. A thick blond braid hung down her perfectly straight back, reaching almost to the base of her spine. When she spoke, her exquisite prettiness was marred by what an obvious strain it was for her to speak; she clenched her teeth together when she talked, as if she were afraid or unable to show her tongue.

Jack thought with a shiver of what an agony it might be for her to kiss someone, or to kiss her. Years later, he imagined his father thinking this upon first meeting her—and Jack felt ashamed.

“I want a tattoo,” Ingrid Moe told Alice. “He said you knew how to do it.” Her speech impediment made her almost impossible to understand, at least in English.

“You’re too young to get a tattoo,” Alice said.

“I wasn’t too young for him, ” Ingrid replied.

When she said the him, she curled back her lips and bared her clenched teeth; the muscles of her neck were tensed, thrusting her lower jaw forward as if she were about to spit. It was tragic that such a beautiful girl could be so instantly transformed; the not-so-simple act of speaking made her ugly.

“I would advise you not to get one,” Alice said.

“If you won’t do it, Trond Halvorsen will,” Ingrid struggled to say. “He’s not very good—he gave William an infection. He gives everyone an infection, I think.”

Perhaps hearing the girl say William made Alice flinch—more than the news that he’d been infected by dirty needles or a bad tattooist. But Ingrid Moe misunderstood Alice’s reaction.

“He got over it,” the girl blurted out. “He just needed an antibiotic.”

“I don’t want to tattoo you,” Alice told her.

“I know what I want and where I want it,” Ingrid answered. “It’s on a part of me I don’t want Trond Halvorsen seeing,” she added. The way she contorted her mouth to say the name Trond Halvorsen made him sound like a kind of inedible fish. Ingrid spread the long fingers of her right hand on the side of her left breast, near her heart. “Here,” she said. Her hand cupped her small breast, her fingertips reaching to her ribs.

“It will hurt there,” Alice informed her.

“I want it to hurt,” Ingrid replied.

“I suppose it’s a heart you want,” Alice said.

Maybe a broken one, Jack was thinking. He was playing with his silverware—his attention had wandered off again.

Alice shrugged. A broken heart was such a common sailor tattoo that she could have done one with her eyes closed. “I won’t do his name,” she said to Ingrid.

“I don’t want his name,” the girl answered. Just a heart, ripped in two, Jack was thinking. (It was something Ladies’ Man Madsen used to say.)

“One day you’ll meet someone and have to explain everything,” Alice warned Ingrid.

“If I meet someone, he’ll have to know everything about me eventually,” the girl responded.

“How will you pay for it?” Alice asked.

“I’ll tell you where to find him,” the girl said. But Jack wasn’t listening; Ingrid’s speech impediment disturbed the boy. The girl might have said, “I’ll tell you where he wants to go.”

So much for rules. Ingrid Moe was not too young to be tattooed after all. She was no child; she just looked like one. Despite her baby face, even Jack knew that. If he’d had to guess, Jack would have said she was sixteen going on thirty. He didn’t know that a world of older women awaited him.

At midday, the amber light that suffused the hotel room made Ingrid Moe’s pale skin seem more golden than it was. She sat stripped to her waist on one of the twin beds, Alice beside her. Jack sat on the other twin bed, staring at the tall girl’s breasts.

“He’s just a child—I don’t mind if he watches,” was how Ingrid had put it.

“Maybe I mind,” Alice said.

“Please, I’d like to have Jack here while you do it,” Ingrid told her. “He’s going to look just like William. You know that, don’t you?”

“Yes, I know,” Alice answered.

Possibly Ingrid didn’t mind the boy seeing her because she had no breasts to speak of; even so, Jack couldn’t take his eyes off her. She sat very straight with her long fingers gripping her knees. The blue veins in her forearms stood out against the gold of her skin. 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.

Alice had outlined the whole heart, which touched both the side of Ingrid Moe’s left breast and her rib cage, before Jack got the idea that it was not a broken heart—not a heart ripped in two, as he’d thought Ingrid had requested—but an un broken one. (Without a mirror, Ingrid couldn’t see the tattoo-in-progress; besides, she kept staring straight at Jack, who was paying more attention to her breasts than to the tattoo.)

Even when Alice did the outlining on Ingrid’s rib cage, the girl sat completely still and didn’t make a sound, although tears flowed freely down her cheeks. Alice ignored Ingrid’s tears, except when they fell on the girl’s left breast; these errant tears she wiped away, as perfunctorily (with a dab of Vaseline on a paper towel) as she wiped away the fine spatter of black ink from the outlining.

It wasn’t until Alice began to shade the heart red that the strangeness of it became apparent. Given the slight contour of Ingrid’s breast, the plump little heart seemed capable of beating. The rise and fall of Ingrid’s breathing gave the tattoo a visible pulse; it looked real enough to bleed. Jack had seen his mother tattoo a heart in a bed of flowers, or frame one with roses, but this heart stood alone. It was smaller than her other hearts, and something else was different about it. The tattoo held the side of Ingrid Moe’s left breast and touched her heart—the way, one day, an infant’s hand would touch her there.

When Alice was finished, she went into the bathroom to wash her hands. Ingrid leaned forward and put her long hands on Jack’s thighs.

“You have your father’s eyes, his mouth,” she whispered, but her speech impediment made a mess of her whisper. (She said “mouth” in such a way that the mangled word rhymed with “roof.”) And while Alice was still in the bathroom, Ingrid leaned farther forward and kissed Jack on the mouth. The boy shivered as though he might faint. Her lips had opened so that her teeth clicked against his. Naturally, he wondered if her speech impediment was contagious.