John Irving - Until I Find You

“Maybe,” Jack said. He didn’t feel like much of an actor anymore. Jack Burns was a boy who’d never known his father, a boy whose father had been kept from him; maybe what Jack was really afraid of was losing his missing father as an excuse. That’s what Claudia would have told him, but Nico said nothing more.

If William had wanted a Herbert Hoffmann, Jack thought he knew which kind. He imagined it was one of Hoffmann’s sailing ships—often seen sailing out of port, or in the open sea on a long voyage. Sometimes there was a dark lighthouse and the ship was headed for rocks. Herbert Hoffmann’s Sailor’s Grave was among his most famous; there were his Last Port and his Letzte Reise or Last Trip, too. In most cases, Hoffmann’s ships were sailing into danger or unknown adventures; the feeling the tattoos gave you was one of farewell, although Herbert Hoffmann had done his share of homeward-bound tattoos as well.

A Homeward Bound would not have been his father’s choice, Jack was thinking. On the ship that had carried Jack away from his dad, Jack sensed there would have been more of a Sailor’s Grave or a farewell feeling—at least from William’s point of view. A ship leaving harbor conveys an uncertain future.

Or else William Burns had stuck to music on his skin. Jack could imagine that, too.

There was a nonstop flight from Los Angeles to Amsterdam—a little more than ten hours in the air. Richard Gladstein was going to be tired. He would leave L.A. at 4:10 in the afternoon and land in Amsterdam at 11:40 in the morning, the next day. Jack assumed that Richard would want to take a nap before they met Vanvleck for dinner that evening.

For two days, Jack didn’t leave his hotel room except to go to the gym on the Rokin. He lived on room service; he wrote pages and pages to Michele Maher. He came up with nothing he would send to her, but the stationery at the Grand was both more plentiful and more attractive than that at the Hotel Torni.

Jack did manage to come up with a clever way of asking Michele Maher the full-body tattoo question—that is, dermatologically speaking.

Dear Michele,

As a dermatologist, can you think of any reason why a person with a full-body tattoo might feel cold?

Please return the stamped, self-addressed postcard—checking the appropriate box.

Yours,

Jack

On a postcard of the Oudezijds Voorburgwal canal, he gave Michele the following options.

o No.

o Yes. Let’s talk about it!

Love,

Michele

Of course he didn’t send that letter or the postcard. For one thing, he didn’t have a U.S. stamp for the return delivery; for another, the “ Love, Michele ” was taking a lot for granted after fifteen years.

His second day alone, Jack almost went to see Els again in her apartment on the Sint Jacobsstraat. He didn’t want to sleep with a prostitute in her seventies—he just liked Els.

Mainly Jack would lie awake at night—imagining his little face on the ship’s deck, where his mother had lifted him above the rail. Jack was just smiling, and waving to beat the band, while the damage was being done around him—especially to his dad.

In Hamburg, maybe William had met someone; that might have helped him to forget Jack, if he’d ever managed to forget his son. After all, he’d had a correspondence with Miss Wurtz when Jack was attending St. Hilda’s. It wasn’t as if William had stopped thinking about Jack, cold.

When Richard arrived, he went straight to bed and Jack went back to the gym. Jack was eating more carbs and had changed his weightlifting routine; he’d managed to put on a few pounds, but Jack was still no Jimmy Stronach. (Not that there was anything he could have done to acquire Jimmy’s penis. )

In the gym on the Rokin, possibly in a failing effort to drown out the awful music in the weight room, Jack tried singing that ditty his mother had sung only when she was drunk or stoned—the one that seemed to resurrect her Scottish accent.

Oh, I’ll never be a kittie

or a cookie

or a tail.

The one place worse than

Dock Place

is the Port o’ Leith jail.

No, I’ll never be a kittie,

of one true thing I’m sure—

I won’t end up on Dock Place

and I’ll never be a hure.

How funny that it had once been Alice’s mantra to never be a whore.

Jack thought of their nightly prayer, which—when he was a child—they usually said together. He remembered one night in Amsterdam when she fell asleep before he did, and he said the prayer by himself. Jack had spoken a little louder than usual, because he had to pray for the two of them. “The day Thou gavest, Lord, is ended. Thank You for it.” (Of course that had probably happened more than once. )

Jack took a footbridge across the canal on his way back to the Grand. He stood on the bridge and watched a sightseeing boat drift by. In the stern, a small boy sat looking up at the footbridge—his face pressed to the glass. Jack waved, but the boy didn’t wave back.

It was already dark when Jack walked with Richard Gladstein to the Herengracht, to a restaurant called Zuid Zeeland, where they were meeting William Vanvleck. Jack was in no mood for the meeting. He kept thinking about the other William—the one he would have loved but was afraid to meet.

Five years later—as if striking the match that would set fire to Jack’s life in Los Angeles, strip his character bare, and ultimately lead him to seek his father—a young woman (younger than he realized at the time) sat not quite fully clothed on Jack’s living-room couch in that forlorn dump he still lived in on Entrada Drive. She was thumbing through his address book, which she’d picked up off his desk, and reading aloud the women’s names. In an insinuating tone of voice, she would first say the name and then guess what relationship Jack might have had, or still had, with the woman.

This juvenile behavior should have alerted him to the fact that she was clearly younger than she’d told him she was—not that Jack shouldn’t have guessed her real age for other reasons. But he did have difficulties with math.

She got into the G ’s before Jack said, “That’s enough,” and took his address book away from her; that’s when the trouble really started.

“Elena García,” the girl had just said. “Your cleaning lady, or former cleaning lady? You definitely fucked her.”

Elena García —Dr. García—was Jack’s psychiatrist. He had never had sex with her. For five years, Dr. García had not once been a love interest—but Jack had never depended on anyone to the degree that he depended on her. Elena García knew more about Jack Burns than anyone had ever known—including Emma Oastler.

Jack had often called Dr. García in tears, not always but sometimes in the middle of the night. He’d called her from Cannes—once when he was at a party at the Hôtel du Cap. That same day Jack had pushed a female photographer, a stalker paparazzo, off a chartered yacht; he’d had to pay an outrageous fine.

Another time, he banged some bimbo on the beach of the Hotel Martinez. She said she was an actress, but she turned out to be one of those Croisette dog-walkers; she’d been arrested for fucking on the beach before. And Jack should have won the Palme d’Or for bad behavior for the fracas he got into in that glass-and-concrete eyesore, the Palais des Festivals. This happened after the evening’s red-carpet promenade. Jack was on a narrow staircase leading to one of the Palais’s upstairs rooms. Some journalist shoved him into one of those thugs who comprise the festival’s security staff; the security guy thought that Jack had purposely shoved him, which led to Jack’s impromptu lateral drop. Chenko would have been proud of Jack for the perfect execution of his move—Coaches Clum, Hudson, and Shapiro, too—but the incident was in all the papers. The security thug broke his collarbone, and Jack got another stiff fine. The weaselly French!