John Irving - Until I Find You

Lastly, from his ocean-front suite at the Carlton, Jack poured a whole bottle of Taittinger (chilled) onto that former agent Lawrence. The fink was giving Jack the finger from the terrace. Lawrence was just the kind of asshole you ran into at Cannes. Jack hated Cannes.

From Dr. García’s point of view, Jack’s behavior was only marginally better in Venice, Deauville, and Toronto—the three film festivals where Richard Gladstein, Wild Bill Vanvleck, Lucia Delvecchio, and Jack promoted The Slush-Pile Reader. (A recent headline in Variety— LOTS OF LIBIDO ON THE LIDO—could have been written about Jack Burns.)

They had a very good run with what Jack would usually call Emma’s movie; careerwise, it may have been Jack’s best year. They shot the film in the fall of ’98 and took it to those festivals in August and September of ’99—before the premieres in New York and London near the end of that year.

There was the unfortunate incident with Lucia Delvecchio in the Hotel des Bains in Venice; she’d had too much to drink, and bitterly regretted having slept with Jack. But no one knew—not even Richard or Wild Bill. And no one except Lucia’s husband, who was not in Venice, would have cared. Bad things happened in that languid lagoon.

“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” Jack told Lucia. “The whole city is sinking. Visconti shot Death in Venice in the Hotel des Bains. I think he knew what he was doing.”

But it was mostly Jack’s fault. Lucia had been drunk; he knew she was married. That precipitated another call to Dr. García. He called her from the Hotel Normandie in Deauville, too. (It wasn’t Lucia that time; worse, it was an older member of the jury.)

“The older-woman thing again ?” Dr. García had asked Jack on the phone.

“I guess so,” he’d told her.

Jack was with Mrs. Oastler at the Toronto film festival when they screened The Slush-Pile Reader in Roy Thomson Hall—a packed house, a triumphant night. It was gratifying to show the film in Emma’s hometown. But Leslie had a new girlfriend, a blonde, who didn’t like Jack. The blonde wanted him to remove all his clothes from Mrs. Oastler’s house. Jack didn’t think Leslie cared whether he left his clothes in her house or not, but the blonde wanted him (and his things) gone.

Jack was in Mrs. Oastler’s familiar kitchen when the blonde handed him the two photographs of his mother’s naked torso and the Until I find you tattoo. “Those are Leslie’s,” he explained. “I have two photos; she has the other two.”

“Take them,” the blonde told him. “Your mother’s dead, Jack. Leslie doesn’t want to look at her breasts anymore.”

“I don’t want to look at them anymore, either,” Jack said, but he took the photos. Now he had all four—these in addition to that photograph of Emma naked at seventeen.

Mrs. Oastler’s mansion, as Jack used to think of it, was different with the blonde there. Leslie’s bedroom door was usually closed; it was hard to imagine Mrs. Oastler closing her bathroom door, too, but maybe the blonde had taught her how to do it.

That trip to Toronto, Jack resisted sleeping with Bonnie Hamilton. She wanted to sell him an apartment in a new condo being built in Rosedale. “For when you tire of Los Angeles,” Bonnie told him. But Toronto wasn’t his town, notwithstanding that he had long been tired of L.A.

When he was in Toronto, Jack had a less than heart-to-heart talk with Caroline Wurtz. She was disappointed in him; she thought he should be looking for his father. Jack couldn’t tell her half of what he’d learned on his return trip to the North Sea. He was in no shape to talk about it. It was all he could do to tell the story to Dr. García, and too often he couldn’t talk to her, either. He tried, but the words wouldn’t come—or he would start to shout or cry.

It was Dr. García’s opinion that Jack shouted and cried too much. “Especially the crying—it’s simply indecent for a man,” she said. “You really should work on that.” To that end, she encouraged Jack to tell her what had happened to him in chronological order. “Begin with that awful trip you took with your mother,” Dr. García instructed him. “ Don’t tell me what you now know about that trip. Tell me what you thought happened at the time. Begin with what you first imagined were your memories. And try not to jump ahead more than is absolutely necessary. In other words, go easy on the foreshadowing, Jack.” Later, after he began—with Copenhagen, when he was four—Dr. García would frequently say: “Try not to interject so much. I know you’re not a writer, but just try to stick to the story.”

It hurt Jack’s feelings to hear her say that he wasn’t a writer; it felt especially unfair after his not-inconsiderable contributions to Emma’s screenplay of The Slush-Pile Reader.

And to recite out loud the story of his life—that is, coherently and in chronological order—would take years ! Dr. García knew that; she was in no hurry. She took one look at what a mess Jack was and knew only that she had to find a way to make him stop shouting and crying.

“It’s woefully apparent that you can’t tell me your life story without everyone in the waiting room hearing you,” she said. “Believe me, it’s only tolerable to listen to you if you calm down.”

“Where does it end ?” Jack asked Dr. García, when he’d been spilling his life story aloud for four, going on five, years.

“Well, it ends with looking for your father—or at least finding out what happened to him,” Dr. García said. “But you’re not ready for that part, not until you can spit out all the rest of it. The end of it, Jack, is where you find him—that’s the last place you have to go. You’re not through with traveling.”

Jack too hastily concluded that if his retelling of his life were a book, for example, his finding his father would be the last chapter.

“I doubt it,” Dr. García said. “Maybe your penultimate chapter, if you’re lucky. When you find him, Jack, you’re going to learn something you didn’t know before, aren’t you? I trust that the learning part will take an additional chapter.”

And the whole thing had to have a name, too, didn’t it? There had to be a title to the story of his life, which Jack was reciting—with such restraint and in chronological order—to his psychiatrist. But Jack knew the name of his life story before he started telling it; the first day he went to see Dr. García, when he’d been unable to tell her anything without shouting or crying, Jack knew that his mother’s Until I find you tattoo had been her crowning deception. Certainly she’d been proudest of it; why else, if only after her death, had Alice wanted Leslie Oastler to show Jack the photographs?

“Why show me at all?” he’d asked his mom.

“I was beautiful once!” Alice had cried—meaning her breasts, when she was younger, he’d thought at the time, but the tattoo was what interested Jack.

She’d been so proud of keeping the tattoo from him that, even after everything, Alice had wanted him to see it! From the time he was four, that Until I find you tattoo said everything there was to say about Jack Burns.

As a psychiatrist, Dr. García was the opposite of an editor. Jack was not supposed to delete anything—he was instructed to leave nothing out. And not infrequently, Dr. García wanted more. She required “corroborating details.” Instances of what Dr. García had identified, early on, as Jack’s older-woman thing could not be overemphasized; in his boyhood, the seemingly unmotivated cruelty and aggressiveness he encountered in older girls was “an underlying problem.” What was it about Jack that had provoked those older girls?