John Irving - Until I Find You

When Alice came back from the bathroom, she brought her hand mirror with her. She sat beside Jack on the twin bed while they watched Ingrid Moe have her first look at her finished heart. Ingrid took a good, long look at it before she said anything. Jack didn’t really hear what she said, anyway. He’d gone into the bathroom, where he put a gob of toothpaste in his mouth and rinsed it out in the sink.

Maybe Ingrid was saying, “It’s not broken—I said a heart ripped in two.”

“There’s nothing the matter with your heart,” Alice might have said.

“It’s ripped in two!” Ingrid declared. Jack heard that and came out of the bathroom.

“You only think it is,” his mom was saying.

“You didn’t give me what I wanted!” Ingrid blurted out.

“I gave you what you have, an actual heart—a small one,” Alice added.

“Fuck you!” Ingrid Moe shouted.

“Not around Jack,” Alice told her.

“I’m not telling you anything,” the girl said. She held the hand mirror close to her tattooed breast. It might not have been the heart she wanted, but she couldn’t stop looking at the tattoo.

Alice got up from the twin bed and went into the bathroom. Before she closed the door, she said: “When you meet someone, Ingrid—and you will—you’ll have a heart he’ll want to put his hand on. Your children will want to touch it, too.”

Alice turned on the water in the sink; she didn’t want Ingrid and Jack to hear her crying. “You didn’t bandage her,” Jack said—to the closed bathroom door.

“ You bandage her, Jackie,” his mother said over the running water. “I don’t want to touch her.”

Jack put some Vaseline on a piece of gauze about as big as Ingrid Moe’s hand; it completely covered the heart on the side of her breast. He taped the gauze to her skin, being careful not to touch her nipple. Ingrid was sweating slightly and he had a little trouble making the tape stick.

“Have you done this before?” the girl asked.

“Sure,” Jack said.

“No, you haven’t,” she said. “Not on a breast.”

Jack repeated the usual instructions; after all, he was pretty familiar with the routine.

“Just keep it covered for a day,” the boy told Ingrid. She was buttoning up her shirt—she didn’t bother with her skimpy bra. “It will feel like a sunburn.”

“How do you know what it feels like?” the girl asked. When she stood up, she was so tall that Jack barely came to her waist.

“Better put a little moisturizer on it,” he told her.

She bent over him, as if she were going to kiss him again. Jack clamped his lips tight together and held his breath. He must have been trembling, because Ingrid put her big hands on his shoulders and said: “Don’t be afraid—I’m not going to hurt you.” Then, instead of kissing him, she whispered in his ear: “Sibelius.”

“What?”

“Tell your mom he said, ‘Sibelius.’ It’s all he thinks about. I mean going there,” she added.

She opened the door to the hall, just a crack. She peered out as if she had a recent history of being careful about how she left hotel rooms.

“Sibelius?” Jack said, testing the word. (He thought it must be Norwegian.)

“I’m only telling you because of you, not her,” Ingrid Moe said. “Tell your mom.”

Jack watched her walk down the hall. From behind, she didn’t look like a child; she walked like a woman.

Back in the hotel room, the boy cleaned up the little paper cups of pigment. He made sure the caps on the glycerine and alcohol and witch hazel were tight. He put away the bandages. On a paper towel, Jack laid out the needles from the two tattoo machines—what his mom called the “Jonesy roundback,” which she used for outlining, and the Rodgers, which she used for shading. Jack knew his mother would want to clean the needles.

When Alice finally came out of the bathroom, she couldn’t hide the fact that she’d been crying. While Jack had always thought of his mother as a beautiful woman—and the way most men looked at her did nothing to discourage his prejudice—she was perhaps undone to have tattooed the breast and golden skin of a baby-faced girl as young and pretty as Ingrid Moe.

“That girl is a heart-stopper, Jack,” was all she said.

“She said, ‘Sibelius,’ ” Jack told his mom.

“What?”

“Sibelius.”

At first the word was as puzzling to Alice as it had been to Jack, but she kept thinking about it. “Maybe it’s where he’s gone,” the boy guessed. “Where we can find him.”

Alice shook her head. Jack took this to mean that Sibelius was another city not on their itinerary; he didn’t even know what country it was in.

“Where is it?” Jack asked his mother.

She shook her head again. “It’s a he, not an it, ” she told him. “Sibelius is a composer—he’s Finnish.”

Jack thought she’d said, “He’s finished”—meaning that the composer was dead.

“He’s from Finland,” Alice explained. “That means your father has gone to Helsinki, Jack.”

Helsinki was definitely not on their itinerary. Jack didn’t like the sound of it one bit. Not a city with Hell in it!

Before leaving for Finland, Alice wanted to have a word with Trond Halvorsen, the bad tattooer who’d given William an infection. Halvorsen was what Tattoo Ole would have called a “scratcher.” He worked out of a ground-floor apartment in Gamlebyen, in the eastern part of Oslo; what passed for a tattoo shop was his kitchen.

Trond Halvorsen was an old sailor. He’d been tattooed “by hand” in Borneo, and—again without the benefit of a tattoo machine—in Japan. He had a Tattoo Jack (Tattoo Ole’s teacher) on his right forearm and one of Ole’s naked ladies on his left. He had some simply awful tattoos, mostly on his thighs and stomach; he’d done them on himself. “When I was learning,” he said, showing Alice and Jack his myriad mistakes.

“Tell me about The Music Man,” Alice began.

“I just gave him some notes he asked for,” Halvorsen said. “I don’t know what the music sounds like.”

“I understand you gave him an infection, too,” Alice said.

Trond Halvorsen smiled; he was missing both an upper and a lower canine. “Infections happen.”

“Do you clean your needles?” Alice asked.

“Who has the time?” Halvorsen replied.

A pot was bubbling on the stove, something with a fish head in it. The kitchen smelled of fish and tobacco in more or less equal parts.

Alice couldn’t hide her disgust; even Halvorsen’s flash was dirty, his stencils smudged with cooking grease and smoke. Some pigments had hardened in the open paper cups on the kitchen table; you couldn’t tell what their true colors had been.

“I’m Aberdeen Bill’s daughter, Alice.” She suddenly seemed uninterested in her own story. “I once worked with Tattoo Ole.” Her voice trailed away.

“I’ve heard of your dad, and everyone knows Ole,” Halvorsen said; he seemed unembarrassed by her evident disapproval.

Jack was wondering why they’d come.

“The Music Man,” Alice said, for the second time. “I don’t suppose he told you where he was going.”

“He was angry about the infection,” Trond Halvorsen admitted. “When he came back, he wasn’t in a mood to talk about his travels.”

“He’s gone to Helsinki,” Alice said. Halvorsen just listened. If she already knew where William had gone, why was she bothering Halvorsen? “Do you know any tattoo artists in Helsinki?” Alice asked.

“There’s nobody good there,” he answered.

“There’s nobody good here, ” Alice said.

Trond Halvorsen winked at Jack, as if acknowledging that the boy’s mother must be hard to live with. He stirred the pot on the stove, briefly holding up the fish head for Jack to see. “In Helsinki,” Halvorsen said, as if he were talking to the fish, “you can get a tattoo from an old sailor like me.”