John Irving - Until I Find You

In Beverly Hills, the sun was now high enough in the sky that the slanted rays of light no longer came in the open windows. Miss Wurtz’s painted toenails were a less-bright shade of rose-pink. The black piano had taken on a more somber tone—less like a pool of oil, more like a coffin. But even without direct sunlight, the Oscar standing beside their bare feet on the glass-topped table was no less gold—no less dazzling.

“I know that William saw you last night, Jack,” Miss Wurtz was saying. “I don’t care what time of night or early morning it was in Europe, if that’s where he is. I just know that he wouldn’t have missed seeing you.”

Caroline got up from the couch and kissed Jack on the forehead; holding her bathrobe tightly to her throat, she bent over and kissed Oscar on the top of his gleaming head. “I’m going to go to sleep, you two,” she said.

Jack watched her walk across the living room, her hand trailing lightly for a moment on the keys of the black piano; there was just the tinkling of those soft notes before she went into her bedroom and closed the door behind her.

Jack got up and went into his bedroom and closed the door; he left the curtains closed, but he opened the windows. Some light came into the bedroom when the breeze stirred the curtains, and he could hear the sound of a hose; below him, in the garden, someone was watering the flowers. Oscar lay down beside Jack. The statuette had its own pillow. Jack looked at Oscar lying there, holding his alleged sword. In the dim light, Oscar looked like a dead soldier; maybe his comrades had found him on the battlefield and laid his body to rest in a dignified pose.

Jack slept until the phone woke him that Monday afternoon. It was Richard. Jack had forgotten that he and Vanvleck and Richard had agreed to go to a sound studio to record the commentary track for the DVD of their film. They had to screen the entire movie, pausing it occasionally, while they talked about the intention behind this shot or that scene—how a particular moment had come about, or how this line of dialogue or voice-over had actually been moved from somewhere else.

Jack took a shower and got dressed. He put the Oscar on the piano, on top of a note of explanation to Miss Wurtz; she was still sleeping. They would have dinner together—maybe with Richard and Wild Bill, Jack said in the note. So that no one would steal the Oscar or wake up Miss Wurtz, Jack left the DO NOT DISTURB card on the door to the suite; at the front desk, he told them not to put through any calls.

Then he walked out into the harsh sunlight, and joined Richard and Wild Bill in the limo for the ride to the sound studio. Wild Bill had a bad hangover, which had not been improved by Anneke getting sick in the middle of the night. “Something she ate,” Wild Bill told them. “I wish I’d eaten it, too. I wish it had killed me.”

Richard told Jack that no hangover was as bad as not winning the Oscar.

It seemed to take hours to record the DVD commentary. As when Jack first met with Richard and Wild Bill in Amsterdam, his heart wasn’t in it. But Jack liked the movie they had made together, and when he watched the film, he remembered how it had all come about.

“Whose idea was this?” Wild Bill would say, from time to time.

“Yours, I think,” Richard would tell him.

It went pretty well, all things considered. Wild Bill’s hangover seemed to go away, or else he rose to the occasion. In a short while, Vanvleck was doing most of the talking. There was almost a half hour when Wild Bill just talked nonstop; it was amazing what he could remember. But hearing the Dutchman’s voice like that was oddly dislocating. Jack could almost hear him asking, “You actually know this lady?”

Or when Jack had explained (that night in the Sint Jacobsstraat) that Els had been his nanny, how Wild Bill had asked Richard: “She was his what ?”

“Jack, why are you crying?” The Mad Dutchman had also asked.

Here they were in Hollywood, in a sound studio, and Wild Bill Vanvleck was going on about how they’d made Emma’s movie. But in the drone of the Dutchman’s voice, his actual words were lost. Jack saw Wild Bill sitting drunk in the street, shouting to his girlfriend: “Well, I didn’t know!” And later, as they made their way through the red-light district, Jack could still hear Vanvleck calling, “Good night, my dears!”

Well, they had a job to do—Richard, Wild Bill, and Jack—and they did it. Later that afternoon, when Jack got back to the Four Seasons, he found Miss Wurtz in the living room of their suite playing the piano. Jack sat on the couch for a while and just listened.

The Wurtz began to talk to him, but—at the same time—she kept playing. “I want to thank you, Jack—I had the best time! It was quite a night for an old lady!”

Jack’s neck was stiff and his toes hurt—something he’d done in the gym, he was thinking.

“But I must enlighten you, Jack,” Miss Wurtz went on. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but not even a night like last night is as special to me as every night I spent with your father. If I never got to go to the Oscars, I would still have had William in my life—that’s all that matters.”

And that was when Jack knew why his neck was stiff and his toes hurt. In those few hours of that early Monday morning, following the Academy Awards—when he actually got to sleep—Jack knew what he’d been dreaming. He was standing on the deck of that ship, leaving Rotterdam, and he was straining to see over the rail. Jack was standing on his toes and stretching his neck; for the few hours he slept, Jack must have maintained this uncomfortable position. No matter how hard he tried, of course, he couldn’t see the shore.

Jack Burns may not have been a big believer in so-called recovered memory, but here is what Jack remembered, listening to Miss Wurtz play the piano, and he was sure it really happened—he knew it was true.

“Lift me up!” Jack had said to his mother on the deck of that ship. The docks were still in sight, but Jack couldn’t see them. “Lift me up!” he’d begged his mom. “I want to see!” But she wouldn’t do it.

“You’ve seen enough, Jack,” his mom had said. She took his hand. “We’re going below deck now,” she’d told him.

“Lift me up! I want to see !” Jack had demanded.

But Alice was in no mood to be bossed around. “You’ve seen enough of Holland to last you a lifetime, Jackie boy, ” she’d said.

Under the circumstances, Jack had seen enough of Canada to last him a lifetime, too. Because the next country Jack saw was Canada, where his mother took him—where he would never see his dad.

It had been Mrs. Machado’s fondest hope, or so she’d said, that Mister Penis would never be taken advantage of. But by whom? By willful girls and venal women? Dr. García told Jack that many women who sexually molest children believe that they are protecting them—that what the rest of us might call abuse is for these women a form of mothering.

Dr. García further speculated that Mrs. Machado must have observed a certain absence of the mothering instinct in Alice. “Women like Mrs. Machado know which boys are vulnerable,” Jack’s psychiatrist said. “It helps, of course, if you know the boy’s mother—if you see what’s missing.”

“ Principiis obsta! ” Mr. Ramsey had once warned him. “Beware the beginnings!”

If Jack had mother and father issues, one wonders what to make of Lucy. She was four, almost five, that early fall evening in 1987, when Jack discovered her in the backseat of her parents’ silver Audi—his first and last night as a parking valet at Stan’s in Venice.