John Irving - Until I Find You

Jack went into his bedroom and saw that Lucy hadn’t been kidding. She’d pulled back the covers and was lying naked on his bed. “ Now we’re going to get in trouble,” Lucy said.

“Maybe you are, Lucy, but I’m not,” he told her.

He walked past her into the bathroom; he was intending to bring her clothes to her, but he couldn’t see her clothes or imagine what she’d done with them. She’d put her dirty running shoes with the little socks on his bathroom scale, but the rest of her clothes were gone. ( How could they just disappear? he was thinking.)

Jack went back into the bedroom. “You’re leaving now, Lucy. Where are your clothes?”

She shrugged. Yes, she was a pretty eighteen-year-old. Even Jack could count the years from 1987, when he first came to L.A., and add them to four. (And after all, he’d been doing a lot of thinking about four-year-olds lately.) But Jack wasn’t even considering having sex with Lucy, not even if it was legal—that wasn’t the issue.

She was one of those willfully grimy girls with flecks of gold glitter in her hair; every toenail was painted a different color. The finger-shaped citron known as Buddha’s Hand was tattooed on the inside of one thigh—high up, where her running shorts had covered it. Some young women were more arousing before they took their clothes off; besides, Jack had never liked being bullied.

“I’ll give you a T-shirt and some running shorts of mine,” he said. “I’ll dress you myself, Lucy, if you don’t get yourself dressed and get out of here.”

“My mom’s already called the cops,” she told him. “She’s home all day with nothing to do. She just screens all her calls, in case it’s my dad. I’m telling you, she’s already played my message twice—she’s already given the cops your address, and everything.”

Jack went into the kitchen and picked up the phone there. He called 911 and said he had an unwelcome eighteen-year-old girl in his house—she had hidden herself in his car. Now she’d undressed herself and called her mother. He hadn’t touched her, Jack said—he didn’t want to touch her. “If the girl won’t dress herself, maybe one of the officers you send should be female,” he said.

Jack was asked if this was a domestic dispute. Did he know the girl? “I haven’t had any contact with her since she was a four-year-old!” he shouted.

Well, that meant he did know her, didn’t it? Jack was asked. (He should have seen that coming.) “Look, she thinks I’m the reason her mother and father got divorced. She and her mother are obsessed with me. Her father hates me!”

“You know the whole family?” he was asked.

When Jack gave his address, he got a quick “Wait a minute” in response. A squad car had already been dispatched. Naturally, there’d been an earlier call—Lucy’s mother. The first caller had said something about a rape-in-progress.

“That’s not true!” Jack shouted.

“The toilet keeps flushing!” Lucy called from the bedroom. “Forget the cops. You better call a plumber!”

Jack hung up the phone and stomped back through his bedroom to the bathroom. Lucy had put her clothes in the water-tank part of the toilet. (They were soaked; Jack put them in the bathtub.) The rod that held the ball was bent out of shape; that was why the toilet kept flushing. At least he knew what to do about that.

When Jack went back into the bedroom, Lucy was writhing all around on his bed; the bedcovers were completely untucked, and one of the pillows had been flung on the floor. The bed looked as if he’d just had sex with several eighteen-year-olds—all of them gymnasts.

“This is nothing but a big nuisance,” he told the little bitch. “Believe me, you’re not going to think this is so funny when they check you for bodily fluids. ”

“I’m just so sick of hearing how you fucked up my entire family!” the girl shouted.

Jack walked out of the bedroom, closing the door behind him. He went outside and stood leaning against his Audi in the driveway. He was still waiting for the police to arrive when he noticed the photographer, an overfamiliar paparazzo—best known for his photos of a young actress barfing in a swimming pool at a wedding in Westwood. Jack saw the paparazzo looking at him through the long telephoto lens from the far side of the street.

When the cops came, Jack was glad that one of the two was a female officer. Jack told her where Lucy was, and the policewoman went into the house to find her while he told his story to the other officer.

“Are you sure she’s eighteen?” the policeman interrupted Jack once; otherwise, he just listened. The paparazzo had crossed the street and was photographing them from the foot of Jack’s driveway.

“She can’t wear her own clothes—they’re all wet,” Jack was explaining to the officer, just before Lucy ran naked out the front door and threw her arms around Jack’s neck. The policeman tried to shield her from the photographer.

The female officer came out of the house carrying a bath towel. She tried to wrap the towel around Lucy, but Lucy kept wriggling out of the towel. It took both officers to disengage the girl from around Jack’s neck. Jack just stood there, doing his best not to touch Lucy, while the paparazzo kept snapping away. If the photographer had taken one step up the driveway, Jack might have broken all the fingers on the guy’s hands—one finger at a time, even with the police officers there.

“I suppose stuff like this happens to you on a regular basis,” the male cop was saying to Jack.

“Whatever he’s been telling you, I’ll bet it’s true,” the female officer told her partner. “If this girl were my daughter, I’d be tempted to drown her in a toilet.”

She was a tall, lean black woman with a despairing expression that was accented by a scar; the scar had dug a groove through one of her eyebrows. Her partner was a husky white guy with a crew cut and pale-blue eyes; his eyes were as calm and unblinking as Lucy’s.

“Be sure to check her for evidence of bodily fluids, ” Jack told the officers, “in case I’m lying.”

The black woman smiled. “Don’t you get in trouble, too,” she told him. “Behave yourself.”

“We’d like to have a look inside your house, just to corroborate a few things,” the husky policeman said.

“Sure,” Jack told him.

It was a long day. Jack kept looking out the window. He was hoping the paparazzo would come onto his property, but the photographer maintained his vigil at the foot of the driveway. After the police took Lucy away—Jack insisted on giving Lucy the bath towel—the photographer went away, too.

Jack was surprised that both police officers never once appeared to doubt his story, but the female officer had cautioned him about the photos of Alice’s breasts and her tattoo on the refrigerator. When Jack explained the history of the photographs, the policewoman said: “That doesn’t matter. If there’s ever any trouble here, you don’t want pictures like those on your fridge. ”

He showed her the photo of Emma naked at seventeen—the one under the paperweight on his desk. “Ditto?” he asked her.

“You’re learning,” the female officer said. “I sense that you have real potential.”

After everyone had gone, Jack found Lucy’s thong in his bathtub; it was so small that the police must have missed it. He put it in the trash, together with the four photos of his mom and the old one of Emma.

If he hadn’t been leaving for Halifax in the morning, Jack might have been more careful about the trash. It would make sense to him later—how the magazine that bought the paparazzo’s photographs had sent someone to the house on Entrada Drive to sort through Jack’s trash. It made sense that the magazine would talk to Lucy, too—and that she would dismiss the incident as a “prank.”