John Irving - Until I Find You

Again, the smile—but even her smile wasn’t exactly as Jack remembered it. He didn’t think that Claudia’s teeth had ever been quite this white. She slowly lifted the long, full skirt. The seductiveness in her eyes was unchanged, and there, high up on her inner thigh, which was even a little plumper than he remembered it, was the tattoo of the Chinese scepter—the short sword symbolizing everything as you wish.

“It took long enough, but it finally healed,” she told him.

It was a pretty good Chinese scepter, Jack thought, but it was not as perfect as the one his mom had learned from Paul Harper.

“It’s real,” the young woman said. “It won’t rub off on your hand. See for yourself, Jack—go on and touch it.”

The voice, her projection, may have been the same, but the language lacked Claudia’s exactness—her correctness of speech, her good education. The “go on and touch it”—the casual use of the word and— was no more like Claudia than the word freakin’ that had caught Jack’s attention earlier.

He touched the young woman’s tattoo, high up on her inner thigh—her imitation Chinese scepter, as Jack thought of it.

“Who are you?” he asked her.

She took his hand and made him touch her, higher up. She wasn’t wearing any panties, not even a thong. “Doesn’t it feel familiar, Jack? Don’t you want to be back there—to be young again?”

“You’re not Claudia,” Jack told her. “Claudia was never crude.” And ghosts, he could have said, not only don’t have body heat; female ghosts don’t get wet. (Or do they?)

“You have a hard-on, Jack,” the girl said, touching him.

“I get a hard-on in my sleep,” he told her, as if the episode with that transvestite dancer at the Trump had been a dress rehearsal. “It’s no big deal.”

“It’s big enough,” the young woman said, kissing him on the mouth; she didn’t come close to kissing like Claudia. But it took no small amount of will power on Jack’s part to stop touching her. To make her stop, he had to let her know that he knew who she was.

“What would your mother say about this?” Jack asked Claudia’s daughter. “The very idea of you having sex with me! That wouldn’t make your mom happy, would it?”

“My mom’s dead,” the girl told him. “I’m here to haunt you—it’s what she would have wanted.”

“I’m sorry your mother’s dead,” he replied. “But what would she have wanted?”

“I don’t believe in ghosts,” Claudia’s daughter said. “I’m here to haunt you because I don’t believe that Mom can do it.”

“What’s your name?” Jack asked her.

“Sally,” the girl said. “After Sally Bowles, the part in Cabaret Mom always wanted—the part she told me you wanted, too. Only you probably would have been better at it, Mom said.”

“What did your mom die of, Sally? When did she die?”

“Cancer, a couple of years ago,” Sally said. “I had to wait till I was eighteen—so it would be legal to haunt you.”

She looked like a woman in her early twenties, but then her mother had always looked older than she was, too.

“Are you really eighteen, Sally?”

“Just like Lucy. Wasn’t Lucy eighteen?” Sally asked him.

“I guess everyone knows about Lucy,” Jack said.

“The Lucy business was the last thing my mom knew about you—it happened just before she died. Maybe it made it easier for her to die without you,” Sally said.

Like Lucy, Sally was walking around in Jack’s house as if she owned it. He noticed she had kicked off her shoes; she walked barefoot on the wrestling mat in his gym. Her beige, sleeveless blouse was a gauzy, fabric; her bra, which Jack could see through the blouse, was the same beige or light-tan color. Sally’s skirt made a swishing sound as she walked. She paused at his desk, reading the title page of a screenplay lying there. (That was when she picked up Jack’s address book.)

“My mom never stopped loving you,” Sally said. “She always wondered what might have happened if she’d stayed with you—if you ever would have given her a child, or children. She regretted breaking up with you, but she had to have children. ”

The way Sally said children, Jack got the feeling that she didn’t like kids—or that the need to have them wasn’t as urgent an issue to her as it had been to Claudia.

Sally plopped herself down on Jack’s living-room couch and opened his address book. He sat down beside her.

“Do you have siblings, Sally?”

“Are you kidding? Mom popped out four kids, one right after the other. Lucky me—I was the first. I got to be the babysitter.”

“And your dad?” Jack asked her.

“He means no harm,” Sally said. “Mom would have married the first guy she met after she split up with you. He just had to promise to give her children. My dad was the first guy she met, the pathetic loser.”

“Why is he a pathetic loser, Sally?”

“He got to go to all your movies with Mom. What a kick that had to be for him, if you know what I mean,” Sally said. “Of course, when I was old enough, I got to watch all your movies, too—with Mom and Dad. There wasn’t anything she didn’t tell Dad about you. There wasn’t anything she didn’t tell me about you, too. That trip you took to the Toronto film festival; how your mother tattooed her. How you made Mom show her tattoo to the customs agent—that was a good one. How she gave you the clap she caught from Captain Phoebus, when you were a gay Esmeralda in The Hunchback of Notre Dame; how you were such a prick about it, as if you’d never fooled around yourself.”

“But your dad loved her?” Jack asked Sally.

“Oh, he worshiped her!” Sally said. “Mom got as big as a cow—she completely let herself go—and it was painfully evident that she never got over you. But Dad adored her.”

“You’re very beautiful, Sally,” he told the girl. “You look so much like your mom, I almost believed you. For a moment, I thought you were Claudia’s ghost.”

“I can haunt you as good as any ghost—believe me, Jack.” She wasn’t looking at him; she just kept thumbing through the pages of his address book, as if she were searching for someone. Suddenly she flipped to the front of the book; she began with the A ’s. In her mother’s stage voice, she read aloud the first woman’s name.

“Mildred (‘Milly’) Ascheim,” Sally said; then her tone of voice became insinuating. “Did you screw her, Jack? Are you still screwing her?”

“No, never,” he replied.

“Uh-oh. Here’s another Ascheim —Myra. You crossed her name out. That’s a pretty clear indication that you fucked her. Then you dumped her, I suppose.”

“I never had sex with her. I crossed out her name because she died. Sally, let’s not play this game,” Jack said.

But she kept reading; she became very excited when she got to Lucia Delvecchio’s name. “Even Mom said you must have slept with her,” Sally said. “Mom said she could tell you were going to sleep with her when she saw you with her in the movie.”

Jack let it go on too long. Sally was into the G ’s when the trouble really started. (Jack knew what Dr. García would say—namely, that he shouldn’t have been sitting next to Sally on the couch in the first place.)

“Elena García,” Sally said. This must have registered on Jack’s face; he clearly found this disrespectful to Dr. García, whom he never called by her first name. Dr. García was the most important person in this stage of Jack’s life, and Sally saw it. “Your cleaning lady, or former cleaning lady?” Sally asked, more disrespectfully. “You definitely fucked her.”