John Irving - Until I Find You

“Well, there’s Sami Salo, but the woman at the Torni is better.”

“Tell me about Sami Salo,” Alice said.

The waitress sighed. She was a short, stout woman whose clothes were too tight; her feet appeared to hurt her. She squinted whenever she took a step, and her fat arms jiggled, but she wasn’t much older than Jack’s mother. Under her apron, she kept a dish towel with which she commenced to wipe the table down.

“Listen, dearie,” the waitress told Alice in a low voice. “You don’t want to bother Sami. He already knows where to find you.”

Alice seemed surprised again; maybe she hadn’t realized that the waitress knew she was the tattoo artist at the Hotel Torni. But they hadn’t been hard to figure out. In Helsinki, who else fit the description of a young woman and a little kid who spoke American-sounding English?

“I want to meet Sami Salo,” Alice said to the waitress. “I want to ask him if he’s tattooed someone I know.”

“Sami Salo doesn’t want to meet you,” the waitress told her. “You’re putting him out of business, and he’s not happy about it. That’s what I hear.”

“I’m impressed by all you manage to hear,” Alice said.

The waitress turned her gruff attention to Jack. “You look tired,” she told him. “Are you getting enough sleep? Is all the tattooing keeping you awake?”

Jack’s mom stood up from the table and held out her hand to her son. The restaurant was noisy and crowded; Finns can be loud when they eat and drink. The boy didn’t quite catch what his mother told the waitress. He could only guess it was something along the lines of “Thank you for your concern”; or more likely, “If you want to stop by the Torni some evening, I’ll be happy to tattoo you where it really hurts.” Alice might also have given the waitress a message for Sami Salo; that the waitress and Sami were friends was pretty obvious, even to Jack.

They didn’t go to Salve again. They ate at the Torni and called the American Bar their home.

But what about the church? Jack would wonder, as he was falling asleep. Why weren’t they asking someone about the particular organ his father might be playing in Helsinki? Where were the destroyed young women who’d had the bad luck to meet William here? And what about Sibelius?

Jack wondered if his mom was growing tired of looking for his dad—or, worse, if she was suddenly afraid of finding him. Maybe it had occurred to her how awful it would be to finally confront William, only to have him walk away with a shrug. Surely William must have known they were looking for him. Church music and tattooing were both small worlds. What if William decided to confront them? What would they have to say for themselves? Did they actually want him to stop running and live with them? Live with them where ?

Helsinki is a hard place to be afflicted with self-doubts. Alice appeared to be unsure of herself. She would not get up at night to go to the bathroom without waking Jack and forcing him to walk down the hall with her; she wouldn’t let him leave the hotel room by himself, either. (Some nights Jack peed in the sink.) And those evenings when she roamed the American Bar, soliciting clients, Jack often watched her from the crow’s-nest perspective of the iron-grate elevator, which was frozen in seemingly permanent disrepair on the floor above the bar.

Whenever a prospective client decided to get a tattoo, Alice would look up at the out-of-service elevator and nod her head to Jack, who was suspended in it like a boy in a birdcage.

Jack would watch Alice lead the client to the stairs. Then he exited the elevator and ran up the stairs to the fourth floor ahead of them. He was usually waiting by the door to their room when his mother brought the tattoo customer down the hall.

“Why—fancy seeing you, Jack!” his mom would always say. “Is it a tattoo you’ve come for?”

“No, thank you,” Jack would always reply. “I’m too young to be tattooed. I’m just an observer.”

It may have been a silly ritual, but it was their routine and they stuck to it. The client recognized that they were a team.

By their third week in Helsinki, Jack had forgotten all about Sibelius. Two young women (brave-looking girls) approached Alice in the American Bar. They asked her about a tattoo—one they wanted to share. In the elevator, one floor above them, Jack couldn’t really hear what they were saying.

“You can’t share a tattoo,” he thought his mother said.

“Sure we can,” the tall one replied.

Maybe the short one said, “We shared you-know-what together. Sharing a tattoo can’t be that bad.”

From the broken elevator, Jack saw his mom shake her head—not her usual signal. He’d seen her say no to young men who were too drunk to be tattooed, or to two or more men; she wouldn’t take more than one man at a time to their room. These two women, Tall and Short, were different; they made Alice seem awkward. Jack thought that his mother might already know them.

Alice abruptly turned and walked away. But the brave girls followed her; they kept talking to her, too. Jack got out of the elevator when he saw his mom start up the stairs. Tall and Short came up the stairs behind her.

“We’re not too young, are we?” the tall one was asking.

Alice shook her head again; she just kept walking up the stairs with the two young women following her.

“You must be Jack,” the short one said, looking up the stairs at the boy. It seemed to Jack that she even knew where to look for him. “We’re both music students,” the short one told him. “I’m studying church music, both choral and the organ.”

Alice stopped on the staircase as if she were out of breath. The two girls caught up to her on the half-landing between the first and second floors. Jack stood waiting for his mom on the second-floor landing, looking down at the three of them.

“Hello, Jack,” the tall girl said to the boy. “I play the cello.”

She wasn’t as tall as Ingrid Moe—nor as breathtakingly beautiful—but she had the same long hands. Her curly blond hair was cut as short as a boy’s, and over a cotton turtleneck she wore a grungy ski sweater with a small herd of faded reindeer on it.

The other girl, the short one, was plump with a pretty face and long, dark hair that fell to her breasts. She wore a short black skirt with black tights, knee-high black boots, and a black V-neck sweater that was too big for her. The sweater was very soft-looking and had no reindeer on it.

“Music students,” Alice repeated.

“At Sibelius Academy, Jack,” the tall young woman said. “Did you ever hear of it?” The boy didn’t answer her; he kept looking at his mother.

“Sibelius …” Alice said—in a way that implied the name hurt her throat.

The short, plump girl with the pretty face looked up the stairs and smiled at Jack. “You’re definitely Jack,” she said.

The tall one came up the stairs two at a time. She knelt at Jack’s feet and framed his face in her long hands, which were slightly sticky. “Look at you, Jack,” she said; her breath smelled like chewing gum, a fruit flavor. “You’re a dead ringer for your dad.”

Jack’s mother came up the stairs with the short girl beside her. “Take your hands off him,” Alice told the tall girl, who stood up and backed away from the boy.

“Sorry, Jack,” the tall girl said.

“What do you want?” Alice asked the music students.

“We told you—a tattoo,” the short girl answered.

“We also wanted to see what Jack looked like,” the tall young woman confessed.

“I hope you don’t mind, Jack,” the short one said.

But Jack was four. How is it possible that he remembered, with any accuracy, what Tall and Short truly said? Isn’t it more likely that, for days—for weeks, even months— after he met these girls, he would ask his mother the meaning of that conversation on the stairs in the Hotel Torni, and his mom would tell him what she wanted him to hear? It might not be Tall’s and Short’s actual words that he “remembered,” but Alice’s unalterable interpretation of William abandoning them.