John Irving - Until I Find You

“Where are the bumps?” Jack asked, descending the stairs ahead of her.

“At the far knuckles of his fingers—that junction between the middle bone of the finger and the little bone at the tip. But his hands don’t look as deformed as he imagines they do; it’s mainly how his hands hurt when he plays.”

“Can’t he stop playing?” Jack asked.

“He goes completely insane if he doesn’t play,” Heather said. “Of course he also wears gloves because he feels cold.”

“Some people with full-body tattoos feel cold,” Jack told her.

“No kidding,” his sister said. (He assumed that she got the sarcasm from her German mother.)

They walked through a parking lot, past more university buildings, down Charles Street to George Square. Heather was a fast walker; even when they were side by side, she wouldn’t look at Jack when she talked. “The arthritis has affected his playing for more than fifteen years,” she said. “The disease involves degeneration of cartilage and what they call hypertrophy—overgrowth of the bones of the joint. For a pianist or an organist, there’s a wear-and-tear factor. The pain of osteoarthritis is increased by activity, relieved by rest. The more he plays, the more it hurts. But the pain makes him feel warm.” She smiled at this. “He likes that about it.”

“There must be medication for it,” Jack said.

“He’s tried all the nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs—they upset his stomach. He’s like you—he doesn’t eat. You don’t eat, do you?”

“He’s thin, you mean?”

“To put it mildly,” Heather said. They had passed some tents for the Festival and were walking through the Meadows—a large park, the paths lined with cherry trees. A woman with a tennis racquet was hitting a ball for her dog to fetch.

“Where are we going?” Jack asked his sister.

“You said you wanted to see where I lived.”

They passed Bruntsfield Links, a small golf course where a young man (without a golf ball) was practicing his swing; the fields, Heather told Jack matter-of-factly, had been an open mass grave during the plague.

“Daddy takes glucosamine sulfate, a supplement—it comes mixed with chondroitin, which is shark cartilage. He thinks this helps,” she said, in a way that implied she didn’t believe it did anything at all. “And he puts his hands in melted paraffin, which he mixes with olive oil. The hot wax dries on his hands. He makes quite a mess when he picks the wax off, but he seems to enjoy doing that. It fits right in with his obsessive-compulsive disorder.”

“His what?”

“We’re not talking about the mental part, not yet,” his sister told him. “He puts his hands in ice water, too—for as long as he can stand it. This is a bit masochistic for someone who feels cold most of the time, but the hot wax and the ice water work—at least they give him some temporary relief.”

It was a warm, windy day, but the way Heather walked—with her head down, her arms swinging, and her shoulders rolling forward—you would have thought that they were marching into a gale.

“All the years I was growing up, Daddy told me every day that he loved you as much as he loved me,” Heather said, still not looking at Jack. “Because he never got to be with you, he said that every minute he was with me, he loved me twice as much. He said he had to love me enough for two people.”

Her fingers were playing on an imaginary keyboard of air; there was no way for Jack to follow the music in his sister’s head. “Naturally, I hated you,” Heather said. “If he had to love me enough for two people, because of how much he missed you, I interpreted this to mean that he loved you more. But that’s what kids do, isn’t it?” She stopped suddenly, looking at Jack. Without waiting for an answer, she said: “We’re here—my street, my building.” She folded her arms across her small breasts, as if they’d been arguing.

“You don’t still hate me, do you?” he asked her.

“That’s a work-in-progress, Jack.”

The street was busy—lots of small shops, a fair amount of traffic. Her apartment building was five or six stories tall—a wrought-iron fence surrounding it, a bright-red door. There were tiled walls in the foyer, a wood-and-iron banister, a stone staircase.

“You go first,” Heather said, pointing up the stairs.

Jack wondered if she was superstitious about stairs. He went up three flights before he turned to look at her. “Keep going,” she told him. “No woman in her right mind would want Jack Burns watching her go up or down stairs. I would be so self-conscious, I would probably trip and fall.”

“Why?” he asked her.

“I would be wondering how I compare to all the beautiful women you’ve seen—from behind and otherwise,” Heather said.

“Is the elevator broken?” Jack asked.

“There’s no lift,” she said. “It’s a fifth-floor walk-up. Lots of high ceilings in Edinburgh—high ceilings mean long flights of stairs.”

The colors in the hallway were warm but basic—mauve, cream, mahogany. The flat itself had the high ceilings Heather had mentioned, and brightly painted walls; the living room was red, the kitchen yellow. The only indication of the five roommates was the two stoves and two refrigerators in the kitchen. Everything was clean and neat—as it would have to be, to make living with five roommates tolerable. Jack didn’t ask how many bathrooms were in the flat. (There couldn’t have been enough for five roommates.)

Heather’s room—with a desk and a lot of bookshelves and a queen-size bed—had mulberry-colored walls and giant windows overlooking Bruntsfield Gardens. The books were mostly fiction, and—as at her office at the university—there were more CDs than books, and some serious-looking stereo equipment. There was a VCR and a DVD player, and a television facing the bed. Jack saw some of his films among the DVDs and videotapes on her bedside table.

“I watch you when I can’t fall asleep,” his sister said. “Sometimes without the sound.”

“Because of the roommates?” he asked.

She shrugged. “It doesn’t matter to them if the sound is on or off,” she said. “It’s because I know all your lines by heart, and sometimes I feel like saying them.”

There was nowhere to sit—only the one desk chair or the bed. It was basically a dormitory room, only larger and prettier.

“You can sit on the bed,” Heather said. “I’ll make some tea.”

On her desk was a framed photograph of a young-looking William Burns playing the organ with Heather-as-a-little-girl in his lap. When Jack sat down on the bed, Heather handed him a leather photo album. “The pictures are reasonably self-explanatory,” she said, leaving him alone in her room.

She was kind to have left him alone; she must have known he’d not seen many photographs of their father and would prefer seeing so much of him, so suddenly, by himself.

The album was chronological. Barbara Steiner was small and blond, but fuller in the face than her daughter—not nearly as pretty. Heather’s good looks came from William. He had kept his long hair—Miss Wurtz would have been pleased—and he got thinner as he grew older. There were many more pictures of him with Heather—as a little girl, and as a teenager—than there were of Heather with her mother, or of William Burns with Barbara Steiner. Of course it was Heather’s album, and she must have selected which photos to put in it.

She seemed to be most fond of the photographs from those father-and-daughter ski trips; postcards from Wengen and Lech and Zermatt were intermingled with photos of Heather and William on skis. (A cold sport for someone who was inclined to feel cold, Jack thought, but William Burns looked comfortable in ski clothes—or else he was so happy to be skiing with his daughter that the feeling warmed him.)