John Irving - Until I Find You

“It was one of Daddy’s bipolar moments,” Jack’s sister said. “I think that’s what the story is really about. He drove your mother out in the rain, so to speak—didn’t he?”

“He’s bipolar?” Jack asked.

“No, he’s obsessive-compulsive,” Heather said, “but he has his bipolar moments. Don’t you, Jack?”

“I suppose so,” he said.

Heather was playing more softly now—she had moved on from the Boellmann. “This is from an aria in Handel’s Solomon, ” she said, as softly as she was playing.

“Do you have bipolar moments, too?” Jack asked her.

“The desire to never leave your side, the desire to never see you again,” his sister said. “The desire to see your face asleep on the pillow beside my face, and to see your eyes open in the morning when I lie next to you—just watching you, waiting for you to wake up. I’m not talking about sex. ”

“I know,” he told her.

“The desire to live with you, to never be separated from you again,” Heather went on.

“I get it,” he said.

“The constant wish that I never knew of your existence, and that our father had never said a word to me about my having a brother—this in tandem with the desire to never see another Jack Burns movie, and that every scene in every film you were ever in, which I have committed to memory, would vanish from my mind as if those movies had never been made.”

She had not stopped playing, but her pace had quickened. The organ’s volume was increasing, too; Heather was almost shouting to be heard over the reverberations.

“We just need to spend more time together,” Jack told her.

She brought both hands down on the keyboard, which made a harsh, discordant sound. She slid toward her brother on the organ bench and threw her arms around his neck, hugging him to her.

“If you see him once, you have to keep seeing him, Jack. You can’t suddenly appear in his life and then go away again. He loves you,” Heather said. “If you love him back, I’ll love you, too. If you can’t bear to be with him, I’ll despise you forever.”

“That’s pretty clear,” he told her.

She pushed herself away from him so violently that Jack thought she was going to hit him. “If you’re not Billy Rainbow, don’t give me his lines,” she snapped.

“Okay,” he said, holding his arms out to her. When she let him take her in his arms, he kissed her cheek.

“No, not like that—that’s not how you kiss your sister,” Heather said. “You should kiss me on the lips, but not the way you kiss a girl—not with your lips parted. Like this, ” she said, kissing him—her dry lips brushing Jack’s, their lips tightly closed.

Who would have thought that Jack Burns could ever love kissing someone as chastely as that? But he was thirty-eight and had never kissed a sister.

They spent the night together in Jack’s suite at the Balmoral. They ordered dinner from room service and watched a bad movie on television. In the backpack, Heather had brought her toothbrush and an extra-large T-shirt, which she wore as a nightgown, and a change of clothes for the morning. They would be getting up early, she’d warned Jack.

She had planned everything, including the reenactment of what she’d told Jack in Old St. Paul’s: that desire to see his face asleep on the pillow beside her face, and to see his eyes open in the morning when she was lying next to him—just watching him, waiting for him to wake up.

Heather told Jack that the Irish boyfriend was no one special; the love of her life, so far, had been one of her professors in Belfast. She’d known he was married, but he told her he was leaving his wife; he left Heather instead.

Jack told his sister about Mrs. Machado—and Mrs. Adkins, and Leah Rosen, and Mrs. Stackpole. (They were the early casualties; they were among the first to mark him and disappoint him in himself.) He told Heather about Emma and Mrs. Oastler, and Claudia and her daughter—and all the rest. Even that crazy woman in Benedict Canyon—the one who was driven mad by the screams and moans of the Manson murder victims whenever the Santa Anas were blowing.

Heather told Jack that she’d lost her virginity to one of William’s music students, someone who was in university when she was still in secondary school. As she put it: “We had comparable keyboard skills at the time, but I’m much better than he is now.”

Jack told Heather that, for the past five years, Dr. García had been the most important woman in his life.

Heather said that she was spending almost as much time improving her German as she was playing the organ—or the piano, or her wooden flute. She’d spoken a child’s German with her mother, and had originally studied German because of her interest in Brahms; now she had an additional reason to learn the language. If she taught in Edinburgh for another two or three years, her teaching credentials would greatly enhance her résumé. By apprenticing herself to John Kitchen at Old St. Paul’s, she was already a better organist. In two or three years’ time, if her German was good enough, she could move to Zurich and get a job there.

“Why Zurich?” Jack asked.

“Well, there’s a university, and a music conservatory, and a disproportionate number of churches for such a small city—in other words, lots of organs. And then I could visit Daddy every day, instead of only once a month or every six weeks.”

“He’s in Zurich ?”

“I never said he was in Edinburgh, Jack. I just said you had to see me first.”

Jack propped himself up in bed on his elbows and looked down at his sister’s face on the pillow; she was smiling up at him, her golden hair pushed back from her forehead and tucked behind her small ears. She cupped the back of Jack’s neck and pulled his face closer to hers. He’d forgotten that she couldn’t be more than a few inches away from his face—not if she wanted to see him clearly without her glasses.

“So we’re going to Zurich?” he asked her.

“You’re going alone, this trip,” Heather told him. “You should see him alone, the first time.”

“How can you afford to go to Zurich once a month, or every six weeks?” he asked her. “You should let me pay for that.”

“The sanatorium costs three hundred and fifty thousand Swiss francs a year—that’s two hundred and twelve thousand U.S. dollars—to keep him in the private section of the clinic. If you pay for that, I can pay for my own travel.” She pulled his head down to the pillow beside her. “If you want to buy me a flat, why don’t you buy something big enough for both of us—in Zurich,” she suggested. “I was born in Edinburgh. I don’t need your help here.”

“I’ll buy a whole house in Zurich!” Jack said.

“You want everything to happen too fast,” she reminded him.

He didn’t know when or if she slept. When Jack woke up, Heather was staring at him—her large brown eyes close to Jack’s, her small nose almost touching his face. “You have four gray hairs,” she told him.

“Let me see if you have any,” he said, but Heather’s hair was golden to its roots. “No, not yet, you don’t.”

“It’s because I’m pretty happy, all things considered,” she said. “Look at me. I just slept with a movie star, and it was no big deal—‘no biggie,’ as Billy Rainbow would say.”

“It was a big deal to me,” Jack told her.

Heather gave him a hug. “Well, actually, it was a big deal to me, too—a very big deal.”

While Jack was in the shower, Heather took his plane tickets down to the concierge’s desk in the lobby; she booked his flight to Zurich, with a connection out of Amsterdam, and his return trip to L.A. from Zurich.