John Irving - Until I Find You

“Whose hair?” Emma asked.

“Yours, I think. It’s long hair, anyway.”

“Good,” Emma said. He couldn’t see her; her hair, now undone, completely hid her face. “We seem to be zeroing in on a few priorities.”

“Zeroing in on what ?”

“Clearly you have a hair thing, honey pie. And the usual older-woman thing.”

“Oh.” (Nothing about his older-woman thing, not to mention his mustache-and-braid fixation, felt the least bit usual to Jack.)

“Oh, my God, now we’re really getting somewhere!” Emma announced; she threw back her hair. Jack had a hard-on like he’d never seen before. If the little guy had stood up any taller, he would have cast a shadow all the way to Jack’s belly button—lint and all.

“Jesus, Jack—what are you gonna do with it?”

Jack was at a loss. “Do I have to do something with it?” he asked.

Emma hugged him to her bare breasts; his enlarged penis brushed against her scratchy wool skirt. Jack shifted slightly in the big girl’s embrace, until the little guy was more comfortably touching Emma’s bare thigh. “Oh, Jack,” Emma told the boy, “that’s the sweetest thing to say—you’re just too cute for words. No, of course you don’t have to do anything with it! One day you’ll know what you want to do with it! That’s gonna be some day.”

He touched one of her breasts with his hand; she held his face more tightly there. The next thing was the little guy’s idea, entirely. Emma and Jack were sitting on his bed, hip to hip—they were hugging each other—but his penis had somehow not lost contact with her thigh. And if Jack could feel her thigh, Emma must have been able to feel his penis. He was eight; she was fifteen. When Jack swung one of his legs over her far hip, he found himself lying on top of her with the little guy in her lap—now touching both her thighs.

“Do you know what you’re doing, Jack?” Emma asked. (Of course he didn’t.) Her gum was a mint flavor. Jack could feel her breath on the top of his head. “Maybe the little guy knows,” she said, answering herself. Jack’s arms could not reach around her hips, but he held her there—his right hand touching the lace waistband of her panties, which Emma had spread on top of her skirt. “Show me what the little guy knows, baby cakes.” Her tone of voice indicated that she was teasing him—the baby cakes was an affectionate appellation, but faintly mocking in the way Emma usually said it.

“I don’t know what the little guy knows,” he admitted, just as the little guy and Jack made an astonishing discovery. There was hair between Emma Oastler’s thighs!

The instant the tip of his penis touched this hairy place, Jack thought that Emma was going to kill him. She scissored her legs around his waist and rolled him over onto his back. The little guy was all bunched up in her itchy wool skirt. Emma had some difficulty finding it with her hand, with which Jack feared she might yank it completely off— but she didn’t. She just held his penis a little too roughly.

“What was that ?” he asked. He was more afraid of the hair he had felt than he was of the way Emma held him.

“I’m not showing you, honey pie. It would be child molestation.”

“It would be what ?”

“It would freak you out,” Emma said. Jack could believe it. He had no desire to see the hairy place. What Jack, or the little guy, strangely wanted was to be there. (Jack was actually afraid of what it might look like.)

“I don’t want to see it,” he said quickly.

Emma relaxed her scissors-hold around his waist; she held his penis a little more gently. “You got a hair thing, all right,” she told him.

“The tea is going to get too strong !” Lottie hollered from the kitchen.

“Then take out the tea bags or the stupid tea ball!” Emma shouted back.

“It’s getting cold, too!” Lottie called to them.

When Emma pulled her panties back on, she turned her back on Jack; conversely, she put on her bra and buttoned up her shirt while she faced him. It was clear that the little guy had touched a private place, but why was there hair there?

“How’s the homework going?” Lottie cried. She was verging on the kind of hysteria that implied to Jack she was reliving the horror of her haywire epidural.

“What kind of life does Lottie have?” Emma asked Jack, but she was looking at his penis. The little guy was returning to normal size before their very eyes. “You gotta watch this guy every second, Jack—it’s like having your own little miracle. Or not- so-little miracle,” Emma added. “Oh, cute ! Look! It’s like it’s going away !”

“Maybe it’s sad,” the boy said.

“Remember that line, Jack. One day you can use it.” He couldn’t imagine under what circumstances an admission of his penis’s sadness would be of any possible use. Miss Wurtz knew a lot about lines. Somehow Jack sensed she would disapprove of this one—too improvisational, maybe.

In a week’s time, Emma would bring him one of her divorced mom’s bras—a black one. It was more like half a bra, Jack observed, with hard wire rims under the cups, which were small but surprisingly aggressive-looking. It was what they called a “push-up” bra, Emma explained. (It was about as assertive as a bra could be—or so Jack imagined.) “What’s it want to push your breasts up for ?” he asked.

“My mom has small boobs,” Emma said. “She’s trying to make more out of them.” But the bra was curious for another reason: it smelled strongly of perfume, and only slightly less powerfully of sweat. Emma had snitched it from the laundry—it wasn’t clean. “But that’s better, isn’t it?” she asked.

“Why?”

“Because you can smell her!” Emma declared.

“But I don’t know your mom. Why would I want to smell her?”

“Just try it, baby cakes. You never know what the little guy might like.” Boy, was that the truth! (Too bad it would take years for Jack to find that out.)

It would be a while, too, before someone told him that the Chinaman’s tattoo shop on the northwest corner of Dundas and Jarvis was never open late at night. The basement tattoo parlor, which you entered from the sidewalk on Dundas, usually closed in the late afternoon. Jack would forget who told him. Maybe it was some old ink addict, a collector, in one of those tattoo shops on Queen Street—around the time his mom opened her own shop there.

Queen Street in the seventies would never have supported the likes of Daughter Alice—it was a greasers’ hangout, full of anti-hippie, whisky-drinking, white-T-shirt people. Whoever told Jack was possibly one of them, but it sounded true. The Chinaman’s unnamed shop was closed at night, or maybe it stayed open a little longer on Friday and Saturday evenings—though never past eight or nine.

So where was she—out late, almost every night, in Jack’s years at St. Hilda’s? He hadn’t a clue. It was only with hindsight, which is never to be wholly trusted, that Jack concluded his mother might have been trying to break her possessive attachment to her son. As he grew older, he looked more and more like his dad; maybe the more Jack resembled William, the more Alice sought to distance herself from the boy.

That Emma Oastler brought him her mother’s push-up bra may have had something to do with it. It was inevitable that Alice would find it. Jack slept with the stupid bra every night—he even took it into his mom’s bed on those nights he slept with her. And it was one of those nights when she threw a leg over Jack and woke him up. This night, something woke her up, too. The mystery bra was mashed between them; Alice must have felt the hard wire rims under the cups. She sat up in bed and turned on the light.