John Irving - Until I Find You

“For God’s sake, Emma,” Mrs. Oastler would say. “Just have a salad. ”

It was over one such gastronomical event—takeout pizza and salad—that Alice and Leslie discussed the dilemma of delivering Jack to his new school in Maine. It seemed he had no certain means of getting there, nor was it an easy place to get to. The boy would fly to Boston and take a smaller plane to Portland; from Portland, one had to rent a car and drive, and Alice wasn’t a driver. Mrs. Oastler could drive, but she was ill disposed to go to Maine.

“If Redding were on the coast, I’d consider it,” Leslie said. But Redding, which was the name of the town and the all-boys’ school, was in southwestern Maine —inland Maine, not coastal Maine. (There was, Jack would learn, a difference.)

“For Christ’s sake, I’ve got my driver’s license—I can take him,” Emma said. But Emma, at seventeen, was too young to be permitted to rent a car in Portland—and even Emma agreed that Redding was far too long a drive from Toronto.

Emma was reading a Maine road map in lieu of eating her salad. “Redding is north of Welchville,” she said. “It’s south of Rumford, east of Bethel, west of Livermore Falls. God, it really is nowhere !”

“We could hire Peewee to go with him and be the driver,” Mrs. Oastler proposed.

“Peewee is a Canadian citizen, but he was born in Jamaica,” Alice pointed out. (Were the Americans touchy about foreign-born Canadians seeking entry into the United States?)

“Boris and Pavel could drive me,” Jack suggested. “They’re taxi drivers.” They were also wrestlers, he was thinking. He knew he would be safe with them. But Boris and Pavel were not yet Canadian citizens; they had only recently applied for refugee status.

Chenko couldn’t drive a car, and Krung, who drove wildly, was a scary-looking Thai with chevron-shaped blades tattooed on his cheeks. Given that the war in Vietnam had ended only a few years before, Leslie Oastler and Alice didn’t think that U.S. Customs would look welcomingly upon Mr. Bangkok.

“Maybe Mrs. McQuat would take me,” Jack suggested. His mother stiffened as if she’d been slapped.

“One shouldn’t bother teachers in the summer,” Mrs. Oastler said—mysteriously, it seemed to Jack. He sensed that his mom had other reasons for not considering The Gray Ghost; maybe Mrs. McQuat had made clear her disapproval of his mother’s plans to send Jack away.

Miss Wurtz, Jack knew, spent part of her summer in Edmonton—not that he relished the prospect of The Wurtz delivering him to Redding. (The very journey itself would be dramatized, of that he had little doubt.)

“What about Mrs. Machado?” Alice asked. Only Emma noticed that this caused Jack to lose his appetite.

“I doubt she can drive,” Leslie Oastler said dismissively. “That woman is so stupid—she can’t put the laundry back in the right drawers.”

“Don’t you like the pizza, honey pie?”

“Jack, please finish your milk—even if you’re full. You have to stop losing weight,” Alice said.

“If you don’t want the rest of that pizza, I’ll eat it,” Emma said.

“What about that little faggot, your drama teacher?” Mrs. Oastler asked Jack. “What’s his name?”

“Mr. Ramsey,” Emma answered. “He’s nice—he’s a good guy! Don’t call him a faggot. ”

“He is one, dear,” Emma’s mom told her. “I’m sure he’s entirely safe, ” Leslie said to Alice. “If he’d so much as touched a boy at St. Hilda’s, someone would have blown the whistle on him.”

“What about not bothering teachers in the summer?” Jack asked.

“Mr. Ramsey wouldn’t mind,” Mrs. Oastler said. “He obviously worships the ground you walk on, Jack.”

“Well, I don’t know—” Alice began.

“You don’t know what, Alice?” Leslie Oastler asked.

“It’s just that he is a homosexual,” Alice replied.

“It’s not guys who are inclined to mess around with Jack,” Emma observed.

“I like Mr. Ramsey—he would be fine, ” Jack said.

“If he can see over the steering wheel, baby cakes.”

“I guess it wouldn’t do any harm to ask him,” Alice said. “Maybe Mr. Ramsey wants a tattoo.”

“He’s a teacher, Alice—he makes no money,” Leslie told her. “Mr. Ramsey doesn’t need a free tattoo; he needs money. ”

“Well—” Alice said.

When Alice and Mrs. Oastler went out to a movie, Emma was left to do the dishes and put Jack to bed. Emma ate the remaining pizza off everyone’s plate. Jack understood why she was hungry—she hadn’t touched her salad.

“Put on some music, honey pie.”

Emma liked to sing when she was eating. She did her best Bob Dylan imitation with her mouth full. Jack put on the album called Another Side of Bob Dylan— loud, the way Emma liked it—and went upstairs to get ready for bed. Even with the water running in the bathroom sink, when he was brushing his teeth, he could hear Emma singing along with “Motorpsycho Nightmare.” It must have put him in a mood.

When Jack undressed, he had a look at his penis, which was a little red and sore-looking. He thought of putting some moisturizer on it, but he was afraid the moisturizer would sting. He put on a clean pair of “summer pajamas”—his boxer shorts—and lay in bed waiting for Emma to come kiss him good night.

Jack was thinking that he missed saying prayers with Lottie. The only prayer he sometimes said by himself was the one he used to say with his mom, who had stopped saying prayers with him—another feature of his being too old, apparently. Besides, that familiar Scottish prayer seemed inappropriate—given his new life with Mrs. Machado. “The day Thou gavest, Lord, is ended. Thank You for it.” (Most nights, Jack didn’t feel like thanking anyone for the day he’d had.)

As for Lottie, she’d sent the boy a postcard from Prince Edward Island; from the look of the fir trees, the gray rocks, the dark-blue ocean, you wouldn’t know that anything was wrong.

“ No, no, no, it ain’t me, babe, ” Emma was singing. “It ain’t me you’re lookin’ for, babe.”

Jack was obsessing about Mr. Ramsey taking him to Maine, which also put him in a mood. He was feeling sorry for himself, which is fertile territory for bad dreams. The Bob Dylan album was still playing when he fell asleep. He imagined that his mother and Mrs. Oastler had returned from the movie before Emma had come upstairs to kiss him good night. He was lying there wondering if his mom or Emma would kiss him good night first, but of course it was a dream—he was only dreaming that he was lying in bed, awake.

Bob Dylan was still wailing away, or he was wailing away in Jack’s dream. “ Perhaps it’s the color of the sun cut flat/An’ cov’rin’ the crossroads I’m standing at, ” Emma sang along with Bob. “Or maybe it’s the weather or something like that,/But mama, you been on my mind.” ( There was an understatement!)

Someone came into Jack’s bedroom. He opened his eyes to see if it was Emma or his mother, but it was Leslie Oastler and she was naked. She pulled back the covers and got into bed with him. Given how small she was, there was more room in the bed for her than there ever had been for Mrs. Machado—and Mrs. Oastler smelled better. She made a sound in the back of her throat, a kind of growl—as if she were feral, or as if she might bite. Her long, painted nails scratched Jack’s chest; her nails skittered over his stomach. Her small, fast hand shot inside his boxers. One of her nails nicked his penis; she just happened to scratch him on a spot where the little guy was sore. Jack must have flinched.