John Irving - Until I Find You

In March of their sophomore year, Claudia and Jack drove halfway across the country in her Volvo to spend their spring vacation with Emma. Jack had decided to take Claudia to Toronto the following fall, and Emma thought she and Jack should prepare “poor Claudia” for the eventual meeting with Alice and Mrs. Oastler. Jack wasn’t taking Claudia to Toronto solely for the purpose of meeting his mother, although such a meeting was to be expected. His mom knew they lived together; naturally, both Alice and Leslie Oastler were eager to meet Claudia.

Jack’s principal reason for going to Toronto was to take Claudia to the film festival and attempt to pass her off as a Russian actress who didn’t speak a word of English; he was looking at the trip as what Mr. Ramsey would have called an “acting opportunity” for both of them. Also Claudia and Jack were a little desperate for some city time, which is what living in New Hampshire did to people.

To Jack’s surprise, Emma liked Claudia, maybe because Claudia also struggled with her weight. Though Claudia was beautiful, her self-deprecating view of herself won Emma over completely. (Quite possibly, Emma also knew that Claudia and Jack wouldn’t last.)

Jack was less certain than Emma that Claudia’s view of herself was self-deprecating. Her criticism of her body may also have been an acting opportunity, because Claudia had no lack of confidence in her attractiveness to men—nor could she have failed to notice Jack’s appreciation of her full figure. And Claudia had overheard Jack saying to Emma, on the phone, that the road trip to Iowa in the spring was first and foremost a “motel opportunity.”

“Just what did you mean by that?” Claudia had asked him, when he hung up the phone.

“You’re the kind of girl who makes me think about finding a motel,” he’d told her; he wasn’t acting.

But Claudia may have been acting when she replied—that was what was a little dangerous or unknowable about her. “With you, I wouldn’t need a motel, Jack. With you, I could do it standing up.”

They had tried it that way—both of them conscious, at first, of how they might have looked to an audience, but in the end they gave themselves over to the moment. At least Jack did; with Claudia, he could never be sure.

There were indeed motel opportunities on their trip to the Midwest and back, and Jack was also pleased that, unlike New England, Iowa had a real spring; the surrounding farmlands were lush. Emma and three other graduate students in the Writers’ Workshop were renting a farmhouse a few miles from Iowa City; the other students had gone home for the holiday, so Emma and Claudia and Jack had the farm to themselves. They drove into town to eat almost every night—Emma was no cook.

Emma wanted Claudia to understand “the lesbian thing” between Jack’s mom and hers, which Emma said was actually not a lesbian thing.

“It’s not ?” Jack asked, surprised.

“They’re not normal lesbians, baby cakes—they’re nothing at all like lesbians, except that they sleep together and live together.”

“They sound a little like lesbians,” Claudia ventured.

“You gotta understand their relationship in context, ” Emma explained. “Jack’s mom feels that her life with men began and ended with Jack’s dad. My mom simply hates my dad—and other men, by association. Before my mom and Jack’s mom met each other, they had any number of bad boyfriends—the kind of boyfriends who are in the self-fulfilling-prophecy category, if you know what I mean.”

“Yes, I know,” Claudia said. “You think men are assholes, so you pick an asshole for a boyfriend. I know the type.”

“That way,” Emma went on, “when your boyfriend dumps you, or you dump him, you don’t have to change your mind about what assholes men are.”

“Yes, exactly,” Claudia agreed.

Jack didn’t say anything. It was news to him that his mother had “had any number of bad boyfriends” before she met Mrs. Oastler, and it struck him that Emma and Claudia might have been describing Emma’s love life—what little he knew of it. There’d been a lot of boyfriends, most of them one-night stands—all of them bad, in Emma’s estimation, yet she’d never experienced the slightest difficulty in getting over any of them. (Most of them young, in Jack’s opinion—at least the ones he’d met.)

In an effort to change the subject, albeit slightly, Jack asked Emma a question about his mother that had been on his mind for years. It was easier to ask the question with a third party present; out of respect for Claudia, Jack hoped that Emma might hold back a little something in her answer.

“I don’t know about your mom, Emma,” he began, “but I would be surprised if my mother wasn’t still interested in men—in young men, anyway. If only occasionally.”

“I wouldn’t absolutely trust my mom around young men, either, honey pie, but I know your mom is still interested in men—in young men especially. ”

Jack wasn’t surprised, but this was the first confirmation he’d had. And, recalling one of Emma’s sleepy-time tales, Jack wondered if the bad boyfriend in the squeezed-child saga might have been an ex-boyfriend of Mrs. Oastler’s—someone who’d turned Emma off older men, or even men her own age.

As for Alice, she had left the Chinaman and moved into her own tattoo shop on Queen Street. When Alice opened her shop, which was called Daughter Alice, she got in on the ground floor of a trend. (No doubt Leslie Oastler had helped her buy the building, Jack thought.)

In later years, Queen Street would be too trendy to stand, with stores with cute names and an overabundance of bistros. Daughter Alice was located west of that, where Queen Street began to get a little seedy—and, in Emma’s opinion, “a lot Chinese.”

From the moment Alice moved in, her clientele was “way young”—to use Emma’s description. But Jack never knew if the young people came because of his mom or because Queen Street was full of young people most of the time. Emma said it was chiefly young men who went to Daughter Alice. Occasionally they went with their girlfriends, who got tattooed, too, but Jack already knew that young men liked his mother, and that she was attracted to them.

Emma also said that Leslie Oastler was “not a Queen Street person.” Mrs. Oastler didn’t much care for the atmosphere or the clientele in Daughter Alice. But after all her years as someone’s apprentice, Alice loved working for herself. The tattoo parlor was always full; people were happy to wait their turn, or just watch Alice work. She had her flash on the walls, nobody else’s; she had her notebooks full of her stencils, which her customers could look through while they waited. She made tea and coffee, and always had music playing. She had tropical fish in brightly lit aquariums; she’d even arranged some of her flash underwater, with the fish, so that the fish appeared to be swimming in a tattoo world.

“That shop is a happening, ” Emma told Claudia.

Jack knew that, but the emphasis on the young men had escaped him—or he just hadn’t wanted to think about it. The thought of his mother with boys his age, or younger, was disturbing. Jack was much happier imagining his mom in Leslie Oastler’s arms, where she’d looked safe to him—if not exactly happy.

“And what do you suppose your mom thinks of my mom’s young men, if there are any?” Jack asked Emma.

“For the most part—” Emma said; she stopped herself and then resumed, speaking more to Claudia than to Jack. “For the most part, I think my mom is glad Jack’s mom isn’t a man. ”