John Irving - Until I Find You

It was always hard for Jack to dispute Emma’s authority, especially on the subject of his mother and Mrs. Oastler. Since ’75, when he’d gone off to Redding, Emma had spent more time with their moms than Jack had. Toronto wasn’t his city, not anymore.

All he’d really known of Toronto was Mrs. Wicksteed’s old house on Spadina and Lowther, and the St. Hilda’s area of Forest Hill. Well, okay—there was the Bathurst Street gym, and what little he could see of the ravine near Sir Winston Churchill Park from Mrs. Machado’s apartment on St. Clair. But Jack had never known downtown Toronto very well, especially not that area of Jarvis and Dundas, where the Chinaman’s tattoo parlor was—and he was a virtual stranger to Queen Street West and his mom’s happening, as Emma called it, at Daughter Alice.

Between Emma and Jack, Emma was the true Torontonian—even when she was in Iowa City, and later, when she was living in Los Angeles.

Alice had finally tattooed Emma. Jack couldn’t imagine the negotiations this had entailed, not only with his mother but with Mrs. Oastler. The butterfly Emma had once wanted was replaced by her latest heart’s desire, a smaller version of Alice’s famous Rose of Jericho.

“Don’t give me any shit about it,” Emma told Jack she had said to her mom. “If you’d let me get a stupid butterfly on my ankle when I wanted one, you wouldn’t be faced with a vagina today.”

The problem was that Emma didn’t want to conceal the vagina. This was no flower hidden in a rose—this was just the petals of that most recognizable flower. Granted it was small, but it was clearly a vagina. (Oh, Jack thought—to have been a fly on the wall for these mother-daughter discussions!)

Alice had smoothed the way for the tattoo to happen. “It’s a question of where it is, Emma,” Alice said. “I refuse to tattoo a vagina on your ankle. ”

Naturally, Emma was “way beyond” (as she put it) wanting a tattoo on her ankle—and Alice would no longer put a tattoo on a woman’s coccyx. She’d read in a tattoo magazine that an anesthesiologist wouldn’t give you an epidural if you were tattooed there. (Possibly this had something to do with the ink getting into the spinal column, although the danger of that happening sounded unlikely.)

“What if you have a child and you need an epidural?” Alice asked Emma.

“I’m not ever going to have children, Alice,” Emma told her.

“You don’t know that,” Alice replied.

“Yeah, I know that, Alice.”

“I’m not giving you a vagina on your coccyx, Emma.”

Even Emma had to admit that her coccyx would have been a confusing place for a vagina. Alice finally agreed to put the tattoo on Emma’s hip, just below the panty line; that way, Emma could see it without looking in a mirror and she could see it in a mirror as well. “Which hip?” Alice asked her.

Emma considered this, but not for long. “My right one,” she replied.

According to Emma, the tattoo was already a vagina-in-progress when Alice asked her: “Why the right hip?”

“I generally sleep on my left side,” Emma told her. “If I’m sleeping with a guy, I want to be sure he can see the vagina—the tattoo, I mean.”

Emma said she appreciated Alice’s thoughtful reply, although she had to wait for it. Jack could imagine this exactly: his mother never taking her foot off the foot-switch, the needles in the tattoo machine going nonstop, the flow of ink and pain as steady as hard rain. At first, Emma was vague about the music that was playing at the time. “It might have been ‘Mr. Tambourine Man,’ ” she said.

Though I know that evenin’s empire has returned into sand,

Vanished from my hand,

Left me blindly here to stand but still not sleeping.

My weariness amazes me, I’m branded on my feet,

I have no one to meet

And the ancient empty street’s too dead for dreaming.

“There were the usual creepy guys hanging around the tattoo parlor,” as Emma remembered her experience. Jack felt certain these guys would have had more than a passing interest in the expanse of Emma’s hip that was exposed, not to mention her tattoo-in-progress.

“Come to think of it, it was Dylan, but it was ‘Just Like a Woman,’ ” Emma suddenly recalled. Jack could imagine this, too.

Ah, you fake just like a woman, yes, you do

You make love just like a woman, yes, you do

Then you ache just like a woman

But you break just like a little girl.

“Let me be sure I understand you, Emma,” Alice said, after a lengthy pause. “If you’re sleeping with a guy, you want him to be able to see this tattoo—even when you’re asleep?”

“He may forget me, but he’ll remember my tattoo,” Emma said.

“Lucky fella,” Alice said. It seemed to Emma that Alice was keeping time to Bob Dylan with the foot-switch as she tattooed on.

“My mom’s a bitch, but you’re gonna love Alice,” Emma told Claudia. “Everyone loves Alice.”

“I used to,” Jack said.

He walked outside to have a look at the Iowa farmland. It was stretched out flat, as far as he could see—nothing like the tree-dense hills of Maine and New Hampshire. Emma followed him outside.

“Okay, so I lied—not quite everyone loves your mother,” Emma said.

“I used to,” Jack said again.

“Let’s go see a movie, baby cakes. Let’s take Claudia to the picture show.”

“Sure,” Jack said.

If he’d had half a brain, he might have anticipated the problem inherent in watching a movie with Emma and Claudia. It was most unlike him not to remember the movie; he even remembered bad movies. But from the moment Jack sat down in the theater, with Claudia seated to his left and Emma to his right, the problem—namely, which of them would hold his penis—presented itself. Any thoughts he might have had about the film vanished.

Emma, who was left-handed, put her hand in Jack’s lap first; she had no sooner unzipped his fly than Claudia, who was right-handed, made contact with his penis, which Emma already held in her hand. No heads turned; the three of them stared unblinkingly at the screen. Claudia politely withdrew her hand, but no farther than the inside of Jack’s left thigh. Emma, in a conciliatory gesture, prodded his penis in Claudia’s direction until the tip touched the back of Claudia’s hand. Claudia put her hand back in his lap, holding both his penis and Emma’s hand. Watching the film in this fashion gave Jack a two-hour erection.

After the movie, they went out and drank some beer. Jack didn’t really like to drink. Emma bought the beer, but either Claudia or Jack could have. No one ever carded Claudia; although she was only nineteen, she looked like an older woman, not a college student. And ever since Jack had seen Yojimbo, no one had carded him. He was nineteen, almost twenty, but he’d adopted Toshiro Mifune’s disapproving scowl, and he used a fair amount of gel in his hair. Emma approved of the look, the scowl especially, but Claudia occasionally complained about his shaving only every third day.

It was Toshiro Mifune’s indignation that Jack chose to imitate—particularly in the beginning of Yojimbo, when the samurai comes to town and sees the dog trot by with a human hand in its mouth. Jack loved that outraged look Mifune gives the dog.

Emma had too much to drink, and Jack drove her car back to the farmhouse, with Emma and Claudia holding hands and making out in the backseat. “If you were back here, honey pie, we’d make out with you, too,” Emma said.

Jack was used to Emma’s lawlessness, her willingness to bend the rules, but Claudia’s seeming complicity unnerved him. Though Emma was complicated—and she could be difficult—it was Claudia Jack couldn’t figure out. Like him, she seemed to be biding her time; she held herself back, she seemed detached, she was always a little hard to read. Or was Claudia merely holding a mirror up to Jack, stymieing him in the same ways he stymied her?