John Irving - Until I Find You

“Nope,” Claudia said.

“Not even some Canadian beer?” the guy asked Claudia; he smiled at her. She was fantastic-looking, really.

“I don’t usually drink beer, and Jack is always watching his weight,” Claudia told him.

“So you’ve got nothing to declare?” the customs agent asked Jack, more sternly.

Jack didn’t know what got into him. (“I just felt like fooling around,” he would tell Claudia later, but there was more to it than that.)

It was a close-up opportunity—Jack gave the guy his furtive look. He did furtive pretty well; it was a look he’d acquired from observing certain kinds of dogs, especially craven and sneaky dogs. “Well—” Jack started to say, interrupting himself by looking furtively at Claudia. “We don’t have to declare the Chinese scepter, do we?” he asked her. Oh, what a look she gave him!

“The what ?” the customs agent said.

“A royal mace, or sometimes it’s a staff—in this case, a short sword,” Jack went on. “It’s a ceremonial emblem of authority.”

“It’s Chinese ?” the guy asked. “Is it very old ?”

“Yes, very— it’s Buddhist, actually,” Jack told him.

“I better have a look at it,” the customs agent said.

“It’s a tattoo,” Claudia told him. “I don’t have to declare a tattoo, do I?”

Why had Jack done this to her? He loved Claudia—well, he liked her, anyway. Jack had not seen Claudia look so disappointed in him since she discovered the photographs of Emma naked; these were the old photos Emma sent to him when he was regularly beating off at Redding. They were photos of Emma at seventeen. Charlotte Barford had taken them. Claudia made Jack throw them away, but he kept one.

“Let me be sure it’s just a tattoo,” the customs guy said to Claudia. “I’ve never seen a Chinese scepter.”

“Do you have a female colleague?” Claudia asked the guy. “ She can see it.”

“It’s in a rather intimate location,” Jack pointed out.

“Just a minute,” the customs agent said. He left them sitting in the car and went off to find a female colleague; there was a building with what looked like offices, where the agent momentarily disappeared.

“You are so immature, Jack,” Claudia said. He remembered that evening in the Oastler mansion when his mom had made a similar point.

“Penis, penis, penis—” Jack started to say, but he stopped. The customs guy was returning with a stout black woman. Claudia got out of the car and went into the office building with the female customs agent while Jack waited in the car.

“What did you do that for?” the customs guy asked him.

“We haven’t been getting along lately,” Jack admitted.

“Well, this’ll really help,” the guy said.

When Claudia came back to the car, she gave Jack her violated look and they drove on. For those first few miles, when they were back in the United States, Jack felt exhilarated without knowing why.

Canada was Jack’s homeland, his country of origin, yet he was elated to be back in America, where he felt more at home. Why was that? he wondered. Wasn’t he Canadian? Was it Jack’s rejection of his mother and her tattoo world that made him turn his back on his native land?

Claudia wouldn’t speak to him for about three hundred miles. She had once again hiked Emma’s skirt to her waist, exposing the tattoo of the Chinese scepter on her right inner thigh, where Jack could see it with a downcast, sideways glance at her lap. It was one of very few tattoos he ever saw that he was tempted to get himself, but not on his inner thigh. He was thinking about where on his body he might one day get a tattoo of that very same Chinese scepter, when Claudia, finally, spoke.

By that time, they were in Vermont—about a hundred miles from where they were going, in New Hampshire. When Claudia saw Jack glance at her crotch—at her brand-new Chinese scepter, specifically—she said: “I got the damn tattoo for you, you know.”

“I know,” Jack said. “I like it. I really do.” Claudia knew that he liked the tattoo and the special place she put it. “I’m sorry about what I did at the border,” Jack told her. “I really am.”

“I’m over it, Jack. It took a while, but I’m over it. I’m sorrier about other things,” she said.

“Oh.”

“Is that all you can say?”

“I’m sorry,” he repeated.

“It’s not just that you’ll never have children,” she told him. “You’ll go on blaming your father’s genes for the fact that you’ll never stay with the same woman—not for long, anyway.”

It was Jack’s turn to say nothing for the next hundred miles. And to make a point of not responding to someone is another acting opportunity.

Jack soon would make a point of not responding to The Gray Ghost, too. A letter came from her not long after he and Claudia were back in New Hampshire. The Gray Ghost made merely a passing reference to Claudia’s “extraordinary beauty”—Mrs. McQuat also referred to Claudia as his “reluctant bride.” But neither Claudia herself nor Jack’s reluctance to have children was the true subject of The Gray Ghost’s letter. Mrs. McQuat was writing to remind him that he must pay closer attention to his mother, whom she felt certain he was neglecting.

“Don’t neglect her, Jack,” The Gray Ghost said.

Well, hadn’t she told him before? Jack threw her letter away without answering it. Later, when he learned that Mrs. McQuat had died, he wondered if he’d had a premonition of her death. Not only would he not pay closer attention to his mother; by not answering The Gray Ghost’s letter, it was as if he’d sensed that Mrs. McQuat was already dying—a death-in-progress, so to speak—and that when she was gone, the voice of Jack’s conscience would leave him, too.

They were just a few miles outside Durham, not far from Claudia’s apartment in Newmarket, before Claudia broke the silence. “God damn you, Jack,” she said. “After I die, I’m going to haunt you—I promise you I will—I might even haunt you before I die.”

Well, Jack Burns was an actor—he should have known an end line when he heard one. He should have committed Claudia’s warning to memory more deeply than he did.

Despite their growing estrangement, Jack and Claudia would live together their final two years at UNH. It was more than inertia that bound them; they were actors-in-training, learning the tricks of concealment. By what they managed to hide of themselves, they instructed each other. They became keen but sullen observers of their innermost secrets, their hidden characters.

The summer following their Toronto trip, they again did summer stock, this time at a playhouse on Cape Cod. The artistic director was a gay guy whom Jack liked a lot. Bruno Litkins was a tall, graceful man who swooped onstage; waving his long arms, he looked like a heron making an exaggerated if misguided effort to teach other, smaller birds to fly.

To Bruno Litkins, a musical based on a play or a novel was something to be tampered with—to be reinvented in a shockingly different way with each new production. The original text might be sacred to Bruno, but once someone had made a musical out of the material, there were no limits regarding how the story and the characters could be altered further.

Announcing auditions for The Hunchback of Notre Dame— in which Claudia had her heart set on the role of the beautiful Gypsy girl, Esmeralda—Bruno Litkins said that his Esmeralda was a beautiful transvestite who would liberate the reluctant homosexuality that flickered in the heart of Captain Phoebus like a flame in need of air. Esmeralda, the Gypsy drag queen of Paris, would wrestle the gay captain out of his closet. She was the oxygen Captain Phoebus needed in order to awaken his homosexual self!