Until I Find You

by John Irving

  But Jack couldn't forget that he'd been sent away from Toronto--and from Canada, his country. For eight years, he'd been living in the United States; his fellow students, for the most part, were Americans, and the films that made him want to be an actor in the movies were European.

  Jack applied to, and was accepted at, the University of New Hampshire. Emma was all over him. "For Christ's sake, baby cakes, you shouldn't choose UNH because of how much you like the local movie theater!" But he'd made his decision. He liked Durham and that movie theater, which was never the same, Jack would admit, when Emma Oastler wasn't sitting beside him holding his penis.

  That trip to the North Sea with his mother had formed Jack Burns. St. Hilda's had established what Emma would correctly call his older-woman thing, and the school had given him some pretty basic acting techniques--also a belief in himself that he could be convincing, even as a girl. Redding had taught him how to work hard. Mrs. Adkins had drawn him to her sadness. And at Exeter he'd discovered that he was not an intellectual, but he had learned how to read and write. (At the time, Jack didn't know how rare and useful this knowledge was--no more than he could have defined the vulnerability Mrs. Stackpole had exposed in him.)

  The female faculty at Exeter struck Jack as sexually unapproachable, in that older-woman way. Whether Jack was right or wrong in that assumption, they were certainly not as approachable as Mrs. Stackpole--her crude, suggestive urgency had captivated him. Redding was a wilderness where women went and became weary, or at least weary-looking. At Exeter, on the other hand, there were some attractive faculty wives who captured the boys' attention--if only at the fantasy level. (Jack wouldn't have dreamed of approaching a single one of them; they all looked too happy.)

  Least approachable of them all was Madame Delacorte, a French fox who worked in the library and whose husband taught in the Department of Romance Languages. Romance was not what Madame Delacorte brought to mind. There wasn't a boy at Exeter who could look her in the eye--nor was there a boy who ever visited the library without searching longingly for her.

  Madame Delacorte looked as if she'd just been laid but wanted more, much more. (Yet, somehow, the first sweaty encounter had not mussed her hair.) Madame Delacorte was as commanding a presence as Jeanne Moreau in Jules and Jim; not even her husband could approach her without stuttering, and he was from Paris.

  Jack was cramming for his history final in the library one spring night; he had a favorite carrel on the second floor of the stacks. He'd burned his bridges with Noah Rosen and Michele Maher, and he was feeling resigned about his next four years in Durham, New Hampshire.

  Emma Oastler was moving to Iowa City. She'd sent some of her writing to Iowa and had been admitted to the Writers' Workshop there. Jack had never heard of the place. He knew only that Iowa was in the Midwest, and that he would miss Emma.

  "You can come visit me, honey pie. I'm sure they have movie theaters there, despite all the writers. They probably have the movie theaters to purposely drive the writers crazy."

  In this context, Jack wasn't worried about his history final--he was just a little depressed. When Madame Delacorte came to his carrel, he'd been plowing through a bunch of books he was supposed to have read already. He'd made a pile of the ones he was finished with; among them was a dusty tome about Roman law, which Madame Delacorte said someone had been looking for. She wanted him to return the book to the stacks on the third floor. The classics were kept there--all the Greek and Latin.

  "Okay," Jack said to Madame Delacorte. He could never look at her above her slender waist; her waist alone was enough to undo him. He went off to the third floor with the book about Roman law.

  "Come right back, Jack," Madame Delacorte called after him. "I don't want to be responsible for distracting you." As if she, or Jack, had any control of that!

  It seemed that, as usual, there was no one in the stacks on the third floor. Jack quickly found where the book belonged, but--above the moldy bindings, in the next aisle--a pair of disembodied eyes regarded him. "Michele Maher isn't the girl for you," the voice that went with the eyes said. "You're already good-looking. What do you need a good-looking girl for? You need something else, something real."

  Another dishwasher? Jack wondered. But he recognized the voice and the diluted, washed-out blue of the eyes. It was Molly whatever-her-name-was, Ed McCarthy's ex-girlfriend. (Penis McCarthy, as Herman Castro less-than-lovingly called him.)

  "Hi, Molly," Jack said; he came around into her aisle and stood next to her.

  "I should be your girlfriend," Molly told him. "I know you love your sister, and she's ugly. Well, I'm ugly, too."

  "You're not ugly, Molly."

  "Yes, I am," she said. She was demented, clearly. She also had a cold; the rims of her nostrils were red and her nose was running. Molly whatever-her-name-was leaned back against the stacks and closed her eyes. "Take me," she whispered.

  Jack didn't know whether to laugh or cry. He did neither. On an impulse largely meant to do her minimal harm, he fell to his knees and lifted her skirt. He pushed his face into her panties; with both his hands on her buttocks, he pulled the waistband of her panties down.

  Jack Burns actually licked a tenth-grade girl, a sixteen-year-old, in the stacks on the third floor of the Exeter library! From Mrs. Machado and Mrs. Stackpole, he knew exactly how to do it; the difference was, this time he initiated it. He could feel Molly's fingers in his hair; she was pulling his head into her. He could feel her slumping against the stacks as she came on his face--not one's usual library experience. And the worst of it was that he didn't know her last name; he couldn't even write her a letter of explanation.

  Jack left her standing in the stacks, or barely standing. Unlike Michele Maher, Molly was short enough that he could kiss her on her forehead--as if she were a little girl. When he left her, with nothing to say for himself except that he had to cram for a history final, it seemed to him that her knees were buckling.

  Jack found a drinking fountain, in which he washed his face. When he returned to his carrel on the second floor, he was aware he'd been away for what may have struck Madame Delacorte as a long time--not to mention that he'd suffered a major distraction. Maybe he was a little wild-eyed, or there was something in the aftermath of impromptu cunnilingus that caught Madame Delacorte's eye.

  "My word, Jack Burns," she said. "What on earth have you been reading? Not Roman law, clearly."

  The lilt in her voice was more mischievous than scientific. Was Madame Delacorte flirting with him? He finally got up the nerve to look at her, but Madame Delacorte was as unreadable as Jack's future. He knew only that the rest of his life had begun, and that he would begin it without Michele Maher--his first, maybe his last, true love.

  18

  Enter Claudia; Exit Mrs. McQuat

  Jack Burns saw his college years through a telescope, the way you do when the object of your desire is not of the moment--the way you do when you're biding your time. The University of New Hampshire was like a layover in an airport--a stop on Jack's journey elsewhere. He got good grades, the kind he never could have gotten at Exeter--he even graduated cum laude--but he was detached the whole time.

  In the student theater, Jack got every part he auditioned for, but there weren't many he wanted. And he saw all the foreign films that came to Durham in those years, sometimes but not usually by himself; if he took a girl with him, she had to be someone who would hold his penis. There were only a couple of girls like that.

  It was most often Claudia, who was a theater major. There was also a Japanese girl named Midori; she was in one of Jack's life-drawing classes. He was the only male model for all of the life-drawing classes. As Mr. Ramsey would have said, it was an acting opportunity--and Jack got paid for it. Modeling for life drawing was not an occasion when he thought so fixedly of his audience of one, as Miss Wurtz had instructed him; rather it was an exercise in imagining the close-ups he was preparing for. He hoped there would be many.

  Modeling for life dr
awing was an exercise in mind-over-matter, too, because Jack willed himself not to get an erection; what was more tricky, but he got pretty good at it, was allowing a hard-on to start and then stopping it. (It might have been that exercise that made a moviegoer out of Midori.)

  "Set us free, O God, from the bondage of our sins," Lottie used to pray. But Jack had stopped hearing from Lottie, even by postcard. He never learned what happened to her on Prince Edward Island--maybe nothing.

  Emma had taught Jack how to drive--illegally, in keeping with her nature, but at least Jack got his driver's license at the earliest opportunity. He didn't own a car; hence he developed a possessive fondness for Claudia's Volvo. He liked Claudia, but he loved her car.

  Claudia was an aspiring actress--she and Jack were in several student plays together--and her willingness as a penis-holder was for the most part unshakable. Yes, he had sex with her, too, which made the penis-holding less strange (albeit arguably less exciting) than with Emma. Claudia also drove Jack where he wanted to go, and once he had his license, she was generous about lending him her Volvo.

  Jack drove to Exeter a few times a week, just to work out with the wrestling team and run on the sloped, wooden track in the indoor cage. He had no interest in wrestling in college; it had never been the competition that mattered to him. He'd wanted to stay in halfway decent shape and to be able to protect himself, and he owed the sport a debt he didn't mind repaying. He made himself an extra coach in the Exeter wrestling room, mostly demonstrating moves and holds for the wrestlers who were beginners--much as Chenko, Pavel, and Boris had done for him as a child, and Coach Clum and Coach Hudson later on.

  Unlike Coach Clum, Coach Hudson hadn't looked down on Jack's habit of having his cauliflower ears drained in the training room. Unlike Coach Clum, Coach Hudson was a good-looking guy; he understood why Jack might not want to look like a wrestler for the rest of his life, especially if he wanted to be an actor.

  "Given what I hope will be my career, wouldn't you say it is practical of me to have my cauliflower ears drained?" Jack asked him.

  "Very practical," Coach Hudson replied.

  There was another wrestling coach at Exeter in those years. Coach Shapiro taught Russian at the academy; later he would be made dean of students.

  Once, when Jack brought Claudia with him to the wrestling room, she sat sullenly on the mat with her back against the padded wall--just watching the wrestlers with hostile, womanly suspicion, as if she might any second pull out a gun and shoot one of them. There was something vaguely dangerous about Claudia--a secret she kept to herself, perhaps, or her plans for a future she wouldn't disclose. Or was she, like Jack, always acting?

  Coach Shapiro remarked that Jack's friend was both "arrestingly beautiful" and "Slavic-looking." Jack knew that Claudia was attractive, although every woman's claim to beauty was diminished, in his mind's eye, by the incomparable Michele Maher. But he hadn't thought of Claudia as particularly Slavic-looking. On the other hand, Coach Shapiro was a Russian scholar; he obviously knew what he was talking about. He knew his wrestling, too. Coach Shapiro and Jack had a few of Chenko's old tricks in common.

  This amounted to Jack's male company in his years in Durham--those wrestling coaches at his old school, and the younger of those Exeter wrestlers who were just learning how.

  Jack was in his second year at UNH before he was forced to choose between his Slavic-looking beauty, Claudia, and his conquest from life drawing--his personal jewel of the Orient, Midori, with whom he had first seen Kurosawa's Yojimbo. (An exciting film to see with a Japanese girl holding your penis in her hand!) Jack must have been in the United States long enough to have succumbed to American materialism, because he chose Claudia--not only because she had a car; she also had her own apartment. It was off-campus, in Newmarket--more or less between Durham and Exeter. And because Claudia was an actress, she and Jack were interested in the same kind of summer jobs. Summer stock, everyone called it. (Claudia used to say that the phrase reminded her of cows.)

  New England had uncounted summer-stock theaters, some better than others, and while graduate students were more often hired for the paying jobs--these were people in MFA theater programs, for the most part--some gifted undergraduates could find internships, and some, including Claudia and Jack, were even paid.

  Claudia liked the theater better than Jack did. She knew Jack wanted to be a movie actor, but films failed to impress her. She once told Jack that she would have walked out of most of the movies she saw with him, except that she was holding his penis in her hand.

  Claudia was heavy-breasted and self-conscious about her hips, but her creamy-smooth skin, and her prominent jaw and cheekbones, gave her a face made for close-ups. She should have liked movies better than she did, because the camera would have loved her--not least her eyes, which were a yellowish brown, like polished wood. But Claudia believed she would be "hopelessly fat" before she was thirty. "Then only the theater will have me, and only because I can act."

  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.)