by John Irving
"Because she finally had to share you," Ingrid said. "She never knew how to share you, Jack."
The food was very good, and Jack was hungry; it seemed strange that there wasn't any music, but music is never background music to musicians.
"Your father was very religious," Ingrid told him when he was helping her do the dishes. "It's hard to play church music in a church and not be, although I wasn't. I became more religious when I went back to playing the piano--that is, not in a church."
"How was he very religious?" Jack asked.
"When Andreas and your mother hurt me, William told me something. He said, 'Find someone; devote yourself to that person; have a child, or children; praise God.' Not that it ever worked out that way for me! But that's what William told me; that's what he believed in. Well, I got the children, and I praise God. That's been good enough."
"So you're religious, too?" he asked.
"Yes--but not like your father, Jack."
"Tell me more about the religious part," he said.
"Take your mother, for example," Ingrid said a little impatiently. "Your father forgave her. I didn't."
"He forgave her?"
"He fought back once, but it backfired. I don't think he fought back again," she told him. It was as if her speech impediment had almost gone away, or he'd forgotten it; she was such a healthy person, Jack was thinking.
She'd gone into the living room and had come back to the kitchen with a photograph. "A pretty young woman, don't you think?" she asked, showing him the picture. Jack recognized the beautiful girl in the photograph; it was the woman William had brought with him to the restaurant in the Hotel Bristol.
"I asked her if she had a tattoo," Jack said.
"That was what backfired," Ingrid told him. "Your dad didn't expect you would speak to them. He felt awful."
"Who was the girl?" Jack asked.
"My sister, an actress," Ingrid said. "She's not a movie star, like you--but in Norway she's a little bit famous, in the theater. I convinced your father to take her with him. I thought it would serve your mother right. Alice was always telling him how and when he could get a look at you. In Copenhagen, and in Stockholm, she even told him who to have with him!"
"Yes, I know," Jack said.
"So I told him to take my sister, the actress, and I told my sister to fall all over him. I said to them both, 'Make the bitch think you're in love with each other. Make her think that all the lies she tells Jack have come true!' But then you went up to them, and they didn't know what to do. Naturally, your mom fell apart, and she took you away again. She was always taking you away."
"Yes," he said.
"Your father told me: 'Maybe forgiveness would have worked better, Ingrid.' But I told him that nothing would work with Alice. Nothing worked--did it, Jack?"
"No, nothing worked," he answered.
"Your father said: 'God wants us to forgive each other, Ingrid.' That's all I know about the religious part, Jack."
It was dark outside--the lonely time of night in the Stensparken--and the candle on the kitchen table was the only light in the darkening apartment. "Look how dark it is, Jack Burns," Ingrid whispered, bending down to touch his ear with her clenched teeth. "You're still a little boy to me. I can't let you go home in the dark."
Even with her speech impediment, she made it sound as if this were another not-difficult decision in her fabulous apartment, where there'd been no difficult decisions--not ever.
Kissing Ingrid Amundsen was almost normal; there was an unnatural sound she made when she swallowed, when she was kissing him, but it wasn't unpleasant. Jack held his mom's ripped-heart tattoo on Ingrid's small left breast--exactly where her babies had been delighted to touch her.
Ingrid had no breasts to speak of, and the blue veins in her forearms stood out against the gold of her skin--just as he'd remembered. Another blue vein, which began at her throat, ran down between her small breasts; that vein seemed to have a pulse in it, as if an animal lived under her skin. Maybe the animal affected her speech. At least he'd remembered her veins correctly.
"I used to think about which of us was the more damaged, but we're all right, aren't we?" Ingrid asked him; her poor voice sounded awful at that moment.
"Yes, I think so," Jack said, but he didn't really feel that he was all right--and he couldn't tell about Ingrid. She had the aura of an accepted sadness about her. Jack hated to think of her meeting people for the first time, and what that did to her. He was even angry at her son, who'd gone off to the university in Bergen. Couldn't the kid have stayed in Oslo and seen more of his mother?
Yet Ingrid's life, her seeming wholeness, impressed Jack as more likable than whatever life Andreas Breivik was living. Breivik's opinion--namely, that Ingrid had not had much success at anything--struck Jack as arrogant and wrong. But Andreas had known her better than Jack did. She was such a beautiful yet flawed woman; it hadn't been hard for Jack's mom to make the boy believe that Ingrid and William had been lovers. (Who wouldn't have been her lover?)
"It couldn't have been as bad for your father anywhere as it was in Copenhagen," Ingrid told Jack, "but I don't think that the problems with your mother ever got better. Not in Helsinki, anyway. Alice was perfectly awful to him there. But she didn't achieve her desired effect. I think your mom started running out of steam in Helsinki, Jack." (That had always been Jack's impression.)
"What happened in Helsinki?" he asked her.
"I don't know everything, Jack. I just know that Alice tried to break up a lesbian couple, but she couldn't manage it. They both slept with her--and had a good time, or not--but they went right on being a couple!"
"Who were they?" Jack asked.
"Music students--your dad's two best, like Andreas and me. Only one of them was an organist; the other one was a cellist."
"Ritva and Hannele were gay?" Jack asked.
"Their names sound familiar," Ingrid said. "The point is, Jack--your mother, once again, didn't get what she wanted. But neither did your father."
"You stayed in touch with him?" Jack asked.
"Till he left for Amsterdam," Ingrid told him. "Whatever happened there, he didn't write me about it. I lost touch with him when he left Helsinki."
The kissing had become more interesting; it was principally her speech that was damaged. There was something detectably but indefinably strange about her mouth--if not actual damage, a kind of involuntary tremor that felt like damage. Jack didn't know what it was, but it was very arousing.
It seemed the wrong time to ask her, but the thought had occurred to Jack--when she implied she'd had some limited correspondence with his father, if only when William was in Finland. Jack just had to ask her: "Was there anything romantic between you and my dad, Ingrid?"
"What a thing to ask me--you naughty boy!" she said, laughing. "He was a lovely man, but he wasn't my type. For one thing, he was too short."
"Shorter than I am?" Jack asked.
"A little shorter, maybe--not much. Of course I was never with him when I was lying down!" she added, laughing again. Ingrid grabbed Jack's penis, which in his experience implied an impatience with the particular conversation--whatever it was.
"So I'm not your type, either?" he asked.
She kept laughing; it was the most natural sound she was capable of making. (Except, perhaps, on the piano.) "I have other reasons for wanting to sleep with you, Jack," was all she told him.
"What other reasons, Ingrid?"
"When you've made love to me again and again, I'll tell you," she said. "I'll tell you later--I promise." There was an urgency about her speech impediment now, something more than impatience. He began by kissing her broken-heart tattoo, which seemed to make her happy.
In the morning, Jack woke her by kissing the tattoo again; it looked as if it were still bleeding. She smiled before she opened her eyes. "Yes, keep doing that," Ingrid said, with her eyes still closed. He kept kissing her wounded-heart tattoo. "If you keep doing that, I'll tell you what I belie
ve about Hell." Her eyes were wide open now--Hell being an eye-opening subject. He kept kissing her, of course.
"If you hurt people, if you know you're hurting them, you go to Hell," Ingrid said. "In Hell you have to watch the people you hurt, the ones who are still alive. If two people you hurt ever get together, you have to watch everything they do very closely. But you can't hear them. Everyone in Hell is deaf. You just have to watch the people you hurt without knowing what they're talking about. Of course, Hell being Hell, you think they're talking about you--it's all you ever imagine, while you're just watching and watching. Kiss me everywhere, Jack--not just the tattoo." He kissed her everywhere; they made love again. "What a bad night's sleep your mother's had, Jack," Ingrid said. "She's been up all night, just watching."
Jack had fallen back to sleep when he heard the piano. There was the smell of coffee in the apartment. He got out of bed and went into the living room, where Ingrid was sitting naked at the piano, playing softly. "Nice way to wake up, isn't it?" she asked, with her back turned to him.
"Yes, it is," he told her.
"We both have to get dressed, and you have to go," she said. "My first pupil is coming."
"Okay," Jack said, turning to go back to her bedroom.
"But come kiss me first," she said, "while the bitch is watching."
There was a lot Jack didn't know about religion. His dad, apparently, was a forgiver. Ingrid Moe (now Amundsen) wasn't; she hadn't forgiven Andreas Breivik or Alice. As Jack kissed Ingrid on her damaged mouth, he was thinking that he wasn't much of a forgiver, either.
In Hell, where his mother was watching, Alice might have regretted giving Ingrid the wrong tattoo--or so Jack Burns was also thinking.
29
The Truth
Jack never saw what the rest of Finland looked like. It was dark all the way from the airport into Helsinki. Although it was April, it was almost snowing; one or two degrees colder, and the rain would have turned to snow.
He checked into the Hotel Torni, marveling at the large, round room on the first floor, which served the hotel as a lobby. Jack remembered it as the American Bar--a hangout for the young and wild, some brave girls among them. The old iron-grate elevator, which had been "temporarily out of service" for the duration of Jack's time in the Torni with his mom, was now working.
But although the American Bar was gone, the Torni was still a hangout for young people. On the ground floor was an Irish pub called O'Malley's; shamrocks all over the place, Guinness on draft. It was an unwise choice for the Jack Burnses of this world--it was packed with more moviegoers than Coconut Teaszer. But Jack wasn't hungry, and he'd slept on the plane. He didn't feel like eating or going to sleep.
A not-bad band of Irish folksingers was playing to the pubcrowd--a fiddler, a guitarist, and a lead singer who said he loved Yeats. He'd left Ireland for Finland fifteen years ago.
Jack talked to the band members between sets. The young Finns in the pub were shy about speaking to Jack, although they did their share of staring. When the Irish folksingers went back to work, a couple of Finnish girls started talking to Jack. They didn't seem all that brave; in fact, they were very tentative. He couldn't tell what they expected, or what they wanted to happen. First one of them began to flirt with him; then she stopped flirting and the other one started.
"You can't dance to this music," the one who'd stopped flirting remarked.
"You look like you don't need music to dance," the one who'd started flirting said to Jack.
"That's right," he told her.
"I suppose you think I was suggesting something," she said.
Jack wasn't about to mess up his memory of Ingrid Moe by sleeping with either of the Finns, or with both of them. He thought he was hungry enough to eat a little something. But when he said good night to the Finnish girls, one of them remarked: "I guess we're not what you're looking for."
"Actually," Jack told them, "I'm looking for a couple of lesbians." What a waste of a good end line--in O'Malley's Irish pub in Helsinki, of all places!
He went to the lobby of the Torni and asked the concierge if there was still a restaurant called Salve. "It used to be popular with sailors," Jack said.
"Not anymore," the concierge told him. "And I'm not sure it's the right place for Jack Burns to walk into. It's a local place." (Given the moviegoing crowd in O'Malley's Irish pub, Jack was glad he'd registered at the Torni as Jimmy Stronach.)
Jack went up to his room and changed into what Leslie Oastler called his "tattoo-parlor clothes"--jeans and a black turtleneck. Mrs. Oastler had also packed Emma's bomber jacket; the sleeves were way too long on Jack, but he loved it.
It still felt cold enough to snow when he walked into Salve--an old-fashioned restaurant, the kind of place where you got fairly ordinary but home-cooked meals. If, as he'd once imagined, Helsinki was a tough town in which to be afflicted with self-doubts, Jack could see what the concierge had meant about a movie star showing up at Salve. Surely some of the locals were moviegoers; maybe they just hadn't liked Jack Burns's movies.
The waitresses were as he'd remembered them--hard-worked and fairly long-of-tooth. Jack was thinking about the tough waitress who'd been married to Sami Salo, the scratcher; she would have fit right in twenty-eight years later. She'd been tough enough to call Alice "dearie," Jack recalled--although he wondered if the bad feelings between them had really been about his mom putting Sami out of business.
Jack remembered Mrs. Sami Salo, if that's who she was, as a short, stout woman whose clothes were too tight. She'd squinted whenever she took a step, as though her feet hurt her; her fat arms had jiggled.
He was trying not to look at anybody too closely--certainly not to meet anyone's eye--when the waitress came up to his table, which needed wiping. She used a wet dishcloth. Jack tried not to look too hard at her, either. She was as thin as Mrs. Sami Salo had been fat, or maybe only Mrs. Salo's arms had been fat. He couldn't remember. The thin waitress had hunched shoulders and a coarse complexion, but there was a kind of tired prettiness in her long face and catlike eyes; when she stood facing Jack at his table, she cocked one hip to the side as if her legs were tired, too.
"I hope you're meeting someone," she said. "You didn't come here alone, did you?"
"Isn't it all right to come here alone?" he asked.
"It's not all right for you to come here alone," she told him. "It might be safer for you to come here as a girl."
"I was hoping you could tell me where to get a tattoo," Jack said. "This used to be the place to ask."
"I'm the one to ask," the waitress said. "Seriously--if you aren't meeting someone here, you better be sure you leave with someone."
"What about the tattoo?" he asked.
"Movie stars shouldn't get tattooed," she told him. "It ruins you for the nude scenes."
"There's makeup for that," Jack said.
"You probably shouldn't get tattooed alone, either," the waitress said. "Are you here making a movie?"
"Actually, I'm looking for a couple of lesbians. But I'll start with where to get a tattoo," he told her. She smiled for the first time; she was missing an eyetooth, which was probably why she was disinclined to smile.
"If you're alone, I'll go home with you," the waitress said. "You can't do much with a couple of lesbians." She could tell he was thinking about it--another close-up opportunity. But Jack was suddenly tired, and he wanted to hold on to the memory of Ingrid Moe a little longer. "I'm not really old enough to be your mother," the waitress added. "I just look it."
"It's not that. I'm just too tired," he told her. "I've been traveling."
"If you end up here, you've been traveling, all right," she said.
"I'll have the Arctic char, please," Jack said.
"What are you drinking?"
"I don't drink," he told her.
"I'll bring you a beer," the waitress said. "You can just pretend you're drinking it."
She was wise to do that, because the locals kept toasting him--all
through his dinner. The toasts were somehow sinister, even hostile--more challenging than friendly. Jack would raise his beer glass and pretend to swallow. They didn't seem to notice that his glass stayed full, or they didn't care. If there were Jack Burns fans in Finland, they had a way of masking their affection.
Jack didn't go home with the waitress. She was nice about it. She made him wait at the table while she called him a taxi. Only when the cab was parked outside would she release him; she even walked him to the door, holding his arm the whole way.
"My name is Marianne. There are much more difficult names in Finland," she said.
"I'll bet there are, Marianne."
She gave him a black-and-white business card; it was a little scary. The place was called The Duck's Tattoo. There was an excellent drawing of Donald Duck, but he was smoking a blunt--a cigar filled with marijuana. His eyes were fried and he looked raving mad. Someone had wrapped a snake around the reefer-smoking duck, more in the manner of a straitjacket than a shawl.
There was a phone number written on the back of the business card. "That's my number," Marianne told Jack. "I've got a couple of tattoos I could show you, if you're ever not too tired."
"Thank you, Marianne."
"The tattooist you want to see is Diego," she said.
"Not a Finnish name, I guess."
"Diego's Italian, but he was born in Finland," Marianne said. "He's been in business here for fifteen years."
The Duck's Tattoo was on Kalevankatu--about a ten-minute walk from the Torni, the concierge said the next morning. The concierge also sent Jack to a gym near the hotel, Kuntokeskus Motivus. ("Call it Motivus for short," the concierge had recommended.) It was clean, with lots of free weights, but Jack was distracted during his workout by a pregnancy-aerobics class. The bouncing women were doing dangerous-looking things.
On his way to The Duck's Tattoo, Jack passed a porn shop. One of the magazines in the window was a German one called Schwangere Girls. All the women were pregnant; more bouncing women doing dangerous-looking things. Pregnancy seemed to have made itself the unwanted theme of Jack's day.
Helsinki struck him as a warren of construction sites. He found himself in a part of the city that had been built by the Russians a hundred years before. The Duck's Tattoo was opposite the former Russian Army Hospital. It had been a sailors' neighborhood, with lots of sailors' pubs and restaurants--like Salve used to be--but the neighborhood was growing trendier by the day, Diego later told Jack.