Jessica Lost

by Crumpacker/Picariello

  But he answered immediately. “Yes, he does.”

  I handed him the letter, and he walked it over to a bank of mailboxes.

  I thanked him and left. In the little pocket park next door, I sat for ten minutes, just to get my breath.

  I went home and waited for the call. When it hadn’t come three days later, Faith decided to call him.

  “Maybe he’s afraid you’re some kind of stalker,” she said. “Or that you’re after his money.”

  My motives were so clear to me; it seemed unimaginable that he would think anything different. Faith left a message on his machine: “I know you’ve received a letter from Jil, and I want to talk to you about her.”

  He called her back that afternoon. “Who’s Jil?” It turned out that he’d been in Los Angeles for the past week and had no idea what she was talking about.

  It hadn’t occurred to Faith that she would have to tell him the whole story, but she did.

  He called me an hour later, “Jil, this is Quint.” His voice seemed strangely familiar from hearing it on television. He seemed relaxed, as if we were talking about a job or a play we’d seen.

  At one point I said, “You seem so calm,” and he answered, “What did you imagine I would do, burst into tears?”

  “Aren’t you shocked?” I asked. “Surprised?”

  “Not really. I’ve always had it in the back of my mind that something like this might happen.”

  I found that hard to believe—he seemed so distanced from the whole idea of me. I couldn’t imagine that he’d ever thought about it at all.

  He asked me a few questions about the search and how I found him, where I lived, where I grew up. I asked him about his parents, his family. His replies were brief: He’d been married twice, no kids, and had lived with the same woman for the last twenty years. He had never told her about me, and said he would wait until he got back to New York to tell her in person.

  “How do you think she’ll react?” I asked.

  He chuckled. “I can’t even imagine.”

  At the end of the short conversation, he said we could get together when he was back in New York and have lunch and “stare at each other.” Then he gave me his number in LA and said that I should feel free to call him and “add or subtract anything” if I wanted to.

  As I said good-bye and hung up, I realized I’d had more emotional conversations with my dry cleaner.

  A week later we met for lunch at the Museum of Modern Art. “So we can smoke,” he said, when he called to set it up. “It’s one of the few places left.”

  I was standing outside the museum, nervously waiting, the sidewalk crowded with tourists and office workers on their way out for lunch, when it suddenly occurred to me that I might not recognize him. I should have found a recent photo of him online, I thought: too late. There were dozens of women standing around, waiting for friends, lunch dates. He couldn’t recognize me. I was supposed to recognize him.

  I was nearing a full-fledged panic attack when a small man in a baseball cap walked up. “Jil?” he asked.

  We kissed politely and made our way to the museum restaurant. I felt ridiculously awkward. I prayed I wouldn’t dribble or drop my fork.

  We had both brought some family photos—good props. He spread his out on the table. There was his father, dark and masculine, sitting with little Quint on the lawn of a grand home, while his mother, a beauty, stood next to a car. There was an adorable little Quint in boarding school uniform, the freckle on his nose clearly visible. I showed him pictures of myself as a child, a teen, my husband and children.

  He told me he had no siblings, no cousins. “In fact, you’re my only blood relative,” he said.

  “Not exactly,” I said, pointing to a photo of my sons. “You have two grandsons.”

  “I guess I do,” he said indifferently.

  He was more surprised by my interests, which were the same as his. I told him that from earliest childhood I wanted to be a writer. I told him about going to film school, writing poems and short stories, acting in high school and college. He shook his head in amazement.

  He told me about his childhood, which sounded lonely, growing up in New York City, with well-off parents who ran with a heady crowd and didn’t seem all that interested in their only child. He talked about finding out in college that his father was Jewish, which was a shock, and about getting started in show business. When I asked him about meeting Jake and Faith, he didn’t seem to remember much. It was a long time ago, he said, and over so quickly.

  After lunch, I thought I’d walk home through the park to calm down. I entered at Seventh Avenue and 59th Street, so wired and tense I almost missed a beautiful white bird, sitting in the middle of a swath of lawn—an egret in Central Park? It opened enormous wings and glided smoothly away over the baseball fields.

  I exited the park at 91st Street and Central Park West and suddenly had all the wind blown out of me. I stumbled to a bench and fell onto it. Staring across at the elegant twin towers of the El Dorado, I started to cry. All the pent-up energy of meeting Quint had escaped like air from a broken balloon, flown off like the egret into the sky, and I crashed. I felt weathered, depleted. I sat there sniffling and moaning softly for ten minutes, then picked myself up and shuffled slowly home.

  I wasn’t working full time, and both my kids were in school, so Faith and I saw each other frequently, nearly every week, sometimes twice a week, writing endless e-mails in between. We were enthralled with each other. “You are wonderful, wonderful,” she wrote to me in her almost daily e-mails. “You are wonderful, too,” I wrote back. We said it to each other so often, we finally acronymed it: YAW and YAW2. I knew someday reality would hit; I would figure out that she was just a person, flaws and foibles along with all the wonder. But at the beginning it was like falling in love, and falling in self-love, too. This is who made me! This is what I am made of ! And it is remarkable and delightful.

  We marveled continually at how alike we were. After a few weeks, we started keeping “The List of Similars.” We both…

  Hated heights, especially small ones—couldn’t go higher than two steps on a ladder.

  Never vomited.

  Had the same smile, chin, larger lower lip, triangular smile.

  Revered Seinfeld.

  Loved food, joyously, passionately, exuberantly, excessively.

  Loved to cook.

  Had difficult mother relationships (like 99 percent of the women in the world).

  Loved movies, theater, books, travel.

  Loved show tunes.

  Laughed at the same things.

  Used (overused) the words wonderful, amazing, and weird.

  Were compelled by the freakish and freaks, not personally, but voyeuristically.

  Wrote words in the air or under the table when annoyed.

  Adored small, cheap, totally unpretentious restaurants.

  Liked to go to the movies alone.

  Belonged to women’s groups of various kinds (writing, reading, creative, consciousness-raising).

  Were education activists, deeply involved in our children’s schools.

  Liked strong/spicy foods: garlic and onions, mustards and chutneys, Indian food and spicy Thai or Vietnamese.

  Liked to stroke, pet, and otherwise fondle appealing surfaces, like a cool water glass or a velvet scarf.

  Loved Kevin Kline, John Cleese, and homemade baked beans—not necessarily all together.

  Disliked cloves, because they reminded us of the dentist’s office.

  Made the same hand gestures with the same small, plump hands.

  Hated to go to sleep at night for the same reason: the fear of loss of consciousness that is like death.

  Had absent, much-loved fathers and domineering mothers.

  Loved being awake alone at night and feeling the sleeping, breathing, warm, safe quiet house.

  Were overweight, and hated it.

  Were gold-medal pouters as children.

  Rereading the e-mails year
s later, our voices are so similar I have to look at the e-mail address on the top of the page to tell which of us has written. Sometimes I think we are like a science experiment: Nature versus Nurture. How much like a mother will a child be, if raised by a completely different person? Was I romanticizing this? Was I deluded? I look at the List of Similars and think about it all—the music, the books, the strange habits… Kevin Kline! Even as a disciple of the “Everything-is-socialization” school of life, I know nature has won this contest, plump little hands down.

  For several weeks, I didn’t hear from Quint. I wanted to talk to him, but wanted him to call me. I was like a teenage girl waiting for a call from the captain of the football team. My anxiety was aggravated by his celebrity. He had way groovier people than me to hang out with, I figured. He could go out to lunch with Warren Beatty or Bruce Willis. Why in heaven’s name would he want to go to lunch with me?

  I knew he was leaving for Los Angeles in a few days so I finally picked up the phone. We made a plan to meet the next day at a bookstore on Madison Avenue, and then have coffee. I arrived early, and perused book jackets while I waited for him to show up. “Reading for free?” he asked, sneaking up on me from behind.

  He bought a book, asked me if I wanted anything. (So much, so much, I said silently.) Walking to the café, we talked about our mutual foot problems (he had just come from the podiatrist). Over cappuccino, we discussed movies. Other than The Third Man, which we both loved, our opinions were nearly always opposite: The ones he loved, I could barely stand; the ones he despised, I adored. What would we put on our List of Similars: bad feet and cigarettes?

  Our taste in books was entirely different as well. I asked him what book he would take if he were to be stranded on a desert island and he chose Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, because he wanted to reread it, and because it’s long—a very practical choice. We talked about the books we loved as children. The first books he could remember liking were the Oz books, especially The Marvelous Land of Oz, and the character of Tip, who changes magically from a young boy to a grown woman. I loved the Oz books, but always found that change, and The Marvelous Land of Oz, deeply disturbing.

  I asked him what he was like as a child.

  “Secretive,” he said quickly.

  “Solitary?” I asked.

  “Yes, although I had friends. But definitely secretive.”

  He did not invite personal questions, nor did he ask them of me. Instead, he told me the story of his career, from the Army to a flat in Greenwich Village to his early struggling years, to work in television, then movies. He was a good storyteller. We left the café around 5:00 p.m. and walked down Madison Avenue toward his apartment.

  At the corner, I gathered my courage to ask something more personal.

  “How do you feel about…” I couldn’t think of a word.

  “Our situation?” he said. I nodded. “I don’t know.”

  “It’s so hard to look at you and Faith and truly realize who you are to me,” I said.

  “I’m sure it’s hard for you. You’re putting together the pieces of who you are.”

  He was right. “But,” I said. “Faith is really the only one of us who’s lived with the reality of this. You and I are new to it. So why does it seem harder for me?”

  “There’s no downside for me,” he said, which wasn’t really what I had asked. “It doesn’t matter to me if people know or not.”

  Was that the most important element to him?

  He’d told his girlfriend and his closest friend, an actor I had a huge crush on when I was in college, and a couple of other good friends in LA. “And, of course, the whole world will know after I take out that ad,” he said, smiling.

  “A full page in the Times would be nice.”

  He laughed. “Kind of costly, don’t you think?”

  “Hey,” I teased. “You didn’t pay for college, and you didn’t pay for my wedding. I don’t think a full page in the Times is too much to ask.”

  He seemed tickled.

  “So where do we go from here?” I asked.

  “I didn’t know I had any options.”

  “There are always options.”

  “Like what?”

  I enumerated: “We shake hands, thank each other for a lovely time, and never see each other again.”

  He shook his head. “Ridiculous.”

  I breathed a sigh of relief. “Option two: We move in together and try to relive the last forty-two years.”

  He laughed. “That might be problematic. How about option three: We just keep going?”

  As we strolled the last block down Madison Avenue, I took his arm, which felt like an enormous act of bravery. We kissed at the corner and he told me he would call from LA. I took hold ofhis collar and said, “I like you.”

  “You’re genetically predisposed to like me,” he said.

  “No,” I said. “I’m genetically predisposed to want to like you. The fact that I do is a bonus.”

  As I walked away I realized that the only right answer to “I like you” is “I like you, too.” That wasn’t the answer I got.

  Every meeting with Quint exhausted me. He made me nervous, insecure, itchy for something I never got. It was as if I were constantly reaching out and grabbing smoke. Although our lunches—always lunch or coffee, never dinner, never even a suggestion of a movie, a show, meeting my husband, my meeting his girlfriend— were friendly and pleasant, there was little warmth. He told wonderful tales, stories of celebrities and movie sets, but seemed uninterested in my life, my family. He was friendly, but distant.

  With Faith and Jake, I’d realized immediately I could ask them anything. Quint felt far away. All I wanted was for him to like me. Why was I so needy, and so damn insecure?

  Every time we met, I had to stop somewhere on the way home and compose myself. Depleted, my throat sore from too many cigarettes, ashamed of myself for feeling like a lovesick teenager, I would wonder whose life I had stepped into. I was living in a bad miniseries, I decided. Life doesn’t imitate art; it imitates soap operas.

  Jake had stopped writing and calling. I wasn’t comfortable calling him because he was nervous about his children answering the phone and asking who I was. I got frustrated and angry when he didn’t respond to my letters. I was surrounded by disappointing father figures.

  But Faith was there, solid and loving and responsive. Everything we learned about each other just spun the connection between us tighter and tighter. I wrote her: “As much as I look forward to a time when things between us are natural, I do enjoy the thrill of now when it is new. The rush of emotion—it’s like having a baby or falling in love or that rare meeting of friends that doesn’t happen often in adulthood. If I didn’t have children and a husband, I probably would have moved in with you by now.”

  There seemed to be nothing we couldn’t say to each other. She wrote: “I can’t stand the idea of having lost you, of not having seen you when you were a baby and a child and a girl and a young woman—and of not having been there when you were unhappy and alone. It is very difficult to ask you to forgive me. Having been found is redeeming, but it doesn’t take the pain away. Yet it’s absolutely wonderful. When you ask me to make three guesses about my birthday gift, I want to say: You, You, and You.”

  Her e-mails were long and juicy, filled with stories and details. I wrote her: “Do you know what I do first when I get an e-mail from you? I scroll down without reading a word just to see how long it is—like counting all the chocolates in the box before you eat a single one, getting ready for something delicious. Then I read it. Then I read it again. Then I open a reply and keep yours open next to it so I can make sure to respond to everything in the right order, and fully.”

  In the fall of that year, Alex started second grade and Damien started high school. I met Quint for lunch in September. He had been to China and brought back two presents for me. I was very pleased that he brought me gifts, but the gifts themselves disturbed me: a set of plastic pla
ce mats with Chinese art reproduced on them, and a blindingly bright purple sweatshirt with a yellow satin flag appliqué, neither of which I would ever wear or use. They seemed like gifts for a completely different person.

  I tried hard to be happy that he thought to bring me a gift at all, and thanked him. But the gifts depressed me. They seemed to be emblematic of the fact that we had not connected at all. He thought I was someone else, someone who ate off ugly plastic place mats and wore garish sweatshirts. It made me wonder why I was there, having lunch with this strange, chilly man. What was the connection between us? Were we trying to make something out of nothing? Was he really anything more than a sperm donor?

  Faith told me that Jake was coming to New York for a memorial service, and had called to set up a visit with her while he was here. I didn’t hear from him. What had happened here? Where had he gone? Had I done something? No, I concluded, his feelings had changed after the DNA results. And all that blather about our powerful connection—what was that? Charm and sparkle and bull? I was angry, so angry that when Jake finally sent an e-mail, two days before arriving, my first reaction was to tell him I was busy. But after thinking about it, I decided I did want to see him, and e-mailed back to set a time.

  It was a strange meeting. He brought me more photos, but this time they were of Quint from when they were in Germany, sitting at a typewriter, in uniform, at a table in a restaurant. It was like he was trying to step out of the picture by introducing me to the new star of the show. He told stories from their time in the Army, his marriage to Faith, what went wrong. It made me unhappy and confused. Was he giving me up? Walking away? Did I care?

  He seemed sad to me now, all the charm worn away, like gold plate rubbed off dull lead. He started to tell me the story of his wedding night, something clearly sexual, and I stopped him. “I don’t want to know about that,” I said. “Of course, of course,” he muttered, shaking his head. It felt like he didn’t know who I was, or why he was with me.

  Later, Faith told me that Jake said little about our meeting, except this: “Jil is the best thing that happened to me this year.”