(2005) Until I Find You

by John Irving

  From Persevere, her father’s shop in Leith, Alice was familiar with the acetate stencils that Tattoo Ole used. She could do a broken heart or a heart torn in two, or a bleeding heart in thorns and roses. She did a scary skull and crossbones and a fire-breathing dragon; she could do a killer version of Christ on the Cross and an exquisite Virgin Mary, with a green tear on her cheek, and some sort of goddess who was captured in the act of decapitating a snake with a sword. She did ships at sea, anchors of all kinds, and a mermaid sitting sidesaddle on a dolphin. Alice also did her own naked ladies, refusing to copy any of Ole’s stencils.

  Tattoo Ole’s naked ladies had an element that bothered her. The slim vestige of pubic hair on his women was arched like an upside-down eyebrow, like a smile with a vertical line slashed through it. There was often more evidence of hair in the ladies’ armpits. But the only criticism Alice would make to Ole’s face was that she preferred her naked ladies “from the back side.”

  Ole’s other apprentice, Lars Madsen, who was called Ladies’ Man Lars or Ladies’ Man Madsen, was a semiconfident young man who told Alice he liked his naked ladies any way he could get them. “From the front side and the back side,” he said.

  Alice would generally respond, if at all, by saying: “Not around Jack.”

  The boy liked Ladies’ Man Lars. Jack’s mom had almost never taken him to the Chinaman’s shop in Toronto. Although Jack knew a lot about her skills and training as a tattoo artist, his mother had never been keen for him to see her work. But there was no Lottie to look after the boy in Copenhagen, and until Tattoo Ole found them two rooms with a bath in the chambermaids’ quarters of the Hotel D’Angleterre, Jack and his mom slept in the tattoo parlor at Nyhavn 17.

  “I’m sleeping in the needles again,” Daughter Alice would say, as if she had mixed feelings about it.

  Despite reservations, she had let Jack play with the electric machine before. To the boy’s eyes, it resembled a pistol, although its sound is more comparable to that made by a dentist’s drill, and it is capable of making more than two thousand jabs a minute.

  Until Jack and Alice went to Copenhagen, what little needlework Jack had been allowed to do was practiced on an orange or a grapefruit—and only once, because his mom said fresh fish were expensive, on a flounder. (A fresh flounder, Aberdeen Bill had told Alice, was the closest approximation to human skin.) But Ladies’ Man Lars let Jack practice on him.

  Lars Madsen was a little younger than Jack’s mother, but he was a whole lot greener as an apprentice; maybe that was why he was generous to the boy. After Tattoo Ole saw the needlework Alice could do, poor Lars was strictly limited to shading. With some exceptions, Ole and Alice let Lars color in their outlines, but Ladies’ Man Madsen let Jack outline him.

  This was a bold, even a reckless, thing for Lars to let a four-year-old do. Fortunately, Jack was restricted to the area of Madsen’s ankles, where some “scratcher” (a bad tattooist) had etched the names of two former girlfriends, which were now an impediment to Lars’s love life—or so he believed. The boy was given the task of covering up the old girlfriends’ names.

  Actually, twenty percent of all tattoos are cover-ups—and half the unwanted tattoos in the world incorporate someone’s name. Ladies’ Man Madsen, who was blond and blue-eyed with a gap-toothed smile and a crooked nose from a lost fight, had one ankle wreathed with small red hearts budding on a green thorny branch—as if an errant rosebush had grown hearts instead of flowers. The other ankle was encircled by black links of chain. The name entwined on and around the branch was Kirsten; linked to the chain was the name Elise.

  With the tattoo machine vibrating in his small hand, and making his first penetrating contact with human skin, the boy must have borne down too hard. The client, unless drunk, is not supposed to bleed, and Madsen had been drinking nothing stronger than coffee. The needles should not draw blood—provided they puncture the skin no deeper than one sixty-fourth of an inch, or even one thirty-second. Jack obviously went deeper than that with poor Lars. The Ladies’ Man was a good sport about it, but with the thin sprinkling of the ink and the surprisingly more vivid spatter of the blood, there was a lot to wipe away. Madsen was not only bleeding; he was glistening with Vaseline.

  That Lars didn’t complain was more than a testimony to his youth. He must have had a crush on Alice—possibly he was trying to win her affection by sacrificing his ankles to Jack.

  While Alice was in her early twenties, and Lars in his late teens, at their age, almost any difference takes on an unwarranted magnitude. Moreover, Madsen’s facial hair did little to help his cause. He wore with a misplaced arrogance the merest wisp of a goatee, which seemed not so much a beard as an oversight in shaving.

  The Madsen family business was fish. (Selling them, not tattooing them.) The fish business was not one that Ladies’ Man Lars longed to join. His talent at tattooing may have been limited, but, in the tattoo world, Lars Madsen had found a measure of independence from his family and the world of fish. He rinsed his hair with fresh-squeezed lemon juice every time he shampooed. The problem was not unlike Kirsten and Elise, the former girlfriends who clung to his ankles; Lars believed that the smell of his family’s business had permeated even the roots of his hair.

  Tattoo Ole closely examined Jack’s cover-up of Kirsten—the one entwined with hearts and thorns—and announced that Herbert Hoffmann in Hamburg could not have done better. (Despite this accolade, Lars Madsen kept bleeding.)

  Alice’s method of covering up letters consisted of leaves and berries. Out of every letter, she told Jack, you could construct a leaf or a berry—or an occasional flower petal. Some letters had more round parts than others; you could make a berry out of anything that was round. The letters with angles instead of round parts made better leaves than berries. A flower petal could be either pointed or round.

  Kirsten yielded more leaves than berries, and one unlikely flower petal. Together with the untouched hearts and thorns, this left Lars’s left ankle wreathed with a confused bouquet; it looked as if many small animals had been butchered, their hearts scattered in an unruly garden.

  Jack had higher hopes for covering up Elise, but those black links of chain made a startling background to any combination of leaves and berries—besides, an E is not easily converted to anything remotely resembling vegetation.

  The four-year-old had chosen a sprig of holly for his second effort on human skin. The sharp, pointed leaves and the bright-red berries struck him as ideal for a name as short as Elise; yet the result called to mind a destroyed Christmas decoration that someone had mockingly affixed to a chain-link fence.

  Nevertheless, Tattoo Ole’s only comment was that the legendary Les Skuse in Bristol would have been envious of Jack’s needlework. This was high praise, indeed. Only Ole making some remark about Aberdeen Bill sitting up in his grave to take notice could have been more flattering, but Ole knew Alice was sensitive to references that placed her dad in his grave.

  She’d not been there to scatter his ashes through the fence guarding the graveyard at South Leith Parish Church, although her father had arranged for a fisherman to scatter his ashes in the North Sea instead. And Ole only once mentioned the sad fact that Aberdeen Bill had drunk himself to death, which every tattoo artist in the North Sea knew.

  Was it his daughter’s disgrace—her running off to Halifax, to have her wee one out of wedlock—that drove him to drink? Or had Aberdeen Bill always been a drinker? Given the weekend when everything went wrong in Aberdeen, maybe his daughter’s departure had merely exacerbated the problem.

  Daughter Alice never spoke of it. Tattoo Ole never brought the subject up again, either. Jack Burns grew up with hearsay and gossip, and the boy got a good dose of both at Nyhavn 17.

  In typical four-year-old fashion, Jack had left to his mother the cleaning up and bandaging of the Ladies’ Man’s ankles. A tattoo usually heals itself. You keep it covered for a few hours, then wash it with some nonperfumed soap. You never soak it; you should u
se a moisturizer. Ole told Jack that a new tattoo felt like a sunburn.

  While the four-year-old’s cover-ups may have failed in the aesthetic sense, the names of those two girlfriends were successfully concealed. That Ladies’ Man Madsen had encircled his ankles with a shrub of what looked like body parts—worse, with what Tattoo Ole called “anti-Christmas propaganda”—was another matter.

  Poor Lars. While Ole had nicknamed him “Ladies’ Man,” the opposite seemed true. Jack never saw him with a girl or heard him speak of one. Naturally, the boy never met Kirsten or Elise—only their names, which he covered in ink and blood.

  Like any four-year-old, Jack Burns didn’t pay close attention to adult conversations. The boy’s understanding of linear time might have been on a level with an eleven-year-old’s, but what he understood of his father’s story came from those private little talks he’d had with his mother—not what he managed to overhear of Alice’s dialogue with other grown-ups. In those conversations, Jack drifted in and out; he didn’t listen like an eleven-year-old at all.

  Even Ladies’ Man Lars remembered meeting William Burns, although Tattoo Ole had done the needlework and there was no shading of the musical notes. William’s tattoos were all in black; there was only outlining, apparently.

  “Everything about him was all in black,” as Ole put it.

  What Jack might have made of this was that his father wore all-black clothes—that is, if the boy registered the remark at all. (Given Ole’s fondness for Daughter Alice, the blackness might have been a reference to William’s unfaithful heart.)

  As for Ole’s nickname for Jack’s dad, the boy had correctly overheard the tattooer call him “The Music Man.”

  Ole had transferred some Christmas music by Bach to William’s right shoulder, where the tattoo lay unfurled like a piece ripped from a flag. Either Bach’s Weihnachtsoratorium or his Kanonische Veränderungen über das Weihnachtslied, Alice guessed; she knew many of the pieces the young organist liked to play. And in the area of William’s kidneys, an especially painful place to be tattooed, Ole had reproduced a rather lengthy and complicated phrase by Handel.

  “More Christmas music,” Ole said dismissively. Alice wondered if it came from the Christmas section in the Messiah.

  Tattoo Ole was critical of two of William’s previous tattoos—not Aberdeen Bill’s work, of course. (Ole much admired the Easter hymn on The Music Man’s right thigh.) And there was what appeared to be a fragment of another hymn, which wrapped his left calf like a sock missing its foot. This one had words as well as music, and Ladies’ Man Madsen had been so struck by the tattoo that he even remembered the words. They are sung throughout the Anglican Communion: “Breathe on me, breath of God.”

  Alice knew the rest. It sounded more like a chant than a hymn, but she called it a hymn, which she said was simply a prayer put to music. (She had sung it to Jack; she’d even practiced it with William.) By both Ole’s and Lars’s high esteem of the breath-of-God tattoo, Alice surmised this would have been Charlie Snow’s or Sailor Jerry’s work; her old friends had spared her the details of the tattoos they’d given William in Halifax.

  Lars was less critical of The Music Man’s two bad tattoos than Tattoo Ole was, but the Ladies’ Man agreed that the needlework was not impressive. There was more music on William’s left hip, but the tattooer had not anticipated how the bending of William’s waist would scrunch some of the notes together.

  On the slim evidence of this description, Alice decided he’d been to see Beachcomber Bill in Toronto—although she later admitted that the Chinaman was also capable of such a miscalculation. The second mistake, where some notes were lost from view because they curled around the underarm side of William’s right biceps, could have been committed by either of those men.

  From Tattoo Ole and Ladies’ Man Madsen, Jack and his mom had a pretty good idea of The Music Man’s body-in-progress. He was an ink addict, all right—a collector, as Aberdeen Bill had predicted.

  “But what about his music?” Alice asked.

  “What about it?” Tattoo Ole replied.

  “He must be playing the organ somewhere,” Alice said. “I assume he has a job.”

  Jack Burns remembered the silence with a fair amount of accuracy, if not the conversation that followed. For one thing, it was never what you would call quiet in Tattoo Ole’s shop. The radio was always tuned to a popular-music station. And at the moment Jack’s mom raised the issue of his dad’s whereabouts, which (even at four) Jack recognized as the centermost issue of her life, there were three tattoo machines in operation.

  Tattoo Ole was working on one of his naked ladies—a mermaid, without the inverted eyebrow that Alice disapproved of. The recipient, an old sailor, appeared to be asleep or dead; he lay unmoving while Ole outlined the scales on the mermaid’s tail. (It was a fishtail with a woman’s hips, which Alice also disapproved of.)

  Ladies’ Man Madsen was also hard at work, shading one of Ole’s sea serpents on a Swedish man. It must have been a constrictor, because it was squeezing a bursting heart.

  Alice was applying the finishing touches to her signature Rose of Jericho. This one was a beauty that half covered the heart side of a boy’s rib cage. To Alice, he looked too young to know what a Rose of Jericho was. Jack was much too young to know what one was. The way it had been explained to him was that a Rose of Jericho was a rose with something hidden inside it.

  “A rose with a mystery,” his mother had told him.

  Concealed in the petals of the rose are those of that other flower; you can discern a vagina in a Rose of Jericho, but only if you know what you are looking for. As Jack would one day learn, the harder to spot the vagina, the better the tattoo. (And in a good Rose of Jericho, when you do locate the vagina, it really pops out at you.)

  Three tattoo machines make quite a racket, and the boy getting the Rose of Jericho had been audibly crying for some time. Alice had warned him that the pain of a tattoo on the rib cage radiates all the way to the shoulder.

  But when Alice said, “I assume he has a job,” Jack thought the electricity had failed; even the radio fell quiet.

  How can three tattooers, without a word or signal to one another, take their feet off their respective foot switches simultaneously? Nevertheless, the three machines stopped; the flow of ink and pain was halted. The comatose sailor opened his eyes and looked at the unfinished mermaid on his reddening forearm. The Swede getting the color in his heart-squeezing serpent—over his heart, of all places—gave Lars a questioning look. The weeping boy held his breath. Was his Rose of Jericho, not to mention his agony, finally over?

  Only the radio started up again. (Even in Danish, Jack recognized the particular Christmas carol.) Since no one had answered her, Alice repeated her inquiry. “He must be playing the organ somewhere,” she said again. “I assume he has a job.”

  “He had one,” Tattoo Ole said.

  With that change of tense, Jack wondered if they had once more arrived too late to catch his dad, but the four-year-old might have misunderstood; he was surprised that his mother didn’t betray her disappointment. Her foot was back on the switch and she went on about her business, hiding the rose-red labia among the flower petals. The Rose-of-Jericho boy commenced to moan; the old sailor, who was patient about acquiring his mermaid, closed his eyes; Lars, forever engaged in coloring-in, saw to it that the serpent’s grip on the heart over the Swede’s own heart appeared to tighten.

  The walls of Tattoo Ole’s shop were covered with stencils and hand-painted drawings. These possible tattoos were called “flash.” Jack occupied himself by staring at a wall of flash while Ole elaborated on the absconding-father story. (This was one of those moments when the boy’s attention wandered.)

  “He was playing the organ at Kastelskirken,” Ole said. “Mind you, he wasn’t the head guy.”

  “The assistant organist, I suppose,” Alice ventured.

  “Like an apprentice,” Lars offered.

  “Yes, but he was good,�
�� Tattoo Ole said. “I admit I never heard him play, but I heard he was quite the player.”

  “Quite the ladies’ man, too, we heard . . .” Lars began.

  “Not around Jack,” Alice told him.

  The area of flash on the wall that had caught Jack’s eye was what they called Man’s Ruin. They were all tattoos on the theme of various self-destructions peculiar to men—gambling, drink, and women. The boy liked best the one of a martini glass with a woman’s breast, just the nipple, protruding from the drink like an olive; or the one that similarly portrayed a woman’s bare bum. In both cases, floating in the glass—like ice cubes—were a pair of dice.

  Jack’s mother did a swell Man’s Ruin, a little different from these. In her version, a naked woman—seen, naturally, from the back side—is drinking from a half-full bottle of wine. The dice are in the palm of the woman’s hand.

  “So there was some trouble at Kastelskirken?” Alice asked.

  Ladies’ Man Madsen nodded enviously.

  “Not around Jack,” was Tattoo Ole’s answer.

  “I see,” Alice said.

  “Not a choirgirl,” Ole offered. “She was one of the parishioners.”

  “A military man’s young wife,” said Ladies’ Man Lars, but Jack must have misheard him; the boy was still staring, open-mouthed, at the woman’s nipple in the martini glass, as dumbstruck as if he were watching television. He didn’t see his mother give Lars a not-around-Jack look.

  “So he’s left town?” Alice asked.

  “You should inquire at the church,” Ole told her.

  “I don’t suppose you heard where he went,” Alice said.

  “I heard Stockholm, but I don’t know,” Ole answered.

  Lars, who had finished with the Swede’s sea serpent, said: “He won’t get a decent tattoo in Stockholm. The Swedes come here to get tattooed.” Lars looked quickly at the Swede. “Isn’t that right?”