(2005) Until I Find You

by John Irving

  The word actor was replaced with waiter, and the names of certain plays or dramatizations (even the musicals) were presented to the clueless American reader as the names of trendy Toronto restaurants, in which Mr. Ramsey extolled the virtue of Jack’s “performance”—an oft-repeated word, which Emma left unaltered, except she sometimes changed it to a verb.

  Hence Jack had “performed” superbly at an alleged bistro called Mail-Order Bride (there was another restaurant called Northwest Territories) and at what was probably a French place, d’Urbervilles, and at several restaurants of note in the northeastern United States, among them The Restaurant of Notre Dame and Peter and Wendy’s—not to mention what must have been a Spanish eatery, Bernarda Alba.

  Mr. Ramsey’s letterhead—namely, that of St. Hilda’s—which stated he was Chairman of English and Drama, had been tweaked to identify him as Chairman of the Hotel and Restaurant of that oddly religious-sounding name. Mr. Ramsey’s opening sentence described St. Hilda’s (he meant, of course, the school) as “one of Toronto’s best.”

  But Donald was an imperious prick—a headwaiter from Hell. “When I’m recommending a hotel with a good restaurant in Toronto, I always recommend the Four Seasons,” he told Jack. He then challenged Jack to take a minute or two to memorize the specials.

  “If you give me ten minutes, I can memorize the whole menu,” Jack told him.

  But Donald didn’t give him the chance. The maître d’ later told Giorgio or Guido that Jack’s attitude had offended him. He had sized up Jack as “a hick from Toronto via New Hampshire”—or so he said to Giorgio or Guido. Jack had already decided he didn’t want the waiter job—not in such a self-important steakhouse. But when Donald offered him an opportunity in the restaurant’s valet-parking department, Jack accepted. He was a good driver.

  It wasn’t that Emma thought the job was beneath him; her objection was political. “You can’t be a parking valet, baby cakes. English is your first language. You’re taking a job from some unfortunate illegal alien.”

  But Giorgio or Guido looked relieved. He didn’t want Jack to be a fellow waiter at Stan’s. He’d had enough difficulty accepting Jack as Emma’s roommate, no matter how many times Emma had told him that she and Jack didn’t have sex together. (Jack wondered what Giorgio or Guido’s problem was. How could you bench-press three hundred pounds and be that insecure?)

  Jack didn’t last long as a parking valet; he was fired from the job his first night—in fact, he never got to park his first car.

  It was a silver Audi with gunmetal-gray leather seats, and the guy who flipped Jack the keys was a young, arty type who appeared to have been quarreling with his young, arty wife—or his girlfriend, Jack had thought, before he’d driven less than a block and the little girl sat up in the backseat. Her face, which was streaked with tears, was perfectly framed in the rearview mirror. She was maybe four, at the most five, years old, and she wasn’t sitting in a booster seat. Evidently the backseat was her bed for the evening, because she was wearing pajamas and clutching both a blanket and a teddy bear to her chest. Jack saw a pillow propped against the armrest on the passenger side of the backseat; the booster seat was on the floor, kicked out of the way.

  “Are you parking in a garage or outdoors?” the little girl asked him, wiping her nose on the sleeve of her pajamas.

  “You can’t stay in the car,” Jack told her. He stopped the Audi and put on the hazard blinkers; she had scared the shit out of him and his heart was pounding.

  “I’m not well enough behaved to eat in a grown-up restaurant,” the little girl said.

  Jack didn’t know what to do. Maybe the young, arty couple had been arguing about leaving the little girl in the backseat, but he thought not. The girl had the look of a valet-parking veteran. “I like the garages better than parking on the street,” she explained. “It will be dark soon,” the little girl observed.

  Jack drove down Main to Windward, where a gang of rowdies—noisy singles, though it was early in the evening—were crowding the entrance to Hama Sushi, waiting for tables. He left the Audi running at the curb and rang the buzzer to the half of the ratty duplex he shared with Emma; then he went back to the car and waited beside it. The little girl was never out of his sight.

  “Is this where we’re parking?” she asked.

  “I’m not leaving you alone, not anywhere,” he told her.

  Emma opened the door and came out on the sidewalk; she was wearing one of her World Gym tank tops and nothing else. Because she looked more than usually pissed off, Jack guessed she’d been writing her novel.

  “Nice car, honey pie. Does it come with the kid?” Jack explained the situation while the little girl observed them from the backseat. She’d probably never seen anyone quite like Emma in her World Gym tank top. “I told you—you shouldn’t be parking cars,” Emma said. She kept looking at the little girl. “I’m not babysitter material, Jack.”

  “I usually sleep on the floor, if I think anyone can see me sleeping on the backseat,” the little girl said.

  The “usually” made up Jack’s mind for him—that and what Emma said before she walked back inside to continue what must have been one of the angrier passages in her novel-in-progress. “Nothing good can come of this job, baby cakes.”

  Jack put the little girl in the middle of the backseat and fastened a seat belt around her, because he couldn’t figure out how the stupid booster seat worked. “It’s probably hard to understand if you don’t have children,” the little girl told him forgivingly. Her name was Lucy. “I’m almost five,” she said.

  When Jack returned to the corner of Rose and Main, he pulled up at the curb in front of Stan’s; his fellow valet parkers looked surprised to see him. “¿Qué pasa?” Roberto asked, when Jack handed him the keys.

  “Better not park the Audi just yet,” Jack told him, taking Lucy into the restaurant. She wanted to bring her blanket and her teddy bear, but not the pillow, which was okay with Jack.

  The asshole maître d’, Donald, was standing at his desk as if it were a pulpit and the book of reservations a Bible. Lucy, seeing all the people, wanted Jack to pick her up, which he did. “Now we’re going to get in trouble,” the child whispered in his ear.

  “You’re going to be fine, Lucy,” Jack told her. “I’m the one who’s going to get in trouble.”

  “You’re already in trouble, Burns,” Donald said, but Jack walked past him into the restaurant. Lucy spotted her parents before Jack did. It was still early, a soft light outside; the tables weren’t full yet. (Maybe the tables were never full at Stan’s.)

  Lucy’s mother got up from her chair and met them halfway to her table. “Is something wrong?” she asked Jack. What a question. And women (not only Claudia) gave Jack a hard time when he said he wasn’t ready to be a parent!

  “You forgot something,” Jack said to the young, arty mom. “You left Lucy in the car.” The woman just stared at him, but Lucy held out her arms and her mother took her from Jack—teddy bear and blanket and all.

  Jack hoped that would be the end of it, but Donald, the headwaiter from Hell, wouldn’t let him leave. “There is no St. Hilda’s, hotel or restaurant, in Toronto,” he hissed. “There is no Mail-Order Bride—”

  “So you’re from Toronto,” Jack interrupted him. The way Donald had said, “T’ronto,” had given him away. Jack should have known. Donald was another undiscovered Canadian working as a waiter in L.A.

  Naturally, the young, arty husband and bad father wouldn’t let Jack leave Stan’s without giving him his two cents’ worth. “I’m gonna get you fired, pretty boy,” the guy said.

  “It’s a good job to lose,” Jack told him, making note of the line.

  Giorgio or Guido was hovering around, to the extent that a bodybuilder who can bench-press three hundred pounds can hover. “You better get outta here, Jack,” he was saying.

  “I’m trying to get out of here,” Jack said.

  He was abreast of the reservation desk when he spotted th
e telephone; it occurred to him to call 911 and report a clear case of child neglect, but he thought better of it. Jack didn’t know the license plate of the silver Audi. He would have to write it down if he wanted to remember it—damn numbers again.

  But the bad father was too angry to let Jack go. He stepped in front of Jack and blocked his way; he was a medium-tall young man, and his chin was level to Jack’s eyes. Jack waited for the guy to touch him. When he grabbed Jack’s shoulders, Jack stepped back a little and the young man pulled Jack toward him. Jack let him pull, head-butting him in the lips. Jack didn’t butt him all that hard, but the guy was a big bleeder.

  “I’m calling nine-one-one the second I’m home,” Jack said to Giorgio or Guido. “Tell Donald.”

  “Donald says you’re fired, Jack,” the bodybuilder said.

  “It’s a good job to lose,” Jack repeated. (He knew that line would have legs.)

  Out on the sidewalk, Roberto was still holding the keys to the silver Audi. That’s when Jack remembered he had the parking chit in his shirt pocket; he’d already written down the license-plate numbers. “You’ll have to write out a new chit for the Audi,” he told Roberto.

  “No problem,” Roberto said.

  Jack walked along Main to Windward. It was a nice evening, only now growing dark. (When you’ve grown up in Toronto, Maine, and New Hampshire, when isn’t it a nice evening in L.A.?)

  Emma was writing away when Jack got home, but she overheard his 911 call. “What did you do with the kid?” she asked him, after he’d hung up.

  “Gave her to her parents.”

  “What’s that on your forehead?” Emma asked.

  “A little ketchup, maybe—I’ve been in a food fight.”

  “It’s blood, baby cakes—I can see the teeth-marks.”

  “You should’ve seen the fucker’s lips,” he told her.

  “Ha!” Emma said. (Shades of Mrs. Machado—that exclamation always gave Jack the shivers.)

  They went out to Hama Sushi. You could talk about anything at Hama Sushi—it was so noisy. Jack really liked the place, but it was partly what Emma called “l’eau de Dumpster” (her Montreal French) that eventually drove them away from their Windward Avenue duplex.

  “So what did you learn from your brief experience as a parking valet, honey pie?”

  “I got one good line out of it,” Jack said.

  What convinced Emma that Jack should be a waiter at American Pacific, a restaurant in Santa Monica not far from the beach, was neither the location nor the menu. She went there on a date one night and liked what the waiters were wearing—blue Oxford cloth button-down shirts with solid burgundy ties, khakis with dark-brown belts, and dark-brown loafers. “It’s very Exeter, baby cakes—you’ll fit right in. I stole a dinner menu for you. Just think of it as an acting opportunity, as Mr. Ramsey would say.”

  Emma meant that memorizing the menu was an acting opportunity. It took Jack the better part of a morning. Counting the salads and other starters together with the main courses, there were about twenty items.

  Jack then called Mr. Ramsey in Toronto and alerted him to the modifications Emma had made in Mr. Ramsey’s recommendation for Jack; just in case someone phoned Mr. Ramsey to verify Jack’s credentials as a waiter, Jack wanted his beloved mentor to know that Mail-Order Bride was supposed to be a fabulous bistro.

  “You have to make reservations a month in advance!” Mr. Ramsey responded, with his usual enthusiasm. “Jack Burns, I know you’ll go far!” (Maybe, Jack thought—if only as a waiter.)

  Jack showed up that afternoon at American Pacific; it still sounded more like a railroad than a restaurant to him, but the maître d’, a handsome fellow named Carlos, was a welcome sight. Jack knew at once that Carlos was no Canadian. When Carlos looked at Jack’s letter of recommendation, he nodded as if he’d eaten at Mail-Order Bride many times.

  The specials were on a blackboard by the bar. “I’ll bet you can memorize them in a heartbeat,” Carlos said.

  “I’ve already memorized the menu,” Jack told him. “You want to hear it?” That got the attention of the other waitstaff. It was only about five-thirty in the afternoon—no customers as yet—but Jack had his audience. He skipped the veal chop with the gorgonzola mashed potatoes, just to make them think he’d forgotten something—only to surprise them by mentioning the veal chop at the end of his recitation. He forgot nothing. He’d already dressed as if he had the job, and he knew he’d nailed the audition. Carlos didn’t ask him to recite the specials.

  It was to be the first in a long line of auditions for Jack—not counting the aborted one with Donald—but all of Jack’s other auditions would be as an actor instead of a waiter; he was at American Pacific until he no longer needed a job waiting tables.

  Emma had arranged for Jack’s head shots with a photographer she knew; they were ridiculously expensive. Emma carried them around with her. At the studio in West Hollywood, she occasionally met an agent or a casting director. But she was more likely to meet someone important on a date, or in any of several restaurants in West Hollywood and Beverly Hills.

  Some young hotshot at Creative Artists wanted to bang Emma in the worst way. There wasn’t an agent at C.A.A. who would represent a nobody like Jack Burns, but the guy told Emma he would negotiate a contract for Jack—if Jack managed to get an acting job. (Just how Jack might do that without an agent wasn’t made clear.)

  Emma took advantage of the young agent’s lust and brought him one night to American Pacific. His name was Lawrence. “Not Larry,” he told Jack, with an arched eyebrow.

  Not much came of that meeting, but Lawrence made a few calls on Jack’s behalf. These were calls to other agents, not at C.A.A. but on Lawrence’s personal B-list—or more likely his C-list.

  Someone whose name Jack confused with Rottweiler (the dog) told him that his recommendations and college acting experiences were basically worthless. “Ditto the summer stock,” Rottweiler said, “except for Bruno Litkins.” Bruno had a Hollywood connection: casting directors occasionally consulted him on roles related to transvestism. “Or transvestitism,” Rottweiler said. “Whatever the fuck you call it.”

  Jack’s toe in the door, albeit an odd one, was that he had found favor with Bruno Litkins for his creation of the gay transvestite Esmeralda in Bruno’s transformation of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. “Not what I’d call super-marketable,” Rottweiler informed Jack. (Not that Jack was at all sure he wanted to be marketed exclusively for roles related to transvestism or transvestitism.)

  Another of the agents on Lawrence’s B- or C-list sent Jack to an audition for a movie in Van Nuys. The place looked like a private home, but doubled as a film set. When the woman who did hair or makeup told Jack the name of the movie, Muffy the Vampire Hooker 3, Jack thought it was a joke. He didn’t understand the situation until the producer introduced herself and asked to see his penis.

  “Small schlongs need not apply,” she said. Her name was Milly. She was wearing a slate-gray pin-striped pantsuit, very businesswoman-banker chic, which stood in seeming contradiction to her old-fashioned pearl necklace—of a kind worn by ladies who belong to bridge clubs. Her hair was huge—a silver-blond bubble, like a motorcycle helmet sans insignia.

  Jack said there’d been a misunderstanding and started to leave. “You might as well show me your schlong,” Milly said. “It’s a free opportunity to find out if you measure up.” That got the attention of a bodybuilder-type with a ponytail and a busty young woman who looked like a vampire. They were sitting on a couch, watching a movie on a VCR. It was footage of themselves, probably from Muffy the Vampire Hooker 2—a long, unvarying blow job, in the throes of which the eponymous Muffy occasionally bared her vampiric canines. One would hope that when she was moved to bite the bodybuilder and suck his blood, she would do so in his throat. Jack saw that Muffy did not have the bloodsucking canines inserted while she watched the movie on the couch; she was innocently chewing gum.

  The guy with the ponytail paused th
e blow job on the VCR, and the three of them had a look at Jack’s penis. While this was not specifically the film career Jack sought, most men are curious to know how their penises compare; after all, here was a panel of experts.

  “It’s okay, buddy,” the bodybuilder told Jack.

  “Cut the crap, Hank,” Milly said.

  “Yeah, Hank,” Muffy the vampire hooker said.

  Hank went back to the couch and started up the blow job on the VCR again. “His dick looks fine to me,” Hank said.

  “It’s cute,” Muffy told Jack, “but in this business, cute doesn’t quite cut it.”

  “Forget quite,” Milly said. She was in her fifties, maybe sixty—a former porn star, one of the cameramen had told Jack, but the cameraman must have been kidding. Except for the big hair, Milly reminded Jack of Noah Rosen’s mother.

  “It’s cute, and it doesn’t matta how big it is,” Muffy whispered in Jack’s ear. She went back to the couch and plopped down next to Hank.

  “It doesn’t cut it, period. And it does matter how big it is,” Milly said. “It doesn’t matter if it’s cute.”

  “Thank you,” Jack told them, zipping up.

  Hank, the big guy getting the endless blow job from Muffy on the VCR, followed Jack to the car; there was nothing cute about Hank’s schlong, which Jack had noticed was enormous. “Don’t be discouraged,” Hank said. “Just eat healthy. I’d stick to low-fat, low-sodium, low-carb stuff, if I were you.”

  “Hank, are you ready?” Milly was screaming from inside the house.

  “This job isn’t for everyone,” Hank admitted to Jack. “There’s a lotta pressure.” He had a high, nasal voice—a mismatch with his hulking presence.

  “Hank!” Muffy called. She was standing in the open doorway of the house, baring her teeth in a broad-mouthed grin. She had inserted the bloodsucking canines; Muffy was ready for the next shot, whatever it was.

  “Coming!” Hank called back to her. “It might have worked out differently if I’d met Mildred’s sister,” he said, “but I met Milly first.”