(2005) Until I Find You

by John Irving

  Mrs. Oastler sat down at the neat table, her hands trembling a little as she drank her coffee. Jack poured himself a cup and sat down beside her.

  “I had a bet with your mom, Jack. I said you were gonna get gang-banged by that bunch of boarders. Alice thought you were gonna go home with that overenthusiastic woman with the big dog. Nobody bet on the crip.”

  “Where did Mom go, Leslie?”

  “Another MRI,” Mrs. Oastler said. “Imaging, they call it.”

  “Imaging for what?”

  “Come on, Jack. Have you talked to her lately? I don’t get the impression that you’ve talked at all.”

  “I’ve tried,” he told her. “She won’t say anything to me.”

  “You haven’t asked her the right questions, Jack.”

  There was a white envelope on the kitchen table; it stood perfectly straight, propped between the salt and pepper shakers, as innocent-seeming as an invitation to a wedding. If it were something Alice had left for Jack, it would have had his name in big letters on it—it would have had her drawing of a monstrous heart, bursting with motherly love for him, or some other over-the-top illustration of undying affection. But the envelope was unmarked and unsealed.

  “Has my mom been sick, Leslie?”

  “Envelope? What envelope? I don’t see an envelope,” Mrs. Oastler said, looking right at it.

  “What’s in the envelope?” he asked.

  “Nothing you’re supposed to see, Jack. Surely nothing I would ever show you.”

  Jack opened the envelope, which of course was what Leslie wanted him to do, and placed the four photographs face-up on the clean kitchen table—as if they were playing cards in a game of solitaire with formidably different rules.

  The photos were slightly varying views of a young woman’s torso, from her pretty navel to her shoulders. She was naked; her breasts, which were fully formed, didn’t droop. Her breasts and the smoothness of her skin were what indicated her youthfulness to Jack, but he was drawn above all to her tattoo. It was a good one, of what his mom would have called the old school. It was a traditional maritime heart—torn vertically in two, all in tattoo-blue. The tattoo was all outline, no shading. The heart was tattooed on the upper, outer quadrant of the left breast, where it touched both the breast and the heart side of the rib cage. It was exactly where, in Alice’s opinion, a tattoo of a damaged heart could best be hidden—and binding this broken heart together, like a bandage, were the words Until I find you. The words were in cursive on a scroll.

  The tattoo was good enough to be his mother’s work, but Jack knew Daughter Alice’s handwriting by heart; the writing wasn’t hers. More traditional—instead of the Until I find you—was the actual name of the lover who’d left you or deceived you, or otherwise broken your heart.

  Jack could easily imagine he was looking at a Tattoo Ole or a Doc Forest or a Tattoo Peter—or possibly Sailor Jerry’s work, from Halifax, long ago. The photos looked old enough. But Jack should have been thinking about the young woman, not her tattoo.

  “You’re looking at the wrong breast, Jack,” Leslie Oastler said. “I don’t know why Alice bothered to keep that tattoo a secret from you all these years. The tattoo isn’t what’s gonna kill her.”

  That was when Jack realized he was looking at pictures of his mother’s breasts—in which case, the photographs must have been taken about twenty years ago. Contrary to her unique reputation as a tattoo artist, not to mention what she’d told him, his mom had been tattooed—probably when William broke her heart, or shortly thereafter; certainly when Jack had still been a child, or even before he’d been born.

  Alice’s insistence on hiding her tattoo from Jack was something he’d mistaken for modesty, which had never made the greatest sense alongside the opposite impression he had of her. It wasn’t modesty—not wanting Jack to take a bath with her, never allowing him to see her naked. (And this had nothing to do with the alleged scar from her C-section.) It was the tattoo that Alice hadn’t wanted Jack to see—and not only because she was tattooed, which contradicted her claim to originality among tattoo artists. Mainly it was the tattoo itself that she’d needed to conceal. Because the you in Until I find you must have been his missing father—it was William she’d kept a secret, from the start! And to mark herself for life because of him belied the indifference she pretended to—abandoning her search for William and refusing to talk to Jack about him.

  The two-inch scar on the upper, outer quadrant of Alice’s right, untattooed breast was a thin, surgical line with no visible stitch-marks.

  “She had the lumpectomy when she was thirty-one,” Mrs. Oastler informed Jack. “You were twelve—in grade seven, if I remember correctly.”

  “I was at Redding,” he remembered out loud. “It was when Mom said she was going to come see me, but she didn’t.”

  “She had radiation, Jack—and the chemotherapy was repeated every four weeks, for six cycles. The chemo made her sick for a few days every month—you know, vomiting—and of course she lost her hair. She didn’t want you to see her bald, or with a wig. You can’t see the scar in her right armpit in the photographs; it’s hard enough to see if you’re looking right at it. Lymph-node removal—rather standard procedure,” Leslie explained.

  “Did a mammogram detect it, or did she feel the lump?” Jack asked.

  “I felt it,” Mrs. Oastler said. “It was fairly firm, actually hard to the touch.”

  “Has the cancer come back, Leslie?”

  “A recurrence in the other breast is very common,” Mrs. Oastler said, “but it hasn’t come back in her breast. It could have spread to her lungs, or to her liver, but it’s gone to her brain. Not the worst place it could show up—bones are awful.”

  “What do they do for brain cancer?” he asked.

  “It’s not really brain cancer, Jack. The breast cancer has metastasized in her brain—those are breast-cancer cells. When breast cancer goes somewhere else, I guess there’s not much they can do about it.”

  “So Mom has a tumor in her brain?” Jack asked.

  “A ‘space-occupying lesion,’ I think they call it—but, yeah, it’s a tumor to you and me,” Leslie said with a shrug. “Any intervention would be futile, they say. Even chemo would be merely palliative, to relieve symptoms—it isn’t a cure. There ain’t a cure,” she added—the curious ain’t (like Leslie’s use of gonna and oughta) being a grieving mother’s conscious or unconscious effort to evoke her late daughter’s persistent but bestselling abuse of the language.

  Mrs. Oastler picked up the photographs and put them in a kitchen drawer. It was where the manuals to the appliances were kept, but it was full of other junk; it was where Emma and Jack, as kids, had searched for Scotch tape or thumbtacks or paper clips or rubber bands.

  The photos of her breasts had been Alice’s idea; she wanted Leslie to show them to Jack, but not until after she was dead.

  “What are the symptoms, Leslie?”

  “Despite the anti-seizure medication, she may have a few more seizures. She’s had one, anyway—I saw it. I felt the lump, I saw the seizure. There’s not much I miss,” Mrs. Oastler added.

  “Is it like a convulsion, or a stroke?” he asked.

  “I suppose so,” Leslie answered, shrugging again. “I’ve also noticed vague changes in her moods, even in her personality.”

  “Leslie, Mom’s moods change all the time—her personality has always been vague!”

  “She’s different, Jack. You’ll see. Especially if you can get her to talk to you.”

  Jack called a taxi to take him to Queen Street. He thought he’d go wait for his mom to show up at Daughter Alice. Mrs. Oastler put her arms around Jack and hugged him with her head against his chest. “She’s gonna go quickly, Jack. They say it’ll be pretty painless, but she’s gonna go fast.” Jack stood in the kitchen with his arms around Leslie, hugging her back. She wasn’t hitting on him; she just wanted him to hold her. “You oughta talk to Maureen Yap, Jack. She kept calling you all nigh
t, from the Four Seasons.”

  “I don’t think Maureen wants to talk to me,” he told Mrs. Oastler.

  “I said you oughta talk to her, Jack. Maureen Yap is a doctor. She’s a fucking oncologist.”

  “Oh.”

  In the lobby of the Four Seasons, the front-desk clerks were surprised to see Jack Burns checking in. He’d planned to spend a couple of days in New York before flying back to L.A., but when he registered—again, as Jimmy Stronach—Jack told them that he would be staying in Toronto indefinitely, meaning until further notice. He also asked them, feigning indifference, if Maureen Yap had checked out. (In fact, Dr. Yap had just called room service and ordered her breakfast.)

  They gave him back his old room. Because he’d forgotten to take the DO NOT DISTURB sign off the door, and the hotel maids hadn’t been informed that he’d checked out, it was almost as if he’d never left the hotel—and never been to Forest Hill and back—except for the news that his mother was dying.

  It crossed Jack’s mind to call Maureen. “This is room service, Dr. Yap,” he might say. “Would you like to have Jack Burns with your breakfast?”

  Jack could only imagine Maureen saying, “Yes, please,” but he didn’t feel like joking around. When Maureen had told him she was staying at the hotel under her maiden name, she hadn’t been kidding.

  Jack took a quick shower and put on the hotel bathrobe and the stupid white slippers, as if he were on his way to or from the swimming pool. He knew Maureen Yap’s room number; his fans at the front desk had told him, although they weren’t supposed to. After all, he was Jack Burns; if he’d called the front desk and asked them to send him a pepperoni pizza with two hookers, they’d have had the pizza and the prostitutes at his door in about forty-five minutes.

  The movies had taught Jack the power of presenting himself without words, and the little peephole in Maureen Yap’s hotel-room door offered Maureen an unexpected close-up of her favorite actor. Her breakfast had arrived only moments before—now here was Jack Burns in a bathrobe!

  “I blame the delay on Pam Hoover,” Maureen mumbled again as she let Jack in. She was wearing her hotel robe, too—sans the stupid white slippers. (Jack kicked his off at the door.)

  “You came all the way from Vancouver for what?” he asked, untying her robe.

  “To have too much sex with you,” Maureen Yap said, untying his. Never mind that it sounded like “To shave my legs for you”; Jack knew what she meant.

  She was a tiny woman: the cavity of her pelvis couldn’t have been bigger than a thirteen-year-old girl’s. The skin on her breasts had the transparency of a child’s—a faint bluish tone, as if her veins, although unseen, lent their color to her skin. Jack could touch the fingers of his hands together when he encircled her thigh.

  “My femur is smaller than your humerus,” Maureen told him; there’s no describing what that sounded like, but he somehow managed to understand her.

  Maureen’s husband and son called her in her hotel room at 9:45 A.M.—6:45 in Vancouver, where the father was getting the little boy up for school. Maureen covered one of Jack’s ears with her cupped palm—pressing his head, and his other ear, into her flat tummy. He could still hear her endearments to her husband, who was also a doctor, and her young son—not that Jack could follow word-for-word what she told them. Maureen was in tears; Jack could feel the taut muscles in her lower abdomen.

  It was the sadness of Emma’s memorial service, she told her family—it still made her cry to think about it. Jack heard Pam Hoover’s name again—there was mention, he thought, of how Pam seemed “shaken” and was “lately insane.” Only after the phone call would Jack figure out that Maureen Yap had said she was “taking a later plane to Vancouver.”

  It was also after the phone call when Jack reminded Maureen that, from their bed in the Four Seasons, they were very close to the bat-cave exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum, which prompted Maureen to show him her fruit-bat and vampire-bat imitations. Naturally, this led them to enact Emma’s squeezed-child saga—all three endings.

  “There is no way to have too much sex with you,” The Yap told him later, when he was having some difficulty peeing in her bathroom. He heard this, of course, as: “It is no fair I bathe all bare for you,” or something like that.

  “My mother has cancer,” Jack called from the bathroom. (Not too loudly; the door was open.) “She’s dying.”

  “Come back to bed,” Maureen said distinctly. Once they’d moved on to medical matters, he had no trouble understanding her. Dr. Yap spoke very clearly.

  What would happen to his mother’s brain? Jack wanted to know. It must have sounded to Maureen like a child’s question, because she held him in her arms, with his head against her breasts, and talked to him as if he were a child. “It probably won’t be as bad for her as it will be for you, Jack,” she began, “depending on where in her brain the tumor is. You should send me the MRI.”

  “Okay,” Jack said. He noticed he was crying.

  “If it’s in her visual cortex, she’ll go blind. If it’s in the speech cortex—well, you get the picture. If the cancer eats through a blood vessel, she will hemorrhage and die without ever knowing or feeling what has happened to her. Or, as her brain swells, she will simply slip away.”

  “Will she be in a coma?” he asked.

  “She could be, Jack. She could die peacefully in a coma—she could simply stop breathing. But along the way, she might think she was someone else. She might have hallucinations—she might smell strange, nonexistent smells. Truly anything is possible. She will go fairly quickly and painlessly, but she may not know who she is when she goes. The hard part for you, Jack, is that you may not know who she is, either.”

  The hard part for Jack, as he would tell Maureen, was that he’d never known who his mother was. The description of her ultimate death seemed almost familiar.

  “Do you mind if I call you Dr. Yap?” Jack asked Maureen, when they were saying good-bye.

  “Not if you call me incessantly,” she said.

  He wouldn’t, of course; Maureen knew that. When Jack sent her his mom’s MRI, he already had a pretty good idea of where the tumor was—the so-called space-occupying lesion. Alice knew, too. Dr. Yap’s interpretation of the MRI would merely confirm the prognosis. The tumor was in the limbic system—the emotional center of the brain.

  “Well, isn’t that fucking great!” Leslie Oastler would say. “I suppose that Alice will think the whole thing is terribly funny, or she’ll be laughing one minute and crying the next—an emotional yo-yo, either telling grossly inappropriate jokes or drowning in some inexpressible sorrow!”

  Of course, from Jack’s point of view, his mom had always been that way; that a malignant tumor now occupied the emotional center of her brain seemed unremarkable, even normal.

  “If it’s gone this far, Jack,” Maureen Yap had forewarned him, “I’m sure that your mother has already come to terms with dying. Just imagine how much she’s thought about it. She even decided, somewhere along the line, not to tell you. That means to me that she’s thought about it a lot—enough to have the peace of mind to keep it to herself. It’s Mrs. Oastler who can’t come to terms with it. And you—you won’t have time to come to terms with it until she’s gone. It’ll happen that fast, Jack.”

  “She’s only fifty-one!” he’d cried against her thirteen-year-old’s breasts, her child-size body.

  “Cancer likes you when you’re young, Jack,” Maureen had told him. “Even cancer slows down when you’re old.”

  There was no slowing down Alice’s cancer; it would run away with her in a hurry, befitting a disease that had a twenty-year head start. Later that same morning—after he’d said good-bye to Dr. Yap—Jack got himself down to Queen Street and once more entered the tattoo world of Daughter Alice, where he and his mother had a little talk. (A little dance would more accurately describe it.)

  “Do you still take your tea with honey, dear?” his mom asked him, when he walked into the shop. “I
just made a fresh pot.”

  “No honey, Mom. We have to talk.”

  “My, aren’t we serious this morning!” his mother said. “I suppose Leslie spilled the beans in her dramatic fashion. You’d think she was the one who’s dying—she’s so angry about it!”

  Jack didn’t say anything; he just let her talk, knowing she might clam up at any moment. “Of course Leslie has a right to be angry,” Alice went on. “After all, I’m leaving her—and I promised her I never would. She let me go to all those tattoo conventions, where there’s a lot of fooling around. But I always came back.”

  “I guess you’re leaving me, too,” Jack said. “When were you planning to tell me?”

  “The only person I ever wanted to agonize over me was your father, Jack, and he simply refused. He didn’t want me—even knowing that, if he rejected me, I would never let him be with you.”

  Perhaps it was being with Maureen Yap that made Jack wonder if he’d misheard what his mother had said, but he could tell by the way she suddenly gave his cup of tea her complete attention that she might have said a little more than she’d meant to say.

  “He wanted to be with me?” Jack asked her.

  “I’m the one who’s dying, dear. Don’t you think you should ask me about me?”

  He watched her put a heaping teaspoon of honey in his tea; her hands, like Mrs. Oastler’s at the kitchen table, were shaking slightly as she stirred the spoon in the cup.

  Jack knew that he’d not misheard her. She’d clearly said that William didn’t want her—even knowing that, if he rejected her, she would never let him be with Jack. When his mom handed him his cup of tea—looking, for all the world, as if she were still the wronged party—Jack imagined there would be no stopping him this time, no turning him away.

  “If my dad wanted to be with me,” Jack persisted, “why did he flee from us? I mean everywhere we went. In city after city, why had he always left before we arrived?”

  “The cancer is in my brain—I suppose you know,” his mother replied. “I wouldn’t be surprised if my memory is affected, dear.”