by John Irving
She had planned everything, including the reenactment of what she’d told Jack in Old St. Paul’s: that desire to see his face asleep on the pillow beside her face, and to see his eyes open in the morning when she was lying next to him—just watching him, waiting for him to wake up.
Heather told Jack that the Irish boyfriend was no one special; the love of her life, so far, had been one of her professors in Belfast. She’d known he was married, but he told her he was leaving his wife; he left Heather instead.
Jack told his sister about Mrs. Machado—and Mrs. Adkins, and Leah Rosen, and Mrs. Stackpole. (They were the early casualties; they were among the first to mark him and disappoint him in himself.) He told Heather about Emma and Mrs. Oastler, and Claudia and her daughter—and all the rest. Even that crazy woman in Benedict Canyon—the one who was driven mad by the screams and moans of the Manson murder victims whenever the Santa Anas were blowing.
Heather told Jack that she’d lost her virginity to one of William’s music students, someone who was in university when she was still in secondary school. As she put it: “We had comparable keyboard skills at the time, but I’m much better than he is now.”
Jack told Heather that, for the past five years, Dr. García had been the most important woman in his life.
Heather said that she was spending almost as much time improving her German as she was playing the organ—or the piano, or her wooden flute. She’d spoken a child’s German with her mother, and had originally studied German because of her interest in Brahms; now she had an additional reason to learn the language. If she taught in Edinburgh for another two or three years, her teaching credentials would greatly enhance her résumé. By apprenticing herself to John Kitchen at Old St. Paul’s, she was already a better organist. In two or three years’ time, if her German was good enough, she could move to Zurich and get a job there.
“Why Zurich?” Jack asked.
“Well, there’s a university, and a music conservatory, and a disproportionate number of churches for such a small city—in other words, lots of organs. And then I could visit Daddy every day, instead of only once a month or every six weeks.”
“He’s in Zurich?”
“I never said he was in Edinburgh, Jack. I just said you had to see me first.”
Jack propped himself up in bed on his elbows and looked down at his sister’s face on the pillow; she was smiling up at him, her golden hair pushed back from her forehead and tucked behind her small ears. She cupped the back of Jack’s neck and pulled his face closer to hers. He’d forgotten that she couldn’t be more than a few inches away from his face—not if she wanted to see him clearly without her glasses.
“So we’re going to Zurich?” he asked her.
“You’re going alone, this trip,” Heather told him. “You should see him alone, the first time.”
“How can you afford to go to Zurich once a month, or every six weeks?” he asked her. “You should let me pay for that.”
“The sanatorium costs three hundred and fifty thousand Swiss francs a year—that’s two hundred and twelve thousand U.S. dollars—to keep him in the private section of the clinic. If you pay for that, I can pay for my own travel.” She pulled his head down to the pillow beside her. “If you want to buy me a flat, why don’t you buy something big enough for both of us—in Zurich,” she suggested. “I was born in Edinburgh. I don’t need your help here.”
“I’ll buy a whole house in Zurich!” Jack said.
“You want everything to happen too fast,” she reminded him.
He didn’t know when or if she slept. When Jack woke up, Heather was staring at him—her large brown eyes close to Jack’s, her small nose almost touching his face. “You have four gray hairs,” she told him.
“Let me see if you have any,” he said, but Heather’s hair was golden to its roots. “No, not yet, you don’t.”
“It’s because I’m pretty happy, all things considered,” she said. “Look at me. I just slept with a movie star, and it was no big deal—‘no biggie,’ as Billy Rainbow would say.”
“It was a big deal to me,” Jack told her.
Heather gave him a hug. “Well, actually, it was a big deal to me, too—a very big deal.”
While Jack was in the shower, Heather took his plane tickets down to the concierge’s desk in the lobby; she booked his flight to Zurich, with a connection out of Amsterdam, and his return trip to L.A. from Zurich.
She also arranged for his first meeting, later that afternoon, with a team of doctors at the Sanatorium Kilchberg; there were five doctors and one professor, in all. Heather gave Jack a brochure of the buildings and grounds of the clinic, which overlooked Lake Zurich. Kilchberg was on the western shore of the lake—in Zurich, they called it the left shore—about fifteen minutes by car from the center of the city.
So Jack was leaving for Switzerland as soon as they finished their breakfast; Heather had reserved a room for him at the Hotel zum Storchen in Zurich.
“You might like the Baur au Lac better,” she told him, “but the Storchen is nice, and it’s on the river.”
“I’m sure it will be fine,” he said.
“The doctors are excellent—I think you’ll like them,” Heather said. She had stopped looking at him. They were in the breakfast café at the Balmoral—a few tired tourists, families with small children. Jack could tell that Heather was nervous again, as they both had been when they’d first met. Jack tried to hold her hand, but she wouldn’t let him.
“People will think we’re sleeping together—I mean really sleeping together,” she told him. “Being with you in public takes a little getting used to, you know.”
“You’ll get used to it,” he said.
“Just don’t let anything happen to you—don’t do anything stupid,” Heather blurted out.
“Can you read lips?” Jack asked her.
“Jack, please don’t do anything stupid,” Heather said. She looked cross, in no mood to play games.
Jack moved his lips without making a sound, forming the words as slowly and clearly as he could. “I have a sister, and I love her,” he told her, without actually saying it out loud.
“You want everything to happen too fast,” Heather said again, but Jack could tell that she’d understood him. “We should go to the airport now,” she announced, looking at her watch.
In the taxi, she seemed distracted—lost in thought. She was once again not looking at him when she said: “When you’ve seen him, I mean after you’ve spent a little time together, please call me.”
“Of course,” Jack said.
“All you have to say is, ‘I love him.’ You don’t have to say anything more, but don’t you dare say anything less,” his sister said. Her fingers were playing Boellmann’s Toccata, or something equally strident, on her tensed thighs.
“You can relax about me, Heather,” he told her.
“Can you read lips?” she asked, still not looking at him.
“All actors can read lips,” Jack said. But Heather just stared out the window, not saying anything—her lips as tightly closed as when she’d given him his first kiss as a brother.
It was still early in the morning when they got to the airport. Jack hadn’t expected Heather to come to the airport with him, much less accompany him inside; now she led him to the check-in counter. Obviously, it was a trip she was familiar with.
“I hope you like Switzerland,” Heather said, scuffing her feet.
She was wearing blue jeans and a darker-colored T-shirt than she’d worn the day before; with the backpack and her cropped hair, she looked more like a university student than a junior lecturer. If you didn’t notice her constantly moving fingers, you could discern nothing musical about her. She was simply a small, pretty girl—made more serious-looking by her glasses and the determined way in which she walked.
Near the metal-detection equipment, where a security guard had a look at Jack’s passport and examined his carry-on bag, there was a Plexiglas barrier that ke
pt Heather from accompanying her brother to his gate. Jack wanted to kiss her, but she kept her face turned away from him.
“I’m not saying good-bye to you, Jack. Don’t you dare say good-bye to me,” she said, still scuffing her feet.
“Okay,” he said.
With the Plexiglas barrier between them, Jack could still see her as he started walking toward his gate. He kept turning to look at her; Jack stopped walking away from her when he saw she was finally looking at him. Heather was pointing to her heart, and her lips were moving—slowly, without uttering a word.
“I have a brother, and I love him,” Jack’s sister was saying, although he couldn’t hear a syllable.
“I have a sister, and I love her,” he said back to her, not making a sound.
Other people were getting between them. Jack had momentarily lost sight of Heather when two young women stepped up close to him, and the black girl with the diamond nose-stud said, “You aren’t Jack Burns, are you? You simply can’t be, right?”
“I’ll bet you anything he isn’t,” her companion said. She was a white girl with sunburned shoulders in a tank top; her nose was peeling a little.
They were Americans, college kids on their way home from a summer trip to Europe—or so Jack guessed. When he looked for his sister, she was gone.
“Yes, I’m Jack Burns,” he said to the girls. (Jack couldn’t have explained it, but he felt that—for the first time in his life—he really was Jack Burns!) “You’re right—it’s me. I actually am Jack Burns.”
For some reason, he was delighted that they’d recognized him. But the young women’s expressions radiated disbelief; they were as suddenly indifferent to Jack as they had at first seemed curious about him.
“Good try,” the white girl told him sarcastically. “You’re not going to fool anyone into thinking you’re Jack Burns—not that way.”
“Not what way?” he asked her.
“Not by being so normal,” the young white woman said.
“Not by looking like you’re happy or something,” the young black woman said.
“But I am Jack Burns,” he told them unconvincingly.
“Let me tell you—you’re awful at this,” the white girl said. “And you’re too old to get away with it.”
“Since when was Jack Burns so sincere or something?” the black girl asked him.
“Let me hear you do noir,” the white girl said.
“Let me hear you say one thing Jack Burns ever said,” the black girl challenged him.
Where was Heather when he needed her? Jack was thinking. Where was his dad, who allegedly had Jack Burns down pat?
The girls were walking away. Jack untucked his T-shirt and held the bottom hem up to his chest, as if he were holding up a dress on a hanger. “Boy, I’ll bet this looks great on you,” he said, in no way resembling the thief whom Jessica Lee caught messing around in her closet.
“Give it up!” the young white woman called to him.
“You know what?” the black girl asked Jack, her diamond nose-stud winking in the bright airport light. “If the real Jack Burns ever saw you, he wouldn’t look twice!”
“It’s a good job to lose!” Jack called after them, but they kept walking. He was so bad as Melody, even Wild Bill Vanvleck would have made him repeat the line.
The point was—he wasn’t acting. It was as if he’d forgotten how! Jack still knew his lines, but he was out of character. He had a sister, and he loved her; she’d said she loved him, too. Jack had stopped acting. He was just Jack Burns—the real Jack Burns at last.
38
Zurich
When that last unmarked area of skin has been tattooed and their bodies become a completed notebook, full-body types don’t all react the same way.
Alice had maintained that some full-bodies simply started tattooing over their old tattoos. But if you keep doing that, the skin eventually turns as dark as night—the designs become indiscernible. Jack once saw a client of his mother’s whose arms, from his wrists to his armpits, were an unvarying black; it was as if he’d been burned. In less radical instances, twice-tattooed skin appears to be covered with curved, abstract figures—the body wrapped in a skin-tight paisley shawl.
But for other full-bodies, the completed notebook amounts to a sacred text; it is unthinkable to tattoo over a single tattoo, or even part of one. Most of William’s tattoos had been done by accomplished tattoo artists, but even his bad or clumsy tattoos were of music that mattered to him. Both the music and the words had marked more than his skin for life.
Heather had told Jack that their father had no gaps of bare skin between his tattoos. The toccatas and hymns, the preludes and fugues, overlapped one another like loose pages of music on a cluttered desk; every inch of the desk itself was covered.
On William’s back, Heather said, where he would have had to make a considerable effort to see it, was a sailing ship—a distant view of the stern. The ship was pulling away from shore, parting the waves of music that all but engulfed it. The full sails were also marked with music, but the ship was so far from shore that the notes were unreadable. It was their father’s Herbert Hoffmann, but Heather said it was “almost lost on a vast horizon of music”—a Sailor’s Grave or a Last Port tattoo, but smaller than Jack had imagined and completely surrounded by sound.
The piece from his dad’s favorite Easter hymn, “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today,” was partially covered by Walther’s “Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme”—the top two staffs beginning where the alleluia chorus to “Christ the Lord” should have been. Elsewhere, Bach’s mystical adoration for Christmas (“Jesu, meine Freude”) was overlapped by Balbastre’s “Joseph est bien marié”; the word Largo, above the top staff of the Bach, was half hidden.
Both the familiar words and music in the soprano aria (“For Unto Us a Child Is Born”) from Handel’s Messiah ran into Widor’s Toccata—from the Fifth Symphony, Op. 42—with even the Op. 42 being part of the tattoo, which included the composer’s full name. It surprised Jack to hear that the composers’ names were always tattooed in full—not Bach and Widor, but Johann Sebastian Bach and Charles-Marie Widor—and the names were tattooed not in cursive but in an italic font, which (over time, and subject to fading) was increasingly hard to read.
Time and fading had taken their toll on some of William’s other tattoos as well—among them John Stanley’s Trumpet Voluntary, his Trumpet Tune in D, which marked Jack’s father’s chest in the area of his right lung, where the bottom or pedal staff (indicating the notes you played with your feet) had faded almost entirely from view, as had the word Vivo above the first staff of Alain’s “Litanies,” but not the quotation from Alain on William’s buttocks. The French was tattooed in cursive on the left cheek of his bum, the English translation on the right; they would fade from Jack’s father’s skin more slowly than youth itself.
Reason has reached its limit. Only belief keeps rising.
Reason had reached its limit in William Burns, too. Evidently that was what Jack’s sister had been saying. Every inch of their dad’s body was a statement; each of his tattoos existed for a reason. But now there was no room left, except for belief.
“You’ll know what I mean when you see him naked, and you will,” Heather had told Jack.
“I will?”
His sister wouldn’t elaborate. To say that Jack was apprehensive when his plane landed in Zurich would be an understatement.
The Swiss, Heather had forewarned him, made a point of remembering your name; they expected you to remember theirs. As an actor, Jack had confidence in his memorization skills—but his abilities, not only as an actor, were severely tested by the task at hand. The cast of characters he would be meeting at the Sanatorium Kilchberg had daunting names, and their specific roles (like his father’s tattoos) were interconnected—at times overlapping.
With Heather’s help, Jack had studied these five doctors and one professor; he’d tried to imagine them, as best he could, before their first meeting.
But he was not acting in this performance—they were. They were in charge of his dad; it was Jack’s job to learn from them.
The head of the clinic, Professor Lionel Ritter, was German. His English was good, Heather had told Jack, and the professor took such pains to be diplomatic that one forgave him for being a bit repetitious. He was always neatly but casually dressed—a trim, fit-looking man who took pride in the Sanatorium Kilchberg’s 136-year history as a private psychiatric clinic. (Jack had envisioned Professor Ritter as looking a little like David Niven dressed for tennis.)
The deputy medical director, Dr. Klaus Horvath, was Austrian. Heather had described him as a handsome, hearty-looking man—an athlete, most notably a skier. William enjoyed talking about skiing with Dr. Horvath, who had great faith in the psychological benefits of the Sanatorium Kilchberg’s jogging program—in which William Burns, at sixty-four, was an enthusiastic participant. Jack had some difficulty seeing his dad as a fully tattooed jogger, and he could imagine Dr. Horvath only with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s accent—possibly in combination with Arnold’s cheerful, optimistic disposition, which was best on display in that comedy where the former bodybuilder is supposed to be Danny DeVito’s twin.
The second German, Dr. Manfred Berger, was a neurologist and psychiatrist; he was head of gerontopsychiatry at the clinic. According to Jack’s sister, their dad was a youthful-looking sixty-four-year-old—not yet a candidate for Dr. Berger’s principal area of expertise. Dr. Berger, in Heather’s view, was “a fact man”—little was given to speculation.
Upon his arrival in Kilchberg, William Burns had exhibited the kind of mood swings common to a bipolar disorder. (Euphoric moments, which crashed in anger; he would be high for a whole week, with no apparent need of sleep, but this would end in a stuporous depression.) As it turned out, William was not bipolar. But before this diagnosis could be made, Dr. Berger had insisted on a neurological examination.
Dr. Berger, Heather had informed Jack, was a man who liked to rule things out. Did William have a brain tumor? Dr. Berger doubted that William did, but what was most dire simply had to be ruled out. Something called temporal lobe epilepsy could also present itself with mood swings not unlike William’s—in particular, his flights of euphoria and his clamorous episodes of anger. But William Burns was not afflicted with temporal lobe epilepsy, nor was he bipolar.