"Not even some Canadian beer?" the guy asked Claudia; he smiled at her. She was fantastic-looking, really.
"I don't usually drink beer, and Jack is always watching his weight," Claudia told him.
"So you've got nothing to declare?" the customs agent asked Jack, more sternly.
Jack didn't know what got into him. ("I just felt like fooling around," he would tell Claudia later, but there was more to it than that.)
It was a close-up opportunity--Jack gave the guy his furtive look. He did furtive pretty well; it was a look he'd acquired from observing certain kinds of dogs, especially craven and sneaky dogs. "Well--" Jack started to say, interrupting himself by looking furtively at Claudia. "We don't have to declare the Chinese scepter, do we?" he asked her. Oh, what a look she gave him!
"The what?" the customs agent said.
"A royal mace, or sometimes it's a staff--in this case, a short sword," Jack went on. "It's a ceremonial emblem of authority."
"It's Chinese?" the guy asked. "Is it very old?"
"Yes, very--it's Buddhist, actually," Jack told him.
"I better have a look at it," the customs agent said.
"It's a tattoo," Claudia told him. "I don't have to declare a tattoo, do I?"
Why had Jack done this to her? He loved Claudia--well, he liked her, anyway. Jack had not seen Claudia look so disappointed in him since she discovered the photographs of Emma naked; these were the old photos Emma sent to him when he was regularly beating off at Redding. They were photos of Emma at seventeen. Charlotte Barford had taken them. Claudia made Jack throw them away, but he kept one.
"Let me be sure it's just a tattoo," the customs guy said to Claudia. "I've never seen a Chinese scepter."
"Do you have a female colleague?" Claudia asked the guy. "She can see it."
"It's in a rather intimate location," Jack pointed out.
"Just a minute," the customs agent said. He left them sitting in the car and went off to find a female colleague; there was a building with what looked like offices, where the agent momentarily disappeared.
"You are so immature, Jack," Claudia said. He remembered that evening in the Oast
ler mansion when his mom had made a similar point.
"Penis, penis, penis--" Jack started to say, but he stopped. The customs guy was returning with a stout black woman. Claudia got out of the car and went into the office building with the female customs agent while Jack waited in the car.
"What did you do that for?" the customs guy asked him.
"We haven't been getting along lately," Jack admitted.
"Well, this'll really help," the guy said.
When Claudia came back to the car, she gave Jack her violated look and they drove on. For those first few miles, when they were back in the United States, Jack felt exhilarated without knowing why.
Canada was Jack's homeland, his country of origin, yet he was elated to be back in America, where he felt more at home. Why was that? he wondered. Wasn't he Canadian? Was it Jack's rejection of his mother and her tattoo world that made him turn his back on his native land?
Claudia wouldn't speak to him for about three hundred miles. She had once again hiked Emma's skirt to her waist, exposing the tattoo of the Chinese scepter on her right inner thigh, where Jack could see it with a downcast, sideways glance at her lap. It was one of very few tattoos he ever saw that he was tempted to get himself, but not on his inner thigh. He was thinking about where on his body he might one day get a tattoo of that very same Chinese scepter, when Claudia, finally, spoke.
By that time, they were in Vermont--about a hundred miles from where they were going, in New Hampshire. When Claudia saw Jack glance at her crotch--at her brand-new Chinese scepter, specifically--she said: "I got the damn tattoo for you, you know."
"I know," Jack said. "I like it. I really do." Claudia knew that he liked the tattoo and the special place she put it. "I'm sorry about what I did at the border," Jack told her. "I really am."
"I'm over it, Jack. It took a while, but I'm over it. I'm sorrier about other things," she said.
"Oh."
"Is that all you can say?"