Until I Find You

"Give me the fucking letter, Leslie!"

"I guess it wasn't a funny inside joke--Emma using Michele Maher's name," Mrs. Oastler said. She made him reach and take the letter from her hand.

The stationery was off-white, almost cream-colored--high quality. The sky-blue letterhead was printed in a large, clear font--Letter Gothic. Nothing personal about it, as Leslie had observed. "With my best wishes" didn't exactly convey a lot of warmth or affection.

"Now that I think of it, it's more of a note than a letter," Mrs. Oastler was saying, while Jack searched Michele's scrawled, almost illegible signature for some clue of her true feelings for him. "Personally, I don't like to touch anything a dermatologist has touched," Leslie went on. "But her letter's been around here so long--you don't suppose it could still be contaminated, do you?"

"No, I don't suppose so," Jack said.

That letter was coming to the North Sea with him; Jack would read it every day. He believed he would keep that distant, uncommitted, even loveless letter forever--knowing that it might be the only contact he would ever have with Michele Maher.

Jack couldn't get a direct flight to Copenhagen. He had an early-morning KLM connection out of Amsterdam, following an early-evening departure from Toronto. When it was time for him to go to the airport, Mrs. Oastler was taking a bath. Jack thought he might leave her a note on the kitchen table, but Leslie had other ideas.

"Don't you dare slip away without kissing me good-bye, Jack!" he heard her call from her bath. She always left the door to her bathroom open--usually the door to her bedroom, too.

They'd been alone together in the house for more than a week, after the bikers had left. But there'd been no nighttime visits, not a single trip down the hall. Not only had there been no penis-holding; there'd been no nakedness or near-nakedness in each other's company, either. Maybe Alice had wanted Leslie and Jack to sleep together a little too much. Despite the spell of attraction that existed between them, Jack believed that he and Mrs. Oastler were still resisting his mother; perhaps, he thought, the Skretkowicz sisters had broken the spell.

Anyway, a good-bye kiss was clearly in order. Jack dutifully traipsed upstairs. He tried not to notice the black bikini-cut underwear tossed on Mrs. Oastler's unmade bed. In the bathtub, Leslie's watchful, feral face was all that was visible above the suds of bubble bath. Under the circumstances, Jack imagined, this might turn out to be a fairly innocent good-bye kiss.

"You're not getting away from me, Jack," Mrs. Oastler said. "Emma and Alice have left me. You're not going to leave me, too, are you?"

"No, I won't leave you," he answered as neutrally as possible. She puckered up her small mouth and closed her dark eyes.

r /> Jack knelt beside the bathtub and kissed her very lightly on the lips. Her eyes snapped open, her tongue slipping into his mouth. Leslie grabbed his wrist with her soapy hand and pulled his hand into the bathwater, soaking the sleeve of his shirt. If Jack had to guess where his fingers touched her underwater, he would say he made contact with Mrs. Oastler's Rose of Jericho before he could pull his hand away.

The kiss lingered a little longer. After all they'd been through, Jack didn't want to hurt her feelings. He tried not to let Leslie sense his impatience with her, but he was irritated that he would have to change his shirt.

Mrs. Oastler had never had the greatest esteem for Jack as an actor; probably because she'd known him as a child, she could always read his face. "Come on, Jack. I may not be Michele Maher, but it wasn't that bad a kiss, was it?"

"I have to change my shirt," Jack said, hoping she wouldn't notice his erection. Keeping his back turned to her, as he went out the open bathroom door, he added: "No, it wasn't bad at all."

"Just remember!" Leslie called after him. "It was what your mom wanted!"

Jack Burns carried that thought to Copenhagen; it felt heavier than his suitcase of winter clothes. He checked into the Hotel D'Angleterre--this time not the chambermaids' quarters but a room overlooking the statue in the square. Both the statue and the arch that stood over it were smaller than he remembered them, but Nyhavn was familiar--the boats slapping on the choppy water of the gray canal, the wind blowing off the Baltic. As for what he'd told his Skretkowicz sister, Jack had guessed right: it was raining.

When he unpacked, he found the photos of his mother's tattooed breast. Mrs. Oastler had carefully placed them on top of his clothes; she'd kept two for herself and had given him two, which seemed fair. Jack was happy to have them--not only for the purpose of verification. His mom had lied to him about so many things; maybe her Until I find you wasn't a Tattoo Ole, although Jack was pretty sure it was.

The tattoo parlor at Nyhavn 17 was still called Tattoo Ole. Some of the flash on the walls was Ole's, and the little shop still smelled of smoke and apples, alcohol and witch hazel; some of the pigments had special odors, too, although Jack couldn't identify them.

Bimbo was the man in charge; he'd come in 1975 and had trained with Tattoo Ole. Bimbo was short and powerfully built; he wore a navy watch cap. His flash was a lot like Ole's. A maritime man--an old-timer, Sailor Jerry would have said. Like Ole, Bimbo would never have called himself a tattoo artist. He was a tattooist or a tattooer of the old school, a man after Daughter Alice's heart.

Bimbo was working on a broken heart when Jack walked in. Nothing really changes, Jack was thinking. Bimbo didn't look up from his tattoo-in-progress. "Jack Burns," he said, as if he'd been expecting him; it wasn't the enthusiastic way Mr. Ramsey said Jack's name, but it wasn't unfriendly, either. "When I heard your mom died, I kind of figured you'd be coming," Bimbo said.

The boy getting the broken heart looked frightened. On his reddened chest, you could see his actual heart beating. The zigzag crack across his tattooed heart was horizontal; the wounded organ lay on a single rose, a real beauty. It was a very good tattoo. There was a banner unfurled across the bottom half of the heart--just a banner with no name on it. If the boy was smart, he would wait and add the name when he met someone who could heal him.

"Why did you think I'd be coming?" Jack asked Bimbo.

"Ole always said you'd be coming, with lots of questions," Bimbo explained. "Ole said you were pumped full of more misinformation than most magazines and newspapers, and that's saying something." Jack was beginning to guess that this was true. "Ole said, 'If that kid turns out to be crazy, I won't be surprised!' But you look like you turned out okay."

"I guess you didn't know my mother," Jack said.

"I never met the lady--that's true," Bimbo answered, choosing his words very carefully.

"Or my dad?" Jack asked.

"Everybody loved your dad, but I never met him, either."

That everybody loved his father came as something of a surprise to Jack. "I don't mean that nobody loved your mom," Bimbo added. "She just did some things that were hard to love."