Until I Find You (111 page)

“How much do you want?” Jack asked Claudia’s daughter.

“It would
kill
my mom to know that I slept with you,” she said.

“How much, Sally?”

She grabbed his wrist and looked at his watch. “Shit! You have to drop me off at The Georgian, or near it. I supposedly went to a movie screening, where I had an opportunity to meet you. Damn curfew!”

“Your mom and dad
knew
you were meeting me?” he asked her.

“Yes, but not to have
sex
!” Sally cried, laughing. “They’re really terrific parents—I
told
you.”

She gave him a brochure of The Nuts & Bolts Playhouse—there were pictures of Claudia and her husband, and the other daughters. The check was to be made payable to The Nuts & Bolts Foundation; it being a nonprofit meant that Jack’s “donation” was tax-deductible, Sally told him.

For years, the children had asked their mother why she didn’t ask Jack Burns for money for their theater enterprise. Jack was a movie star and Claudia knew him; surely he would give
something.

“Why didn’t
you
just ask me for a donation?” he asked Sally.

“Would you have given me this much?” Sally asked. (He’d written out a check to The Nuts & Bolts Foundation for $100,000. Compared to what the California Penal Code could cost him, it was a bargain.)

Jack drove the girl and Claudia’s old suitcase back to Ocean Avenue. At least he’d been right about the suitcase; it had been a prop.

Sally’s parents were night people. After they put the younger daughters to bed, Claudia and her husband went downstairs to have a drink in the bar; that’s where they would be waiting for Sally to come back from the “screening.” They’d agreed to let her go out and meet Jack Burns, solely for the purpose of asking Jack to make a donation to their efforts on behalf of Claudia’s first and most enduring love—the theater. (This must have been what Sally meant by learning to be
independent.
) As for Claudia’s old suitcase, Sally had stuffed it full of brochures of The Nuts & Bolts Playhouse—just in case she met
other
rich and famous movie stars at the alleged screening.

Sally and Jack discussed whether it was a good idea or not for him to come into the lobby of The Georgian with her. Meet her dad—say hello to Claudia, for old times’ sake. Sally could announce the extraordinary generosity of Jack’s donation. Gifts of $100,000 were rare; gifts of that size constituted “naming opportunities,” Sally told him. A fellowship for a young student-actor, director, or playwright in Jack Burns’s name; there was a capital campaign for a new six-hundred-seat theater, too. (
Lots
of naming opportunities, apparently.)

“Or you could choose to remain anonymous,” Sally said.

Jack opted to remain anonymous. He told Sally that he thought he
wouldn’t
go meet her dad and renew his acquaintance with her mom in the bar of The Georgian Hotel.

“That’s probably best,” Sally said. “Frankly,
I
could pull it off. I’ve rehearsed this for freakin’
forever.
But I honestly don’t know if you’re a good enough actor to just walk in there and pretend that you
haven’t
fucked my brains out.”

“I’m probably not that good,” he admitted.

“Jack, I think you’re very sweet,” Claudia’s daughter said, kissing his cheek. “Mom and Dad are going to write you—I know they will. A big thank-you letter, at the very least. For the rest of your life, you’ll be on their mailing list; they’ll probably ask you for money every year. I don’t mean another hundred-thou or anything, but they’ll ask you for
something.
I always thought they
should
ask you.”

In the Nuts & Bolts Playhouse brochure, Claudia was wearing a tent-shaped dress and looked bigger than Kathy Bates climbing into that hot tub with Jack Nicholson in whatever that movie was. Her husband was a tall, bearded man who looked as if he were always cast as a betrayed king. The younger daughters were as big-boned and pretty as Sally.

When Jack pulled up to the curb at The Georgian Hotel on Ocean Avenue, Sally kissed him on his forehead. “You seem like a good guy, Jack—just a sad one,” she said.

“Please give your mother my fondest regards,” he told the fifteen-year-old.

“Thanks for the money, Jack. It means a lot—I’m not kidding.”

“How does this constitute
haunting
me?” he asked her. “I mean, it was a sting. A pretty good one—I’ll give you that, Sally. But how have you
haunted
me, exactly?”

“Oh, you’ll see,” Sally said. “This
will
haunt you, Jack—and I don’t mean the money.”

He went back to Entrada Drive—the scene of the crime, so to speak. It
was
a crime, not only according to the California Penal Code; it felt very much like a crime to Jack Burns. He’d had sex with a fifteen-year-old girl, and it had cost him only $100,000.

Jack stayed up late reading every word of the brochure Sally had left with him; he looked at all the pictures, over and over again. The Nuts & Bolts Playhouse was dedicated to that noble idea of theater as a public service. A neighbor who was an electrician had installed the new stage lights for free; a couple of local carpenters had built the sets for three Shakespearean productions, also at no charge. In a small southern Vermont town, virtually everyone had contributed something to the community playhouse.

The area schoolchildren performed their school plays in the theater; a women’s book club staged dramatizations of scenes from their favorite novels. A New York City opera company rehearsed there for the month of January, before going on tour; some local children with good voices were taught to sing by professional opera singers. Poets gave readings; there were concerts, too. The summer-stock productions, while pandering to tourists’ fondness for popular entertainment, included at least two “serious” plays every summer. Jack recognized a few of the guest performers in the summer casts—actors and actresses from New York.

There were two pictures of Claudia; in both she looked radiant and joyful, and fat. Her daughters were most photogenic—self-confident girls who’d been taught to perform. Certainly Claudia could be proud of Sally for possessing both poise and determination beyond her years. Did Claudia and her husband know that Sally was a model of self-assurance and independent thinking? Probably. Did her parents also know that Sally was as sexually active (on her family’s behalf) as she was? Probably not.

Claudia had made the theater her family’s business—perhaps more successfully than she knew. But no matter how hard Jack tried to understand the financing, he couldn’t grasp how a so-called nonprofit foundation worked. (His math let him down again.) All Jack knew was that he would be writing out checks to The Nuts & Bolts Foundation for the rest of his life;
regular
donations of $100,000, or more, seemed a small price to pay for what he had done.

He wanted to call Dr. García, but it was by now two or three in the morning and he knew what she would say. “Tell me
in chronological order,
Jack. I’m not a priest. I don’t hear confessions.” What she meant was that she didn’t give absolution, not that there was any forgiveness for his having had sex with Claudia’s daughter—not even if Jack could have convinced himself that Sally really
was
Claudia’s ghost.

Jack was turning out the lights in the kitchen, before he finally went to bed, when he saw the rudimentary grocery list he had fastened to the refrigerator with one of his mom’s Japanese-tattoo magnets.

COFFEE BEANS

MILK

CRANBERRY JUICE

It didn’t add up to much of a life. He was already beginning to see how Claudia had kept her promise to haunt him.

Jack discovered that when you’re ashamed, your life becomes a
what-if
world. Claudia’s daughter Sally was fifteen; it wasn’t hard to imagine a girl of that age having some sort of falling-out with her mom. Teenage girls didn’t need legitimate provocation to hate their mothers. What if, for some stupid reason, Sally wanted to
hurt
her mom? What if Sally
told
Claudia that she’d slept with Jack?

Or what if, later in her life, Sally came to the illogical conclusion that Jack had taken advantage of her? What if—for a host of reasons, possibly having nothing to do with what had inspired Sally to seduce Jack in the first place—the wayward girl simply decided that he deserved to pay for his crime, or that Jack Burns should at least be publicly exposed?

“Well, Jack, I’m sure your shame is even greater than your fear of the California Penal Code,” Dr. García would later tell him. “But in our past, don’t many of us have someone who could destroy us with a letter or a phone call?”

“
You
don’t have someone like that, do you, Dr. García?”

“I’m not the patient, Jack. I don’t have to answer that kind of question. Let’s just say, we all have to learn to live with
something.
”

It was August 2003. Jack’s house on Entrada Drive was still for sale, but he felt that Claudia’s ghost had moved in to stay; it was as if she were living with him. Wherever else he might go, before or after that wretched house was sold, Jack had no doubt that Claudia’s ghost would come with him.

Krung, the Thai kickboxer from that long-ago gym on Bathurst Street, had told him once: “Gym rats always gotta find a new ship, Jackie.” Well, Jack was a gym rat who would soon have to find a new ship, but now he was a gym rat with a ghost.

Jack found that you don’t sleep well when you’re living with a ghost. He had meaningless but disturbing dreams, from which he would awaken with the conviction that his hand was touching Emma’s tattoo. (That perfect vagina, the
not-
a-Rose-of-Jericho, which his mom had tattooed on Emma’s right hip—just below the panty line.)

Jack took his real estate agent’s advice and moved out; this allowed her to empty the house of all the old and ugly furniture, most of which Emma had acquired for their first apartment in Venice, as well as the rugs and Jack’s gym equipment; the floors were sanded and the walls were painted white. The house became a clean and spare-looking dump, at least—and Jack moved into a modest set of rooms at the Oceana in Santa Monica.

It was a third-floor suite with four rooms, including a kitchen, overlooking the courtyard and the swimming pool. He could have chosen a view of Ocean Avenue, but the Oceana was a moderately priced residential hotel that appealed to families; Jack liked the sound of the children playing in the pool. Some of the families were Asian or European; Jack liked listening to the foreign languages, too. He accepted the transience of staying there, because Jack Burns was transient—impermanent, almost ceasing to exist.

He kept next to nothing from Entrada Drive. He gave three quarters of his clothes to Goodwill and his Oscar to his lawyer for safekeeping.

Jack kept his most recent Audi, of course. The gym at the Oceana was a joke, but there were two gyms in Venice that he liked—and, from the Oceana, Jack was even closer to Dr. García’s office on Montana Avenue than he’d been on Entrada Drive.

Jack registered at the Oceana as Harry Mocco; as usual, the few important people in his life knew where to find him. Somehow it seemed fitting (to a man in limbo) that Jack would hear from Leslie Oastler shortly after his move. Mrs. Oastler called because she hadn’t heard from him in a while—which was all right with her, she added quickly. And just fine with Dolores, no doubt.

Dolores had made such a fuss about the ongoing presence of Jack’s clothes that Mrs. Oastler had donated them to St. Hilda’s, where Mr. Ramsey had happily accepted the clothes as costumes for the school’s dramatic productions. Mr. Ramsey
and
Miss Wurtz had called to thank Leslie for the unusual gift. (“We never have enough men’s clothes for the dramatizations,” Caroline had explained.)

Jack’s
former
bedroom, Mrs. Oastler told him, had been converted to a studio for Dolores. (Leslie’s blonde must have been a poet or a painter—some kind of artist, surely—but Jack didn’t ask.) As for Emma’s old bedroom, it was now the
official
guest room. The wallpaper was different—“more feminine,” Leslie said. The furniture and curtains were “more feminine,” too. All this was Dolores’s doing, Jack guessed, but again he didn’t ask.

“When you’re back in town, you’ll probably prefer to stay in a hotel,” Mrs. Oastler said.

“Probably,” Jack replied. He couldn’t tell why she had called.

“Any
new
news from or about your dad, Jack?” Leslie asked.

“No. But I’m not looking for him,” Jack explained.

“I wonder why not,” Leslie said. “He would be a man in his sixties, wouldn’t he? Things happen to men at that age. You might lose him before you find him, if you know what I mean.”

“He might die, you mean?”

“He might be dead already,” Mrs. Oastler said. “You were so curious about him. What happened to your curiosity, Jack?” (This was what Dr. García was always asking him.)

“I’ve been seeing a psychiatrist,” he half explained.

“I’m glad you’re seeing
somebody
!” Leslie exclaimed. “But you used to be able to do more than one thing at a time.”

“What Mrs. Oastler may mean, Jack,” Dr. García would soon tell him, “is that seeing a psychiatrist is not something you necessarily do
in lieu of
having a little natural curiosity.”

But Jack was guilty of an indefensible crime. He’d not only had sex with a fifteen-year-old girl—he had
acquiesced
to it. He carried an awful secret, and—provided Claudia’s daughter let him—Jack would bear its burden to his grave.
Shame
had robbed him of his curiosity. When you’re ashamed, you don’t feel inclined to undertake another adventure—at least not right away.

The thank-you letter from Claudia and her husband (whom Jack would forever imagine as a bearded, betrayed king) came with family photographs—among them one of Sally as a little girl and one of Claudia when she was noticeably thinner. There was also a photo of the husband and father of four when he was clean-shaven; Jack could understand why the king had grown a beard.