Until I Find You (77 page)

At first, it gave Jack pause that he was alone with Mrs. Oastler for the duration of the workday. He had some anxiety that she would throw herself at him in a state of undress. After all, his mother had not only given Jack permission to sleep with Leslie—she also repeatedly
encouraged
Leslie to sleep with Jack. (When Mrs. Oastler was doing the dishes after dinner, for example—when Jack was listening to music in the living room, while his mom was stretched out on the couch.)

“Leslie, why don’t you sleep with Jack tonight?” Alice would call out to the kitchen.

“Mom, for Christ’s sake—”

“No, thank you, Alice!” Mrs. Oastler would call into the living room.

“You should try it—you might like it,” Alice told them over supper one night. “You don’t snore, do you, Jack? He won’t keep you awake, Leslie—well, not like I do, anyway. He won’t keep you awake
all night,
I mean.”

“Please stop, Alice,” Leslie said.

“How much longer do you
realistically
expect me to sleep with you?” Alice snapped at Mrs. Oastler. “You won’t sleep with me when I’m in a
coma,
I hope!”

“Mom, Leslie and I don’t
want
to sleep together,” Jack said.

“Yes, you do, dear,” his mother said. “Don’t you want to sleep with Jack, Leslie? Well, of
course
you do!” she said cheerfully, before Mrs. Oastler could respond one way or another.

Jack could only imagine what a dysfunctional stew Emma would have made of their threesome—a relationship as challenging as that of a too-small slush-pile reader and a too-big porn-star screenwriter! Jack was indeed living, as he had hoped, in the
perfect
atmosphere in which to finish his (or Emma’s) screenplay.

The script itself was becoming an intense marriage of plagiarism and rightful ownership; a partnership of wily commerce with those near-blinding shafts of light in which familiar but nonetheless amazing dust motes float. (“These ordinary but well-illuminated things are what we remember best about a good film,” Emma had said.)

Perhaps because Jack was devoted to the task of making Emma’s best book into a movie, but also because he and Mrs. Oastler were both victims of his mother’s escalating abuse, Jack lost his fear of Leslie throwing herself at him in a state of undress. For the most part, she left him alone.

When he would venture downstairs into the kitchen, either to make himself a cup of tea or to eat an apple or a banana, Mrs. Oastler would often be sitting at the kitchen table—as if Alice had only recently left the house or was, at any minute, expected to return. Then, in the briefest possible conversation, Mrs. Oastler would convey to Jack some new detail or missing information she remembered about his father.

Mrs. Oastler struck Jack as exhausted most of the time. Her memory of what Alice had concealed from Jack about his dad returned to her unexpectedly and at unplanned moments, which made Jack extremely jumpy in her company—largely because he never knew what secret she might suddenly divulge. Sadly, this had the effect on Leslie of making her appear as if she
had
slept with Jack, which Alice never failed to notice.

“You slept with him, Leslie, didn’t you?” his mom would regularly ask, upon coming home from Daughter Alice.

“No, I did not,” Mrs. Oastler would say, still sitting—as if she had taken root—at the kitchen table.

“Well, you look as if you did,” Alice would tell her. “You look as if
someone’s
been banging your brains out, Leslie.”

It was too easy to say that this was the tumor talking—too convenient to call Alice’s outrageous behavior the cancer’s fault. But even her language was changing. Not her diction or enunciation, which were the unstumbling examples of Miss Wurtz’s determined eradication of Alice’s Scottish accent, but Alice was increasingly vulgar-tongued—as Emma had
always
been, as Leslie
could
be, as Alice unwaveringly criticized
Jack
for being. (“Since California,” as his mother put it.)

But Jack’s work went on. He even showed a draft of the screenplay to Mrs. Oastler; she’d said she was dying to read it. To Jack’s surprise, Leslie was much moved by the script; she found it extremely faithful to the novel. She even took the time to compose a list of the things that were different from what they’d been in the book. These weren’t offered as criticisms—Mrs. Oastler merely wanted Jack to appreciate that she’d noticed. Among the many differences, of course, were those things Emma herself had changed—or else she’d suggested that Jack change them. And some of the changes were entirely his.

“But you
like
it?” he asked Leslie.

“I
love
it, Jack,” she said, with tears in her eyes.

Jack Burns was a first-time writer; he’d never encountered
literary
approval. Something in his relationship with Mrs. Oastler changed because of it. They were united by more than his mother’s dying; they were joined by Emma’s giving him the opportunity to make a movie of
The Slush-Pile Reader,
and by his bringing Leslie into the process.

They were brought together, too, by Alice’s refusal to talk to Jack about his dad—and the consequent burden of what Mrs. Oastler knew of that subject, which she was now under pressure to tell Jack. Worst—but, in the long run, maybe this was best—Leslie Oastler and Jack were drawn to each other by Alice’s relentless and incomprehensible efforts to virtually
force
them to sleep together, which both Leslie and Jack were determined
not
to do, at least not while Alice was alive and she so thoroughly and insensitively
wanted
them to do it. (And of course what made this last part so difficult was that Alice, even in her madness, was right about one thing: increasingly, Leslie and Jack
did
want to sleep together.)

Alice was inarguably crazy, but how much of her craziness was the result of the breast-cancer cells in her brain—or was, more simply, her undying anger at William Burns—Mrs. Oastler and Jack would never know.

There was the night Jack discovered his mother naked and asleep in Emma’s bed—in
his
bed, under the new circumstances—and when he woke her, she told him she was staying where she was so that he could sleep with Leslie. Jack went to bed in his old bedroom (his new office) that night, in the bed where Mrs. Machado had so roughly educated him.

This episode was not repeated, but there were other episodes. The police called Mrs. Oastler one day to say that Daughter Alice was “evidently closed”—meaning all the lights were off and the venetian blinds were shut. Yet, inside the shop, Bob Dylan was singing up a storm—even passersby, on the Queen Street sidewalk, were complaining. This was how Leslie and Jack learned that Alice now routinely closed the tattoo parlor almost as soon as she’d opened it; she took an all-day nap on the sofa bed. Lately there were sounds in her brain that kept her awake at night, Alice explained to them. (According to Mrs. Oastler, Alice was either wide awake or snoring.)

“What sounds, Alice?” Leslie asked her.

“Nothing I can understand,” Alice answered. “Voices, maybe—not yours, not Jack’s. No one I want to listen to.” (Hence Bob, at high volume; thus the complaints.)

“If there’s a bend in the road to your dying, Alice, you may have gone around it,” Mrs. Oastler told her.

“Suddenly she’s a
writer
!” Alice cried, hitting Jack’s shoulder but pointing derisively at Leslie. “Here I am, living with a
pair
of writers!”

Jack saw in his mind’s eye what he’d tried to overlook when he’d found his mother naked and snoring in his (formerly Emma’s) bed: the slackness of her breasts in sleep, and how the tattoo of her broken heart had shifted slightly from its perfect placement on her younger left breast and the heart side of her rib cage. It was now a
lopsided
broken-heart tattoo, as if there’d been something irreparably wrong with Daughter Alice’s heart
before
William Burns had broken it. Even in her sleep, there were still faint creases where the underwire of her bra had marked both breasts, and in the light cast from the bathroom—the door was ajar—the scar from Alice’s lumpectomy shone an unnatural white, as did the scar in that same-side armpit, where the lymph node had been removed. (Jack had never seen that scar before.)

“If you’d only just
fuck
each other!” his mother shouted one night, making a fist and pounding the kitchen table, which made Jack and Mrs. Oastler jump. “If you fucked each other all day, I’ll bet you two writers wouldn’t be so
poetic
!”

Although the screenplay kept getting better, Jack rarely felt he was
poetic.
It was no surprise, but it hurt nonetheless, that his mother refused to read the script. (“I’ll be dead by the time you make the movie, dear,” she’d told him.)

If there were a poetic presence in the house in his mother’s final days, Jack would have said that it was Leslie, who appeared early one afternoon in the doorway of his makeshift office—an unprecedented interruption. She was naked. By her reddened skin, in the area of her Rose of Jericho, he saw that she’d been scratching at her tattoo. She was sobbing.

“I regret ever getting this tattoo,” she said. Her appearance did not have that unmistakable aura of seduction.

“I’m sorry, Leslie.”

“Life forces enough final decisions on us,” Mrs. Oastler continued. “We should have the sense to avoid as many of the unnecessary ones as we can.”

Jack just sat at Emma’s old desk while Mrs. Oastler turned away from him and went down the hall. “Can I use that, Leslie?” he called after her. (He was missing some essential voice-over for the Michele Maher character, and there it was.) “What you just said—can I use it?”

“Sure,” Mrs. Oastler said, so softly that Jack almost didn’t hear her.

When they eventually signed Lucia Delvecchio for the Michele Maher role, Lucia would say it was the voice-over that made her want the part—that and the fact that she knew she’d have to lose twenty pounds to play Michele. Miramax would put that voice-over on the movie poster, and in all the ads for the film: “Life forces enough final decisions on us. We should have the sense to avoid as many of the unnecessary ones as we can.”

“Bingo!” Jack shouted down the hall, after Mrs. Oastler. But she’d gone into her bedroom and had uncharacteristically closed the door.

There was also the night when Leslie came to his bedroom, where Jack was sleeping—but there was scarcely an aura of seduction about this visit, either. By now, the remembered bits of information—the lost details of his missing father—were waking Mrs. Oastler at all hours of the night. This happened as regularly as Alice’s alternating sleeplessness and snoring would wake Mrs. Oastler, or the more violent occurrences when Alice would beat Leslie’s back with her fists—this for no better reason than that Alice had woken up and discovered that Leslie had turned her back on her, which was apparently forbidden in their relationship.

Neither Alice nor Mrs. Oastler could remember when this rule had been established, or even if it had ever been observed, but this didn’t deter Alice from attacking Leslie, who was at least grateful that Alice didn’t insist on Bob Dylan blaring through the house all night—not the way Bob belted it out all day at Daughter Alice, or so the police duly reported.

“When I start to go, Jack—you take me there,” his mom had told him. He knew she meant her tattoo shop. “When I start to go, I’m sleeping in the needles—nowhere else, dear.”

It was in this largely sleepless context that Mrs. Oastler crawled into Jack’s bed one night; she took hold of his penis so suddenly, but without any indication of seeking more intimate contact, that he at first thought Emma’s ghost had grabbed him. (After all, it was Emma’s bed.)

“I’m here to talk, Jack,” Leslie said. “I don’t care if your mother thinks we’re fucking. I’m just here to tell you something.”

“Go ahead,” he said.

She’d already told him that his father had paid the lion’s share of Jack’s tuition at St. Hilda’s; it was Mrs. Wicksteed who had only, to use his mother’s words, “occasionally helped.” And the clothes he’d believed Mrs. Oastler had bought for him, both for Redding and for Exeter—not to mention the tuition at both schools? “I was just the shopper,” Leslie had told him. “The money came from William.”

“Even for college—those years in Durham?” he’d asked her.

“Even your first couple of years in L.A.,” she’d said. “He didn’t stop sending money until you were famous, Jack.”

“And what about Daughter Alice? I mean the tattoo parlor, Leslie.”

“William bought her the fucking shop.”

This was a portrait of a very different dad from the one Jack had imagined—when last heard of, playing the piano on a cruise ship to Australia, on his way to be tattooed by the famous Cindy Ray! Not so, maybe. Mrs. Oastler remembered Alice saying that William had
never
gone to Australia. Leslie had further surprised Jack by telling him she was sure his father was still in Amsterdam when Jack and his mother left. “I think he watched you leave,” Mrs. Oastler had said.

Thus, when Leslie slipped into his bed and took hold of his penis—this was almost, in his half-sleep, like old times—Jack was eager to learn which new tidbit of information about his father might have surfaced in Mrs. Oastler’s fitful sleep. “It’s about her tattoo—I mean the
you
in
Until I find you,
” Leslie whispered in his ear. “It’s not necessarily William.”

“What?” he whispered back.

“Think about it, Jack. She wasn’t looking for him—she’d already found him! It’s not like William was
lost
or something.”

“Where is he now?” Jack asked her.

“I have no idea where he is now. Alice doesn’t know, either.”

“Stop
whispering
!” Alice cried; she was calling from Mrs. Oastler’s bedroom, down the hall, although her voice was so loud that she could have been in Emma’s bed with Leslie and Jack. “
Talking
is better than whispering!” his mother shouted.