Until I Find You (109 page)

When I get older losing my hair,

Many years from now.

Will you still be sending me a Valentine,

Birthday greetings bottle of wine?

Jack tried to say good night to the transvestite dancer at the elevator, but she insisted on coming to his room with him. All the way up on the elevator, they kept singing. (She sat in his lap in the elevator, too.)

If I’d been out till quarter to three

Would you lock the door,

Will you still need me, will you still feed me,

When I’m sixty-four?

The transvestite wheeled him down the hall to his hotel room. At the door, Jack tried again to say good night to her.

“Don’t be silly, Jack,” she said, wheeling him inside the room.

“I’m not going to have sex with you,” Jack told her.

“Yes, you are,” the pretty dancer said.

Jack soon had a fight on his hands. When a transvestite wants to have sex, she feels as strongly about it as a guy—because she
is
a guy! Jack had a
battle
on his hands. The room got trashed a little—one lamp, especially. Yes, Jack
was
aroused—but even he knew the difference between wanting to have sex and actually having it. Not even he would submit to
every
desire.

“Look, it’s obvious you want me,” the dancer said. “Stop fighting it.” She’d taken off all her clothes and had managed to destroy most of Jack’s. “You have a
hard-on,
” she kept pointing out, as if Jack didn’t know.

“I get a hard-on in my sleep,” he told her.

“
Look
at me!” she screamed. “
I
have a hard-on!”

“I can see that you do,” Jack said. “
And
you have breasts.” (They were as hard as apples; Jack knew, because he was trying to push them out of his face.)

This time, he saw the left hook coming—and the right uppercut, and the head-butt, too. She may have been a dancer, but she was not without some other training; this wasn’t her first fight.

Naturally, the phone was ringing—the front-desk clerk, Jack assumed. There had probably been calls to the front desk from those rooms adjacent to Jack’s, within hearing distance of the destroyed lamp and all the rest.
Well, wouldn’t Donald Trump love
this!
Jack was thinking. (The Trump’s fabulous view of Central Park—for the time being, utterly ignored.)

He heard the security guys picking at the lock on his hotel-room door, but Jack had a Russian front headlock on the dancer and he wasn’t letting go—not even to open the door. Her fingernails were like claws, and he had to give up the front headlock when she bit him in the forearm.

“You fight like a girl,” Jack told her.

He knew that would
really
piss her off. When she came at him, Jack hit a pretty good duck-under and got behind her. He held her chest-down on the rug with a double-armbar, where she couldn’t bite him. The security guys finally got the door open; there were two of them, plus the night manager.

“We’re here to help you, Mr. Burns—I mean Mr.
Mocco,
” the night manager said.

“I have a distraught dancer on my hands,” Jack told them.

“He had a hard-on. I saw it,” the transvestite said.

One of the security guys had thought that Jack really
was
a cripple. He’d never seen Jack out of the wheelchair—not even in the movies. (He wasn’t a moviegoer, clearly.) From the other security guy’s reaction when the three of them were forcibly dressing the dancer, chicks with dicks were new to him.

Jack never went to bed; he stayed up, rehearsing how he would tell this part of the story of his life to Dr. García. He knew this episode wouldn’t wait for chronological order. Jack kept a cold washcloth on his forearm, where the transvestite dancer had bitten him. She hadn’t broken the skin, but the bite marks were sore and ugly-looking.

In the late morning, when Jack talked to Dr. García from the set of
The Love Poet,
he told her that the unfortunate incident was out of character for Harry Mocco but sadly typical of Jack Burns. (Jack thought he might preempt her criticism by criticizing himself.)

“You acquiesce too much, Jack,” Dr. García said. “You should never have let the transvestite into the elevator—you should have had the fight in the lobby, where it would have been a shorter fight. For that matter, you should never have let her sit in your lap in the bar.”

“It wouldn’t have been a good idea to have had that fight in the bar,” he assured Dr. García.

“But why did you leave the nightclub with her in the first place?” Dr. García asked him.

“She turned me on. I was aroused,” he admitted.

“I’m sure you were, Jack. That’s what transvestites
do,
isn’t it? They go to great lengths to turn men on. But what does that lead to, Jack? Every time, where does that go?”

He couldn’t think of what to say.

“You keep getting in trouble,” Dr. García was saying. “It’s always just a
little
trouble, but you know what that leads to—don’t you, Jack? Don’t you know where that goes?”

It was July 2003 when they had the wrap party for
The Love Poet
in New York, and Jack flew back to L.A. He’d succumbed to Harry Mocco’s habit of reciting fragments of love poems to total strangers, but in the case of the attractive stewardess on his flight from New York to Los Angeles, this wasn’t entirely Jack’s fault. She’d asked him to tell her about his next movie, and Jack began by explaining to her that Harry Mocco compulsively memorizes love poems and recites them at the drop of a hat.

“For example, do you know the poem ‘Talking in Bed’ by Philip Larkin?” he asked her. (She was probably Jack’s age.)

“Do I
want
to know it?” she asked him warily. “I’m
married.
”

But he kept trying. (Jack hadn’t slept with a stewardess in years.) “Or ‘In Bertram’s Garden’ by Donald Justice,” he went on, as if the flight attendant were encouraging him. “ ‘Jane looks down at her organdy skirt / As if
it
somehow were the thing disgraced—’ ”

“Whoa!” the stewardess said, cutting him off. “I don’t want to hear about it.”

That’s what happens when you ask an actor to tell you about his next movie.

When Jack walked into his place on Entrada Drive, he immediately called a real estate agent and asked to have the house put on the market. (
Sell the fucker!
Jack was thinking;
maybe that would force me to live a little differently.
)

He headed off for his appointment with Dr. García—his first in two months—feeling like a new man.

“But you haven’t really made a decision about where you want to live, Jack,” Dr. García pointed out. “Aren’t you pulling the rug out from under your feet, so to speak?”

But if Jack couldn’t make up his mind about his life, he had at least decided to make something happen.

“Is it the house itself that let Lucy come inside?” Dr. García asked him. “Is it
because of
your mother’s lies to you,
or
your missing father, that you are an unanchored ship—in danger of drifting wherever the wind or the currents, or the next sexual encounter, will take you?”

Jack didn’t say anything.

“Think about Claudia,” Dr. García said. “If you want to make something meaningful happen—if you
really
want to live differently—think about finding a woman like that. Think about committing yourself to a relationship; it doesn’t even have to last four years. Think about being with a woman you could live with for
one
year! Start small, but start
something.
”

“You asked me not to mistake you for a dating service,” Jack reminded her.

“I’m recommending that you
stop
dating, Jack. I’m suggesting that, if you tried to live with someone, you would have to live a lot differently. You don’t need a new house. You need to find someone you can live with,” Dr. García said.

“Someone like Claudia? She wanted
children,
Dr. García.”

“I don’t mean someone like Claudia in that respect, but a relationship like that—one that has a chance of lasting, Jack.”

“Claudia is probably very fat now,” he told Dr. García. “She had an epic battle with her weight ahead of her.”

“I don’t necessarily mean someone like Claudia in that respect, either, Jack.”

“Claudia wanted children so badly—she’s probably a
grandmother
now!” he said to Dr. García.

“You never could count, Jack,” she told him.

Jack didn’t blame Dr. García. He would take full responsibility for what happened. But the very idea of Claudia—the
reason
she was recently on his mind—surely came from the Claudia conversation in his therapy session with Dr. García. Jack was thinking about her—that’s all he would say in his own defense—when he drove back home to Santa Monica from a dinner party one warm night that summer.

Jack was remembering the first time Claudia let him borrow her Volvo—the incredible feeling of independence that comes from being young and alone and driving a car.

He pulled into his driveway on Entrada—his headlights illuminating the arrestingly beautiful, incontestably Slavic-looking young woman who sat on her battered but familiar suitcase on Jack’s absurdly small lawn. She sat so serenely still, as if she were placidly posing for a photograph beside the
FOR SALE
sign, that for a moment Jack forgot what was for sale. He thought
she
was for sale, before he remembered he was selling his house—and that thought would come back to haunt him, because she was more for sale than Jack could possibly have imagined.

He knew who she was—Claudia, or her ghost. It was a wonder he didn’t lose control of the Audi and drive over her—either killing Claudia on the spot, or killing her ghost again.
But how can it be Claudia?
Jack was thinking. The young woman on his lawn was as young as Claudia had been when he’d known her, or younger. (Besides, Claudia had always looked older than she was,
and
she had the habit of lying about her age.)

“God damn you, Jack,” Claudia had said. “After I die, I’m going to haunt you—I promise you I will—I might even haunt you
before
I die.”

Since Claudia had promised that she would haunt him, wasn’t it forgivable that Jack assumed the apparition sitting beside his
FOR SALE
sign was Claudia’s
ghost
? A ghost doesn’t usually travel with a suitcase, but maybe Heaven or Hell had kicked her out—or her mission to haunt Jack had required her to have several changes of clothes. After all, Claudia was (or had been) an actress—and she’d loved the theater, more than Jack had. In the case of Claudia’s ghost, the suitcase could have been a
prop.

Jack somehow managed to get out of the Audi and walk up to her, although his legs had turned to stone. He knew that driving away, or running away, wasn’t an option—you can’t get away from a ghost. But he left the Audi’s headlights on. When approaching a ghost, you at least want to see her clearly. Who wants to walk up to a ghost in the dark?

“Claudia?” Jack said, his voice trembling.

“Oh, Jack, it’s been too long,” she said. “It’s been
forever
since I’ve seen you!”

She was the same old Claudia, only younger. The same stage presence, the same projection of her voice—as if, even one-on-one, she was making sure that those poor souls in the worst seats in the uppermost balcony could hear her perfectly.

“But you’re so
young,
” he said.

“I died young, Jack.”

“
How
young, Claudia? You look even younger than you
were
! How is that possible?”

“Death becomes me, I guess,” she said. “Aren’t you going to ask me inside? I’ve been
dying
to see you, Jack. I’ve been sitting on this freakin’ lawn for an
eternity.
”

The word
freakin’
was new, and not at all like Claudia. But who knew where she’d been—and, among the dead, with whom? She held out her hands and Jack helped her to her feet. He was surprised that he could feel her not-inconsiderable weight. Who would have guessed that ghosts weighed anything at all? But from the look of her—even in Heaven, or that other place—Claudia still had to watch her weight.

She was still self-conscious about her hips, too. She wore the same type of long, full skirt that she’d always liked to wear—even in the summer. She was as heavy-breasted as Jack remembered her; in fact, given what people who believed in ghosts were generally inclined to believe, she was disarmingly full-figured for a spirit.

Jack ran to the car and turned off the Audi’s headlights, half expecting Claudia’s ghost to disappear. But she waited for him, smiling; she let him carry her old leather suitcase inside. She went straight to Jack’s bedroom, as if they were still a couple and she’d been living with him all these years—even though Claudia had never been in that house. He waited in shock while she used his bathroom. (The things ghosts had to do!)

Jack was deeply conflicted. He both believed her
and
suspected her. She had the same creamy-smooth skin, the same prominent jaw and cheekbones—a face made for close-ups, he’d always said. Claudia should have been in the movies, despite the problem with her weight; she had a face that was wasted in the theater, Jack had always told her.

When Claudia’s ghost emerged from the bathroom, she came up to Jack and nuzzled his neck. “I’ve even missed your smell,” she said.

“Ghosts have a sense of smell?” he asked.

Jack held her by the shoulders, at arm’s length, and looked into her eyes; they were the same yellowish brown they’d always been, like polished wood, like a lioness’s eyes. But there was something about her that wasn’t quite the same; the resemblance was striking but inexact. It wasn’t only that she seemed too young to be the Claudia he’d known—even if she’d died the day after they parted company, even if death (as the ghost had said)
did
become her.