Until I Find You (69 page)

In any case, when Emma had held his penis, his erection always subsided before long—not so with Mrs. Oastler. Jack was sure he had a hard-on that would last as long as she held him, and Leslie gave no indication that she was about to let go. He attempted to distract her with conversation of an inappropriate kind, but this only inspired her to alter her grip—or to alternately stroke and pull his penis in a maddeningly indifferent way.

“I feel that I never thanked you properly,” Jack began. His betrayal of Emma’s strongly expressed wish—namely, that he
not
thank her mother—made him feel as disloyal to his dear, departed friend as his continuing erection in her mother’s hand.

“Thanked me for
what
?” Mrs. Oastler asked.

“For buying my clothes—for Redding, and for Exeter. For paying my tuition at both schools. For taking care of us—I mean my mother
and
me. For all you did for us, after Mrs. Wicksteed—”

“Stop it, Jack.” He would have stopped without her telling him to do so, because her grip on his penis had tightened—painfully. Leslie Oastler pressed her open mouth between his shoulder blades, as if she were preparing to bite him; maybe she was smothering a scream. But all she said was, “Don’t thank
me.
”

“But why not, Leslie? You’ve been very generous.”

“Me,
generous
?” Mrs. Oastler asked. He felt her hand relax at last; her fingers lightly traced an imaginary outline of his penis, which had not relaxed at all.

Jack remembered a lull between customers at Daughter Alice, when his mom had said to him—as if it were part of an ongoing conversation, which it wasn’t, and not out of the blue, which it was—“Promise me one thing, Jack. Don’t ever sleep with Leslie.”

“Mom, I would never do such a thing!” he’d declared.

And there was that night at the Sunset Marquis, a small West Hollywood hotel where Jack had been banging a model; she had a private villa on the grounds, not one of those cheap rooms in the main building. A noisy bunch of musicians—rock-’n’-rollers and their groupies—were partying in an adjacent villa, and Jack’s model wanted to crash their party. Jack just needed to crash, but not there—he wanted to go home. To prevent him from leaving, the model flushed his car keys down the toilet.

Jack could have gone to the front desk and asked someone to call him a taxi, but he didn’t want to leave the Audi at the Sunset Marquis overnight; bad things had happened there. Besides, except for her bra, the model had dressed herself in Jack’s clothes and gone off to the musicians’ party. He would have had to leave the hotel wearing
her
clothes, and they weren’t a good fit. (She was a size six, or something.)

Jack had called Emma, who was writing. He’d begged her to take a taxi and bring him the spare set of keys to the Audi; they were in the kitchen drawer, by the telephone, he was explaining, when she interrupted him. “Promise me one thing, Jack. Just don’t ever sleep with my mother.”

“Emma, I would never do such a thing!”

“I’m not so sure, baby cakes. I know
she
would.”

“I promise,” he’d told her. “Please come get me.”

The model had gone off with Jack’s wallet, which was in the left-front pocket of his suit pants, so he had to crash the rock-’n’-rollers’ party and find her. He made himself up pretty well—the lipstick, the eye shadow, the works. Her bras were so small that Jack mistook one for a thong, but he managed to stuff each cup with half a tennis ball; he’d cut the ball in two.

The model had “twitches” in her fingers—the result of some deficiency in her diet, probably—and her personal trainer had prescribed squeezing a tennis ball as a remedy. There were tennis balls all over the villa; Jack had used her nail scissors to cut one in half.

He crammed himself into a lime-green camisole with a bare midriff, which unfortunately exposed the line of dark hair that ran from his navel below his waist. But Jack shaved this off with the model’s razor. At the same time, he shaved his legs in her sink—cutting one shin. He stuck a piece of toilet paper on the cut and painted his toenails a blood-red color, which matched his wound.

Jack found a pair of peach-colored panties with a lace waistband, but the leg holes would have cut his circulation off if he hadn’t snipped them with the nail scissors. Naturally, he couldn’t close the zipper on the short navy-blue skirt, but the half-zipped look, which revealed the lace waistband of his panties, more or less went with the overall portrait. He looked very trashy, but so did half the hangers-on and groupies who hung out at the bar at the Sunset Marquis.

In the full-length mirror, Jack saw that he’d painted his nails in too hasty a fashion—it appeared that he’d had a barefoot accident with a lawn mower. The skirt fell off one hip, and he’d torn one side of the camisole, which exposed the tight, twisted back strap of the ivory-colored bra. Jack’s tennis-ball breasts were noticeably smaller than his biceps. He looked like a field-hockey player, maybe three or four months pregnant, just starting to show.

He would have forgone the toenail polish if he could have worn his shoes, but the model had used them to weigh down his suit jacket, which was under about four inches of water in the bathtub.

It was just a musicians’ party—Jack didn’t expect that the dress code would be very severe. He thought it was adequate that he’d used a gob of the model’s extra-body conditioner and then blow-dried his hair. He looked like a slightly pregnant
former
field-hockey player (now a hooker) who’d been struck by lightning, but compared to the girls who were the usual groupies with the rock-’n’-rollers at the Sunset Marquis, Jack was head and shoulders above the competition.

Except for the model—she was hot. She’d stripped off Jack’s suit pants and the white dress shirt; she was dancing up a storm in his boxers and her bra. The musicians and their entourage were so wasted that Jack could have been Toshiro Mifune in drag, and no one would have noticed him. All but one guy, who appeared to be giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to his harmonica. He stopped playing and stared at Jack—well, at Jack’s tennis ball in two halves, specifically.

“Did you come with her?” he asked Jack, nodding to the dancing model.

“I recognize the boxers and the bra,” Jack said. It was a Jack Burns kind of line—it gave him away.

“You could pass for Jack Burns,” the harmonica player said. “I’m not shitting you.”

“Really?” Jack asked him. “Any idea where the honey in the boxers ditched the rest of her clothes?”

The harmonica player pointed to a couch, where a tall young woman was stretched out; she was asleep or passed out or dead. (Unmindful of the din, whichever the case.) She’d covered herself with Jack’s white dress shirt, which either she or the model had used to blot her lipstick. Jack found his suit pants and took the wallet out of the left-front pocket. There was no point in keeping the pants—not with the suit jacket under water in the model’s bathtub—and he had a hundred white dress shirts. It was the kind of night when you cut your losses and left.

The model was still dancing. “Tell her she can keep the boxers, but I want my bra back,” Jack said to the harmonica player, who was yowling away on his instrument like a runover cat; he barely nodded in Jack’s direction.

There was a bouncer-type who’d not seen Jack come in. The bouncer followed Jack out, into the semidark grounds, where there were other villas—some lit, some not. There was already dew on the grass. “Hey,” the bouncer said. “Someone said you were that weirdo Jack Burns.”

Jack’s face came up to the broad chest of the bouncer’s Hawaiian shirt; he was blocking Jack’s way. Ordinarily Jack would have sidestepped him; he could have easily outrun him to the lineup at the velvet rope out in front of the bar. The bouncer wouldn’t have messed with Jack in a crowd. But Jack’s skirt was so tight that his knees were brushing together when he walked; he couldn’t have run anywhere.

“Is that you, honey pie?” he heard Emma say. The bouncer stepped aside and let him pass. “Just look at you—you’re half unzipped!” Emma said to Jack. She threw her big arm around his hip, pulling him to her. She kissed Jack on the mouth, smearing his lipstick. “What happened to your shoes, baby cakes?” she asked.

“Under water,” Jack explained.

“They better not have been your Manolo Blahniks, you bad girl,” Emma said, putting her big hand on Jack’s ass.

“Dykes!” the bouncer called after them.

“I’ve got a dildo that would make you cry like a little baby!” Emma yelled at the bouncer, who looked suddenly pale in the bad light.

A tall, floppy guy, like a scarecrow, had fallen on the velvet rope in front of the bar; he was draped over it like a coat over a clothesline.

“I think it’s illegal to drive barefoot in California,” Emma was telling Jack.

“I promise I won’t sleep with your mother,” he whispered to her.

Jack was almost asleep, with his penis still stiff in Mrs. Oastler’s hand, when Leslie spoke to him. “I had to promise your mom I wouldn’t sleep with you, Jack. Of course, we’re not
really
sleeping together—not the way Alice meant—are we?”

“Of course not,” Jack told her.

One of Mrs. Oastler’s fingernails nicked the tip of his penis, and he flinched against her. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I haven’t played with anyone’s penis in quite some time.”

“It’s okay,” he said.

“You gotta talk to your mom, Jack,” Leslie said, the way Emma might have said it.

“Why’s that?” he asked.

“Talk to her while there’s still time, Jack.”

“Still time for what?”

“Emma and I didn’t talk enough,” Mrs. Oastler said. “Now we’re out of time.”

“Talk to my mom about
what
?”

“You must have questions, Jack.”

“She never answered them!” he told her.

“Well, maybe now’s the time,” Mrs. Oastler said. “Ask her
again.
”

“Do you know something I don’t, Leslie?”

“Definitely,” she said. “But I’m not telling you. Ask your mom.”

Outside, someone was screaming—probably in the parking lot near the hotel, but at Shutters on the Beach you could hear someone screaming all the way from the Santa Monica Pier. Perhaps it was the screaming that did it, but Jack’s erection finally subsided.

“Oh,
cute
!” Mrs. Oastler said. (She was making a considerable effort to bring his penis back to life.) “It’s like it’s going
away
!”

“Maybe it’s sad,” he suggested.

“Remember that line, Jack,” Emma had told him. “You can use it.” And to think he hadn’t been able to imagine under what circumstances an admission of your penis’s sadness would be of any possible use!

But the word
sad
affected Leslie Oastler in a way Jack wouldn’t have predicted. She let go of his penis and rolled over, turning her back to him. He didn’t know she was crying until he felt the bed tremble; she was crying without making a sound. Jack guessed that this was the
eventually
his mother had meant when she’d said that Leslie would break down, but—even in the act of falling apart—Mrs. Oastler was contained. Her small body shook, her face was wet with tears, her breasts were cool to his touch, but she never said a word.

When Jack woke up, he could hear Mrs. Oastler in the shower; room service had come and gone, unbeknownst to him. The pot of coffee, which was all that Leslie had ordered, was lukewarm. She’d already packed her small suitcase, and had laid flat (at the foot of the bed) the clothes she would wear on the plane—a black pantsuit, her bikini-cut panties, the little push-up bra. On her pillow, Mrs. Oastler had left a surprise for Jack: that photograph of Emma, naked, the one he’d kept. Leslie must have found it in the Entrada house; she wanted him to know she’d seen it.

The photo regarded Jack critically—Emma at seventeen, when Jack was ten and heading off to Redding. She had never been fitter. There was evidence of a matburn on one of her cheeks; probably Chenko, or one of the Minskies, had given it to her.

When Leslie Oastler came out of the bathroom, she was wearing a Shutters bathrobe and her hair was still wet. “Cute picture, huh?” Mrs. Oastler asked.

“Charlotte Barford took it,” he said.

“Then she probably took more than one—didn’t she, Jack?”

“An ex-girlfriend made me throw them away,” he told her.

“She probably thought you threw
all
of them away, Jack.”

“Right,” he said.

“A famous guy like you shouldn’t have pictures like that lying around,” Mrs. Oastler told him. “But I’m not going to throw it away for you. I’m not likely to throw
any
photographs of Emma away—not now.”

“No, of course not,” he said.

Jack went and stood naked at the window, overlooking the parking lot; there was a partial view of the dead, motionless Ferris wheel, which resembled the skeleton of a dinosaur in the bleached-gray light. Santa Monica wasn’t an early-morning town.

Mrs. Oastler came and stood behind him, holding his penis in both her hands; he had a hard-on in a matter of seconds. It seemed like such a betrayal of Emma—all of it. That was when Jack began to cry. He could tell that Leslie was naked because she was rubbing herself against his bare back. If she’d wanted to make love, he would have; that was probably why he was crying. The promises he’d made to Emma and his mother meant nothing.

“Poor Jack,” Leslie Oastler said sarcastically. She let him go and dressed herself; her hair was so short, she could dry it easily with a towel. “You’re going to have a busy day, I’m sure,” she told him, “doing whatever literary executors do.” Jack could have cried all day, but not in front of her. He stopped. He found his clothes and started to get dressed, putting Emma’s photo in his right-front pocket. “Your mother will no doubt call you before I’m back in Toronto,” Mrs. Oastler was telling him. “She’ll want to know all about our night together—how we
didn’t
sleep together, and all of that.”

“I know what to say,” he told her.

“Just be sure you
talk
to her, Jack. Ask her everything, while there’s still time.”