Until I Find You (107 page)

According to Dr. García, Jack had come closest to having a
real
or
normal
relationship with Claudia—it was, at least, an
actual
relationship, before they went their separate ways. But Michele Maher was both more dangerous and more unforgettable to Jack, because she’d only ever existed as a
possible
relationship. “They’re the most damaging kind, aren’t they?” Dr. García had asked him. (Of course she also meant the relationship that Jack could only imagine having with his father.)

Thus warned, Jack drove out to Universal City to pick up Michele Maher
—Dr.
Maher, a thirty-eight-year-old unmarried dermatologist. What was he thinking? He already suspected that he might have a better time with an amnesiac transvestite prostitute. That was Jack’s state of mind when he walked into the lobby of the Sheraton Universal, which was overrun with hyperactive-looking children returning from their day of theme-park rides. Michele had said she would meet him in the bar, where he found her drinking margaritas with three or four of her fellow dermatologists. They were all sloshed, but Jack was heartened to see that Michele could manage to stand; at least she was the only one who stood to greet him.

She must have forgotten how short Jack was, because she was wearing
very
high heels; at five-ten, even barefoot she towered over him. “You see?” she said to the other doctors. “Aren’t movie stars always smaller than you expect them to be?” (The unkind thought occurred to Jack that, if Penis McCarthy had been there, he would have observed that Jack came up to her high, hard ones.)

He took Michele out to dinner at Jones—a trendy Hollywood hangout. It was not Jack’s favorite place—crowded, irritatingly thriving—but he figured that Michele would be disappointed if he didn’t provide her with an opportunity for a little sightseeing. (The food wasn’t all that interesting, but the clientele was hip—models, starlets, lots of fake boobs with the pizzas and pasta.)

Of course Jack saw Lawrence with one of the models; Jack and Lawrence automatically gave each other the finger. Michele was instantly impressed, if a little unsteady on her feet. “I haven’t eaten all day,” she confessed. “I should have skipped that second margarita.”

“Have some pasta,” Jack said. “That’ll help.” But she downed a glass of white wine while he was still squeezing the lemon into his iced tea.

He kept looking all around for Lawrence, who probably wanted to pay Jack back for the bottle of Taittinger Jack had poured on him in Cannes.

“My
Gawd,
” Michele was saying—a conflation of the worst of Boston and New York in her accent. “This place is cool.”

Alas, she wasn’t. Her skin, which he’d remembered as glowing, was dry and a trifle raw-looking—as if she’d just emerged from a hot bath and had stood outside for too long on a New England winter day. Her honey-blond hair was dull and lank. She was too thin and sinewy, in the manner of women who work out to excess or diet too rigorously—or both. She hadn’t had all that much to drink, but her stomach was empty—Michele was one of those people who looked like her stomach was empty most of the time—and even a moderate amount of alcohol would have
looped
her.

She was wearing a streamlined gray pantsuit with a slinky silver camisole showing under the jacket. New York clothes—Jack was pretty sure you couldn’t buy a suit like that in Boston or Cambridge, and she probably didn’t get those
very
high heels anywhere but New York, either. Even so, she looked like a
doctor.
She held her shoulders in an overerect way, the way someone with a neck injury does—or as if she’d been born in a starched lab coat.

“I don’t know how you do what you do,” she was telling Jack. “I mean how you’re so natural doing such
un
natural things—a cross-dressing ski bum, for example. A dead rock star—a
female
one! A limo driver who’s married to a hooker.”

“I’ve known a lot of limo drivers,” he told her.

“How many homophobic veterinarians have you known, Jack?” Michele asked him. (She had even seen that unfortunate film.)

“I’m
weird,
you mean,” he said to her.

“But you bring it off. You’re a
natural
at being weird,” Michele told him.

Jack didn’t say anything. She was fishing for something that had fallen to the bottom of her second glass of white wine, which was half empty. It was a ring that had slipped off her finger.

“I’ve lost so much weight for this date,” she said. “I’m two sizes smaller than I was a month ago. I keep moving my rings to bigger fingers.”

Jack used a spoon to scoop her ring out of her wineglass. The ring had slipped off the middle finger of her right hand; the middle finger of her left hand was even smaller, Michele explained, but the ring was too small to fit either index finger.

It was a somewhat old-fashioned-looking ring for a woman her age to wear. A little clunky—a big sapphire, wreathed by diamonds. “It has some sentimental value, this ring?” Jack asked her.

Michele Maher knocked over her wineglass and burst into tears. Against Jack’s advice, she’d ordered a pizza—not pasta. The pizza at Jones had a pretty thin crust; Jack didn’t think the pizza had a rat’s ass of a chance of absorbing the alcohol in her.

It had been her mother’s ring—hence the bursting into tears. Her mother had died of skin cancer when Michele was still in medical school. Michele had instantly developed a skin ailment of her own; she called it stress-related eczema. She’d specialized in dermatology for personal reasons.

Her father was remarried, to a
much
younger woman. “The gold digger is
my
age,” Michele said. She’d ordered a third glass of white wine, and she hadn’t touched her pizza.

“You remember my parents’ apartment in New York, don’t you, Jack?” she asked. She had placed her dead mother’s unwearable ring on the edge of her plate, where it seemed poised to eat the pizza. (The ring honestly looked more interested in eating the pizza than Michele did.)

“Of course,” Jack answered. How could he forget that Park Avenue apartment? The beautiful rooms, the beautiful parents, the beautiful
dog
! And the Picasso, toilet-seat-high in the guest-room bathroom, where it virtually
dared
you to pee on it.

“That apartment was supposed to be my inheritance,” Michele said. “Now the
gold digger
is going to get it.”

“Oh.”

“Why didn’t you sleep with me, Jack?” she asked. “How could you have proposed that we
masturbate
together? Mutual masturbation is much more intimate than having conventional sex, isn’t it?”

“I thought I had the clap,” he admitted. “I didn’t want you to get it.”

“The clap from
whom
? You weren’t seeing anyone else, were you?”

“I was sleeping with Mrs. Stackpole, the dishwasher. You probably don’t remember her, Michele.”

“Those women who worked in the kitchen were all old and fat!” she cried.

“Yes, they were,” Jack said. “Well—Mrs. Stackpole was, anyway.”

“You could have slept with
me,
but you slept with an old, fat
dishwasher
?” she asked, in a ringing voice. (She said
dishwasher
the way she’d said
gold digger.
)

“I was sleeping with Mrs. Stackpole before I knew I
could
sleep with you,” Jack reminded her.

“And your relationship with Emma Oastler—what was that, exactly?” Michele asked.

Here we go,
Jack thought;
here comes
“
too weird,
”
and all the rest of it.
“Emma and I were just roommates—we lived together, but we never had sex.”

“That’s so hard to imagine,” Michele said, toying with the ring on the edge of her plate. “You mean you just
masturbated
together?”

“Not even that,” he told her.

“What did you
do
? You must have done
something,
” Michele said.

“We kissed, I touched her breasts, she held my penis.”

In reaching for her wineglass, Michele’s elbow came down on the edge of her plate; her mother’s ring went flying. The ring landed on an adjacent table, startling two models who were on a red-wine diet.

One of the models picked up the ring and looked at Jack. “Oh, you shouldn’t have,” she said, slipping the ring onto one of her pretty fingers.

“I’m sorry—it’s her mother’s ring,” Jack told the model; she pouted at him while Michele looked mortified.

“You don’t remember me, do you, Jack?” the other model asked.

Jack got up and went over to their table, holding his hand out to the model who was still wearing Michele’s ring. He was trying to buy a little time, struggling to remember who the other model was.

“I was afraid you’d forgotten me,” he told her. (It was one of Billy Rainbow’s lines—Jack had always liked it.)

It was not the answer the model had been expecting. Jack still couldn’t place her, or else he’d never met her before in his life and she was just playing a game with him.

The model who had Michele’s ring was playing another kind of game with Jack; she was trying to put the ring on one of his fingers. “Who would have thought Jack Burns had such little hands?” she was saying. (The ring was a loose fit on his left pinkie; Jack went back to his table wearing it.)

“Jack Burns has a little
penis,
” the other model said.

Jack guessed that she
did
know him, but he still didn’t remember her. Michele just sat there looking glassy-eyed. “I don’t feel very well,” she told Jack. “I think I’m drunk, if you want to know the truth.”

“You should try to eat something,” he said.

“Don’t you know that you can’t tell a doctor what to do, Jack?”

“Come on. I’ll take you back to the hotel,” he said.

“I want to see where you live!” Michele said plaintively. “It must be fabulous.”

“It’s a hole in the wall,” the model who knew Jack said. “Don’t tell me you’ve actually moved out of that nookie house on Entrada, Jack.”

“We’re much closer to your hotel than we are to where I live,” he told Michele.

“Did you sleep with that girl?” Michele asked him, when they were back in the Audi. “You didn’t look like you knew her.”

“I don’t remember sleeping with her,” Jack said.

“What’s a
nookie house
?” she asked him.

“It’s slang for
brothel,
” Jack explained.

“Do you really live in a hole in the wall on La Strada?” Michele asked.

“Yes, I do,” he admitted. “It’s on
Entrada.
”

“But why do you live in a
hole in the wall
? Why wouldn’t Jack Burns live in a
mansion
?”

“I don’t really know where I want to live, Michele.”

“My
Gawd,
” she said again.

Michele fell sound asleep on the Hollywood Freeway. Jack had to carry her into the lobby of the Sheraton Universal. He didn’t know her room number; he couldn’t find her room key in her purse. He carried her into the bar, where he was sure he would find a few of her drunken colleagues. Jack hoped that one of them would be sober enough to recognize Michele.

Another woman dermatologist came to Jack’s assistance; she was a homely, caustic person, but at least she hadn’t been drinking. Together they got Michele to her room. The other doctor’s name was Sandra; she was from somewhere in Michigan. Sandra must have assumed that Jack was sleeping with Michele, because she proceeded to undress Michele in front of him.

“Run a bath for her,” Sandra said. “We can’t let her pass out like this. If she vomits, she might choke. People who are dead-drunk often aspirate their vomit. It’s better to wake her up, and let her be sick when she’s awake.”

Jack did what the doctor said. Then he carried Michele to the bath and, with Sandra’s assistance, slid her into it. Naked, she was much too thin—emaciated. Like a woman who’d been recently pregnant, Michele had stretch marks on her small breasts; the skin there looked wrinkled. (It was the weight loss; she hadn’t been pregnant.)

“Christ, how much weight has she lost?” Sandra asked Jack, as if he were the one who’d put Michele up to it.

“I don’t know what she weighed before,” Jack said. “I haven’t seen Michele in twenty years.”

“Well, this is a wonderful way to see her,” Sandra said.

Michele had told him more about the stress-related eczema; it occurred on her elbows and knees. When it was bad, the eczema was the color and nubbly texture of a rooster’s wattle. Jack kept staring at Michele’s elbows and knees while she lolled in the bath; he half expected her mysterious skin ailment to suddenly appear.

“What are you
looking
at?” Sandra asked him. (Michele, even in the bathwater, was still out cold; Jack held her under her armpits so her head wouldn’t slip underwater.)

He explained about the stress-related eczema, but Sandra assured him that it wasn’t about to blossom before his eyes. “It’s not like time-lapse photography,” she said. Sandra looked at his hands. “Nice
ring,
” she commented. (Michele’s mother’s ring was still on Jack’s left pinkie.)

When Michele started coming around, she was unaware that Sandra was with them. “I’ll leave you two lovebirds alone. Just don’t let her throw up in her sleep,” Sandra said. “You seem to enjoy staring at her, anyway.”

“Did we do it yet?” Michele asked him. He heard Sandra letting herself out of the hotel room, the door closing on her harsh laugh.

“No,” Jack said. “We didn’t do it.”

“When are we going to do it, Jack? Or do you think you have the clap again?”

“I didn’t have it the first time. I just thought I
might
have it,” he explained to her.

“But you can’t even remember who you’ve slept with,” Michele reminded him. “And it’s not as if you drink or anything. You must sleep with an awful lot of women, Jack.”

“Not really,” Jack said.