Until I Find You (110 page)

“A thought occurs to me, Claudia,” he said. Holding her, even at arm’s length, Jack could feel her body’s heat. And all this time, he’d thought that ghosts (if you could feel them at all) would feel
cold.
“Since my mother died, I’ve been wondering about this,” he told her. “If ghosts get to keep the tattoos they had in life—I mean in the hereafter.”

Again, the smile—but even her smile wasn’t exactly as Jack remembered it. He didn’t think that Claudia’s teeth had ever been quite this white. She slowly lifted the long, full skirt. The seductiveness in her eyes was unchanged, and there, high up on her inner thigh, which was even a little plumper than he remembered it, was the tattoo of the Chinese scepter—the short sword symbolizing
everything as you wish.

“It took long enough, but it finally healed,” she told him.

It was a pretty good Chinese scepter, Jack thought, but it was not as perfect as the one his mom had learned from Paul Harper.

“It’s real,” the young woman said. “It won’t rub off on your hand. See for yourself, Jack—go on and touch it.”

The voice, her
projection,
may have been the same, but the language lacked Claudia’s exactness—her correctness of speech, her good education. The “go on and touch it”—the casual use of the word
and—
was no more like Claudia than the word
freakin’
that had caught Jack’s attention earlier.

He touched the young woman’s tattoo, high up on her inner thigh—her
imitation
Chinese scepter, as Jack thought of it.

“Who
are
you?” he asked her.

She took his hand and made him touch her, higher up. She wasn’t wearing any panties, not even a thong. “Doesn’t it feel familiar, Jack? Don’t you want to be back there—to be young again?”

“You’re not Claudia,” Jack told her. “Claudia was never crude.” And ghosts, he could have said, not only don’t have body heat;
female
ghosts don’t get wet. (Or do they?)

“You have a hard-on, Jack,” the girl said, touching him.

“I get a hard-on in my sleep,” he told her, as if the episode with that transvestite dancer at the Trump had been a dress rehearsal. “It’s no big deal.”

“It’s big enough,” the young woman said, kissing him on the mouth; she didn’t come close to kissing like Claudia. But it took no small amount of will power on Jack’s part to stop touching her. To make
her
stop, he had to let her know that he knew who she was.

“What would your mother say about this?” Jack asked Claudia’s daughter. “The very idea of you having sex with me! That wouldn’t make your mom happy, would it?”

“My mom’s dead,” the girl told him. “I’m here to haunt you—it’s what she would have wanted.”

“I’m sorry your mother’s dead,” he replied. “But
what
would she have wanted?”

“I don’t believe in ghosts,” Claudia’s daughter said. “I’m here to haunt you because I don’t believe that Mom can do it.”

“What’s your name?” Jack asked her.

“Sally,” the girl said. “After Sally Bowles, the part in
Cabaret
Mom always wanted—the part she told me
you
wanted, too. Only you probably would have been better at it, Mom said.”

“What did your mom die of, Sally? When did she die?”

“Cancer, a couple of years ago,” Sally said. “I had to wait till I was eighteen—so it would be
legal
to haunt you.”

She looked like a woman in her early twenties, but then her mother had always looked older than she was, too.

“Are you really eighteen, Sally?”

“Just like Lucy. Wasn’t Lucy eighteen?” Sally asked him.

“I guess everyone knows about Lucy,” Jack said.

“The Lucy business was the last thing my mom knew about you—it happened just before she died. Maybe it made it easier for her to die without you,” Sally said.

Like Lucy, Sally was walking around in Jack’s house as if she owned it. He noticed she had kicked off her shoes; she walked barefoot on the wrestling mat in his gym. Her beige, sleeveless blouse was a gauzy, fabric; her bra, which Jack could see through the blouse, was the same beige or light-tan color. Sally’s skirt made a swishing sound as she walked. She paused at his desk, reading the title page of a screenplay lying there. (That was when she picked up Jack’s address book.)

“My mom never stopped loving you,” Sally said. “She always wondered what might have happened if she’d stayed with you—if you ever would have given her a child, or children. She regretted breaking up with you, but she had to have
children.
”

The way Sally said
children,
Jack got the feeling that she didn’t like kids—or that the need to have them wasn’t as urgent an issue to her as it had been to Claudia.

Sally plopped herself down on Jack’s living-room couch and opened his address book. He sat down beside her.

“Do you have siblings, Sally?”

“Are you kidding? Mom popped out four kids, one right after the other. Lucky me—I was the first. I got to be the babysitter.”

“And your dad?” Jack asked her.

“He means no harm,” Sally said. “Mom would have married the first guy she met after she split up with you. He just had to promise to give her children. My dad was the first guy she met, the pathetic loser.”

“Why is he a pathetic loser, Sally?”

“He got to go to all your movies with Mom. What a kick that had to be for him, if you know what I mean,” Sally said. “Of course, when I was old enough, I got to watch all your movies, too—with Mom
and
Dad. There wasn’t anything she didn’t tell Dad about you. There wasn’t anything she didn’t tell
me
about you, too. That trip you took to the Toronto film festival; how your mother tattooed her. How you made Mom show her tattoo to the customs agent—that was a good one. How she gave you the clap she caught from Captain Phoebus, when you were a gay Esmeralda in
The Hunchback of Notre Dame;
how you were such a prick about it, as if you’d never fooled around yourself.”

“But your dad loved her?” Jack asked Sally.

“Oh, he
worshiped
her!” Sally said. “Mom got as big as a cow—she completely let herself go—and it was painfully evident that she never got over you. But Dad
adored
her.”

“You’re very beautiful, Sally,” he told the girl. “You look so much like your mom, I almost believed you. For a moment, I thought you
were
Claudia’s ghost.”

“I can haunt you as good as any ghost—believe me, Jack.” She wasn’t looking at him; she just kept thumbing through the pages of his address book, as if she were searching for someone. Suddenly she flipped to the front of the book; she began with the
A
’s. In her mother’s stage voice, she read aloud the first woman’s name.

“Mildred (‘Milly’) Ascheim,” Sally said; then her tone of voice became insinuating. “Did you screw her, Jack? Are you still screwing her?”

“No, never,” he replied.

“Uh-oh. Here’s another Ascheim
—Myra.
You crossed her name out. That’s a pretty clear indication that you fucked her. Then you dumped her, I suppose.”

“I never had sex with her. I crossed out her name because she died. Sally, let’s not play this game,” Jack said.

But she kept reading; she became very excited when she got to Lucia Delvecchio’s name. “Even Mom said you
must
have slept with her,” Sally said. “Mom said she could tell you were going to sleep with her when she saw you with her in the movie.”

Jack let it go on too long. Sally was into the
G
’s when the trouble really started. (Jack knew what Dr. García would say—namely, that he shouldn’t have been sitting next to Sally on the couch in the first place.)

“Elena García,” Sally said. This must have registered on Jack’s face; he clearly found this disrespectful to Dr. García, whom he never called by her first name. Dr. García was the most important person in this stage of Jack’s life, and Sally saw it. “Your cleaning lady, or former cleaning lady?” Sally asked,
more
disrespectfully. “You definitely fucked her.”

“She’s my doctor—my psychiatrist,” Jack said. “I don’t even call her by her first name.”

“Oh, yes—she’s
Lucy’s
shrink, too, isn’t she? How could I forget that!” Sally said. “I’ll bet Lucy’s
mom
is stalking you now.”

The girl was good; she had her mother’s talent, if not half her training. And at that moment, when she was teasing him, she reminded Jack more of Claudia than at any time when he’d imagined she was Claudia’s ghost.

“Please don’t be angry with me, Jack,” Sally said, very much the way her mother would have said it. “I just miss my mom, and I thought that being with you might bring her back to me.”

Jack couldn’t move; he just sat there. In his experience, women, even young women, knew when they had frozen you. Claudia had known those moments when Jack couldn’t resist her. Sally knew, too. She pressed herself against him on the couch; she started unbuttoning his shirt. He didn’t stop her. “Remember when you were John the Baptist?” Sally asked him.

“I was just his head—a small part,” he answered her. “His severed head—that’s all I was.”

“His decapitated head, on a table,” Sally reminded him, slipping off his shirt. Jack didn’t know when she’d unbuttoned her blouse; he noticed only that it was unbuttoned. “Mom was Salomé, wasn’t she?” Claudia’s daughter asked him.

“Yes,” Jack answered; he could barely talk. The girl had undressed him
and
herself. Naked, she was more like Claudia than Claudia—Chinese scepter and all.

“Mom said that was the best kiss she ever gave you.”

That was some kiss, he remembered. Yet the damage to Claudia and Jack’s relationship had already been done; not even that kiss could undo their drifting apart.

Jack recognized the blue foil wrapper of his favorite brand of Japanese condom. Sally was tearing the wrapper with her teeth. It seemed entirely too strange that Claudia’s daughter would know, in advance, his preference for Kimono MicroThins. Then he remembered that the girl had used his bathroom, where she’d no doubt discovered his condoms in the medicine cabinet.

Jack looked into her dark-gold eyes and saw Claudia, as if she were alive and young again. The same wide mouth, but whiter teeth; the same full breasts and broad hips of a girl who would wage her own war with her weight one day. Like her mother, Sally was the kind of woman you sank into.

There would be no need to explain the problem to Dr. García—anyone but Jack could have done the math. If he’d last seen Claudia in June 1987, even if she’d met Sally’s dad
immediately—
and married him,
and
gotten pregnant, all in that same month—Sally
couldn’t
have been born before March 1988. In that case, in July 2003, Sally was
fifteen.
In order for her to be eighteen, she would (in all likelihood) have to have been
Jack’s
daughter! As Dr. García had reminded him, he never could count.

As it happened, as Sally explained to him—this was
after
they had sex, unfortunately—in June 1987, Claudia went off to some Shakespeare festival in New Jersey, where she met a young director and Shakespearean scholar. They were married that August, and Claudia got pregnant in September; Sally was born in June 1988. When she and Jack had sex in his house on Entrada Drive, Sally had been fifteen for all of one month. But she looked a lot older!

Sally quickly ran a bath and sat in it, with the bathroom door open. She hated to have sex and run, she said, but she was in a hurry. She had a curfew; she had to get back to The Georgian Hotel in Santa Monica, where she was staying with her mom and dad and the rest of her family.

“Your mom is
alive
?”

“She’s as big as a barn, but she’s very healthy,” Sally said. “You wouldn’t have slept with me if you thought Mom was alive, would you?”

Jack didn’t say anything; he just sat on the bathroom floor with his back against a towel rack, watching Claudia’s near-perfect likeness in the tub.

“My parents are the happiest couple I know,” Sally was saying. “My mother gets embarrassed when we tease her about being your ex-girlfriend. But my sisters and I,
and
my dad, think it’s the funniest thing in the world. We order a pizza and watch one of your movies—we all just
howl
! Mom sometimes has to leave the room. We make her laugh so hard she has to pee! ‘Pause it—I’ll be right back,’ Mom says. When you won the Oscar, I thought we were all going to wet our pants.”

“You’re
how
old?” he asked her.

“Your math is
ridiculous—
Mom wasn’t kidding,” Sally said. “For your self-protection, Jack, you ought to look up the California Penal Code—the part about unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor. You’re over twenty-one, I’m under sixteen—that’s really all that matters. You’re guilty of either a misdemeanor or a felony. You could go to jail for one, two, three, or four years—and you’re liable for a civil penalty, not to exceed twenty-five thousand dollars. That is, if I tell anybody.”

She stood up in the tub and hastily dried herself off, throwing the towel on the bathroom floor. He followed her through his bedroom and into the living room, where her clothes were scattered everywhere; while Sally got dressed, Jack searched for her shoes.

“This is kind of my summer job,” she was explaining to him.

“
What
is?” (Seducing Jack Burns? Extortion?)

Sally further explained that her dad—who was hardly a pathetic loser, in Sally’s fond opinion—managed a small, community-operated theater in Vermont. It was called The Nuts & Bolts Playhouse. They did summer-stock productions; they ran workshops in acting, directing, and playwriting during the school months. A nonprofit foundation funded everything. When Claudia and her Shakespearean husband weren’t engaged in their theater productions and workshops, they were full-time fund-raisers.

“We’re a big family—four girls,” Sally elaborated. “We all have to go to college one day. My parents’ whole life is by example. We love the theater, we learn to be independent, we don’t
care
about money, but we always
need
money. Do you get it?”