Until I Find You

hadn’t seen before—probably the same young man who’d put through Alice’s call. Of course the clerk knew it was the Jack Burns—everyone did. But as Jack was leaving, the clerk called out—his voice full of the utmost sincerity, of the kind that young people express when they genuinely want to please you. “Have a nice day, Mr. Rainbow!”

As it turned out, Jack had been wrong to envision Emma’s death as a heart attack, which typically has some familiar symptoms antecedent to death—like sweating, shortness of breath, light-headedness, and chest pains. But Emma Oastler died of a heart condition called Long QT Syndrome; an inherited disease, it affects the sodium and potassium channels in the heart. (This, in turn, leads to abnormalities in the heart’s electrical system.) Emma died of a sudden arrhythmia—ventricular fi-brillation, her doctor told Jack. Her heart suddenly stopped pumping; Emma died before she was even aware of not feeling well.

With Long QT Syndrome, often sudden death is the first indication of a problem. In sixty percent of patients, a resting EKG would indicate an abnormality, which would alert a doctor to the possibility of the condition. But the other forty percent would have completely normal examinations—unless exercise EKG’s were used. (Emma’s doctor told Jack that Emma had never had one.)

Her doctor went on to tell him that a fatal episode could be triggered by a loud noise, extreme emotion, exertion, or an electrolyte imbalance—which, in turn, could be caused by drinking alcohol or having sex.

The boy from Coconut Teaszer—whose name would never be made public—said that Emma had collapsed on him so spontaneously that he’d thought it was simply the way she liked to have sex, which he was having for the first time. He’d done exactly what Emma had told him to do; he hadn’t moved. (He was probably too afraid to move.) After he’d managed to extricate himself from Emma’s last embrace, the kid called the police.

Given the genetic nature of the syndrome, Emma’s surviving family would eventually be screened for it. Leslie Oastler was the sole survivor, and she showed no signs of the abnormality. Her ex-husband, Emma’s father, had died several years earlier—apparently, in his sleep.

“What a pisser,” as Leslie would put it.

Jack arrived home before he had time to prepare himself for Mrs. Oastler. On the plane, he’d been thinking about Emma—not Leslie. (He’d been considering his lack of emotion, if that was the right word for what he lacked.)

Leslie Oastler was all over Jack, like a storm. “I know Leslie,” Alice had said. “She’ll break down, eventually.” But Mrs. Oastler’s grief was not yet evident—only her anger.

Leslie greeted him at the door. “Where the fuck is Emma’s novel, Jack? I mean the new one.”

“I don’t know where Emma’s novel is, Leslie.”

“Where’s your novel, Jack? Or whatever the fuck it is that you’re supposed to be writing—you don’t even have a computer!”

“I don’t work at home,” he answered. This was not exactly a lie—regarding the writing part of his life, Jack didn’t work anywhere.

“You don’t even have a typewriter!” Mrs. Oastler said. “Do you write in longhand?”

“Yes. I happen to like writing by hand, Leslie.” This wasn’t exactly a lie, either. What writing he did—shopping lists, script notes, autographs—was always in longhand.

Mrs. Oastler had been all through Emma’s computer. She had searched for Emma’s novel under every name she could think of; nothing on Emma’s computer had a name that contained the word novel, or the number three, or the word third. There was nothing resembling a title of a work-in-progress, either.

The boy from Coconut Teaszer must have been very believable, because the police never treated the house on Entrada as a crime scene. And because Emma was a famous author—not that the boy even knew she was a writer—both the police and Emma’s doctor had concluded their business promptly, and without making much of a mess.

Mrs. Oastler, on the other hand, had ransacked the house. Whatever damage had been done by Emma spontaneously dying on top of the kid from Coconut Teaszer was minimal in comparison to Leslie’s frenzied searching, which resembled a drug-induced burglary—drawers and closets flung wide open, clothes strewn about. She’d found a couple of pairs of Jack’s boxers in Emma’s bedroom, and a pair of Emma’s panties and two of her bras under Jack’s bed; she’d found Emma’s cache of porn films, too. “Did you watch them together?” Mrs. Oastler asked.

“Sometimes—for research,” Jack said.

“Bullshit!”

“We should get out of here, Leslie—let me take you to dinner.” Jack was trying to imagine what else Mrs. Oastler might have discovered in her search.

“Were you fucking each other or not?” she asked him.

“Absolutely not,” he told her. “Not once.”

“Why not?” Mrs. Oastler asked. Jack had no good answer to that question; he said nothing. “You slept together but you didn’t do it—is that the way it was, Jack?” He nodded. “Like the script reader and the porn star in Emma’s depressing novel?” Leslie asked.

“Kind of,” was all he could say. Jack didn’t want to give Mrs. Oastler the impression that he was too big for Emma, which would imply they had tried. But Leslie had come to her own conclusions—at least in regard to how Emma had handled her vaginismus. (Top position; young boys she could boss around, usually.)

Jack had been right to ask Emma if her vaginismus had a cause—of course it did, not that Emma could ever have told him. She’d been sexually abused when she was nine or ten—one of her mother’s bad boyfriends had done it. He would be Mrs. Oastler’s last boyfriend. Emma had been so traumatized that she’d missed a year of school. “Some problem at home” was all Jack remembered hearing about it; he’d assumed that this had something to do with Leslie’s divorce.

Mrs. Oastler’s final boyfriend gave new meaning to Emma’s saga of the squeezed child; at twelve, perhaps this had been her first attempt to fictionalize her personal grievances. “Of course there were any number of traumatic visits to doctors’ offices, beginning with Emma’s first gynecological examination,” Leslie told Jack. “And she hated her father—naturally, he was a doctor.”

Jack didn’t know that Emma’s dad had been a doctor. Whenever Emma or her mother mentioned him, the word asshole was dominant. The word doctor, if Jack had ever heard it, had been drummed out of his memory by asshole.

“Let me take you to dinner, Leslie,” Jack repeated. “Let’s go someplace Emma liked.”

“I hate to eat,” Mrs. Oastler reminded him.

“Well, I usually have just a salad,” Jack said. “Let’s go somewhere and have a salad.”

“Which one of you liked the Japanese condoms?” Leslie asked. (She’d even found Jack’s Kimono MicroThins!)

“Those are mine,” he told her. “They have great salads at One Pico.” His old boss—Carlos, from American Pacific—was now working as a waiter there. Jack called and asked Carlos for a table with a view of the ocean and the promenade.

There were a lot of messages on the answering machine, but Mrs. Oastler assured Jack they were not worth listening to—she’d already done so. Condolences from friends—even Wild Bill Vanvleck had called. (The Mad Dutchman hadn’t made a movie in years. Jack had worried that he might be dead.)

The only thing even mildly interesting, Leslie said, was the call from Alan Hergott—informing Jack that he’d been named literary executor in Emma’s will. (Alan was also Emma’s lawyer.) And Bob Bookman, their agent, had called; it was important, Bookman said, that he and Jack meet with Alan to discuss Emma’s will. (Jack had only recently learned—from his last, unpleasant conversation with Emma—that she had a will, and that she’d supposedly taken good care of him in it.)

“I’ll bet she’s left you everything,” Mrs. Oastler remarked, with an encompassing wave of her thin arm—indicating the ransacked ruin of the wretched house on Entrada Drive. “Lucky you.”

While Leslie had a shower and changed her clothes, Jack played the messages on the answering machine at low volume. Both Bob Bookman and Alan Hergott made him think that his role as “literary executor” was a bigger deal than he might be anticipating; their voices had an unexpected urgency, which Mrs. Oastler had missed or