Until I Find You

chosen to ignore.

Leslie had changed into a sexy backless dress with a halter-type neckline. Only nine years older than Alice, Mrs. Oastler had just turned sixty, but she was so sleek and unwrinkled that she looked ten years younger—and she knew it. Her dark, boyish pixie was dyed to its roots, her small breasts didn’t droop, her small bottom looked firm. Only the veins on the backs of her hands betrayed her, and her hands were never at rest—as if to deny you a lingering look at them.

Leslie announced that Emma’s bedroom had the ambience of a crime scene, and that she wouldn’t sleep there. Jack offered her his bedroom, or the guest room, but Mrs. Oastler told him that she had reserved a room for them at Shutters. After all, they were going to eat at the restaurant there. “We might as well spend the night,” she said.

“We?” he asked her.

“I shouldn’t be left alone,” she told him. “If you slept with Emma and didn’t do it, I guess you can sleep with me and not do it, too, Jack.”

He put her small carry-on bag in the backseat of the Audi and drove her to Shutters. The sun had set, but a faded-pink glow served as a backlight to the Santa Monica Pier; the lights on the Ferris wheel were on. On the promenade below One Pico, people on Rollerblades swept past incessantly. Leslie drank a bottle of red wine with her salad; Jack had about a gallon of iced tea with his.

“I wonder what you’re the literary executor of,” Mrs. Oastler remarked. (Carlos had told him, while she’d gone off to register in the hotel, that Leslie was the best-looking date he’d seen Jack with in a long time.)

“Her novel, maybe,” Jack said.

“In which case, what would you do with it, Jack?”

“Maybe Emma wanted me to decide if it was fit to publish or not,” he replied.

“It doesn’t exist, Jack. There is no third novel. It wasn’t her novel that was growing too long—it was the period of time in which she’d written nothing,” Leslie said.

“Emma told you that?” he asked, because it suddenly sounded true.

Mrs. Oastler shrugged. “Emma never told me anything, Jack. Did she talk to you?”

“Not about her third novel,” he admitted.

“There is no third novel,” Leslie repeated.

It turned out that Mrs. Oastler had called Alan Hergott. Alan said something vague to her: the proceedings were “of a literary nature”; in fact, Emma had specified that her mother be excluded from the process. Even the reading of the will was a private matter, Alan told Mrs. Oastler; only Bob Bookman and Jack were allowed to hear what Emma wanted done with her estate.

“But are you guessing, or do you know there’s no third novel—not even a work- in-progress?” Jack asked Leslie.

“I’m only guessing,” Mrs. Oastler admitted. “With Emma, I was always guessing.”

“Me, too,” he said.

Surprisingly, Mrs. Oastler held his hand. He looked at her pretty face—her bright, dark eyes, her thin-lipped mouth with that seductive smile, her perfectly straight little nose—and wondered how a creature of Emma’s outsize dimensions could ever have come forth from such a lean, taut body.

What Mrs. Oastler said surprised him. “Emma’s death was not your fault, Jack. You were the only person she cared about. She told me once that taking care of you was all that mattered to her.”

“She never told me that,” he admitted. It would have been a good time to cry, but he still couldn’t. And if, in his mother’s estimation, Leslie Oastler would eventually break down, now was apparently not her moment to fall apart, either.

“Let’s get the check,” Leslie said. “I can’t wait to see what sleeping with you and not doing it is like.”

Jack thought they should tell his mother where they were spending the night. Alice would be worried about Leslie—and about Jack, to a lesser degree. What if his mom called the house on Entrada and got only the answering machine? Alice would be calling him on his cell phone all night.

“I’ll call her while you use the bathroom,” Mrs. Oastler said.

He’d forgotten to bring a toothbrush. For a host of historical reasons, Jack was disinclined to use Leslie’s toothbrush, but he took a dab of her toothpaste and smeared it on his teeth with his index finger.

“Please feel free to use my toothbrush, Jack,” Mrs. Oastler said through the closed bathroom door. “In fact, if you have any expectations of kissing me, please do use it.”

He had no expectations of kissing Leslie Oastler—that is, not until she brought it up. Against his better judgment, Jack used her toothbrush to brush his teeth.

When he exited the bathroom, Mrs. Oastler had already undressed. She was naked except for her black bikini-cut panties—a sinister match to the bikini cut of her C-section scar and Alice’s signature Rose of Jericho. Leslie crossed her arms over her small, perfect breasts as she slipped past Jack, into the bathroom, with a modesty that was as unexpected as her kisses a few minutes later.

She was an intimidating kisser, excitable and feral—without once closing her bright, watchful eyes. But Jack had the feeling that everything about her was an experiment, that she was merely conducting a test.

When they’d kissed to the point of exhaustion—either they had to stop or they had to progress to a more serious level of foreplay—Mrs. Oastler calmly asked him: “You did this with Emma, didn’t you? I mean you kissed.”

“Yes, we kissed.”

“Did you touch each other?”

“Sometimes.”

“How?” He took Mrs. Oastler’s breasts in his hands. “Is that all?” she asked.

“That’s the only way I touched Emma,” he told her.

“Where did she touch you, Jack?”

He couldn’t say penis—with all the penis-holding in his life, God knows why. Jack let go of Leslie’s breasts and rolled over, turning his back to her. Mrs. Oastler didn’t hesitate; her thin arm snaked around Jack’s waist, her small hand closing on his penis, which was already hard. “Like that,” was all he said to her.

“Well, that’s not very big,” Leslie said. “I don’t think Emma would have had an involuntary muscle spasm over that. Do you, Jack?”

“Maybe not,” he said.

Mrs. Oastler went on holding him. He tried to will his erection away, but it endured. Leslie Oastler would always have a certain power over him, he was thinking. She had entered his childhood at a vulnerable time, first with her push-up bra—before he even met her—and later by showing him her Rose of Jericho, when Jack was of such a young age that the way she trimmed her pubic hair would become the model of the form for him.

In this way, in increments both measurable and not, our childhood is stolen from us—not always in one momentous event but often in a series of small robberies, which add up to the same loss. For surely Mrs. Oastler was one of the thieves of Jack’s childhood—not that she necessarily meant to hurt him, or that she gave the matter any thought one way or another. Leslie Oastler was simply someone who disliked innocence, or she held innocence in contempt for reasons that weren’t even clear to her.

She’d been disillusioned by her doctor ex-husband, whose great wealth was family money, which both he and Mrs. Oastler took for granted. (Dr. Oastler didn’t make all that money as a doctor— not in Canada.) As a result, Mrs. Oastler had dedicated herself to the task of disillusioning others; and because Leslie met Alice, Jack just happened to fall under Leslie’s spell.

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