Until I Find You

Jack said that he thought he’d met one of her pupils, and that he’d probably made him nervous—without meaning to. “An English boy, about twelve or thirteen?” Jack asked.

She nodded and smiled. Many of her students were from diplomats’ families; the parents wanted their children to be occupied with cultural things. “To keep them from being at loose ends,” Ingrid said. “Not a bad reason for playing the piano.”

Jack asked her if she would play for him, but she shook her head. The apartment wasn’t soundproofed, she explained. In the old building, her neighbors could hear the piano through the walls. She stopped playing after five in the afternoon, and the first of her students never came to the apartment before nine—more often ten—in the morning.

She and Jack sat in the kitchen, where Ingrid made some tea. Her cheeks were a little sunken in, but she was still beautiful; nothing of what had been baby-faced about her remained, and her long limbs and broad hips had always given her a womanly appearance. She was more handsome than pretty, befitting the mother of two grown children—the children’s photos were all over the apartment, not just on the wall behind the piano.

Jack had spotted a nice-looking man with the children, when the kids were younger; he was a sailor in some of the pictures, a skier in others. The children’s father, Ingrid’s ex-husband, Jack assumed; the man looked nice in the way Emma had once defined the word, meaning that he looked normal. Everything about Ingrid seemed normal, too—in the best sense of the word.

“I shouldn’t have said I was glad your mother was dead. That’s an awful thing to say about a mother to her son!” she exclaimed. “I’m sorry.”

“No, don’t be sorry,” Jack said. “I understand.”

“I hated her twice,” Ingrid told him. “For what she did to me, for seducing Andreas—of course I hated her for that. But when I had children of my own—when they were the age you were when I met you—I hated your mother all over again. I hated her for what she did to you. First I hated her as a woman, then as a mother. No woman can have children and continue to think of herself first, but she did. Alice wasn’t thinking of you—of you not having a father. She was thinking only about herself.”

Jack couldn’t say anything; everything Ingrid said sounded true. He couldn’t argue with her, but he also couldn’t agree with her—not with any authority. What did Jack Burns know about having children, and how having children changed you? He finally said: “You have a third reason to hate her—for your tattoo. I remember that it wasn’t what you asked for.”

Ingrid laughed; her laughter was more natural-sounding than the way she had cried on the telephone. She was moving gracefully around the kitchen—opening the refrigerator, putting food on the table. Jack realized that she’d prepared a cold supper—gravlaks with a mustard sauce, a potato salad with cucumber and dill, and slices of very dark rye bread.

“Well, it was just a tattoo—it wasn’t life-changing,” she was saying. “But I was proud of myself for telling her what I wanted. I knew she would hate the idea. ‘A whole heart, a perfectly unbroken one,’ I told her. ‘A heart my babies will one day love to touch,’ I said. ‘There’s not a thing the matter with my heart,’ I told your mother. ‘Maybe just make it a little smaller than average,’ I told her, ‘because my breast is a little smaller than average, too.’ I thought I was so brave to tell her this, when all the while my heart was broken. Andreas and your mother had broken it, but I wasn’t going to let her know that.”

“What did you say?” Jack asked her. It wasn’t the speech impediment; he was pretty sure he had understood her. “You didn’t ask for a broken heart, Ingrid?”

“Ask? Who would want one?” she exclaimed. “I asked your mother for the kind of heart I had before she fucked Andreas!” Ingrid was lighting a candle; she’d already arranged the place settings. She hadn’t turned a light on in the kitchen, preferring the dusk and the view of the Stensparken. “And the bitch gave me a broken heart!” Ingrid said. “As ugly a heart as one could imagine. Well, you put the bandage on it, Jack. You remember.”

“I remember it the other way around,” he told her. She was pouring herself a glass of wine. (Somehow she knew Jack didn’t drink; she told him later that she’d read about his being a teetotaler in an interview.) “I remember you asking for a heart ripped in two, and my mom gave you a good one.”

“She gave me a good one, all right,” Ingrid said. She stood next to Jack’s chair and unbuttoned the flannel shirt; she wasn’t wearing a bra. (He thought of Miss Wurtz in a shirt like that, without a bra—unbuttoning her shirt for his father.)

Even at dusk, in the dim candlelight, the tattoo of Ingrid Amundsen’s torn heart looked like a fresh wound— the jagged tear cut the heart diagonally in two. The blood-red edges of the tear were darker than the shading of the heart, and more sharply defined than the outline. Jack had not seen his mother do an uglier tattoo, but Ingrid seemed accepting of it.

“Well, guess what?” she said, buttoning her shirt back up. “My babies loved it! They loved to touch it! And I came to realize that your mother had given me the heart I had—not the heart I used to have. How much more cruel it would have been to walk around wearing the heart I used to have. Not that Alice was consciously doing me a favor.” She sat down at the table and served him. “Bon appetit, Jack,” she said. “When I see you in the movies, I think of how proud you must make your father—and how it must have hurt your mother to see you.”

“Hurt her? How?” he asked.

“Because she finally had to share you,” Ingrid said. “She never knew how to share you, Jack.”

The food was very good, and Jack was hungry; it seemed strange that there wasn’t any music, but music is never background music to musicians.

“Your father was very religious,” Ingrid told him when he was helping her do the dishes. “It’s hard to play church music in a church and not be, although I wasn’t. I became more religious when I went back to playing the piano—that is, not in a church.”

“How was he very religious?” Jack asked.

“When Andreas and your mother hurt me, William told me something. He said, ‘Find someone; devote yourself to that person; have a child, or children; praise God.’ Not that it ever worked out that way for me! But that’s what William told me; that’s what he believed in. Well, I got the children, and I praise God. That’s been good enough.”

“So you’re religious, too?” he asked.

“Yes—but not like your father, Jack.”

“Tell me more about the religious part,” he said.

“Take your mother, for example,” Ingrid said a little impatiently. “Your father forgave her. I didn’t.”

“He forgave her?”

“He fought back once, but it backfired. I don’t think he fought back again,” she told him. It was as if her speech impediment had almost gone away, or he’d forgotten it; she was such a healthy person, Jack was thinking.

She’d gone into the living room and had come back to the kitchen with a photograph. “A pretty young woman, don’t you think?” she asked, showing him the picture. Jack recognized the beautiful girl in the photograph; it was the woman William had brought with him to the restaurant in the Hotel Bristol.

“I asked her if she had a tattoo,” Jack said.

“That was what backfired,” Ingrid told him. “Your dad didn’t expect you would speak to them. He felt awful.”

“Who was the girl?” Jack asked.

“My sister, an actress,” Ingrid said. “She’s not a movie star, like you—but in Norway she’s a little bit famous, in the theater. I convinced your father to take her with him. I thought it would serve your mother right. Alice was always telling him how and when he could get a look at you. In Copenhagen, and in Stockholm, she even told him who to have with him!”

“Yes, I know,” Jack said.

“So I told him to take my sister, the actress, and I told my sister to fall all over him. I said to them both,