Until I Find You

airport into Helsinki. Although it was April, it was almost snowing; one or two degrees colder, and the rain would have turned to snow.

He checked into the Hotel Torni, marveling at the large, round room on the first floor, which served the hotel as a lobby. Jack remembered it as the American Bar—a hangout for the young and wild, some brave girls among them. The old iron-grate elevator, which had been “temporarily out of service” for the duration of Jack’s time in the Torni with his mom, was now working.

But although the American Bar was gone, the Torni was still a hangout for young people. On the ground floor was an Irish pub called O’Malley’s; shamrocks all over the place, Guinness on draft. It was an unwise choice for the Jack Burnses of this world—it was packed with more moviegoers than Coconut Teaszer. But Jack wasn’t hungry, and he’d slept on the plane. He didn’t feel like eating or going to sleep.

A not-bad band of Irish folksingers was playing to the pubcrowd—a fiddler, a guitarist, and a lead singer who said he loved Yeats. He’d left Ireland for Finland fifteen years ago.

Jack talked to the band members between sets. The young Finns in the pub were shy about speaking to Jack, although they did their share of staring. When the Irish folksingers went back to work, a couple of Finnish girls started talking to Jack. They didn’t seem all that brave; in fact, they were very tentative. He couldn’t tell what they expected, or what they wanted to happen. First one of them began to flirt with him; then she stopped flirting and the other one started.

“You can’t dance to this music,” the one who’d stopped flirting remarked.

“You look like you don’t need music to dance,” the one who’d started flirting said to Jack.

“That’s right,” he told her.

“I suppose you think I was suggesting something,” she said.

Jack wasn’t about to mess up his memory of Ingrid Moe by sleeping with either of the Finns, or with both of them. He thought he was hungry enough to eat a little something. But when he said good night to the Finnish girls, one of them remarked: “I guess we’re not what you’re looking for.”

“Actually,” Jack told them, “I’m looking for a couple of lesbians.” What a waste of a good end line—in O’Malley’s Irish pub in Helsinki, of all places!

He went to the lobby of the Torni and asked the concierge if there was still a restaurant called Salve. “It used to be popular with sailors,” Jack said.

“Not anymore,” the concierge told him. “And I’m not sure it’s the right place for Jack Burns to walk into. It’s a local place.” (Given the moviegoing crowd in O’Malley’s Irish pub, Jack was glad he’d registered at the Torni as Jimmy Stronach.)

Jack went up to his room and changed into what Leslie Oastler called his “tattoo-parlor clothes”—jeans and a black turtleneck. Mrs. Oastler had also packed Emma’s bomber jacket; the sleeves were way too long on Jack, but he loved it.

It still felt cold enough to snow when he walked into Salve—an old-fashioned restaurant, the kind of place where you got fairly ordinary but home-cooked meals. If, as he’d once imagined, Helsinki was a tough town in which to be afflicted with self-doubts, Jack could see what the concierge had meant about a movie star showing up at Salve. Surely some of the locals were moviegoers; maybe they just hadn’t liked Jack Burns’s movies.

The waitresses were as he’d remembered them—hard-worked and fairly long-of-tooth. Jack was thinking about the tough waitress who’d been married to Sami Salo, the scratcher; she would have fit right in twenty-eight years later. She’d been tough enough to call Alice “dearie,” Jack recalled—although he wondered if the bad feelings between them had really been about his mom putting Sami out of business.

Jack remembered Mrs. Sami Salo, if that’s who she was, as a short, stout woman whose clothes were too tight. She’d squinted whenever she took a step, as though her feet hurt her; her fat arms had jiggled.

He was trying not to look at anybody too closely—certainly not to meet anyone’s eye—when the waitress came up to his table, which needed wiping. She used a wet dishcloth. Jack tried not to look too hard at her, either. She was as thin as Mrs. Sami Salo had been fat, or maybe only Mrs. Salo’s arms had been fat. He couldn’t remember. The thin waitress had hunched shoulders and a coarse complexion, but there was a kind of tired prettiness in her long face and catlike eyes; when she stood facing Jack at his table, she cocked one hip to the side as if her legs were tired, too.

“I hope you’re meeting someone,” she said. “You didn’t come here alone, did you?”

“Isn’t it all right to come here alone?” he asked.

“It’s not all right for you to come here alone,” she told him. “It might be safer for you to come here as a girl.”

“I was hoping you could tell me where to get a tattoo,” Jack said. “This used to be the place to ask.”

“I’m the one to ask,” the waitress said. “Seriously—if you aren’t meeting someone here, you better be sure you leave with someone.”

“What about the tattoo?” he asked.

“Movie stars shouldn’t get tattooed,” she told him. “It ruins you for the nude scenes.”

“There’s makeup for that,” Jack said.

“You probably shouldn’t get tattooed alone, either,” the waitress said. “Are you here making a movie?”

“Actually, I’m looking for a couple of lesbians. But I’ll start with where to get a tattoo,” he told her. She smiled for the first time; she was missing an eyetooth, which was probably why she was disinclined to smile.

“If you’re alone, I’ll go home with you,” the waitress said. “You can’t do much with a couple of lesbians.” She could tell he was thinking about it—another close-up opportunity. But Jack was suddenly tired, and he wanted to hold on to the memory of Ingrid Moe a little longer. “I’m not really old enough to be your mother,” the waitress added. “I just look it.”

“It’s not that. I’m just too tired,” he told her. “I’ve been traveling.”

“If you end up here, you’ve been traveling, all right,” she said.

“I’ll have the Arctic char, please,” Jack said.

“What are you drinking?”

“I don’t drink,” he told her.

“I’ll bring you a beer,” the waitress said. “You can just pretend you’re drinking it.”

She was wise to do that, because the locals kept toasting him—all through his dinner. The toasts were somehow sinister, even hostile—more challenging than friendly. Jack would raise his beer glass and pretend to swallow. They didn’t seem to notice that his glass stayed full, or they didn’t care. If there were Jack Burns fans in Finland, they had a way of masking their affection.

Jack didn’t go home with the waitress. She was nice about it. She made him wait at the table while she called him a taxi. Only when the cab was parked outside would she release him; she even walked him to the door, holding his arm the whole way.

“My name is Marianne. There are much more difficult names in Finland,” she said.

“I’ll bet there are, Marianne.”

She gave him a black-and-white business card; it was a little scary. The place was called The Duck’s Tattoo. There was an excellent drawing of Donald Duck, but he was smoking a blunt—a cigar filled with marijuana. His eyes were fried and he looked raving mad. Someone had wrapped a snake around the reefer-smoking duck, more in the manner of a straitjacket than a shawl.

There was a phone number written on the back of the business card. “That’s my number,” Marianne told Jack. “I’ve got a couple of tattoos I could show you, if you’re ever not too tired.”

“Thank you, Marianne.”

“The tattooist you want to see is Diego,” she said.

“Not a Finnish name, I guess.”

“Diego’s Italian, but he was born in Finland,” Marianne said. “He’s been in business here for fifteen years.”

The Duck’s Tattoo was on Kalevankatu—about a ten-minute walk from the Torni, the concierge said the next morning. The concierge also sent Jack to a gym near the hotel, Kuntokeskus Motivus. (“Call it Motivus for short,” the concierge had recommended.) It was clean, with lots of free weights, but Jack was distracted during his workout by a pregnancy-aerobics class. The bouncing women were doing dangerous-looking things.