Until I Find You

On his way to The Duck’s Tattoo, Jack passed a porn shop. One of the magazines in the window was a German one called Schwangere Girls. All the women were pregnant; more bouncing women doing dangerous-looking things. Pregnancy seemed to have made itself the unwanted theme of Jack’s day.

Helsinki struck him as a warren of construction sites. He found himself in a part of the city that had been built by the Russians a hundred years before. The Duck’s Tattoo was opposite the former Russian Army Hospital. It had been a sailors’ neighborhood, with lots of sailors’ pubs and restaurants—like Salve used to be—but the neighborhood was growing trendier by the day, Diego later told Jack.

Diego was a small man with friendly eyes and a goatee; his forearms were completely covered with tattoos. One was a rather formal portrait of a woman, almost like a photograph. Another was an entirely less formal-looking woman, who was naked; in fact, she was naked with a duck. Diego had other tattoos, but the naked woman with the duck was the one Jack would remember best.

He liked Diego, who’d never met Daughter Alice but had heard of her. Diego had three children and was not a regular participant at the tattoo conventions. He’d studied with Verber in Berlin; he’d worked in Cape Town, South Africa. He was planning a trip to Thailand to get a handmade tattoo by a monk in a monastery. “A chest tattoo,” he called it. He was inclined to “big works,” Diego said—both getting them and doing them. He’d recently copied a whole movie poster onto someone’s back.

Diego had two apprentices working with him. One of them was a muscleman in camouflage pants and a black Jack Daniel’s T-shirt. The other was a blond woman named Taru. Evidently Taru did the piercing; she had a silver stud in her tongue. There was another guy in The Duck’s Tattoo—a friend of Diego’s named Nipa, who told Jack a fairly involved story about accidentally dropping a paperback novel in a toilet. It was his favorite novel, Nipa said, and he was trying to figure out a way to dry it.

Jack talked to Diego about the relationship between sailors and tattooing. Diego had his first boat when he was just fourteen. The flash in The Duck’s Tattoo was impressive: Indian chiefs, dragons, skulls, birds, Harley engines, and many cartoon characters, like The Joker—and ducks, of course, lots of edgy ducks.

Diego admitted he wasn’t much of a moviegoer—he mentioned his three children again—but Taru, the piercer, and the muscleman in the Jack Daniel’s T-shirt had seen all of Jack’s films. (Nipa told Jack he was more of a book person than a movie person, as one might surmise from the toilet accident.)

“I don’t suppose you ever tattooed an organist named William Burns,” Jack said to Diego. “Tattoo artists call him The Music Man. I guess most of his tattoos are music. He might be a full-body.”

“Might be!” Diego said, laughing. “I never tattooed him—I never met the guy—but from what I hear, The Music Man hasn’t got a whole lot of skin left!”

When Jack got back to his room at the Hotel Torni, he tried to write a letter to Michele Maher. As a dermatologist, maybe she would know why some people with full-body tattoos felt cold. It was a strange way to start a letter to someone he’d not written or spoken to for fifteen years, and quite possibly the full-body people only thought they felt cold. What if the part about feeling cold was all in their minds and had nothing to do with their skin?

Tattoo artists themselves didn’t agree about the full-body types; Alice had believed that most full-bodies felt cold, but some of the tattooists Jack met at his mom’s memorial service told him that many full-bodies felt normal.

“The ones who feel cold were either cold or crazy to begin with,” North Dakota Dan had said.

But how else could Jack begin a letter to Michele Maher after fifteen years of silence?

Dear Michele,

Here I am in Helsinki, looking for a couple of lesbians. What’s up with you?

How was that for too weird? Jack crumpled up the piece of stationery. Perhaps a more general beginning would be better.

Dear Michele,

Guess what? My mother died. It turns out she lied to me about my father—maybe about a lot of other things. I’m in Europe, where I once believed my dad had slept with just about everyone he met, but it turns out that my mom was the one who was sleeping with everybody—among them a twelve- or thirteen-year-old boy and a couple of lesbians.

Interesting, huh? The things you think you know!

Jack crumpled up another page. He was beginning to believe that the only way he could communicate with Michele Maher was if he developed a skin problem. But wait! Hadn’t she written to him to wish him luck on his adaptation of The Slush-Pile Reader? Michele was an Emma Oastler fan! Perhaps a more literary approach would impress her.

Dear Michele,

Thank you for your letter. Yes, I was close to Emma Oastler, although we never actually had sex. Emma just held my penis. And of course, as with any adaptation, I have had to take some liberties with her novel. The name of the porn star, for example—I don’t exactly look like a Miguel Santiago, do I? And please don’t think there will be any actual porn-film footage in The Slush-Pile Reader; it won’t be that kind of movie. The pornography will be sort of implied. Besides, I have what I’m told is a rather small (or smallish) penis.

Jack couldn’t write a letter to Michele Maher. He was too weird for Michele, or for anyone else who wasn’t desperately lonely or crazy or a kid or grief-stricken (or otherwise depressed) or cheating on her husband or tattooed (with an octopus on her ass) or an old lady!

Besides, he had used up what pathetically little stationery the Hotel Torni provided for guests. Jack blamed the day on the agitation the pregnancy-aerobics class had caused him—not to mention the added stress of seeing Schwangere Girls. He was even tempted to go buy the magazine, but what he really wanted—and this truly disturbed him—was to have sex with a nice pregnant woman. (Like a wife, Jack was thinking; like someone who was going to have his baby; like Michele Maher, he kept hoping.)

More realistically, because he wasn’t hungry or too tired, Jack could try his luck with whomever he might pick up downstairs—in O’Malley’s—or he could call the waitress at Salve. But by the time Marianne got off work, Jack probably would be too tired. And the very idea of looking for a brave girl in O’Malley’s Irish pub was humiliating.

There was still some daylight left in the sky when Jack called Sibelius Academy, the music college, and asked if there was anyone who might be able to tell him the whereabouts of two of their graduates in the early 1970s. The matter was complicated. Not only did it take the college a little time to connect him with someone who spoke English; Jack didn’t even know the last names of the graduates. (Talk about taking a stab in the dark!)

“I know it sounds crazy,” Jack said, “but Hannele was a cellist and Ritva was an organist, and I think they were a couple.”

“A couple?” the woman who spoke English said on the phone. She had the doubting tone of voice of a knowledgeable bookseller who’s convinced that the title of the book you’re asking for is not the correct one.

“Yes, I mean a lesbian couple,” he said.

The woman sighed. “I suppose you’re a journalist,” she said. Her tone of voice was worse than doubting now; she couldn’t have made journalist sound any nastier if she’d said rapist.

“No, I’m Jack Burns—the actor,” he told her. “I believe these women were students of my father, William Burns—the organist. I met them when I was a child. They also knew my mother.”

“Well, well,” the woman said. “Am I truly speaking with the Jack Burns—I mean really?”

“Yes, really.”

“Well, well,” she said again. “Hannele and Ritva aren’t as famous as you are, Mr. Burns, but they’re rather famous in Finland.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really,” the woman said. “It would be hard for them to hide in Helsinki.