Until I Find You

Dear Jack,

Richard Gladstein loved your script of The Slush-Pile Reader. He wants to discuss possible directors with you. Richard has the crazy—maybe not so crazy—idea of using Wild Bill Vanvleck. Call me. Call Richard.

Bob

Jack was so excited that he called Richard Gladstein at home, waking him up. (It was very early in the morning in L.A.)

Wild Bill Vanvleck was in his late sixties, maybe his early seventies. He’d moved back to Amsterdam from Beverly Hills. No one in Hollywood had asked him to direct a picture for a couple of years. The Remake Monster had sold his ugly mansion on Loma Vista Drive. Something had gone wrong with his whippets. Jack remembered the skinny little dogs running free in the mansion, slipping and falling on the hardwood floors.

Something bad had happened to Wild Bill’s chef and gardener, the Surinamese couple. Someone had drowned in Vanvleck’s swimming pool, Richard Gladstein told Jack; Richard couldn’t remember if it was the child- size woman from Suriname or her miniature husband. (Possibly the drowning victim had been one of the whippets!)

So The Mad Dutchman was back in Amsterdam, where he was living with a much younger woman. Vanvleck had a hit series on Dutch TV; from Richard Gladstein’s description, Wild Bill had remade Miami Vice in Amsterdam’s red-light district.

Richard talked about the difficulty of bringing Miramax around to the idea of hiring William Vanvleck to direct The Slush-Pile Reader—that is, assuming Richard and Jack had a good meeting with The Mad Dutchman. But the idea, Gladstein and Jack agreed, had possibilities. (Bob Bookman had already overnighted Jack’s screenplay to Wild Bill.)

Richard and Jack also talked about the idea of Lucia Delvecchio in the Michele Maher role. “She’d have to lose about twenty pounds,” Jack told Richard.

“She’d love to!” Gladstein said. There was little doubt of that, Jack thought. There were a lot of women in Hollywood who wanted to lose twenty pounds—they just needed a reason.

The more he thought about Wild Bill Vanvleck, the better Jack liked the idea. What had always been wrong with The Remake Monster’s material was the material itself—namely, Wild Bill’s screenplays. Not only how he’d ripped them off from other, better material, but how he went too far; he always pushed the parody past reasonable limits. If you’re irreverent about everything, the audience is left with nothing or no one to like. Conversely, there was sympathy in Emma’s story—both for the too-small slush-pile reader and for the porn star and bad screenwriter with the big penis. Vanvleck had never directed a sympathetic script before.

Jack wished he could ask Emma what she thought of the idea, but he didn’t think that his working with Wild Bill Vanvleck as a director would necessarily make Emma roll over in her grave.

Jack went back out in the rain. He passed the Casa Rosso, where they showed porn films and had live-sex shows—more advice-giving, Jack had once believed. He wasn’t tempted to see a show, not even as research for The Slush-Pile Reader.

He walked once more to the Warmoesstraat police station, but Nico was out working in the red-light district. A couple of young cops, both in uniform, told Jack that they thought William Vanvleck’s TV series about homicide policemen was reasonably authentic. Wild Bill had spent time in the Warmoesstraat station; he’d gone out in the district with real cops on the beat. It was a favorable sign that real policemen actually liked a TV series about cops.

Jack worked out at a gym on the Rokin. It was a good gym, but the music was too loud and relentless; it made him feel he was rushing, though he was taking his time. His appointment with Femke, which Nico had arranged, wasn’t until four o’clock that afternoon. He was in no hurry. When Jack returned to the Grand from the gym, Nico Oudejans had left a package at the reception desk—a videocassette of Vanvleck’s homicide series.

Jack showered and shaved, put on some decent clothes, and went out again. The address of Marinus and Jacob Poortvliet’s law firm was on the Singel. Femke, their mother, was retired. Jack saw at once how easy it had been for his mom to confuse him into thinking that Femke occupied a prostitute’s room on the Bergstraat. The Poortvliets’ law office was roughly halfway between the Bergstraat and the Korsjespoortsteeg—virtually around the corner from those streets where the more upscale prostitutes were in business.

Some small details about the office were familiar; both the cars on the Singel and the pedestrians on the sidewalk were visible from the leather reading chair and the big leather couch. On the walls of the office, a few of the landscapes were also familiar. Jack even remembered the rug, an Oriental.

Femke was late; Jack talked with her sons. Conservatively dressed gentlemen in their fifties, they’d been university students in 1970. But even people of their generation remembered the controversial organist, William Burns, who’d played for the prostitutes in the Oude Kerk in the early-morning hours. University students had made the organ concerts in the Old Church a favorite among their late-night outings.

“Some of us considered your father an activist, a social reformer. After all, he expressed a profound sympathy for the prostitutes’ plight,” Marinus told Jack.

“Others took a view that was common among some of the prostitutes—I’m referring to those women who were not in William’s audience at the Old Church. William was a Holy Roller in their eyes; converting the prostitutes meant nothing less than steering them away from prostitution,” Jacob explained.

“But he played great,” Marinus said. “No matter what you thought of William, he was a terrific organist.”

The Poortvliets had a family-law practice; they not only took divorce and child-custody cases, but they also settled inheritance disputes and were engaged in estate planning. What had made William Burns’s case difficult was that he was still a citizen of Scotland, although he had a visa that permitted him to work in Holland for a limited period of time. Alice, who was a Canadian citizen, had no such visa—but in the case of foreigners who were apprenticed to Dutch tattoo artists, the police allowed them several months to earn a tax-free living. After that, they were pressured to leave or pay Dutch taxes.

There could be no child-custody case in the Dutch courts, because Jack’s mom and dad weren’t Dutch citizens. As outrageously as his mother was exposing Jack to her new life as a prostitute, his father had no means to claim custody of the boy. Alice, however, could be made to leave the country—chiefly on the grounds that, as a prostitute, she had repeatedly engaged in sex with underage boys. And she was a magnet for more widespread condemnation within the prostitute community. (As if the hymn-singing and prayer-chanting in her window and doorway weren’t inflammatory enough, Alice had dragged her four-year-old through the district.)

“You were carried, day and night, in the arms of that giantess among the whores,” Marinus Poortvliet told Jack.

“Half the time you were asleep, or as inert as groceries,” his brother, Jacob, said.

“The prostitutes called you ‘the whole week’s shopping,’ because in that woman’s arms you looked like a bag of groceries that could feed a family for a week,” Marinus explained.

“So Dutch law had the means to deport my mom, but not to gain custody of me for my dad,” Jack said, just to be sure. The two sons nodded.

That was when Femke arrived, and Jack once again felt intimidated by her—not because she was a fearsome and different kind of prostitute, but because she struck him as a great initiator. (No matter what experience you thought you’d had, Femke could initiate you into something you’d never known or even imagined.)

“When I look at you in your movies,” she said to Jack, without bothering to say hello, “I see someone as pretty and talented as your father, but not half so open—so utterly unguarded. You’re very much guarded, aren’t you, Jack Burns?” she asked, seating herself in the leather reading chair. And Jack had once thought she’d taken up that position in her sidewalk window to attract customers off the street!

“Thank you for seeing me,” Jack said to her.

“Very much guarded, isn’t he?” she asked her sons, not expecting so much as a nod or a shake of the head from either of them. It wasn’t a real question; Femke had already decided upon the