Until I Find You

Jack might have had, or still had, with the woman.

This juvenile behavior should have alerted him to the fact that she was clearly younger than she’d told him she was—not that Jack shouldn’t have guessed her real age for other reasons. But he did have difficulties with math.

She got into the G’s before Jack said, “That’s enough,” and took his address book away from her; that’s when the trouble really started.

“Elena Garcia,” the girl had just said. “Your cleaning lady, or former cleaning lady? You definitely fucked her.”

Elena Garcia—Dr. Garcia—was Jack’s psychiatrist. He had never had sex with her. For five years, Dr. Garcia had not once been a love interest—but Jack had never depended on anyone to the degree that he depended on her. Elena Garcia knew more about Jack Burns than anyone had ever known—including Emma Oastler.

Jack had often called Dr. Garcia in tears, not always but sometimes in the middle of the night. He’d called her from Cannes—once when he was at a party at the Hotel du Cap. That same day Jack had pushed a female photographer, a stalker paparazzo, off a chartered yacht; he’d had to pay an outrageous fine.

Another time, he banged some bimbo on the beach of the Hotel Martinez. She said she was an actress, but she turned out to be one of those Croisette dog-walkers; she’d been arrested for fucking on the beach before. And Jack should have won the Palme d’Or for bad behavior for the fracas he got into in that glass-and-concrete eyesore, the Palais des Festivals. This happened after the evening’s red-carpet promenade. Jack was on a narrow staircase leading to one of the Palais’s upstairs rooms. Some journalist shoved him into one of those thugs who comprise the festival’s security staff; the security guy thought that Jack had purposely shoved him, which led to Jack’s impromptu lateral drop. Chenko would have been proud of Jack for the perfect execution of his move—Coaches Clum, Hudson, and Shapiro, too—but the incident was in all the papers. The security thug broke his collarbone, and Jack got another stiff fine. The weaselly French!

Lastly, from his ocean-front suite at the Carlton, Jack poured a whole bottle of Taittinger (chilled) onto that former agent Lawrence. The fink was giving Jack the finger from the terrace. Lawrence was just the kind of asshole you ran into at Cannes. Jack hated Cannes.

From Dr. Garcia’s point of view, Jack’s behavior was only marginally better in Venice, Deauville, and Toronto—the three film festivals where Richard Gladstein, Wild Bill Vanvleck, Lucia Delvecchio, and Jack promoted The Slush-Pile Reader. (A recent headline in Variety—LOTS OF LIBIDO ON THE LIDO—could have been written about Jack Burns.)

They had a very good run with what Jack would usually call Emma’s movie; careerwise, it may have been Jack’s best year. They shot the film in the fall of ’98 and took it to those festivals in August and September of ’99—before the premieres in New York and London near the end of that year.

There was the unfortunate incident with Lucia Delvecchio in the Hotel des Bains in Venice; she’d had too much to drink, and bitterly regretted having slept with Jack. But no one knew—not even Richard or Wild Bill. And no one except Lucia’s husband, who was not in Venice, would have cared. Bad things happened in that languid lagoon.

“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” Jack told Lucia. “The whole city is sinking. Visconti shot Death in Venice in the Hotel des Bains. I think he knew what he was doing.”

But it was mostly Jack’s fault. Lucia had been drunk; he knew she was married. That precipitated another call to Dr. Garcia. He called her from the Hotel Normandie in Deauville, too. (It wasn’t Lucia that time; worse, it was an older member of the jury.)

“The older-woman thing again?” Dr. Garcia had asked Jack on the phone.

“I guess so,” he’d told her.

Jack was with Mrs. Oastler at the Toronto film festival when they screened The Slush-Pile Reader in Roy Thomson Hall—a packed house, a triumphant night. It was gratifying to show the film in Emma’s hometown. But Leslie had a new girlfriend, a blonde, who didn’t like Jack. The blonde wanted him to remove all his clothes from Mrs. Oastler’s house. Jack didn’t think Leslie cared whether he left his clothes in her house or not, but the blonde wanted him (and his things) gone.

Jack was in Mrs. Oastler’s familiar kitchen when the blonde handed him the two photographs of his mother’s naked torso and the Until I find you tattoo. “Those are Leslie’s,” he explained. “I have two photos; she has the other two.”

“Take them,” the blonde told him. “Your mother’s dead, Jack. Leslie doesn’t want to look at her breasts anymore.”

“I don’t want to look at them anymore, either,” Jack said, but he took the photos. Now he had all four—these in addition to that photograph of Emma naked at seventeen.

Mrs. Oastler’s mansion, as Jack used to think of it, was different with the blonde there. Leslie’s bedroom door was usually closed; it was hard to imagine Mrs. Oastler closing her bathroom door, too, but maybe the blonde had taught her how to do it.

That trip to Toronto, Jack resisted sleeping with Bonnie Hamilton. She wanted to sell him an apartment in a new condo being built in Rosedale. “For when you tire of Los Angeles,” Bonnie told him. But Toronto wasn’t his town, notwithstanding that he had long been tired of L.A.

When he was in Toronto, Jack had a less than heart-to-heart talk with Caroline Wurtz. She was disappointed in him; she thought he should be looking for his father. Jack couldn’t tell her half of what he’d learned on his return trip to the North Sea. He was in no shape to talk about it. It was all he could do to tell the story to Dr. Garcia, and too often he couldn’t talk to her, either. He tried, but the words wouldn’t come—or he would start to shout or cry.

It was Dr. Garcia’s opinion that Jack shouted and cried too much. “Especially the crying—it’s simply indecent for a man,” she said. “You really should work on that.” To that end, she encouraged Jack to tell her what had happened to him in chronological order. “Begin with that awful trip you took with your mother,” Dr. Garcia instructed him. “Don’t tell me what you now know about that trip. Tell me what you thought happened at the time. Begin with what you first imagined were your memories. And try not to jump ahead more than is absolutely necessary. In other words, go easy on the foreshadowing, Jack.” Later, after he began—with Copenhagen, when he was four—Dr. Garcia would frequently say: “Try not to interject so much. I know you’re not a writer, but just try to stick to the story.”

It hurt Jack’s feelings to hear her say that he wasn’t a writer; it felt especially unfair after his not- inconsiderable contributions to Emma’s screenplay of The Slush-Pile Reader.

And to recite out loud the story of his life—that is, coherently and in chronological order—would take years! Dr. Garcia knew that; she was in no hurry. She took one look at what a mess Jack was and knew only that she had to find a way to make him stop shouting and crying.

“It’s woefully apparent that you can’t tell me your life story without everyone in the waiting room hearing you,” she said. “Believe me, it’s only tolerable to listen to you if you calm down.”

“Where does it end?” Jack asked Dr. Garcia, when he’d been spilling his life story aloud for four, going on five, years.

“Well, it ends with looking for your father—or at least finding out what happened to him,” Dr. Garcia said. “But you’re not ready for that part, not until you can spit out all the rest of it. The end of it, Jack, is where you find him—that’s the last place you have to go. You’re not through with traveling.”

Jack too hastily concluded that if his retelling of his life were a book, for example, his finding his father would be the last chapter.

“I doubt it,” Dr. Garcia said. “Maybe your penultimate chapter, if you’re lucky. When you find him, Jack, you’re going to learn something you didn’t know before, aren’t you? I trust that the learning part will take an additional chapter.”

And the whole thing had to have a name, too, didn’t it? There had to be a title to the story of his life, which Jack was reciting—with such restraint and in chronological order—to his psychiatrist. But Jack knew the name of his life story before he started telling it; the first day he went to see Dr. Garcia, when he’d been unable to tell her anything without shouting or crying, Jack knew that his mother’s Until I find you tattoo had been her crowning deception. Certainly she’d been