Until I Find You

she was imagining to words.

They went to the Vanity Fair party at Morton’s next; Erica got them there somehow. Jack remembered how long he and Emma had waited to get into that party the night he’d been nominated but didn’t win the Oscar. It makes a difference when you win. Their limo driver waved the gold, bald, naked man out the window and they were swiftly ushered through the traffic. Hugh Hefner (among others) appeared to have arrived before them; probably Hugh had come early because he hadn’t been at the Shrine. The Playboy founding publisher had those twins with him—Sandy and Mandy.

Miss Wurtz was more incensed at Hef than she’d been at the anti-pornography people. “What does that dirty old man think he’s doing with those young girls?” Caroline said to Erica and Jack.

Rob Lowe and Mike Meyers and Dennis Miller were all talking about something, but they stopped the second Jack got near them. When that happened to him around men, Jack couldn’t help but think that they’d been talking about him as a girl. As it happened, Jack was on his way to the men’s room again— although this time he’d left his Academy Award with Erica and Miss Wurtz.

They went next to the Miramax party at the Polo Lounge in the Beverly Hills Hotel. Jack knew that Richard and Wild Bill would be there; he just wanted to be with friends. Miss Wurtz once more avoided making any prizefighter references to Harvey Weinstein.

Caroline had a little too much champagne. Jack had a beer—a green bottle of Heineken, which looked especially green alongside the gold of his Oscar. (He couldn’t remember when he’d last had a whole beer—maybe when he was a college student.)

Then there was a breakfast party in another area of the Beverly Hills Hotel. They went to that, too. It must have started at three or four in the morning. Roger Ebert was there; he was eating his breakfast on a bed, which Jack found peculiar. Jack was nice to him, although Roger had savaged The Slush-Pile Reader. Roger’s wife and daughter were very nice; they informed Miss Wurtz that they’d liked the movie. It pleased Jack to think that he and Emma might have caused an argument in the Ebert family.

It was about 5:00 A.M. when Jack told Miss Wurtz that he was tired and wanted to go to bed. “We can go back to our hotel, Jack,” she told him, “but you can’t go to bed. Not until you tell me about the second time in Amsterdam.” She’d had it on her mind the whole night, The Wurtz went on to say. She knew she couldn’t sleep until she heard the story.

Jack told Erica that they had to leave, and she rode with them in the limo back to the Four Seasons. On a side street in Beverly Hills, they got stuck behind a garbage truck—the only traffic they encountered at that time on a Monday morning. The smell of the garbage wafted over them in their limousine, as if to remind Jack—even with his newly won Oscar in hand—that there are some things you can’t escape, and they will find you.

Jack was okay telling Miss Wurtz about the Amsterdam business; only the end of the story was difficult. Dr. Garcia would have been proud of him—no tears, no shouting. When Jack told Caroline how his heart wasn’t in that first meeting with Richard Gladstein and William Vanvleck—that he kept thinking about the other William—the southern California sun was streaming in the open windows of the living room of the two-bedroom suite at the Four Seasons. Miss Wurtz and Jack were seated on the couch in their matching white terry-cloth bathrobes—their bare feet on the glass-topped coffee table, where the Oscar gleamed. Caroline’s toenails were painted a rose-pink color. The sunlight seemed especially bright on her toenails, and on the Oscar—and on the lustrous black piano, which was shining like a pool of oil.

“Don’t look at my feet, Jack,” Miss Wurtz said. “My feet are the oldest part of me. I must have been born feet first.”

But Jack Burns was miles away, in the dark of night—the streetlights reflecting in the Herengracht canal. Richard Gladstein and Wild Bill Vanvleck and Jack had been talking in the restaurant called Zuid Zeeland, and Wild Bill’s much younger girlfriend—Anneke, the anchorwoman—was looking restless and bored. (How much fun is it to be young and green-eyed and beautiful, and have three men talking to one another and ignoring you—especially when they’re talking about how to make a movie from a novel you haven’t read?)

As little as Jack’s heart was in it, he saw that he and Richard and Wild Bill were all on the same page; they seemed to agree about what needed tweaking in the script, and about the tone the film must have. Richard’s eyes kept closing—he was falling asleep because of his jet lag. Wild Bill was teasing him, to the effect that Richard was not allowed to fall asleep before he signed the check. “Producers pay the bills!” Vanvleck was chanting; he was a man who loved his red wine.

Out on the Herengracht, Richard woke up a little in the damp night air. It seemed inevitable to Jack now that Wild Bill would suggest a stroll through the red-light district, but it took him by surprise at the time. When they walked past the first few girls in their windows and doorways, Jack could tell that Richard was wide awake. Anneke was still bored. Jack had the feeling that Wild Bill took all his out-of-town friends on a tour of the red-light district; after all, it was the homicide territory of his TV series and he knew the district well. (Almost as well as Jack knew it, but Jack didn’t let on that he’d ever been there before.)

Anneke livened up a little, most noticeably when she observed how the prostitutes in their windows and doorways recognized Jack Burns as frequently as they recognized her. As an attractive anchorwoman, she was a famous fixture on Dutch television—but no more famous than Jack was. And not only was Jack a movie star; he had the added advantage of Nico Oudejans telling all the whores in the district to be on the lookout for him.

“You cocktease, Jack!” one of the transvestite prostitutes called out; she was Brazilian, probably. (Those chicks with dicks were out to get him.) This captured Anneke’s attention, but Wild Bill had downed a couple of bottles of red wine; he didn’t notice. The Mad Dutchman was lecturing Richard nonstop.

Suddenly Jack was irritated by it. Vanvleck was showing off the red-light district as if he’d invented it, as if he’d hired all the girls himself. Poor Richard was fighting off his jet lag and the overwhelming seediness of the place. By all counts, it had been a forgettable night for Anneke.

Well, Jack thought—I’ll show them something they’ll all remember! “This is nothing,” Jack announced as they circled the Oudekerksplein. He began to lead them across the Warmoesstraat, out of the red-light district. “You haven’t seen anything until you’ve seen Els.”

“Els?” Vanvleck said.

“Where are we going?” Richard asked. (They were walking away from the hotel; that was all he knew.)

“Els is the oldest working prostitute in Amsterdam,” Jack told them. “She’s an old friend.”

“She is?” Wild Bill said, stumbling along.

Jack led them across the Damrak. It was now late at night. He was sure that Els would have gone to bed. Petra, her colleague who was only sixty-one, might be sitting in the second-floor window. Or maybe Petra would have gone home and gone to bed, too. In either case, Jack would wake up Els—just to show Wild Bill and Richard and Anneke that he had a history in Amsterdam that ran a little deeper than a Dutch TV series.

When they came into the narrow Sint Jacobsstraat, Wild Bill was staggering. The street could seem a little menacing at night. Jack saw Richard look over his shoulder a couple of times, and Anneke took Jack’s arm and walked close beside him.

To Jack’s surprise, Els—not Petra—was in the window. (“Some drunk woke me up shouting,” she would tell Jack later. “Petra had gone home, and I felt like staying up. Call it my intuition, Jackie.”)

When Jack spotted her, he started waving. “Els is in her seventies,” he said to Wild Bill, who was staring up at Els in her red-lit window as if he had seen one of Hell’s own avenging spirits—a harpy from the netherworld, an infernal Fury.

“She’s how old?” Richard asked.

“Think of your grandmother,” Jack told him.

“Jackie!” Els shouted, blowing kisses. “My little boy has come back again!” she once more announced to the Sint Jacobsstraat.

Jack blew kisses to her; he waved and waved. That was when he lost it—when Els started waving back to him.

It is impossible that Jack could have “remembered” his mother lifting him above the ship’s rail as they sailed from the dock in Rotterdam; impossible that he actually recalled waving to Els, twenty-