Until I Find You

unfortunate film.)

“I’m weird, you mean,” he said to her.

“But you bring it off. You’re a natural at being weird,” Michele told him.

Jack didn’t say anything. She was fishing for something that had fallen to the bottom of her second glass of white wine, which was half empty. It was a ring that had slipped off her finger.

“I’ve lost so much weight for this date,” she said. “I’m two sizes smaller than I was a month ago. I keep moving my rings to bigger fingers.”

Jack used a spoon to scoop her ring out of her wineglass. The ring had slipped off the middle finger of her right hand; the middle finger of her left hand was even smaller, Michele explained, but the ring was too small to fit either index finger.

It was a somewhat old-fashioned-looking ring for a woman her age to wear. A little clunky—a big sapphire, wreathed by diamonds. “It has some sentimental value, this ring?” Jack asked her.

Michele Maher knocked over her wineglass and burst into tears. Against Jack’s advice, she’d ordered a pizza—not pasta. The pizza at Jones had a pretty thin crust; Jack didn’t think the pizza had a rat’s ass of a chance of absorbing the alcohol in her.

It had been her mother’s ring—hence the bursting into tears. Her mother had died of skin cancer when Michele was still in medical school. Michele had instantly developed a skin ailment of her own; she called it stress- related eczema. She’d specialized in dermatology for personal reasons.

Her father was remarried, to a much younger woman. “The gold digger is my age,” Michele said. She’d ordered a third glass of white wine, and she hadn’t touched her pizza.

“You remember my parents’ apartment in New York, don’t you, Jack?” she asked. She had placed her dead mother’s unwearable ring on the edge of her plate, where it seemed poised to eat the pizza. (The ring honestly looked more interested in eating the pizza than Michele did.)

“Of course,” Jack answered. How could he forget that Park Avenue apartment? The beautiful rooms, the beautiful parents, the beautiful dog! And the Picasso, toilet-seat-high in the guest-room bathroom, where it virtually dared you to pee on it.

“That apartment was supposed to be my inheritance,” Michele said. “Now the gold digger is going to get it.”

“Oh.”

“Why didn’t you sleep with me, Jack?” she asked. “How could you have proposed that we masturbate together? Mutual masturbation is much more intimate than having conventional sex, isn’t it?”

“I thought I had the clap,” he admitted. “I didn’t want you to get it.”

“The clap from whom? You weren’t seeing anyone else, were you?”

“I was sleeping with Mrs. Stackpole, the dishwasher. You probably don’t remember her, Michele.”

“Those women who worked in the kitchen were all old and fat!” she cried.

“Yes, they were,” Jack said. “Well—Mrs. Stackpole was, anyway.”

“You could have slept with me, but you slept with an old, fat dishwasher?” she asked, in a ringing voice. (She said dishwasher the way she’d said gold digger.)

“I was sleeping with Mrs. Stackpole before I knew I could sleep with you,” Jack reminded her.

“And your relationship with Emma Oastler—what was that, exactly?” Michele asked.

Here we go, Jack thought; here comes “too weird,” and all the rest of it. “Emma and I were just roommates—we lived together, but we never had sex.”

“That’s so hard to imagine,” Michele said, toying with the ring on the edge of her plate. “You mean you just masturbated together?”

“Not even that,” he told her.

“What did you do? You must have done something,” Michele said.

“We kissed, I touched her breasts, she held my penis.”

In reaching for her wineglass, Michele’s elbow came down on the edge of her plate; her mother’s ring went flying. The ring landed on an adjacent table, startling two models who were on a red-wine diet.

One of the models picked up the ring and looked at Jack. “Oh, you shouldn’t have,” she said, slipping the ring onto one of her pretty fingers.

“I’m sorry—it’s her mother’s ring,” Jack told the model; she pouted at him while Michele looked mortified.

“You don’t remember me, do you, Jack?” the other model asked.

Jack got up and went over to their table, holding his hand out to the model who was still wearing Michele’s ring. He was trying to buy a little time, struggling to remember who the other model was.

“I was afraid you’d forgotten me,” he told her. (It was one of Billy Rainbow’s lines—Jack had always liked it.)

It was not the answer the model had been expecting. Jack still couldn’t place her, or else he’d never met her before in his life and she was just playing a game with him.

The model who had Michele’s ring was playing another kind of game with Jack; she was trying to put the ring on one of his fingers. “Who would have thought Jack Burns had such little hands?” she was saying. (The ring was a loose fit on his left pinkie; Jack went back to his table wearing it.)

“Jack Burns has a little penis,” the other model said.

Jack guessed that she did know him, but he still didn’t remember her. Michele just sat there looking glassy-eyed. “I don’t feel very well,” she told Jack. “I think I’m drunk, if you want to know the truth.”

“You should try to eat something,” he said.

“Don’t you know that you can’t tell a doctor what to do, Jack?”

“Come on. I’ll take you back to the hotel,” he said.

“I want to see where you live!” Michele said plaintively. “It must be fabulous.”

“It’s a hole in the wall,” the model who knew Jack said. “Don’t tell me you’ve actually moved out of that nookie house on Entrada, Jack.”

“We’re much closer to your hotel than we are to where I live,” he told Michele.

“Did you sleep with that girl?” Michele asked him, when they were back in the Audi. “You didn’t look like you knew her.”

“I don’t remember sleeping with her,” Jack said.

“What’s a nookie house?” she asked him.

“It’s slang for brothel,” Jack explained.

“Do you really live in a hole in the wall on La Strada?” Michele asked.

“Yes, I do,” he admitted. “It’s on Entrada.”

“But why do you live in a hole in the wall? Why wouldn’t Jack Burns live in a mansion?”

“I don’t really know where I want to live, Michele.”

“My Gawd,” she said again.

Michele fell sound asleep on the Hollywood Freeway. Jack had to carry her into the lobby of the Sheraton Universal. He didn’t know her room number; he couldn’t find her room key in her purse. He carried her into the bar, where he was sure he would find a few of her drunken colleagues. Jack hoped that one of them would be sober enough to recognize Michele.

Another woman dermatologist came to Jack’s assistance; she was a homely, caustic person, but at least she hadn’t been drinking. Together they got Michele to her room. The other doctor’s name was Sandra; she was from somewhere in Michigan. Sandra must have assumed that Jack was sleeping with Michele, because she proceeded to undress Michele in front of him.