Until I Find You

“You have a hard-on, Jack,” the girl said, touching him.

“I get a hard-on in my sleep,” he told her, as if the episode with that transvestite dancer at the Trump had been a dress rehearsal. “It’s no big deal.”

“It’s big enough,” the young woman said, kissing him on the mouth; she didn’t come close to kissing like Claudia. But it took no small amount of will power on Jack’s part to stop touching her. To make her stop, he had to let her know that he knew who she was.

“What would your mother say about this?” Jack asked Claudia’s daughter. “The very idea of you having sex with me! That wouldn’t make your mom happy, would it?”

“My mom’s dead,” the girl told him. “I’m here to haunt you—it’s what she would have wanted.”

“I’m sorry your mother’s dead,” he replied. “But what would she have wanted?”

“I don’t believe in ghosts,” Claudia’s daughter said. “I’m here to haunt you because I don’t believe that Mom can do it.”

“What’s your name?” Jack asked her.

“Sally,” the girl said. “After Sally Bowles, the part in Cabaret Mom always wanted—the part she told me you wanted, too. Only you probably would have been better at it, Mom said.”

“What did your mom die of, Sally? When did she die?”

“Cancer, a couple of years ago,” Sally said. “I had to wait till I was eighteen—so it would be legal to haunt you.”

She looked like a woman in her early twenties, but then her mother had always looked older than she was, too.

“Are you really eighteen, Sally?”

“Just like Lucy. Wasn’t Lucy eighteen?” Sally asked him.

“I guess everyone knows about Lucy,” Jack said.

“The Lucy business was the last thing my mom knew about you—it happened just before she died. Maybe it made it easier for her to die without you,” Sally said.

Like Lucy, Sally was walking around in Jack’s house as if she owned it. He noticed she had kicked off her shoes; she walked barefoot on the wrestling mat in his gym. Her beige, sleeveless blouse was a gauzy, fabric; her bra, which Jack could see through the blouse, was the same beige or light-tan color. Sally’s skirt made a swishing sound as she walked. She paused at his desk, reading the title page of a screenplay lying there. (That was when she picked up Jack’s address book.)

“My mom never stopped loving you,” Sally said. “She always wondered what might have happened if she’d stayed with you—if you ever would have given her a child, or children. She regretted breaking up with you, but she had to have children.”

The way Sally said children, Jack got the feeling that she didn’t like kids—or that the need to have them wasn’t as urgent an issue to her as it had been to Claudia.

Sally plopped herself down on Jack’s living-room couch and opened his address book. He sat down beside her.

“Do you have siblings, Sally?”

“Are you kidding? Mom popped out four kids, one right after the other. Lucky me—I was the first. I got to be the babysitter.”

“And your dad?” Jack asked her.

“He means no harm,” Sally said. “Mom would have married the first guy she met after she split up with you. He just had to promise to give her children. My dad was the first guy she met, the pathetic loser.”

“Why is he a pathetic loser, Sally?”

“He got to go to all your movies with Mom. What a kick that had to be for him, if you know what I mean,” Sally said. “Of course, when I was old enough, I got to watch all your movies, too—with Mom and Dad. There wasn’t anything she didn’t tell Dad about you. There wasn’t anything she didn’t tell me about you, too. That trip you took to the Toronto film festival; how your mother tattooed her. How you made Mom show her tattoo to the customs agent—that was a good one. How she gave you the clap she caught from Captain Phoebus, when you were a gay Esmeralda in The Hunchback of Notre Dame; how you were such a prick about it, as if you’d never fooled around yourself.”

“But your dad loved her?” Jack asked Sally.

“Oh, he worshiped her!” Sally said. “Mom got as big as a cow—she completely let herself go—and it was painfully evident that she never got over you. But Dad adored her.”

“You’re very beautiful, Sally,” he told the girl. “You look so much like your mom, I almost believed you. For a moment, I thought you were Claudia’s ghost.”

“I can haunt you as good as any ghost—believe me, Jack.” She wasn’t looking at him; she just kept thumbing through the pages of his address book, as if she were searching for someone. Suddenly she flipped to the front of the book; she began with the A’s. In her mother’s stage voice, she read aloud the first woman’s name.

“Mildred (‘Milly’) Ascheim,” Sally said; then her tone of voice became insinuating. “Did you screw her, Jack? Are you still screwing her?”

“No, never,” he replied.

“Uh-oh. Here’s another Ascheim—Myra. You crossed her name out. That’s a pretty clear indication that you fucked her. Then you dumped her, I suppose.”

“I never had sex with her. I crossed out her name because she died. Sally, let’s not play this game,” Jack said.

But she kept reading; she became very excited when she got to Lucia Delvecchio’s name. “Even Mom said you must have slept with her,” Sally said. “Mom said she could tell you were going to sleep with her when she saw you with her in the movie.”

Jack let it go on too long. Sally was into the G’s when the trouble really started. (Jack knew what Dr. Garcia would say—namely, that he shouldn’t have been sitting next to Sally on the couch in the first place.)

“Elena Garcia,” Sally said. This must have registered on Jack’s face; he clearly found this disrespectful to Dr. Garcia, whom he never called by her first name. Dr. Garcia was the most important person in this stage of Jack’s life, and Sally saw it. “Your cleaning lady, or former cleaning lady?” Sally asked, more disrespectfully. “You definitely fucked her.”

“She’s my doctor—my psychiatrist,” Jack said. “I don’t even call her by her first name.”

“Oh, yes—she’s Lucy’s shrink, too, isn’t she? How could I forget that!” Sally said. “I’ll bet Lucy’s mom is stalking you now.”

The girl was good; she had her mother’s talent, if not half her training. And at that moment, when she was teasing him, she reminded Jack more of Claudia than at any time when he’d imagined she was Claudia’s ghost.

“Please don’t be angry with me, Jack,” Sally said, very much the way her mother would have said it. “I just miss my mom, and I thought that being with you might bring her back to me.”

Jack couldn’t move; he just sat there. In his experience, women, even young women, knew when they had frozen you. Claudia had known those moments when Jack couldn’t resist her. Sally knew, too. She pressed herself against him on the couch; she started unbuttoning his shirt. He didn’t stop her. “Remember when you were John the Baptist?” Sally asked him.

“I was just his head—a small part,” he answered her. “His severed head—that’s all I was.”

“His decapitated head, on a table,” Sally reminded him, slipping off his shirt. Jack didn’t know when she’d unbuttoned her blouse; he noticed only that it was unbuttoned. “Mom was Salome, wasn’t she?” Claudia’s daughter asked him.

“Yes,” Jack answered; he could barely talk. The girl had undressed him and herself. Naked, she was more like Claudia than Claudia—Chinese scepter and all.

“Mom said that was the best kiss she ever gave you.”