Until I Find You

That was some kiss, he remembered. Yet the damage to Claudia and Jack’s relationship had already been done; not even that kiss could undo their drifting apart.

Jack recognized the blue foil wrapper of his favorite brand of Japanese condom. Sally was tearing the wrapper with her teeth. It seemed entirely too strange that Claudia’s daughter would know, in advance, his preference for Kimono MicroThins. Then he remembered that the girl had used his bathroom, where she’d no doubt discovered his condoms in the medicine cabinet.

Jack looked into her dark-gold eyes and saw Claudia, as if she were alive and young again. The same wide mouth, but whiter teeth; the same full breasts and broad hips of a girl who would wage her own war with her weight one day. Like her mother, Sally was the kind of woman you sank into.

There would be no need to explain the problem to Dr. Garcia—anyone but Jack could have done the math. If he’d last seen Claudia in June 1987, even if she’d met Sally’s dad immediately—and married him, and gotten pregnant, all in that same month—Sally couldn’t have been born before March 1988. In that case, in July 2003, Sally was fifteen. In order for her to be eighteen, she would (in all likelihood) have to have been Jack’s daughter! As Dr. Garcia had reminded him, he never could count.

As it happened, as Sally explained to him—this was after they had sex, unfortunately—in June 1987, Claudia went off to some Shakespeare festival in New Jersey, where she met a young director and Shakespearean scholar. They were married that August, and Claudia got pregnant in September; Sally was born in June 1988. When she and Jack had sex in his house on Entrada Drive, Sally had been fifteen for all of one month. But she looked a lot older!

Sally quickly ran a bath and sat in it, with the bathroom door open. She hated to have sex and run, she said, but she was in a hurry. She had a curfew; she had to get back to The Georgian Hotel in Santa Monica, where she was staying with her mom and dad and the rest of her family.

“Your mom is alive?”

“She’s as big as a barn, but she’s very healthy,” Sally said. “You wouldn’t have slept with me if you thought Mom was alive, would you?”

Jack didn’t say anything; he just sat on the bathroom floor with his back against a towel rack, watching Claudia’s near-perfect likeness in the tub.

“My parents are the happiest couple I know,” Sally was saying. “My mother gets embarrassed when we tease her about being your ex-girlfriend. But my sisters and I, and my dad, think it’s the funniest thing in the world. We order a pizza and watch one of your movies—we all just howl! Mom sometimes has to leave the room. We make her laugh so hard she has to pee! ‘Pause it—I’ll be right back,’ Mom says. When you won the Oscar, I thought we were all going to wet our pants.”

“You’re how old?” he asked her.

“Your math is ridiculous—Mom wasn’t kidding,” Sally said. “For your self- protection, Jack, you ought to look up the California Penal Code—the part about unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor. You’re over twenty-one, I’m under sixteen—that’s really all that matters. You’re guilty of either a misdemeanor or a felony. You could go to jail for one, two, three, or four years—and you’re liable for a civil penalty, not to exceed twenty-five thousand dollars. That is, if I tell anybody.”

She stood up in the tub and hastily dried herself off, throwing the towel on the bathroom floor. He followed her through his bedroom and into the living room, where her clothes were scattered everywhere; while Sally got dressed, Jack searched for her shoes.

“This is kind of my summer job,” she was explaining to him.

“What is?” (Seducing Jack Burns? Extortion?)

Sally further explained that her dad—who was hardly a pathetic loser, in Sally’s fond opinion—managed a small, community-operated theater in Vermont. It was called The Nuts & Bolts Playhouse. They did summer- stock productions; they ran workshops in acting, directing, and playwriting during the school months. A nonprofit foundation funded everything. When Claudia and her Shakespearean husband weren’t engaged in their theater productions and workshops, they were full-time fund-raisers.

“We’re a big family—four girls,” Sally elaborated. “We all have to go to college one day. My parents’ whole life is by example. We love the theater, we learn to be independent, we don’t care about money, but we always need money. Do you get it?”

“How much do you want?” Jack asked Claudia’s daughter.

“It would kill my mom to know that I slept with you,” she said.

“How much, Sally?”

She grabbed his wrist and looked at his watch. “Shit! You have to drop me off at The Georgian, or near it. I supposedly went to a movie screening, where I had an opportunity to meet you. Damn curfew!”

“Your mom and dad knew you were meeting me?” he asked her.

“Yes, but not to have sex!” Sally cried, laughing. “They’re really terrific parents—I told you.”

She gave him a brochure of The Nuts & Bolts Playhouse—there were pictures of Claudia and her husband, and the other daughters. The check was to be made payable to The Nuts & Bolts Foundation; it being a nonprofit meant that Jack’s “donation” was tax-deductible, Sally told him.

For years, the children had asked their mother why she didn’t ask Jack Burns for money for their theater enterprise. Jack was a movie star and Claudia knew him; surely he would give something.

“Why didn’t you just ask me for a donation?” he asked Sally.

“Would you have given me this much?” Sally asked. (He’d written out a check to The Nuts & Bolts Foundation for $100,000. Compared to what the California Penal Code could cost him, it was a bargain.)

Jack drove the girl and Claudia’s old suitcase back to Ocean Avenue. At least he’d been right about the suitcase; it had been a prop.

Sally’s parents were night people. After they put the younger daughters to bed, Claudia and her husband went downstairs to have a drink in the bar; that’s where they would be waiting for Sally to come back from the “screening.” They’d agreed to let her go out and meet Jack Burns, solely for the purpose of asking Jack to make a donation to their efforts on behalf of Claudia’s first and most enduring love—the theater. (This must have been what Sally meant by learning to be independent.) As for Claudia’s old suitcase, Sally had stuffed it full of brochures of The Nuts & Bolts Playhouse—just in case she met other rich and famous movie stars at the alleged screening.

Sally and Jack discussed whether it was a good idea or not for him to come into the lobby of The Georgian with her. Meet her dad—say hello to Claudia, for old times’ sake. Sally could announce the extraordinary generosity of Jack’s donation. Gifts of $100,000 were rare; gifts of that size constituted “naming opportunities,” Sally told him. A fellowship for a young student-actor, director, or playwright in Jack Burns’s name; there was a capital campaign for a new six-hundred-seat theater, too. (Lots of naming opportunities, apparently.)

“Or you could choose to remain anonymous,” Sally said.

Jack opted to remain anonymous. He told Sally that he thought he wouldn’t go meet her dad and renew his acquaintance with her mom in the bar of The Georgian Hotel.

“That’s probably best,” Sally said. “Frankly, I could pull it off. I’ve rehearsed this for freakin’ forever. But I honestly don’t know if you’re a good enough actor to just walk in there and pretend that you haven’t fucked my brains out.”

“I’m probably not that good,” he admitted.

“Jack, I think you’re very sweet,” Claudia’s daughter said, kissing his cheek. “Mom and Dad are going to write you—I know they will. A big thank-you letter, at the very least. For the rest of your life, you’ll be on their mailing list; they’ll probably ask you for money every year. I don’t mean another hundred-thou or anything, but they’ll ask you for something. I always thought they should ask you.”

In the Nuts & Bolts Playhouse brochure, Claudia was wearing a tent-shaped dress and looked bigger than Kathy Bates climbing into that hot tub with Jack Nicholson in whatever that movie was. Her husband was a tall, bearded man who looked as if he were always cast as a betrayed king. The younger daughters were as big-