Until I Find You

loves Alice.”

“I used to,” Jack said.

He walked outside to have a look at the Iowa farmland. It was stretched out flat, as far as he could see— nothing like the tree-dense hills of Maine and New Hampshire. Emma followed him outside.

“Okay, so I lied—not quite everyone loves your mother,” Emma said.

“I used to,” Jack said again.

“Let’s go see a movie, baby cakes. Let’s take Claudia to the picture show.”

“Sure,” Jack said.

If he’d had half a brain, he might have anticipated the problem inherent in watching a movie with Emma and Claudia. It was most unlike him not to remember the movie; he even remembered bad movies. But from the moment Jack sat down in the theater, with Claudia seated to his left and Emma to his right, the problem—namely, which of them would hold his penis—presented itself. Any thoughts he might have had about the film vanished.

Emma, who was left-handed, put her hand in Jack’s lap first; she had no sooner unzipped his fly than Claudia, who was right-handed, made contact with his penis, which Emma already held in her hand. No heads turned; the three of them stared unblinkingly at the screen. Claudia politely withdrew her hand, but no farther than the inside of Jack’s left thigh. Emma, in a conciliatory gesture, prodded his penis in Claudia’s direction until the tip touched the back of Claudia’s hand. Claudia put her hand back in his lap, holding both his penis and Emma’s hand. Watching the film in this fashion gave Jack a two-hour erection.

After the movie, they went out and drank some beer. Jack didn’t really like to drink. Emma bought the beer, but either Claudia or Jack could have. No one ever carded Claudia; although she was only nineteen, she looked like an older woman, not a college student. And ever since Jack had seen Yojimbo, no one had carded him. He was nineteen, almost twenty, but he’d adopted Toshiro Mifune’s disapproving scowl, and he used a fair amount of gel in his hair. Emma approved of the look, the scowl especially, but Claudia occasionally complained about his shaving only every third day.

It was Toshiro Mifune’s indignation that Jack chose to imitate—particularly in the beginning of Yojimbo, when the samurai comes to town and sees the dog trot by with a human hand in its mouth. Jack loved that outraged look Mifune gives the dog.

Emma had too much to drink, and Jack drove her car back to the farmhouse, with Emma and Claudia holding hands and making out in the backseat. “If you were back here, honey pie, we’d make out with you, too,” Emma said.

Jack was used to Emma’s lawlessness, her willingness to bend the rules, but Claudia’s seeming complicity unnerved him. Though Emma was complicated—and she could be difficult—it was Claudia Jack couldn’t figure out. Like him, she seemed to be biding her time; she held herself back, she seemed detached, she was always a little hard to read. Or was Claudia merely holding a mirror up to Jack, stymieing him in the same ways he stymied her?

Back at the farmhouse, after Emma had passed out, Claudia helped Jack carry Emma to her bedroom, where they undressed her and put her to bed. Emma was already snoring, but this failed to distract Claudia and Jack; they couldn’t help noticing the perfect vagina tattooed on Emma’s right hip.

“Exactly what is your relationship with Emma?” Claudia asked.

“I don’t really know,” Jack replied honestly.

“Boy, I’ll say you don’t!” Claudia said, laughing.

When they were in bed, Claudia asked him: “When did the penis-holding start? I mean with Emma. I know when it started with me.”

Jack pretended not to remember exactly. “When I was eight or nine,” he said. “Emma would have been fifteen or sixteen. Or maybe it was a little earlier. I might have been seven. Emma was maybe fourteen.”

Claudia went on holding his penis, not saying anything. When he was almost asleep, she asked him: “Do you have any idea how weird that is, Jack?”

Michele Maher had made him sensitive to his alleged weirdness—as in too weird. Jack harbored no illusion that Claudia had mistaken him for the love of her life; surely Claudia was too smart to imagine for a moment that Jack thought she was the love of his life. But it hurt him that Claudia thought he was weird.

“Too weird?” Jack asked her.

“That depends, Jack.”

He didn’t like this game. Depends on what? he knew she wanted him to ask her. But he wouldn’t ask—he already knew the answer. He held her breasts, he nuzzled her neck, but just as his penis was coming to life in her hand, Claudia let it go. “Why doesn’t Emma want to have children?” she asked.

Well, Jack Burns was an actor—he knew a loaded question when he heard one. “Maybe she doesn’t think she’ll be a good mother,” Jack ventured, still holding Claudia’s breasts. The question was really about him, of course. Why didn’t he want children? Because, if he turned out to be like his father, he would leave, he had told Claudia once. He didn’t want to be the kind of father who left.

But this answer hadn’t satisfied Claudia. Jack was well aware she wanted to have children. As an actress, Claudia hated her body; that she had “a body designed to have children” was the only positive thing she ever said about herself. She said this as if she meant it, too. To Jack, it didn’t sound like an act. Clearly, in her mind, the kind of father Jack would turn out to be was Jack’s problem.

“It depends on whether or not you want children, Jack,” Claudia said.

Jack let go of her breasts and rolled over, turning his back to her in the bed. Claudia rolled toward him, wrapping her arm around his waist and once more holding his penis.

“We don’t graduate from college for another two years,” Jack pointed out to her.

“I don’t mean I want children now, Jack.”

He’d already told Claudia that he never wanted children. “Not till the day I discover that my dad has been a loving father to a child, or children, he didn’t leave.” That was how Jack had put it to her.

Was it any wonder Claudia held herself back from him?

Yet they had fun together—in summer stock, especially. The previous summer, they’d done Romeo and Juliet in a playhouse in the Berkshires. The older, veteran actors got all the main parts. Claudia was Juliet’s understudy. The dull, flat-chested robot they cast as Juliet never missed a night’s performance—not even a matinee. Jack had wanted to be Romeo—or, failing that, Mercutio—but because he’d been a wrestler and looked confrontational, they made him Tybalt, that cocky asshole.

Claudia was always taking their picture; maybe she thought that if there were sufficient photographic evidence of them as a couple, they might stay together. She had a camera with a delayed-shutter mechanism; she would set the timer and then run to get in the photo. (The obsessive picture-taking sometimes made Jack wonder if Claudia just might have mistaken him for the love of her life.)

After their visit to Emma, Claudia and Jack did a Garcia Lorca play—The House of Bernarda Alba—at a summer playhouse in Connecticut. The setting was Spain, 1936. Claudia and Jack both played women. Jack had eaten some bad clams and was food-poisoned for one evening performance. There was no intermission. The director, who was also a woman, told him to “suck it up and wear a longer skirt.” His understudy had a yeast infection, and the director was more sympathetic to her ailment than she was to Jack’s. (There were nine women in the cast, plus Jack.)

He had terrible stomach cramps and diarrhea. In the grip of an alarmingly explosive episode, he flinched so violently that one of his falsies slipped out of his bra; he managed to trap it against his ribs with his elbow. Claudia later told him that he looked as if he were mocking the moment of the playwright’s assassination in the Spanish Civil War; Jack was thankful Garcia Lorca was not alive to suffer through his performance.

“What a learning experience!” Mr. Ramsey responded, when Jack wrote him about the long night of the bad clams.

Miss Wurtz would have been proud of him; never had he concentrated with such pinpoint accuracy on his audience of one. He could almost see his father in the audience. (It was the perfect play for William, Jack was thinking—all women!)