Until I Find You

head was bobbing up and down like one of those distracting dashboard toys. He was from “somewhere in the Maritimes,” he told Jack—as if the exact city or town had disowned him, or he’d banished it from what was left of his drugged memory. He had a tattoo of a green-and-red lobster on one forearm. The creature looked half cooked— therefore inadvisable to eat.

Bob wailed away.

Yonder stands your orphan with his gun,

Crying like a fire in the sun.

The sign in the Queen Street window that advertised Daughter Alice was painted wood. “As cheerful as sunny Leith, where the sun never shines,” Alice said of the colorful sign. It had a seaside feeling to it, as if Daughter Alice were the name of a ship or a port of call. “Daughter Alice is a maritime name,” Alice always said—coming, as it did, from Copenhagen and Tattoo Ole.

“All your seasick sailors, they are rowing home,” Bob Dylan sang.

Or they’re rowing here, Jack thought. He went to have a look at Claudia behind the curtain; she smiled at him, clenching her fists to her sides. “The scepter is a Buddhist symbol,” Alice was saying softly, while the tattoo needles danced on Claudia’s thigh and she winced in pain. (Jack knew that the inner side of limbs hurt more than the outer.) “The shape of the scepter is modeled on the magic fungus of immortality,” Alice went on.

A mushroom of immortality! What next? Jack turned away. The rubber gloves really bothered him. He preferred to watch the pothead from the Maritimes; the guy looked as if he were getting high on the honey in his coffee. This was the trip to Toronto that would convince Jack Burns it would never be his true home.

“Forget the dead you’ve left, they will not follow you,” Bob sang—as always, with the utmost authority. Bob got a lot right, but he was wrong about that. As Jack would discover, everything followed you.

The scepter high on her inner thigh made lovemaking uncomfortable for Claudia during their remaining days in Toronto, but Jack was increasingly aware of Claudia holding him in disfavor; even without the new tattoo, Claudia might have been disinclined to make love to him. (That they were sleeping in Emma’s bed didn’t help.) They left Toronto before the film festival’s closing night.

Jack could tell that Claudia was disheartened; the pettiness of their bickering had worn them both down. And her new tattoo chafed when she walked. With Mrs. Oastler’s permission, Claudia had borrowed one of Emma’s skirts; it was way too big for her, but she could walk in it with her legs wide apart, as if she were wearing a diaper.

Looking back, Jack found the retrospective material at the film festival more interesting than most of the featured competition. The one movie that Claudia and Jack had seen alone was Fassbinder’s The Marriage of Maria Braun. Jack loved that film.

Hanna Schygulla is the soldier’s wife who makes such a success of herself in postwar Germany. There are worse things than watching Hanna Schygulla while a woman holds your penis. The problem was, although this was the first and only occasion at the film festival when Claudia held his penis, Jack had seen The Marriage of Maria Braun with Emma when he was fourteen. (They were in the cinema in Durham; it was his first year at Exeter.)

The comparison was disconcerting, and it was a premonition of a life-changing experience: Jack realized that he liked the way Emma held his penis better than he liked the way anyone else held it. (Of course he still had hopes for Michele Maher one day.)

“Is it me or Hanna?” Claudia had whispered in his ear, noting the little guy’s enthusiastic response. But Jack knew it was neither Claudia nor Fraulein Schygulla who provoked such an uplifting of the little guy’s spirits. It was his memory of Emma holding his penis when he was all of fourteen.

Jack knew from that moment in The Marriage of Maria Braun that he and Claudia were merely marking time; they were just going through the paces, like a married couple who knew the divorce was pending.

His parting of the ways with Claudia had been set in motion by that trip to Iowa to visit Emma the previous spring. “The children conversation,” as Claudia called it. They had continued on a downward path at the Toronto film festival. And when they drove back from Toronto, things got even worse.

They went home a different route than they’d come; it wasn’t the best way to go, but it was a boring drive no matter how you did it. They drove to Kingston, Ontario, and crossed the St. Lawrence at Gananoque; the bridge took them into New York State at Alexandria Bay. At U.S. Customs, Jack presented his student visa and his Canadian passport. Claudia handed the customs guy her American passport. Jack was driving the Volvo. Claudia’s new tattoo was bothering her; she didn’t want to drive.

She was still wearing Emma’s overlarge skirt, which Mrs. Oastler had insisted she take with her. “Emma will be several sizes too big for it the next time she’s home, anyway,” Leslie had said pessimistically. “You look better in it than Emma does, Claudia—even though it’s enormous on you.”

For most of the ride, Claudia sat with the skirt pulled up to her waist—airing the Chinese scepter, which she kept rubbing with moisturizer. Her skin was a little red around the edges of the tattoo, and she was tired of hearing that the inner skin of limbs is tender.

When Jack stopped the car at the border crossing, Claudia properly lowered Emma’s skirt. The customs agent looked them over. “We were visiting my mother, who lives in Toronto,” Jack told him, unasked. “We saw some movies at the film festival.”

“Are you bringing anything back from Canada?” the customs agent inquired.

“Nope,” Claudia said.

“Not even some Canadian beer?” the guy asked Claudia; he smiled at her. She was fantastic-looking, really.

“I don’t usually drink beer, and Jack is always watching his weight,” Claudia told him.

“So you’ve got nothing to declare?” the customs agent asked Jack, more sternly.

Jack didn’t know what got into him. (“I just felt like fooling around,” he would tell Claudia later, but there was more to it than that.)

It was a close-up opportunity—Jack gave the guy his furtive look. He did furtive pretty well; it was a look he’d acquired from observing certain kinds of dogs, especially craven and sneaky dogs. “Well—” Jack started to say, interrupting himself by looking furtively at Claudia. “We don’t have to declare the Chinese scepter, do we?” he asked her. Oh, what a look she gave him!

“The what?” the customs agent said.

“A royal mace, or sometimes it’s a staff—in this case, a short sword,” Jack went on. “It’s a ceremonial emblem of authority.”

“It’s Chinese?” the guy asked. “Is it very old?”

“Yes, very—it’s Buddhist, actually,” Jack told him.

“I better have a look at it,” the customs agent said.

“It’s a tattoo,” Claudia told him. “I don’t have to declare a tattoo, do I?”

Why had Jack done this to her? He loved Claudia—well, he liked her, anyway. Jack had not seen Claudia look so disappointed in him since she discovered the photographs of Emma naked; these were the old photos Emma sent to him when he was regularly beating off at Redding. They were photos of Emma at seventeen. Charlotte Barford had taken them. Claudia made Jack throw them away, but he kept one.

“Let me be sure it’s just a tattoo,” the customs guy said to Claudia. “I’ve never seen a Chinese scepter.”

“Do you have a female colleague?” Claudia asked the guy. “She can see it.”

“It’s in a rather intimate location,” Jack pointed out.

“Just a minute,” the customs agent said. He left them sitting in the car and went off to find a female colleague; there was a building with what looked like offices, where the agent momentarily disappeared.

“You are so immature, Jack,” Claudia said. He remembered that evening in the Oastler mansion when his mom had made a similar point.

“Penis, penis, penis—” Jack started to say, but he stopped. The customs guy was returning with a stout black woman. Claudia got out of the car and went into the office building with the female customs agent while Jack waited in the car.