Until I Find You

“What did you do that for?” the customs guy asked him.

“We haven’t been getting along lately,” Jack admitted.

“Well, this’ll really help,” the guy said.

When Claudia came back to the car, she gave Jack her violated look and they drove on. For those first few miles, when they were back in the United States, Jack felt exhilarated without knowing why.

Canada was Jack’s homeland, his country of origin, yet he was elated to be back in America, where he felt more at home. Why was that? he wondered. Wasn’t he Canadian? Was it Jack’s rejection of his mother and her tattoo world that made him turn his back on his native land?

Claudia wouldn’t speak to him for about three hundred miles. She had once again hiked Emma’s skirt to her waist, exposing the tattoo of the Chinese scepter on her right inner thigh, where Jack could see it with a downcast, sideways glance at her lap. It was one of very few tattoos he ever saw that he was tempted to get himself, but not on his inner thigh. He was thinking about where on his body he might one day get a tattoo of that very same Chinese scepter, when Claudia, finally, spoke.

By that time, they were in Vermont—about a hundred miles from where they were going, in New Hampshire. When Claudia saw Jack glance at her crotch—at her brand-new Chinese scepter, specifically—she said: “I got the damn tattoo for you, you know.”

“I know,” Jack said. “I like it. I really do.” Claudia knew that he liked the tattoo and the special place she put it. “I’m sorry about what I did at the border,” Jack told her. “I really am.”

“I’m over it, Jack. It took a while, but I’m over it. I’m sorrier about other things,” she said.

“Oh.”

“Is that all you can say?”

“I’m sorry,” he repeated.

“It’s not just that you’ll never have children,” she told him. “You’ll go on blaming your father’s genes for the fact that you’ll never stay with the same woman—not for long, anyway.”

It was Jack’s turn to say nothing for the next hundred miles. And to make a point of not responding to someone is another acting opportunity.

Jack soon would make a point of not responding to The Gray Ghost, too. A letter came from her not long after he and Claudia were back in New Hampshire. The Gray Ghost made merely a passing reference to Claudia’s “extraordinary beauty”—Mrs. McQuat also referred to Claudia as his “reluctant bride.” But neither Claudia herself nor Jack’s reluctance to have children was the true subject of The Gray Ghost’s letter. Mrs. McQuat was writing to remind him that he must pay closer attention to his mother, whom she felt certain he was neglecting.

“Don’t neglect her, Jack,” The Gray Ghost said.

Well, hadn’t she told him before? Jack threw her letter away without answering it. Later, when he learned that Mrs. McQuat had died, he wondered if he’d had a premonition of her death. Not only would he not pay closer attention to his mother; by not answering The Gray Ghost’s letter, it was as if he’d sensed that Mrs. McQuat was already dying—a death-in-progress, so to speak—and that when she was gone, the voice of Jack’s conscience would leave him, too.

They were just a few miles outside Durham, not far from Claudia’s apartment in Newmarket, before Claudia broke the silence. “God damn you, Jack,” she said. “After I die, I’m going to haunt you—I promise you I will—I might even haunt you before I die.”

Well, Jack Burns was an actor—he should have known an end line when he heard one. He should have committed Claudia’s warning to memory more deeply than he did.

20. Two Canadians in the City of Angels

Despite their growing estrangement, Jack and Claudia would live together their final two years at UNH. It was more than inertia that bound them; they were actors-in-training, learning the tricks of concealment. By what they managed to hide of themselves, they instructed each other. They became keen but sullen observers of their innermost secrets, their hidden characters.

The summer following their Toronto trip, they again did summer stock, this time at a playhouse on Cape Cod. The artistic director was a gay guy whom Jack liked a lot. Bruno Litkins was a tall, graceful man who swooped onstage; waving his long arms, he looked like a heron making an exaggerated if misguided effort to teach other, smaller birds to fly.

To Bruno Litkins, a musical based on a play or a novel was something to be tampered with—to be reinvented in a shockingly different way with each new production. The original text might be sacred to Bruno, but once someone had made a musical out of the material, there were no limits regarding how the story and the characters could be altered further.

Announcing auditions for The Hunchback of Notre Dame—in which Claudia had her heart set on the role of the beautiful Gypsy girl, Esmeralda—Bruno Litkins said that his Esmeralda was a beautiful transvestite who would liberate the reluctant homosexuality that flickered in the heart of Captain Phoebus like a flame in need of air. Esmeralda, the Gypsy drag queen of Paris, would wrestle the gay captain out of his closet. She was the oxygen Captain Phoebus needed in order to awaken his homosexual self!

The wicked Father Frollo, who first imagines he is in love with Esmeralda, ultimately wants her to be put to death—not only because Esmeralda doesn’t love him but because Esmeralda is a guy. (Father Frollo is a French homophobe.) Quasimodo, who also falls in love with Esmeralda, is in the end relieved that Esmeralda is in love with Captain Phoebus.

“It’s a better story,” Bruno Litkins told the shocked ensemble, “because Quasimodo isn’t sad to give up Esmeralda to the soldier.” (His hunchback notwithstanding, Quasimodo is straight.)

“What would Victor Hugo say?” Claudia asked. Poor Claudia saw that her cherished role was gone; at least onstage, Jack Burns was born to be a transvestite Esmeralda.

“Keep the audience guessing!” Bruno Litkins, flapping his long arms, liked to say. “Is Esmeralda a woman? Is she a man? Make them guess!”

There was, of course, another beautiful Gypsy girl in the play—Quasimodo’s murdered mother, who has a brief but moving part. And there were other plays in that Cape Cod summer season—not all of them musicals that opened themselves to new, gay interpretations. Claudia would have bigger and better roles. She was the eponymous Salome in Bruno Litkins’s production of the Oscar Wilde play—Bruno revered Wilde and wouldn’t change a purple word he’d written. Claudia was one hot Salome. Her absurd dance of the seven veils was Wilde’s fault, not Claudia’s—although the Chinese scepter on her inner right thigh required a lot of makeup to conceal. (Without the makeup, the scepter might have been confusing to the audience—possibly mistaken for a birthmark, or a wound.)

Jack had the smaller part in Salome—the prophet Jokanaan, good old John the Baptist, whose decapitated head Salome kisses. That was some kiss. (Jack was kneeling under a table with a hole cut in the top for his head; the tablecloth hid not only his hard-on, but all the rest of him.) Yet the damage to his relationship with Claudia had already been done; not even that kiss could undo their drifting apart.

The gay version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame merely served to further the distance between them. In retrospect, Jack didn’t blame Claudia for her one-night stand with the handsome actor who played the gay Captain Phoebus, but he blamed her at the time. (Jack knew that Claudia had every right to repay him for cheating on her with a tango teacher that previous spring.)

Claudia’s luck was bad. The actor who played Captain Phoebus gave her and Jack the clap. Jack would never have found out about the affair otherwise, unless Claudia eventually told him—and given her unrepentant lies about her age, Jack had no reason to think that she ever would have let him in on her little secret. It was the captain’s gonorrhea that gave her away.

Naturally, Jack pretended it was much more painful than it was, dropping to his knees and screaming upon every act of urination—while Claudia called from the bedroom, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!”