Until I Find You

planet Earth, the size of a beach ball, with a barbell in his hairy hands—the barbell had to weigh three or four hundred pounds, not that this was a credible explanation for why the bar was bending.

The World Gym tank tops were cut low; they had a scoop neck and a lot of space under the arms. They weren’t made for women to wear—at least not the ones Emma bought, which were all in workout-gray with Day- Glo orange lettering. The tank tops showed a lot of cleavage, and Emma’s breasts would occasionally fall out at the sides, but she only got the World Gym tank tops to wear as nightshirts or when she was writing.

Emma and Jack had their own bedrooms in the duplex, but most nights, when they didn’t have “dates,” they slept in the same bed—not really doing anything. Emma would hold Jack’s penis until one of them fell asleep—that is, if they even went to bed at the same time, which they didn’t often. Jack would occasionally hold her breasts, nothing more. He never once masturbated in the bed when she was there.

Emma and Jack had had their one time; they seemed to know this without discussing it. She had taught him how to beat off; she’d even invited him to imagine her when he did it. But this was entirely for Jack’s self- preservation in prep school, especially at Redding, and although she’d sent him photographs of herself naked—and, unbeknownst to Emma, Jack still had one of them—it was their mutual understanding in Los Angeles that they were more than friends, and certainly a little different from other brothers and sisters, but they were not lovers. (The penis-holding notwithstanding—and no matter how many times they were undressed in each other’s company, without seeming to think twice about it.)

Emma met another bodybuilder—this one at World Gym—and he didn’t beat her up. He worked as a waiter at Stan’s, which was on the corner of Rose and Main.

Stan’s was one of those places that wouldn’t last long in Venice. The waiters weren’t as brash as they were in a New York steakhouse, like Smith & Wollensky, and for steaks and chops and Maine lobsters, which was all they served, the white tablecloths seemed out of place; yet the waiters wore white dress shirts with their sleeves rolled up, and no ties, and those starched white aprons that made them look like butchers who’d not yet made contact with any meat. It’s hard to feel superior in a steakhouse, but the waiters at Stan’s (there were no waitresses) took naturally to superiority. It was as if they’d been born in those starched white aprons—remarkably, without a drop of blood being shed in the process.

The waiter Emma knew who worked at Stan’s had a name like Giorgio or Guido; he could bench-press three hundred pounds. Emma managed to persuade him that Jack was an experienced waiter, and Giorgio or Guido reluctantly introduced Jack to Donald, the maitre d’ at Stan’s—a headwaiter of intimidating snottiness.

Admittedly, Jack had had no experience as a waiter, but Emma had skillfully revised Mr. Ramsey’s written recommendation of Jack’s training as an actor, which repeatedly cited his “vast potential.” The studio in West Hollywood where, every morning, Emma turned in her notes and picked up an armload of new screenplays—she read and critiqued three or four scripts a day—had lots of fancy copying equipment, with which Emma slickly executed Mr. Ramsey’s edited recommendation of Jack.

The word actor was replaced with waiter, and the names of certain plays or dramatizations (even the musicals) were presented to the clueless American reader as the names of trendy Toronto restaurants, in which Mr. Ramsey extolled the virtue of Jack’s “performance”—an oft- repeated word, which Emma left unaltered, except she sometimes changed it to a verb.

Hence Jack had “performed” superbly at an alleged bistro called Mail-Order Bride (there was another restaurant called Northwest Territories) and at what was probably a French place, d’Urbervilles, and at several restaurants of note in the northeastern United States, among them The Restaurant of Notre Dame and Peter and Wendy’s—not to mention what must have been a Spanish eatery, Bernarda Alba.

Mr. Ramsey’s letterhead—namely, that of St. Hilda’s—which stated he was Chairman of English and Drama, had been tweaked to identify him as Chairman of the Hotel and Restaurant of that oddly religious-sounding name. Mr. Ramsey’s opening sentence described St. Hilda’s (he meant, of course, the school) as “one of Toronto’s best.”

But Donald was an imperious prick—a headwaiter from Hell. “When I’m recommending a hotel with a good restaurant in Toronto, I always recommend the Four Seasons,” he told Jack. He then challenged Jack to take a minute or two to memorize the specials.

“If you give me ten minutes, I can memorize the whole menu,” Jack told him.

But Donald didn’t give him the chance. The maitre d’ later told Giorgio or Guido that Jack’s attitude had offended him. He had sized up Jack as “a hick from Toronto via New Hampshire”—or so he said to Giorgio or Guido. Jack had already decided he didn’t want the waiter job—not in such a self-important steakhouse. But when Donald offered him an opportunity in the restaurant’s valet-parking department, Jack accepted. He was a good driver.

It wasn’t that Emma thought the job was beneath him; her objection was political. “You can’t be a parking valet, baby cakes. English is your first language. You’re taking a job from some unfortunate illegal alien.”

But Giorgio or Guido looked relieved. He didn’t want Jack to be a fellow waiter at Stan’s. He’d had enough difficulty accepting Jack as Emma’s roommate, no matter how many times Emma had told him that she and Jack didn’t have sex together. (Jack wondered what Giorgio or Guido’s problem was. How could you bench-press three hundred pounds and be that insecure?)

Jack didn’t last long as a parking valet; he was fired from the job his first night—in fact, he never got to park his first car.

It was a silver Audi with gunmetal-gray leather seats, and the guy who flipped Jack the keys was a young, arty type who appeared to have been quarreling with his young, arty wife—or his girlfriend, Jack had thought, before he’d driven less than a block and the little girl sat up in the backseat. Her face, which was streaked with tears, was perfectly framed in the rearview mirror. She was maybe four, at the most five, years old, and she wasn’t sitting in a booster seat. Evidently the backseat was her bed for the evening, because she was wearing pajamas and clutching both a blanket and a teddy bear to her chest. Jack saw a pillow propped against the armrest on the passenger side of the backseat; the booster seat was on the floor, kicked out of the way.

“Are you parking in a garage or outdoors?” the little girl asked him, wiping her nose on the sleeve of her pajamas.

“You can’t stay in the car,” Jack told her. He stopped the Audi and put on the hazard blinkers; she had scared the shit out of him and his heart was pounding.

“I’m not well enough behaved to eat in a grown-up restaurant,” the little girl said.

Jack didn’t know what to do. Maybe the young, arty couple had been arguing about leaving the little girl in the backseat, but he thought not. The girl had the look of a valet-parking veteran. “I like the garages better than parking on the street,” she explained. “It will be dark soon,” the little girl observed.

Jack drove down Main to Windward, where a gang of rowdies—noisy singles, though it was early in the evening—were crowding the entrance to Hama Sushi, waiting for tables. He left the Audi running at the curb and rang the buzzer to the half of the ratty duplex he shared with Emma; then he went back to the car and waited beside it. The little girl was never out of his sight.

“Is this where we’re parking?” she asked.

“I’m not leaving you alone, not anywhere,” he told her.

Emma opened the door and came out on the sidewalk; she was wearing one of her World Gym tank tops and nothing else. Because she looked more than usually pissed off, Jack guessed she’d been writing her novel.

“Nice car, honey pie. Does it come with the kid?” Jack explained the situation while the little girl observed them from the backseat. She’d probably never seen anyone quite like Emma in her World Gym tank top. “I told you—you shouldn’t be parking cars,” Emma said. She kept looking at the little girl. “I’m not babysitter material, Jack.”

“I usually sleep on the floor, if I think anyone can see me sleeping on the backseat,” the little girl said.

The “usually” made up Jack’s mind for him—that and what Emma said before she walked back inside to continue what must have been one of the angrier passages in her novel-in-progress. “Nothing good can come of this job, baby cakes.”

Jack put the little girl in the middle of the backseat and fastened a seat belt around her, because he couldn’t figure out how the stupid booster seat worked. “It’s probably hard to understand if you don’t have children,” the little girl told him forgivingly. Her name was Lucy. “I’m almost five,” she said.

When Jack returned to the corner of Rose and Main, he pulled up at the curb in front of Stan’s; his fellow valet parkers looked surprised to see him. “?Que pasa?” Roberto asked, when Jack