Until I Find You

31. Therapy

Five years later—as if striking the match that would set fire to Jack’s life in Los Angeles, strip his character bare, and ultimately lead him to seek his father—a young woman (younger than he realized at the time) sat not quite fully clothed on Jack’s living-room couch in that forlorn dump he still lived in on Entrada Drive. She was thumbing through his address book, which she’d picked up off his desk, and reading aloud the women’s names. In an insinuating tone of voice, she would first say the name and then guess what relationship Jack might have had, or still had, with the woman.

This juvenile behavior should have alerted him to the fact that she was clearly younger than she’d told him she was—not that Jack shouldn’t have guessed her real age for other reasons. But he did have difficulties with math.

She got into the G’s before Jack said, “That’s enough,” and took his address book away from her; that’s when the trouble really started.

“Elena García,” the girl had just said. “Your cleaning lady, or former cleaning lady? You definitely fucked her.”

Elena García—Dr. García—was Jack’s psychiatrist. He had never had sex with her. For five years, Dr. García had not once been a love interest—but Jack had never depended on anyone to the degree that he depended on her. Elena García knew more about Jack Burns than anyone had ever known—including Emma Oastler.

Jack had often called Dr. García in tears, not always but sometimes in the middle of the night. He’d called her from Cannes—once when he was at a party at the Hôtel du Cap. That same day Jack had pushed a female photographer, a stalker paparazzo, off a chartered yacht; he’d had to pay an outrageous fine.

Another time, he banged some bimbo on the beach of the Hotel Martinez. She said she was an actress, but she turned out to be one of those Croisette dog-walkers; she’d been arrested for fucking on the beach before. And Jack should have won the Palme d’Or for bad behavior for the fracas he got into in that glass-and-concrete eyesore, the Palais des Festivals. This happened after the evening’s red-carpet promenade. Jack was on a narrow staircase leading to one of the Palais’s upstairs rooms. Some journalist shoved him into one of those thugs who comprise the festival’s security staff; the security guy thought that Jack had purposely shoved him, which led to Jack’s impromptu lateral drop. Chenko would have been proud of Jack for the perfect execution of his move—Coaches Clum, Hudson, and Shapiro, too—but the incident was in all the papers. The security thug broke his collarbone, and Jack got another stiff fine. The weaselly French!

Lastly, from his ocean-front suite at the Carlton, Jack poured a whole bottle of Taittinger (chilled) onto that former agent Lawrence. The fink was giving Jack the finger from the terrace. Lawrence was just the kind of asshole you ran into at Cannes. Jack hated Cannes.

From Dr. García’s point of view, Jack’s behavior was only marginally better in Venice, Deauville, and Toronto—the three film festivals where Richard Gladstein, Wild Bill Vanvleck, Lucia Delvecchio, and Jack promoted The Slush-Pile Reader. (A recent headline in Variety—LOTS OF LIBIDO ON THE LIDO—could have been written about Jack Burns.)

They had a very good run with what Jack would usually call Emma’s movie; careerwise, it may have been Jack’s best year. They shot the film in the fall of ’98 and took it to those festivals in August and September of ’99—before the premieres in New York and London near the end of that year.

There was the unfortunate incident with Lucia Delvecchio in the Hotel des Bains in Venice; she’d had too much to drink, and bitterly regretted having slept with Jack. But no one knew—not even Richard or Wild Bill. And no one except Lucia’s husband, who was not in Venice, would have cared. Bad things happened in that languid lagoon.

“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” Jack told Lucia. “The whole city is sinking. Visconti shot Death in Venice in the Hotel des Bains. I think he knew what he was doing.”

But it was mostly Jack’s fault. Lucia had been drunk; he knew she was married. That precipitated another call to Dr. García. He called her from the Hotel Normandie in Deauville, too. (It wasn’t Lucia that time; worse, it was an older member of the jury.)

“The older-woman thing again?” Dr. García had asked Jack on the phone.

“I guess so,” he’d told her.

Jack was with Mrs. Oastler at the Toronto film festival when they screened The Slush-Pile Reader in Roy Thomson Hall—a packed house, a triumphant night. It was gratifying to show the film in Emma’s hometown. But Leslie had a new girlfriend, a blonde, who didn’t like Jack. The blonde wanted him to remove all his clothes from Mrs. Oastler’s house. Jack didn’t think Leslie cared whether he left his clothes in her house or not, but the blonde wanted him (and his things) gone.

Jack was in Mrs. Oastler’s familiar kitchen when the blonde handed him the two photographs of his mother’s naked torso and the Until I find you tattoo. “Those are Leslie’s,” he explained. “I have two photos; she has the other two.”

“Take them,” the blonde told him. “Your mother’s dead, Jack. Leslie doesn’t want to look at her breasts anymore.”

“I don’t want to look at them anymore, either,” Jack said, but he took the photos. Now he had all four—these in addition to that photograph of Emma naked at seventeen.

Mrs. Oastler’s mansion, as Jack used to think of it, was different with the blonde there. Leslie’s bedroom door was usually closed; it was hard to imagine Mrs. Oastler closing her bathroom door, too, but maybe the blonde had taught her how to do it.

That trip to Toronto, Jack resisted sleeping with Bonnie Hamilton. She wanted to sell him an apartment in a new condo being built in Rosedale. “For when you tire of Los Angeles,” Bonnie told him. But Toronto wasn’t his town, notwithstanding that he had long been tired of L.A.

When he was in Toronto, Jack had a less than heart-to-heart talk with Caroline Wurtz. She was disappointed in him; she thought he should be looking for his father. Jack couldn’t tell her half of what he’d learned on his return trip to the North Sea. He was in no shape to talk about it. It was all he could do to tell the story to Dr. García, and too often he couldn’t talk to her, either. He tried, but the words wouldn’t come—or he would start to shout or cry.

It was Dr. García’s opinion that Jack shouted and cried too much. “Especially the crying—it’s simply indecent for a man,” she said. “You really should work on that.” To that end, she encouraged Jack to tell her what had happened to him in chronological order. “Begin with that awful trip you took with your mother,” Dr. García instructed him. “Don’t tell me what you now know about that trip. Tell me what you thought happened at the time. Begin with what you first imagined were your memories. And try not to jump ahead more than is absolutely necessary. In other words, go easy on the foreshadowing, Jack.” Later, after he began—with Copenhagen, when he was four—Dr. García would frequently say: “Try not to interject so much. I know you’re not a writer, but just try to stick to the story.”

It hurt Jack’s feelings to hear her say that he wasn’t a writer; it felt especially unfair after his not-inconsiderable contributions to Emma’s screenplay of The Slush-Pile Reader.

And to recite out loud the story of his life—that is, coherently and in chronological order—would take years! Dr. García knew that; she was in no hurry. She took one look at what a mess Jack was and knew only that she had to find a way to make him stop shouting and crying.

“It’s woefully apparent that you can’t tell me your life story without everyone in the waiting room hearing you,” she said. “Believe me, it’s only tolerable to listen to you if you calm down.”

“Where does it end?” Jack asked Dr. García, when he’d been spilling his life story aloud for four, going on five, years.

“Well, it ends with looking for your father—or at least finding out what happened to him,” Dr. García said. “But you’re not ready for that part, not until you can spit out all the rest of it. The end of it, Jack, is where you find him—that’s the last place you have to go. You’re not through with traveling.”

Jack too hastily concluded that if his retelling of his life were a book, for example, his finding his father would be the last chapter.

“I doubt it,” Dr. García said. “Maybe your penultimate chapter, if you’re lucky. When you find him, Jack, you’re going to learn something you didn’t know before, aren’t you? I trust that the learning part will take an additional chapter.”

And the whole thing had to have a name, too, didn’t it? There had to be a title to the story of his life, which Jack was reciting—with such restraint and in chronological order—to his psychiatrist. But Jack knew the name of his life story before he started telling it; the first day he went to see Dr. García, when he’d been unable to tell her anything without shouting or crying, Jack knew that his mother’s Until I find you tattoo had been her crowning deception. Certainly she’d been proudest of it; why else, if only after her death, had Alice wanted Leslie Oastler to show Jack the photographs?

“Why show me at all?” he’d asked his mom.

“I was beautiful once!” Alice had cried—meaning her breasts, when she was younger, he’d thought at the time, but the tattoo was what interested Jack.

She’d been so proud of keeping the tattoo from him that, even after everything, Alice had wanted him to see it! From the time he was four, that Until I find you tattoo said everything there was to say about Jack Burns.

As a psychiatrist, Dr. García was the opposite of an editor. Jack was not supposed to delete anything—he was instructed to leave nothing out. And not infrequently, Dr. García wanted more. She required “corroborating details.” Instances of what Dr. García had identified, early on, as Jack’s older-woman thing could not be overemphasized; in his boyhood, the seemingly unmotivated cruelty and aggressiveness he encountered in older girls was “an underlying problem.” What was it about Jack that had provoked those older girls?

Ditto the penis-holding. Most surprising in Jack’s case, in Dr. García’s experience, was how this didn’t necessarily lead to having sex. Then there was the closeness he’d felt to his mom as a child, but how swiftly and absolutely they had grown estranged; it was almost as if Jack knew that Alice’s lies were lies before he actually found out.

Dr. García was further puzzled by the Emma relationship, which stood in contrast (but bore certain similarities) to Jack’s relationship with Leslie Oastler. Did he still want to sleep with Leslie? Dr. García wanted to know. If so, why? If not, why not?

Dr. García was a stickler for thoroughness. “I think I’m done with the St. Hilda’s part,” Jack had told her on several occasions.

“Oh, no—you’re not,” Dr. García had said. “A boy with looks like yours in an all-girls’ school? Are you kidding? You’re not only not done with St. Hilda’s, Jack—you may never be done with it!”

Jack got tired of all the contradictions—his inglorious return to the North Sea, especially. But not Dr. García; there couldn’t be too many contradictions for her. “How long’s it been since you thought about dressing as a girl?” she asked him. “I don’t mean in a movie!” (He must have hesitated.) “You see?” she said. “Give me more contradictions—give me all you’ve got, Jack.”

Jack sometimes felt he wasn’t seeing a psychiatrist—it was more like taking a creative writing class, but with nothing on paper to show for it. And when Dr. García gave him an actual writing assignment, he almost stopped the therapy altogether. She wanted him to write letters to Michele Maher—not to send to Michele, but to read out loud at their therapy sessions.

“There’s no way I can explain myself to Michele,” Jack told his psychiatrist. At the time, it had been more than a year—closer to two years—since Michele had written him. He still hadn’t answered her letter.

“But explaining yourself to Michele is what you want to do, isn’t it?” Dr. García asked him. He couldn’t deny that.

It was further unnerving that Dr. García’s office was on Montana Avenue in Santa Monica, within walking distance of that breakfast place where he’d first met Myra Ascheim—another older woman who had changed his life.

“Fascinating,” Dr. García said. “But don’t tell me about it now. Please keep everything in chronological order, Jack.”

In 2000, when Jack won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, Dr. García found it “illuminating” that he referred to the award (and the statuette itself) as Emma’s Oscar. But Dr. García wouldn’t allow him to tell her his feelings. Even the Oscar had to be rendered in chronological order.

And Dr. García disapproved of his first actual communication with Michele Maher, for several reasons. In the first place, Jack hadn’t shown the doctor the letter he wrote Michele before he mailed it; in the second place, it was a ridiculous letter to have sent Michele after almost eighteen years of nothing between them.

But when Jack was nominated for two Academy Awards (one for Best Supporting Actor and the other for the screenplay), he felt he had a golden opportunity to make contact with Michele Maher—while at the same time sounding casual about getting together.

Dear Michele,

I don’t know if you’re married, or otherwise attached to someone, but—if you’re not—would you be my date at the Academy Awards? This would mean coming to Los Angeles—Sunday, March 26. Naturally, I would take care of your travel expenses and hotel accommodations.

Yours truly,

Jack Burns

What was wrong with that? Wasn’t it polite, and to the point? (Michele’s answer, which was prompt, was a little wishy-washy.)

Dear Jack,

Gosh, I would love to! But I have a boyfriend, sort of. I don’t live with anyone, but I’m seeing someone—as they say. Of course I’m very flattered that you thought of me—after all these years! I’ll make a point of actually staying up to watch the awards this year, and I’ll keep my fingers crossed for you.

Best regards,

Michele

“It’s hard to tell if she really wanted to go, isn’t it?” Jack asked Dr. García, which prompted his psychiatrist’s third reason for disapproving of his letter to Michele.

“Jack, you are very fortunate that Michele turned you down,” Dr. García said. “What a wreck you would have been if she’d said yes! If she’d been your date, you would have blown it.”

Jack didn’t think this was fair. He could have had a ball with the media—just telling them that his date for the Academy Awards was his dermatologist! But Dr. García was not amused; she considered his faux pas of inviting Michele Maher to the Oscars to be “in the denial category.” Dr. García said that Jack was completely unaware of how far removed he was from the normal world, of normal people and normal relationships.

“But what about her?” he cried. (Jack meant Michele Maher.) “What’s she mean that she has a boyfriend, sort of? Is that normal?”

“You’re not ready to make contact with Michele Maher, Jack,” Dr. García said. “You have heaped so many unrealistic expectations upon a relationship that, as I understand it, never developed in the first place—well, I don’t want to hear another word about this now! To me, you’re still a four-year-old in the North Sea. Speaking strictly professionally, you’ve not recovered from your sea of girls—and I need to know much more about Emma and your older-woman thing. Keep it in chronological order. Is that understood?”

It was. He had a bitch psychiatrist, or so it seemed to Jack, but he had to admit that her therapy had noticeably cut down his tendency to shout and burst into tears—and his inclination to wake up weeping in the middle of the night, which became habitual after he came back from the North Sea the second time. So Jack stuck with her, and the unfinished telling of his life story went on and on. Jack had become what Emma said he could be—a writer, albeit one given to melancholic logorrhea. A storyteller, if only out loud. (Jack’s actual writing was limited to those unmailed letters to Michele Maher.)

Dr. García was a heavyset but attractive Mexican-American. She appeared to be in her late forties. From the photographs in her office, she either came from a large family or had a large family of her own. Jack didn’t ask her, and—from the photos—he couldn’t tell.

Of the children in the many pictures, he couldn’t recognize Dr. García as a child—so perhaps they were her children. Yet the older-looking man in the photographs seemed more like a father to her than a husband; he was always well dressed, to the point of fastidiousness, and his pencil-thin mustache and perfectly trimmed sideburns suggested a character actor of a bygone era. (A cross between Clifton Webb and Gilbert Roland, Jack thought.)

Dr. García didn’t wear any rings; she wore no jewelry to speak of. Either she was married with more children than Jack could count in her office photos, or she’d come from such an overlarge family that this had persuaded her to never marry and have children of her own.

In a doomed effort to solve this mystery, Jack cleverly said: “Maybe you should be my date for the Academy Awards, Dr. García. At a stressful event like that, a psychiatrist would probably come in handier than a dermatologist—don’t you think?”

“You don’t date your psychiatrist,” Dr. García said.

“Oh.”

“That’s a word you overuse,” Jack’s psychiatrist said.

The distinguished-looking older man in Dr. García’s family photographs had an air of detachment about him, as if he were withdrawing from a recurrent argument before it started. He seemed far removed from the clamor of the ever-present children in the photos; it was almost as if he couldn’t hear them. Maybe Dr. García had married a much older man, or a deaf one. Jack’s psychiatrist was such a strong woman, she was probably contemptuous of the convention of wedding rings.

Richard Gladstein had recommended Dr. García to Jack. “She knows actors,” Richard had told him. “You wouldn’t be her first movie star.”

At the time, this had been a comforting thought. Yet Jack hadn’t seen anyone famous in Dr. García’s waiting room; it made him wonder if she made house calls to the more famous movie stars among her patients. But to judge Dr. García by the waiting room outside her office was confusing. There were many young married women, and some of them came with their small children; there were toys and children’s books in a corner of the waiting room, which gave you the disquieting impression that you were seeing a pediatrician. The young married women who showed up with their children always brought friends or nannies with them; these other women looked after the kids when the young mothers went into Dr. García’s office for their therapy sessions.

“Are you here to see the doctor or to watch someone’s kid?” Jack asked one of the young women once; like Dr. García, she wasn’t wearing a wedding ring.

“Are you trying to pick me up or something?” the young woman said.

Jack almost asked her if she would be his date at the Academy Awards, but he stopped himself when he considered what Dr. García might have to say about that.

“Who should I take to the Academy Awards?” he’d asked his psychiatrist.

“Please don’t mistake me for a dating service, Jack.”

Thus Jack was on his own for the Academy Awards. In addition to his two nominations, Lucia Delvecchio had a nomination for Best Actress, Wild Bill Vanvleck had one for Best Director, and Richard Gladstein got a Best Picture nomination, too.

No one thought Lucia had a shot. She was up against some very big guns—Meryl Streep and Julianne Moore and Annette Bening—and besides, it was Hilary Swank’s year. (As an occasional cross-dresser, Jack was a big fan of Hilary in Boys Don’t Cry.) And Richard Gladstein knew, going in, that The Slush-Pile Reader was a long shot for Best Picture. (It would go to American Beauty.)

William Vanvleck was just happy to be there. Not one review of The Slush-Pile Reader referred to Wild Bill as The Remake Monster; The Mad Dutchman had become almost acceptable. Not acceptable enough to win Best Director; there were some heavy hitters in the lineup that year. (Sam Mendes would win—American Beauty again.)

Nor did Jack realistically have a chance to win Best Supporting Actor—Michael Caine won. (Jack’s role as a nice-guy porn star was sympathetic, but not that sympathetic.)

Jack knew long before the night of the awards that the film’s best chance for an Oscar was in the Best Adapted Screenplay category—Emma’s screenplay, as he thought of it. How could he not look at it as Emma’s Oscar? It was her movie!

Yes, Jack had learned a little bit about screenwriting in the course of fine-tuning the script Emma had given him. But as a storyteller, he was learning more from his therapy with Dr. García. (Go easy on the foreshadowing; watch the interjections; keep it in chronological order.)

Miramax’s promotion of The Slush-Pile Reader was exhausting, and the lion’s share of it had fallen to Jack in February and March of 2000. Wild Bill Vanvleck was back in Amsterdam; his much younger girlfriend was an anchorwoman on Dutch television, and Wild Bill was completely taken with her. Besides, Vanvleck was a disaster at promoting his own picture—in this case. That pornography was such an issue in the United States offended The Mad Dutchman; nobody had a problem with pornography in the Netherlands. “It is only a problem in Puritan America, which is ruled by the Christian Right!” Vanvleck declared. (It was probably wise of Miramax to keep Wild Bill in Amsterdam, except for the film festivals.)

Following her tragic one-night error in Venice, Lucia Delvecchio had shunned Jack. She’d virtually turned her back on the film, too. Jack’s old friend Erica Steinberg was the Miramax publicist. Jack had been on the road with Erica—in print and on television—for The Slush-Pile Reader almost nonstop.

It was the night after Jack did Larry King Live that he called Leslie Oastler and asked her if she would be his date at the Academy Awards. (Fuck the blonde, he thought.)

“I’m flattered you would think of me, Jack,” Mrs. Oastler began. “But how would that make Dolores feel? And I don’t know what I would wear.”

“It’s Emma’s night, Leslie,” Jack said.

“No, it’s gonna be your night, Jack. Emma’s dead. Why don’t you go with Miss Wurtz?” Mrs. Oastler asked him.

“The Wurtz! Are you kidding?”

“An Oscar would be wasted on me, Jack. What would I want with a gold, bald, naked man holding what is alleged to be his sword?” Leslie Oastler had always had a particularly pointed way of seeing things.

The next morning Jack called Caroline Wurtz and popped the question. Would she consider coming to Los Angeles to attend the Academy Awards with him?

“I’ve heard so many terrible things about the drive-by shootings,” Miss Wurtz said. “But they don’t shoot people at the Oscars, do they?”

“No,” he told her. “They only wound you internally.”

“Well, I suppose I should go see the movie, shouldn’t I?” Caroline asked. “I’ve heard both wonderful and awful things from people who’ve seen it. As you know, your friend Emma was never one of my favorite writers.”

“I think it’s a pretty good film,” Jack said. There was a lengthy pause, as if Caroline was considering the invitation—or perhaps The Wurtz had forgotten that he’d invited her to anything. Jack was a little miffed that she hadn’t seen The Slush-Pile Reader. (The movie had five Oscar nominations! Everyone Jack knew had seen it.)

“Don’t you have anyone else to ask, Jack? I can’t be the best you can do,” Caroline said.

“For a couple of years, I’ve been seeing a psychiatrist,” he admitted to her. “I haven’t been in the best shape.”

“Goodness!” Miss Wurtz cried. “In that case, of course I’ll go with you! I’m sure if Mrs. McQuat were alive, she’d want to go with us, too!”

Well, there was a concept! At Mrs. McQuat’s urging, Jack had taken Miss Wurtz to that most memorable Toronto film festival—the one he went to with Claudia, when The Wurtz was convinced that the morons protesting the Godard film were outraged by the ritualistic suicide in the Mishima movie. Jack wondered what confusions awaited Miss Wurtz at the Shrine Civic Auditorium on the night of the Academy Awards. Whom might she mistake Billy Crystal for?

Jack explained to Caroline that he would arrange her air travel and all the rest of it. That Jack Burns was taking his third-grade teacher to the Oscars was a bonus bit of publicity; nor did it hurt that Emma Oastler had died and put him in charge of bringing her first and best novel to the screen. “The death connection,” Jack had called it; that turned out to be a bonus bit of publicity for both Miramax and Jack Burns.

The issue of what Miss Wurtz would wear provided a down-to-earth return to the heart of the matter. Jack told her that Armani was dressing him for the Academy Awards. (They had called; he’d said okay. This was how it usually happened.)

“Who is dressing you?” The Wurtz asked.

“Armani—the designer, Caroline. Different fashion designers dress the nominees and their guests for the Oscars. If there’s a particular designer you like, I’m sure I could arrange it. Or you could just wear something by Armani, too.”

“I think I’ll dress myself, if it’s all the same to you,” Miss Wurtz replied. “I have some perfectly lovely clothes your father bought for me. Naturally, William will be watching. He’ll be so proud of you! I wouldn’t want William to see me wearing a dress he didn’t choose for me, Jack.”

Well, there was a concept, too—namely, that Jack’s father would be watching. The Wurtz would be dressing for him!

“You’ll have to tell me who’s nominated for what,” Caroline was saying. “Then I’ll go see all the movies.”

Jack wondered how many Academy voters had the diligence of a third-grade teacher, but—when Jack would finally get to the Oscar-winning part of his life story—Dr. García would call the “diligence” detail an example of his interjecting too much.

Jack doubted that every film nominated for an Oscar was still playing in a theater in Toronto; quite possibly, not every film had ever played there. But he knew this wouldn’t deter Miss Wurtz from trying to see them all.

Jack almost called Leslie Oastler to thank her for suggesting The Wurtz as his date for the Academy Awards, but he didn’t want to risk getting Leslie’s blonde on the phone.

“Dolores,” he would be tempted to say to the bitch, “I wanted to alert you to a large package that’s coming your way—more of my clothes. If you or Leslie wouldn’t mind hanging them in my closet as soon as they arrive, I’d appreciate it. I wouldn’t want them to be wrinkled for my next visit.” Or words to that effect; naturally, Jack didn’t make the call. (Had she known, Dr. García would have been proud of him for exercising such restraint.)

The two-bedroom suite at the Beverly Hills Four Seasons, where Miramax put them up for the long Oscar weekend, was larger than Miss Wurtz’s apartment—or so she told Jack. There was even a piano, which Miss Wurtz liked to play in her Four Seasons white terry-cloth bathrobe. She claimed to know only hymns and the St. Hilda’s school songs, but her voice was pretty and she played well.

“Oh, I don’t play well—nothing like your father, who used to tease me,” she said. “William would say, ‘If you want to be even a bit more tentative, Caroline, you might try breathing on the keys instead of using your fingers.’ He could be funny, your father. I wish you’d tell me more about your trip, Jack. Why don’t you begin with Copenhagen? I’ve never been there.”

There were always a lot of parties prior to the Academy Awards. As a nondrinker escorting his third-grade teacher, a woman in her sixties, Jack didn’t think that he and Caroline were in step with the bacchanalian behavior of many of his colleagues in the industry. But they went to those parties where Jack’s absence would have been resented, even if they spent much of the time talking quietly to each other.

Having calmly described so many of the painful passages in his life to Dr. García, Jack found that he was in better control of himself while recounting to Miss Wurtz those discoveries he made in his return trip to the North Sea—beginning with the Ringhof family tragedy that Alice had engendered in Copenhagen, which Jack was able to relate in a deadpan narrative more closely resembling the written word than conversation. Not once did he raise his voice, nor did he shed a tear; Jack didn’t even blink.

“Goodness!” was all Miss Wurtz had to say in reply.

They were at an outdoor luncheon at Bob Bookman’s home. The screenwriters who were Jack’s (or Emma’s) principal competition in the Best Adapted Screenplay category that year were there—in addition to Jack, Bookman represented three of his fellow nominees. But there Jack was, in Bob Bookman’s garden, with his third-grade teacher—his father’s former lover—and Jack was back in those North Sea ports of call, telling Miss Wurtz what he had learned.

“Don’t downplay what happened in Stockholm, Jack—I mean just because it wasn’t as bad as what happened in Copenhagen,” Miss Wurtz would tell him later that same weekend. “And even if you had sex with someone in Oslo, please don’t spare me any details.”

He didn’t. (Dr. García had taught him not to spare her any details.) Jack found that he could actually talk his way through it—at least to as sympathetic a soul as Caroline Wurtz. Jack doubted that he would have been able to tell the North Sea story to Leslie Oastler and her unfriendly blonde—not without shedding a tear or two, or indulging in a little shouting. But he told Miss Wurtz everything about Copenhagen and Stockholm without batting an eye. He didn’t even hesitate when he got to Oslo. He didn’t want to be over-optimistic, but Jack thought that Dr. García’s therapy was working.

32. Straining to See

The Weinstein brothers were backing more than one Oscar-nominated film that year. The night before the Academy Awards, Miramax had a party at the Regent Beverly Wilshire. The anti-pornography people were protesting The Slush-Pile Reader outside the hotel. The film had an R rating; it wasn’t pornographic, but it was offensive to the anti-pornography people that Jack’s character (Jimmy Stronach, the porn star) was sympathetically portrayed. Those other characters in the film who were part of the porn industry were also sympathetic—chiefly Hank Long and Muffy; and Mildred “Milly” Ascheim made a cameo appearance as herself. Worse, from the point of view of the anti-pornography people, all the porn stars were portrayed as having normal lives—to the degree that so-called L.A. dysfunctional is normal, and Emma believed it was.

There were fewer than a dozen protesters outside the hotel, but the media gave them undue attention. There were usually the same small number of zealots every year—some of them protesting what Jack’s mother would have called “the deterioration of language” in movies in general. The anti-profanity people, the anti-pornography people—there would always be complainers with too much time on their hands. Jack thought that the best thing was to pay them no attention, but the media tended to inflate their importance and their numbers.

Miss Wurtz hadn’t noticed the protesters. When Wild Bill Vanvleck was ranting at the Miramax party about the anti-pornography people, Caroline clutched Jack’s arm and said anxiously: “There are protesters? What are they protesting?”

“Pornography,” Jack said.

Miss Wurtz looked all around the room, as if there might be pornographic acts under way in their very midst and she had somehow mistaken them for more innocent forms of entertainment. Jack explained: “You know, Caroline—my character, Jimmy Stronach, is a porn star. I think that’s what they’re protesting.”

“Nonsense!” Miss Wurtz shouted. “I did not see a single reproductive organ in the film—not one penis or one female thingamajig!”

“A what?” Wild Bill said, looking shocked.

“A vagina,” Jack whispered to him.

“You shouldn’t say that word at a party,” Caroline said.

It soon became clear that The Wurtz had seen too many films in too short a period of time—as many as three a day for the past several weeks, or so she’d told Jack. Miss Wurtz had never seen so many movies in her life; they were all a blur. And this year’s films were mingled with movies she’d not seen since she was a child. To her, the recognizable celebrities at the party were not movie stars but the actual characters they’d played. Unfortunately, these movies had overlapped in her mind—to the extent that she’d merged the plots of several different films into one incomprehensible epic, in which virtually everyone she “recognized” at the Regent Beverly Wilshire had played a pivotal role.

“Oh, look—there’s that envious young man who killed those people. One with an oar, I think,” she said, indicating Matt Damon, who was Tom Ripley in The Talented Mr. Ripley. Not that The Wurtz made any distinction between Tom Ripley and the character Tom Cruise played in Magnolia that year. And she had convinced herself that Kevin Spacey was trapped in a bad marriage, which he periodically escaped by lusting after young girls. “Someone should be assigned to watch him,” Miss Wurtz told Jack, who understood that by watch, she meant control him.

Seeking to change the subject, Jack said he admired how thin Gwyneth Paltrow was—to which The Wurtz replied: “She looks in need of intravenous feeding.”

When you’ve seen too many movies, time stands still; no one grows old or dies. Miss Wurtz mistook Anthony Minghella for Peter Lorre. (“I thought Peter Lorre was dead,” Caroline would tell Jack the next day. “He hasn’t made a movie in years.” To which Jack could only think to himself, True!)

Looking worriedly around, The Wurtz announced that a party of this size—and with so many celebrities—should have more than one bouncer; she thought that Ben Affleck was the sole bouncer.

Judi Dench was there, which prompted Caroline to confess to Jack that she’d always thought Judi Dench would be an inspired choice to play Mrs. McQuat—should anyone ever make a movie about The Gray Ghost.

“A movie about Mrs. McQuat?” Jack said, stunned.

“You know she was a combat nurse, Jack. The trouble with her breathing was because she’d been gassed—I’m not sure with what.”

Thus Jack was doomed to think of Judi Dench as The Gray Ghost, gassed but come back to life—a troubling thought.

Jack kept giving Wild Bill Vanvleck the eye—the eye that meant, “Isn’t it time to leave?”

But Wild Bill was nowhere near ready to go. He was back in Hollywood, reborn as the director of an Academy Award–nominated film. Jack didn’t begrudge The Mad Dutchman his triumph; The Remake Monster had admirably restrained himself in directing The Slush-Pile Reader. Jack had always trusted Vanvleck as a craftsman, and Wild Bill had stuck to the craftsmanlike part of his business; this time, he’d left the parody alone.

After they finally left the Miramax party, Jack and Miss Wurtz went out to dinner with Richard Gladstein and his wife and Vanvleck and his much younger anchorwoman, whose name was Anneke. Outside the Regent Beverly Wilshire, the protesters were still chanting and holding up posters of male and female reproductive organs—penises and thingamajigs galore. Miss Wurtz became incensed all over again.

“If you don’t like pornography, stop thinking about it!” Caroline said sharply out the window of the limousine to a baffled-looking man in a lime-green short-sleeved shirt; he was holding a poster depicting a naked child, above whom the intimidating shadow of a grown-up loomed.

It was a good thing The Wurtz wasn’t riding in the limo with Hank Long and Muffy and Milly Ascheim. Jack found out later that Milly had put down her window and shouted at the protesters: “Oh, go home and watch a movie and beat off! You’ll feel better!”

“Goodness, it’s already Sunday morning,” Miss Wurtz declared, when she and Jack were having breakfast at the pool at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills. “And your story has bogged down in Oslo, as I recall. It’s probably best not to try to imitate Ingrid Moe’s speech impediment. Just tell me what she said the way you would normally say it, Jack. The speech impediment is too distracting.”

Not surprisingly, Jack would elect to tell the story in this fashion when he told it to Dr. García, too. He made no effort to render an approximation of Ingrid’s awful affliction. (Knowing Dr. García, she would have referred to any effort on Jack’s part to re-create the speech impediment as an interjection.)

Thus Jack described Ingrid Moe’s vision of Hell as if it were his personal account of an actual visit to the place. He paid particular attention to Ingrid’s lack of forgiveness for his mother, which stood in such dramatic contrast to the fact that his father forgave his mother for everything—even the Amsterdam part of the story, which Jack was a long way from getting to on that Sunday morning in Beverly Hills. He felt certain that he and Miss Wurtz wouldn’t get to Amsterdam—at least not before the Academy Awards, which would commence later that afternoon.

Having been to the Oscars once before, Jack knew they were in for a long night. Miss Wurtz, wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat and smeared from head to toe with more sunscreen than a naked newborn, was pressing Jack for details about Helsinki. She was clearly impatient with Oslo and Ingrid Moe, although William’s appearance at the Hotel Bristol had thrilled her. The Wurtz was especially pleased to learn that William had not cut his hair.

“William had beautiful hair. You have his hair, Jack,” Caroline said, taking his hand. “I’m so glad you haven’t cut your hair short, the way everyone else does nowadays. Frankly, it doesn’t matter whether long hair for men is in or out. If you have good hair, you should grow it.”

The Helsinki part of the story took what remained of their private time that Sunday. Erica Steinberg had thoughtfully arranged for someone to come to the hotel to do Miss Wurtz’s hair. “Whatever do means,” The Wurtz whispered to Jack, before she went off with Erica after lunch. “I’m keeping it gray—that’s all I know. It’s too late for me to be a blonde—not that there aren’t enough blondes already, especially out here.”

Jack went to the gym, which was next to the pool. Sigourney Weaver was there. (He came up to her collarbone.) “Good luck tonight, Jack,” she said.

That was when he began to get nervous; that was when he realized that it meant everything to him to win.

“It’s just possible, Jack,” Dr. García would tell him later, “that winning the Oscar was some small consolation for what you’ve lost.”

She didn’t mean only his father. She didn’t mean only Emma, either. She meant Michele Maher, notwithstanding Dr. García’s assessment of the “unrealistic expectations” Jack had heaped upon Michele; she meant Jack’s false memories, the childhood his mother had fabricated for him, which he’d lost, too. (Dr. García also meant his mom, of course.)

Erica rode in the stretch limo with Jack and Miss Wurtz to the Shrine Auditorium. They saw the protesters from the night before—the same righteous faces, the identical posters. The limo was moving so slowly that, this time, Jack could count them. There were nine anti-pornography people altogether—not that this would prevent Entertainment Weekly, in its post-Oscar issue, from describing the “scores” of protesters ringing the auditorium.

Miss Wurtz looked wonderful. She wore a long, slender gown with a Queen Anne neckline; it was the same silver color as her hair. Jack’s all-black Armani, which included a black shirt as well as the black tuxedo and the black tie, made him resemble a shrunken gangster. He’d lost the twenty pounds he’d put on for the Jimmy Stronach role—he was looking lean and mean, as Michele Maher had once observed.

They weren’t on the red carpet more than twenty minutes before Erica steered them in the direction of the obligatory Joan Rivers interview. Jack was dreading Miss Wurtz’s answer to Joan’s predictable question regarding “who” she was wearing. But rather than say, “Jack’s father gave it to me when we were lovers,” Caroline answered: “The dress is personal, a gift from a onetime admirer.” That was perfect, Jack thought.

Joan Rivers knew all about the third-grade connection in advance; it seemed that everyone in the media knew. “What sort of a student was Jack?” she asked Miss Wurtz.

“Even as a child, Jack was as convincing as a woman as he was as a man,” Caroline answered. “He just needed to know who his audience was.”

“And who is your audience, Jack Burns?” Joan Rivers asked him.

“My father is my audience of one,” he told her, “but I suppose I’ve picked up a few other fans along the way.” Jack looked into the camera and said, for the first time in his life: “Hi, Dad.” He noticed that Miss Wurtz was smiling shyly at the camera.

After that, Jack couldn’t get off the red carpet fast enough. He was a wreck. (He almost called Dr. García.)

“Calm down,” Caroline said. “It’s not necessary for you to say anything to William. He just wants to see you—he wants, more than anyone, to see you win.”

There was a lot of waiting at the Academy Awards. Erica took Jack and Miss Wurtz inside the auditorium, where they waited for an eternity. Jack drank too much Evian and had to pee—this was before Billy Crystal was carried onstage like a baby by a motorcycle cop in sunglasses and a white helmet, and the evening officially began.

Jack had a sixth-row aisle seat. All the nominees had aisle seats; Richard Gladstein sat in the aisle seat in front of Jack, and Wild Bill Vanvleck had the one behind him. Miss Wurtz was seated between Jack and Harvey Weinstein. Caroline didn’t remember who Harvey was—Jack had introduced them twice at the party the previous night—but she knew he was someone important because there was a television camera pointed at him from start to finish. For reasons that would remain unclear to Jack, Miss Wurtz deduced that Harvey was a famous prizefighter—a former heavyweight champ. (Quite possibly she’d overheard someone saying how much Harvey enjoyed a good fight. Jack could think of no other explanation.)

The Best Supporting Actor award was announced fairly early in the program. When Michael Caine won, Jack knew it would be a long wait for the writing awards, which were near the end of the evening. Almost no one sat through the entire program—especially not if you’d had as much Evian as Jack. But you had to pick your pee-break pretty carefully; they would let you leave or go back to your seat only during the TV commercials.

Miss Wurtz became enraged at those award-winners who overspent their allotted forty-five seconds for their acceptance speeches. Pedro Almodóvar really pissed her off; in accepting the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film for All About My Mother, Pedro went on for so long that Antonio Banderas had to pull him offstage.

“Buenas noches!” Miss Wurtz called out to Almodóvar.

They took their pee-break—that is, they took Jack’s pee-break, since he was the one in dire need of it—during the presentation of the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award. This year it went to Warren Beatty. Caroline was cross with Jack for causing her to miss it. Miss Wurtz had once had a crush on Warren Beatty. “Nothing compared to what I felt for your father, Jack, but it was a crush just the same.”

By the time they were back in their seats, Jack had to pee again. He whispered to Miss Wurtz that if he didn’t win, he would have to pee in his Evian bottle. (Jack was counting on there being a men’s room backstage—if he could get there.)

Finally, the writing awards came; thankfully the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay preceded the award for Best Original Screenplay. Kevin Spacey was the lone presenter. Annette Bening was supposed to join him onstage, but she was arguably too pregnant to risk the short trip from her seat. Spacey made a joke about how she was “due to go into production herself.” He said further: “I could not ask her to climb stairs, unless of course she wins the Oscar. Then she’ll climb up here on all fours.”

Jack took this as an unfavorable omen for his chances to win. Given his night in Helsinki with the pregnant aerobics instructor, the very idea of Annette Bening on all fours in her condition filled him with remorse. But it was only seconds after that bad moment when Kevin Spacey said, “And the Oscar goes to—” Jack didn’t hear the rest because Miss Wurtz was shrieking.

“Think of how happy William is for you, Jack,” she shouted in his ear, between kisses. Of course the camera was on them, and Jack was aware of The Wurtz looking past him to the camera; she knew exactly where the camera was because it had been pointed at Harvey Weinstein, the former prizefighter, all night. Jack was on his feet—Richard was kissing him, Wild Bill, too. Harvey crushed Miss Wurtz and Jack in one embrace. When Jack stepped into the aisle, he saw Caroline blow a kiss to the camera—her lips forming the name William as she did so.

Jack took the Oscar from Kevin Spacey and spoke for only thirty-five of his allotted forty-five seconds; in a small way, this made up for Pedro Almodóvar thanking the Virgin of Guadalupe, the Virgin of La Cabeza, the Sacred Heart of Mary, and all the rest of the living and the dead. Of course Jack thanked his third-grade teacher, Miss Caroline Wurtz, because he knew that the camera would go to her if he did. He thanked Mr. Ramsey, too, and naturally he thanked Richard, and Wild Bill, and everyone at Miramax. Most of all, Jack thanked Emma Oastler for everything she’d done for him, and—largely because he knew how angry it would make the blonde—he thanked Leslie Oastler for her contributions to the screenplay. Lastly, Jack thanked Michele Maher for staying up late to watch him. (In his heart, he hoped Michele’s sort-of boyfriend was watching, too. Hearing Jack thank Michele might make the boyfriend jealous and lead to their breaking up.)

Jack might have used the full forty-five seconds if he hadn’t had to pee so badly. When he left the stage with Kevin Spacey, they passed Mel Gibson coming on—Mel was the presenter for the Best Original Screenplay award, which would go to Alan Ball for American Beauty. Tom Cruise, a fellow former wrestler, tried to wrestle the Oscar away from Jack backstage; the way Jack had to pee, that bit of friendly fooling around could have ended badly. Clint Eastwood spoke to Jack. (He said: “Way to go, kid,” or words to that effect. Jack knew he couldn’t trust his memory of moments like that—the ones that mattered too much.)

Jack was still seeking the whereabouts of the men’s room when Alan Ball came offstage with his Oscar, and Jack congratulated him. (“Good job, mate,” Jack thought Mel Gibson said, but had Mel been speaking to Jack or to Alan?) After a night of waiting, everything seemed over so quickly.

At last Jack found the place he was looking for. His relief turned to awkwardness almost immediately, however, because he had never been to a men’s room with an Academy Award before. Leslie Oastler had attempted to diminish Oscar by describing him as a “gold, bald, naked man holding what is alleged to be his sword,” but in Jack’s estimation, an Oscar was longer than a porn star’s penis and a whole lot heavier. Jack wouldn’t recommend peeing with one.

It was an experience in childlike clumsiness that reminded him of Marja-Liisa’s four-year-old peeing in his parka pocket at the Hotel Torni. Jack couldn’t quite get the hang of it, so to speak. He tried pinning the Oscar under one arm, but that didn’t work very well. If you’ve just won your first Academy Award, fully understanding that you might never win another one, you’re not inclined to put it down on the floor of a public men’s room—nor would you attempt to balance it on the urinal by maintaining perilous little contact with Oscar’s sleek head by means of your chin.

Jack was glad he was alone in the men’s room; there was no one to observe his embarrassing struggle—or so he thought. Suddenly he saw, at the opposite end of the row of urinals, that there was someone else there. The fellow appeared to have finished with his business; no one could help but notice how Jack was failing to do his.

The man was broad-shouldered, with a weightlifter’s crafted body and an unbreakable-looking jaw. Jack didn’t recognize him right away, nor did he remember that the former bodybuilder had been a presenter; from Jack’s perspective, the opposite end of the row of urinals seemed a football field away. But Jack had no trouble identifying the big man’s inimitable Austrian accent.

“Would you like me to give you a hand with that?” Arnold Schwarzenegger asked.

“No, thank you—I can manage,” Jack answered.

“Goodness, I hope he meant he would give you a hand with the Oscar!” Miss Wurtz said later, when Jack told her the story. Well, of course Arnold had meant the Oscar—he was just being nice! (That the future governor of California might have been offering to hold Jack’s penis was unthinkable!)

It was bedlam backstage. At the next television commercial, Jack went back to his seat in the auditorium; he didn’t want to leave Miss Wurtz unattended. She might ask Harvey Weinstein about his greatest fights, Jack was thinking. Or, God forbid, what if there were a power outage and Miss Wurtz suffered an uncontrollable flashback to her experience in the bat-cave exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum? But by then the evening was winding down; The Slush-Pile Reader had won its only Oscar. It was American Beauty’s night, but it was Jack’s night and Emma’s night, too.

Miss Wurtz was perplexed that she could see no evidence of dancing at the Board of Governors Ball—the dinner party at the Shrine Auditorium after the Academy Awards. No amount of explaining could convince her that ball was an acceptable description of the occasion, but what did Jack care? He was happy.

They ate dinner at a table with Meryl Streep, who’d brought her daughter. Jack could see the wheels of The Wurtz’s mind spinning: here was that woman from Sophie’s Choice with an actual, living child! Jack told Erica that he thought they should leave and go to another party before Caroline committed whatever she was imagining to words.

They went to the Vanity Fair party at Morton’s next; Erica got them there somehow. Jack remembered how long he and Emma had waited to get into that party the night he’d been nominated but didn’t win the Oscar. It makes a difference when you win. Their limo driver waved the gold, bald, naked man out the window and they were swiftly ushered through the traffic. Hugh Hefner (among others) appeared to have arrived before them; probably Hugh had come early because he hadn’t been at the Shrine. The Playboy founding publisher had those twins with him—Sandy and Mandy.

Miss Wurtz was more incensed at Hef than she’d been at the anti-pornography people. “What does that dirty old man think he’s doing with those young girls?” Caroline said to Erica and Jack.

Rob Lowe and Mike Meyers and Dennis Miller were all talking about something, but they stopped the second Jack got near them. When that happened to him around men, Jack couldn’t help but think that they’d been talking about him as a girl. As it happened, Jack was on his way to the men’s room again—although this time he’d left his Academy Award with Erica and Miss Wurtz.

They went next to the Miramax party at the Polo Lounge in the Beverly Hills Hotel. Jack knew that Richard and Wild Bill would be there; he just wanted to be with friends. Miss Wurtz once more avoided making any prizefighter references to Harvey Weinstein.

Caroline had a little too much champagne. Jack had a beer—a green bottle of Heineken, which looked especially green alongside the gold of his Oscar. (He couldn’t remember when he’d last had a whole beer—maybe when he was a college student.)

Then there was a breakfast party in another area of the Beverly Hills Hotel. They went to that, too. It must have started at three or four in the morning. Roger Ebert was there; he was eating his breakfast on a bed, which Jack found peculiar. Jack was nice to him, although Roger had savaged The Slush-Pile Reader. Roger’s wife and daughter were very nice; they informed Miss Wurtz that they’d liked the movie. It pleased Jack to think that he and Emma might have caused an argument in the Ebert family.

It was about 5:00 A.M. when Jack told Miss Wurtz that he was tired and wanted to go to bed. “We can go back to our hotel, Jack,” she told him, “but you can’t go to bed. Not until you tell me about the second time in Amsterdam.” She’d had it on her mind the whole night, The Wurtz went on to say. She knew she couldn’t sleep until she heard the story.

Jack told Erica that they had to leave, and she rode with them in the limo back to the Four Seasons. On a side street in Beverly Hills, they got stuck behind a garbage truck—the only traffic they encountered at that time on a Monday morning. The smell of the garbage wafted over them in their limousine, as if to remind Jack—even with his newly won Oscar in hand—that there are some things you can’t escape, and they will find you.

Jack was okay telling Miss Wurtz about the Amsterdam business; only the end of the story was difficult. Dr. García would have been proud of him—no tears, no shouting. When Jack told Caroline how his heart wasn’t in that first meeting with Richard Gladstein and William Vanvleck—that he kept thinking about the other William—the southern California sun was streaming in the open windows of the living room of the two-bedroom suite at the Four Seasons. Miss Wurtz and Jack were seated on the couch in their matching white terry-cloth bathrobes—their bare feet on the glass-topped coffee table, where the Oscar gleamed. Caroline’s toenails were painted a rose-pink color. The sunlight seemed especially bright on her toenails, and on the Oscar—and on the lustrous black piano, which was shining like a pool of oil.

“Don’t look at my feet, Jack,” Miss Wurtz said. “My feet are the oldest part of me. I must have been born feet first.”

But Jack Burns was miles away, in the dark of night—the streetlights reflecting in the Herengracht canal. Richard Gladstein and Wild Bill Vanvleck and Jack had been talking in the restaurant called Zuid Zeeland, and Wild Bill’s much younger girlfriend—Anneke, the anchorwoman—was looking restless and bored. (How much fun is it to be young and green-eyed and beautiful, and have three men talking to one another and ignoring you—especially when they’re talking about how to make a movie from a novel you haven’t read?)

As little as Jack’s heart was in it, he saw that he and Richard and Wild Bill were all on the same page; they seemed to agree about what needed tweaking in the script, and about the tone the film must have. Richard’s eyes kept closing—he was falling asleep because of his jet lag. Wild Bill was teasing him, to the effect that Richard was not allowed to fall asleep before he signed the check. “Producers pay the bills!” Vanvleck was chanting; he was a man who loved his red wine.

Out on the Herengracht, Richard woke up a little in the damp night air. It seemed inevitable to Jack now that Wild Bill would suggest a stroll through the red-light district, but it took him by surprise at the time. When they walked past the first few girls in their windows and doorways, Jack could tell that Richard was wide awake. Anneke was still bored. Jack had the feeling that Wild Bill took all his out-of-town friends on a tour of the red-light district; after all, it was the homicide territory of his TV series and he knew the district well. (Almost as well as Jack knew it, but Jack didn’t let on that he’d ever been there before.)

Anneke livened up a little, most noticeably when she observed how the prostitutes in their windows and doorways recognized Jack Burns as frequently as they recognized her. As an attractive anchorwoman, she was a famous fixture on Dutch television—but no more famous than Jack was. And not only was Jack a movie star; he had the added advantage of Nico Oudejans telling all the whores in the district to be on the lookout for him.

“You cocktease, Jack!” one of the transvestite prostitutes called out; she was Brazilian, probably. (Those chicks with dicks were out to get him.) This captured Anneke’s attention, but Wild Bill had downed a couple of bottles of red wine; he didn’t notice. The Mad Dutchman was lecturing Richard nonstop.

Suddenly Jack was irritated by it. Vanvleck was showing off the red-light district as if he’d invented it, as if he’d hired all the girls himself. Poor Richard was fighting off his jet lag and the overwhelming seediness of the place. By all counts, it had been a forgettable night for Anneke.

Well, Jack thought—I’ll show them something they’ll all remember! “This is nothing,” Jack announced as they circled the Oudekerksplein. He began to lead them across the Warmoesstraat, out of the red-light district. “You haven’t seen anything until you’ve seen Els.”

“Els?” Vanvleck said.

“Where are we going?” Richard asked. (They were walking away from the hotel; that was all he knew.)

“Els is the oldest working prostitute in Amsterdam,” Jack told them. “She’s an old friend.”

“She is?” Wild Bill said, stumbling along.

Jack led them across the Damrak. It was now late at night. He was sure that Els would have gone to bed. Petra, her colleague who was only sixty-one, might be sitting in the second-floor window. Or maybe Petra would have gone home and gone to bed, too. In either case, Jack would wake up Els—just to show Wild Bill and Richard and Anneke that he had a history in Amsterdam that ran a little deeper than a Dutch TV series.

When they came into the narrow Sint Jacobsstraat, Wild Bill was staggering. The street could seem a little menacing at night. Jack saw Richard look over his shoulder a couple of times, and Anneke took Jack’s arm and walked close beside him.

To Jack’s surprise, Els—not Petra—was in the window. (“Some drunk woke me up shouting,” she would tell Jack later. “Petra had gone home, and I felt like staying up. Call it my intuition, Jackie.”)

When Jack spotted her, he started waving. “Els is in her seventies,” he said to Wild Bill, who was staring up at Els in her red-lit window as if he had seen one of Hell’s own avenging spirits—a harpy from the netherworld, an infernal Fury.

“She’s how old?” Richard asked.

“Think of your grandmother,” Jack told him.

“Jackie!” Els shouted, blowing kisses. “My little boy has come back again!” she once more announced to the Sint Jacobsstraat.

Jack blew kisses to her; he waved and waved. That was when he lost it—when Els started waving back to him.

It is impossible that Jack could have “remembered” his mother lifting him above the ship’s rail as they sailed from the dock in Rotterdam; impossible that he actually recalled waving to Els, twenty-eight years before, or that (when Jack was four) he truly saw his father fall to the ground with both hands holding his broken heart.

“Don’t cry, Jackie—don’t cry!” Els called to him from her second-floor window, but Jack had dropped to his knees on the Sint Jacobsstraat. He was still waving good-bye, and Els kept waving back to him.

Richard and Wild Bill were struggling to get Jack to his feet, but Wild Bill was drunk. Richard, in addition to his jet lag, had been knocking back the red wine, too.

“You’re her little boy?” Richard was asking, but Jack was waving good-bye to his dad and couldn’t answer; Jack’s heart was in his throat.

“You actually know this lady?” Wild Bill asked, losing his balance and sitting down in the street. Richard was holding Jack under one arm, but he let go. Jack just lay in the street beside Wild Bill; Jack was still waving.

“Jackie, Jackie—your mother loved you!” Els was calling. “As best she could!”

It was Wild Bill’s pretty anchorwoman who finally helped Jack to his feet; she’d laid off the red wine, Jack had noticed. “For God’s sake, stop waving to that old hooker!” Anneke said. “Stop encouraging her!”

“She was my nanny!” Jack blubbered.

“She was his what?” Wild Bill asked Richard.

“His babysitter,” Richard explained.

“Marvelous!” Wild Bill exclaimed.

“Oh, shut up, Bill! Can’t you see he’s crying?” Anneke asked The Mad Dutchman.

“Jack, why are you crying?” Wild Bill asked.

“She looked after me while my mother was working,” Jack told them.

“Working where? Working here?” Richard asked.

“My mom worked in a window, in one of those doorways—back there,” Jack said, pointing in the general direction of the red-light district. “My mother was a prostitute,” he told them.

“I thought his mom was a tattoo artist!” Wild Bill said to Richard.

“She was a tattoo artist, too,” Jack said. “She wasn’t a prostitute for very long, but she was one.”

Jack began to wave good-bye to Els again, but Anneke wrapped her arms around him; she pinned his arms to his sides. “For God’s sake, stop!” the anchorwoman said.

“Come back and see me before I die, Jackie!” Els was calling.

Wild Bill was still sitting in the street. He had begun to wave good-bye to Els, too, but Anneke kicked him. “What a great idea, Bill!” she said. “You give a tour of the red-light district to a guy whose mom was a whore!”

“Well, I didn’t know!” Wild Bill shouted. Richard helped him to his feet; Anneke removed a candy-bar wrapper from Vanvleck’s long, gray ponytail.

They were walking away from Els in her window, toward the red-light district; that was the most direct way back to the Grand. Richard, who was walking beside Jack, put his arm around him. “Are you all right, Jack?” Richard asked.

“I’ll be fine,” Jack told him.

But Richard was sober enough to be worried about Jack, and they were fast becoming friends. “When you get back to L.A., I know someone you could see,” Richard said.

“Do you mean a psychiatrist?” Jack asked.

“Dr. García knows actors,” Richard said. “You wouldn’t be her first movie star.”

The waving good-bye had stopped, but Jack could still see Els lifting his dad off the pavement and carrying him like a child to Femke’s Mercedes. (In all probability, Alice had put Jack down on the deck and the boy could no longer see over the ship’s rail.) The damp night air blew into Jack’s face, like ocean air—like the air blowing all the way from Rotterdam to Montreal, which was where the ship was heading.

Jack heard the women and girls in their windows and doorways calling out his name, but he just kept walking. “Brilliant!” Jack heard Richard say once, for no apparent reason.

Anneke was holding Jack’s arm again—this time as if to shield him from the greetings of the prostitutes. “When you get back to the hotel, just go straight to bed and try to forget about it,” Anneke whispered to him.

“Good night, my dears!” Wild Bill was calling to the red-light women.

Jack would forever feel the movement of the ship pulling out of the harbor—the deck rolling under his four-year-old feet, Rotterdam receding. How he wanted to see his father’s Herbert Hoffmann—the tattoo William got in Hamburg, if he got one. A sailing ship seen from the stern; the ship would be pulling away from shore. Hoffmann’s Sailor’s Grave or his Last Port—a tattoo like that was what William would have wanted. Jack felt pretty sure about it. That was when Jack knew he would have to find him.

In Beverly Hills, the sun was now high enough in the sky that the slanted rays of light no longer came in the open windows. Miss Wurtz’s painted toenails were a less-bright shade of rose-pink. The black piano had taken on a more somber tone—less like a pool of oil, more like a coffin. But even without direct sunlight, the Oscar standing beside their bare feet on the glass-topped table was no less gold—no less dazzling.

“I know that William saw you last night, Jack,” Miss Wurtz was saying. “I don’t care what time of night or early morning it was in Europe, if that’s where he is. I just know that he wouldn’t have missed seeing you.”

Caroline got up from the couch and kissed Jack on the forehead; holding her bathrobe tightly to her throat, she bent over and kissed Oscar on the top of his gleaming head. “I’m going to go to sleep, you two,” she said.

Jack watched her walk across the living room, her hand trailing lightly for a moment on the keys of the black piano; there was just the tinkling of those soft notes before she went into her bedroom and closed the door behind her.

Jack got up and went into his bedroom and closed the door; he left the curtains closed, but he opened the windows. Some light came into the bedroom when the breeze stirred the curtains, and he could hear the sound of a hose; below him, in the garden, someone was watering the flowers. Oscar lay down beside Jack. The statuette had its own pillow. Jack looked at Oscar lying there, holding his alleged sword. In the dim light, Oscar looked like a dead soldier; maybe his comrades had found him on the battlefield and laid his body to rest in a dignified pose.

Jack slept until the phone woke him that Monday afternoon. It was Richard. Jack had forgotten that he and Vanvleck and Richard had agreed to go to a sound studio to record the commentary track for the DVD of their film. They had to screen the entire movie, pausing it occasionally, while they talked about the intention behind this shot or that scene—how a particular moment had come about, or how this line of dialogue or voice-over had actually been moved from somewhere else.

Jack took a shower and got dressed. He put the Oscar on the piano, on top of a note of explanation to Miss Wurtz; she was still sleeping. They would have dinner together—maybe with Richard and Wild Bill, Jack said in the note. So that no one would steal the Oscar or wake up Miss Wurtz, Jack left the DO NOT DISTURB card on the door to the suite; at the front desk, he told them not to put through any calls.

Then he walked out into the harsh sunlight, and joined Richard and Wild Bill in the limo for the ride to the sound studio. Wild Bill had a bad hangover, which had not been improved by Anneke getting sick in the middle of the night. “Something she ate,” Wild Bill told them. “I wish I’d eaten it, too. I wish it had killed me.”

Richard told Jack that no hangover was as bad as not winning the Oscar.

It seemed to take hours to record the DVD commentary. As when Jack first met with Richard and Wild Bill in Amsterdam, his heart wasn’t in it. But Jack liked the movie they had made together, and when he watched the film, he remembered how it had all come about.

“Whose idea was this?” Wild Bill would say, from time to time.

“Yours, I think,” Richard would tell him.

It went pretty well, all things considered. Wild Bill’s hangover seemed to go away, or else he rose to the occasion. In a short while, Vanvleck was doing most of the talking. There was almost a half hour when Wild Bill just talked nonstop; it was amazing what he could remember. But hearing the Dutchman’s voice like that was oddly dislocating. Jack could almost hear him asking, “You actually know this lady?”

Or when Jack had explained (that night in the Sint Jacobsstraat) that Els had been his nanny, how Wild Bill had asked Richard: “She was his what?”

“Jack, why are you crying?” The Mad Dutchman had also asked.

Here they were in Hollywood, in a sound studio, and Wild Bill Vanvleck was going on about how they’d made Emma’s movie. But in the drone of the Dutchman’s voice, his actual words were lost. Jack saw Wild Bill sitting drunk in the street, shouting to his girlfriend: “Well, I didn’t know!” And later, as they made their way through the red-light district, Jack could still hear Vanvleck calling, “Good night, my dears!”

Well, they had a job to do—Richard, Wild Bill, and Jack—and they did it. Later that afternoon, when Jack got back to the Four Seasons, he found Miss Wurtz in the living room of their suite playing the piano. Jack sat on the couch for a while and just listened.

The Wurtz began to talk to him, but—at the same time—she kept playing. “I want to thank you, Jack—I had the best time! It was quite a night for an old lady!”

Jack’s neck was stiff and his toes hurt—something he’d done in the gym, he was thinking.

“But I must enlighten you, Jack,” Miss Wurtz went on. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but not even a night like last night is as special to me as every night I spent with your father. If I never got to go to the Oscars, I would still have had William in my life—that’s all that matters.”

And that was when Jack knew why his neck was stiff and his toes hurt. In those few hours of that early Monday morning, following the Academy Awards—when he actually got to sleep—Jack knew what he’d been dreaming. He was standing on the deck of that ship, leaving Rotterdam, and he was straining to see over the rail. Jack was standing on his toes and stretching his neck; for the few hours he slept, Jack must have maintained this uncomfortable position. No matter how hard he tried, of course, he couldn’t see the shore.

Jack Burns may not have been a big believer in so-called recovered memory, but here is what Jack remembered, listening to Miss Wurtz play the piano, and he was sure it really happened—he knew it was true.

“Lift me up!” Jack had said to his mother on the deck of that ship. The docks were still in sight, but Jack couldn’t see them. “Lift me up!” he’d begged his mom. “I want to see!” But she wouldn’t do it.

“You’ve seen enough, Jack,” his mom had said. She took his hand. “We’re going below deck now,” she’d told him.

“Lift me up! I want to see!” Jack had demanded.

But Alice was in no mood to be bossed around. “You’ve seen enough of Holland to last you a lifetime, Jackie boy,” she’d said.

Under the circumstances, Jack had seen enough of Canada to last him a lifetime, too. Because the next country Jack saw was Canada, where his mother took him—where he would never see his dad.

33. Signs of Trouble

It had been Mrs. Machado’s fondest hope, or so she’d said, that Mister Penis would never be taken advantage of. But by whom? By willful girls and venal women? Dr. García told Jack that many women who sexually molest children believe that they are protecting them—that what the rest of us might call abuse is for these women a form of mothering.

Dr. García further speculated that Mrs. Machado must have observed a certain absence of the mothering instinct in Alice. “Women like Mrs. Machado know which boys are vulnerable,” Jack’s psychiatrist said. “It helps, of course, if you know the boy’s mother—if you see what’s missing.”

“Principiis obsta!” Mr. Ramsey had once warned him. “Beware the beginnings!”

If Jack had mother and father issues, one wonders what to make of Lucy. She was four, almost five, that early fall evening in 1987, when Jack discovered her in the backseat of her parents’ silver Audi—his first and last night as a parking valet at Stan’s in Venice.

When he saw Lucy again, in the waiting room of Dr. García’s office in Santa Monica, it was more than a year after he’d won the Oscar—April or May 2001. Lucy would have been eighteen. Jack didn’t recognize her, but she recognized him; everyone did. (A pretty girl—someone’s nanny, Jack had assumed.)

He’d long ago learned to expect and tolerate the stares of girls Lucy’s age, but Lucy’s eyes were riveted to his face, his hands, his every glance and movement. Her keen interest in him went far beyond overt flirtation or the groupie thing. Jack almost asked the receptionist if he could wait in another room. He didn’t know if there were other rooms—that is, other than a bathroom and a closet—but Lucy’s wanton obsession with him was distressing.

Then the problem appeared to go away; they overlapped only that one time in Dr. García’s waiting room. Jack completely forgot about the girl.

The reason Jack would remember the year and the season of his first reunion with Lucy, which (at the time) he didn’t know was a reunion, is that he was getting ready for a trip to Halifax—his first trip there since he’d crossed the Atlantic and landed in Nova Scotia in his mother’s womb. Dr. García had warned him against returning to his birthplace, which she viewed as a possible setback to his therapy. But Jack had other business in Halifax.

A not-very-good Canadian novelist and screenwriter, Doug McSwiney, and a venerable French director, Cornelia Lebrun, wanted him to play the lead in a movie about the Halifax Explosion in 1917. They probably couldn’t get adequate financing for the film without a movie star attached, and—given the off-center nature of McSwiney’s screenplay—not just any movie star would do. Because of the cross-dressing inclination of the main character, the movie star had to be Jack Burns.

The character Jack would play, a transvestite prostitute, loses his (or her) memory in the explosion, when all his clothes are blown off and he suffers second-degree burns over his entire body; then he falls in love with his nurse. At first, Jack’s character doesn’t remember that he’s a transvestite prostitute, but it wouldn’t be a movie if his memory didn’t return.

Jack had some issues with the screenplay, but he’d always been interested in the Halifax Explosion—and in seeing the city of his birth. It appealed to him to work with Cornelia Lebrun as a director, too. She was by far the more accomplished element in this collaboration, and when she proposed a meeting in Halifax—where she was working with McSwiney, urging him to improve his tortured script—Jack seized the opportunity to see his birthplace. He would also have a chance to put in his two cents regarding Doug McSwiney’s trivialization of the Halifax disaster.

After Jack had won the Oscar, he’d said no to an uncountable number of offers. Many of these were suggested adaptations. He’d read a lot of novels, looking for a possible adaptation that appealed to him. But ever since Jack had been telling the story of his life to Dr. García, the idea of writing any screenplay paled.

Jack Burns was back in the acting business, at least for the time being—or so he told Bob Bookman. But after the Oscar, Jack had been inclined to be picky about the acting opportunities, too. The thought of making a movie in Halifax, however, intrigued him. Who knows what so-called recovered memories he might unlock there? (Infant dreams and premonitions mainly, Jack imagined.)

That was his state of mind in June 2001, when he drove to Santa Monica for his appointment with Dr. García. It was a warm day; when he parked the Audi, he left all the windows open.

Jack had a number of reasons to be feeling positive. Three years after the fact, he had described his return trip to all but one of the North Sea ports of call—and Jack had discovered that he could tell Dr. García what had happened while managing to hold himself together. (In a few instances, Dr. García had looked in danger of losing it.)

Furthermore, Jack was looking forward to his trip to Halifax—no small part of the reason being that his going there was against Dr. García’s wishes. And last but not least, Jack had just heard from Michele Maher. This was all the more remarkable because he had not heard from her for well over a year—not even so much as a postcard congratulating him for the Academy Award.

Jack had concluded, of course, that the sort-of boyfriend had taken stronger possession of her; that the boyfriend had forbidden her to communicate with Jack Burns had also crossed Jack’s mind. Now came her long, most informative—if not overaffectionate—letter. Naturally, Jack showed Michele’s letter to Dr. García, but the doctor wasn’t pleased.

In Jack’s acceptance speech at the Academy Awards, his thanking Michele Maher for staying up late to watch him had backfired. It had prompted a heated discussion with her sort-of boyfriend—apparently on the subject of Michele’s commitment to him, or lack thereof. Michele had never lived with anyone. To her old-fashioned thinking, cohabitation meant marriage and children; living with someone wasn’t supposed to be an experiment. But because Jack mentioned her name—to an audience of millions—Michele’s sort-of boyfriend insisted that they live together. Michele gave in, though she stopped short of marriage and children.

He was a fellow doctor, an internist—a friend of a friend she’d known in medical school. They were very much (perhaps too much) alike, she wrote.

“Everything in Dr. Maher’s letter,” Dr. García said, when she’d finished reading it, “suggests a pragmatism unlike your approach to anything in this world, Jack.”

But Jack had come away with something a little different from Michele’s letter—for starters, it hadn’t worked out with the live-in boyfriend. (“A year of commitment, in which I’ve never felt so uncommitted,” as Michele put it.) She was living alone again; she had no boyfriend. She was finally free to congratulate Jack for winning the Oscar, and to suggest that—were he ever to find himself in the Boston area—they should meet for lunch.

“I realize that you don’t get nominated for an Oscar every year,” Michele wrote. “Moreover, should you ever go back to the Academy Awards, I wouldn’t expect you to consider asking me to go with you again. But, in retrospect, I might have spared myself an unhappy year by saying yes to you the first time.”

“There’s more than a hint of a come-on in the ‘in retrospect’ part, isn’t there?” Dr. García commented. (This was not phrased as a question she expected Jack to answer; this was simply Dr. García’s way of presuming his agreement.)

“Später—vielleicht,” Michele’s letter concluded.

“You’ll have to help me with the German,” Dr. García said, almost as an afterthought.

“ ‘Later—perhaps,’ ” Jack translated.

“Hmm.” (This was Dr. García’s way of downplaying the importance of something.)

“I could come back from Halifax via Boston,” he suggested.

“How old is Michele—thirty-five, thirty-six?” Dr. García asked, as if she didn’t know.

“Yes, she’s my age,” Jack replied.

“Most doctors are workaholics,” Dr. García said, “but, like any woman her age, Michele’s clock is ticking.”

He should have told Dr. García about Michele’s letter in chronological order, Jack was thinking, but he didn’t say anything.

“On the other hand, she doesn’t exactly sound like a star-fucker, does she?” Dr. García said.

“She was just suggesting lunch,” Jack said.

“Hmm.”

There were no new photographs in Dr. García’s office; there hadn’t been any new photos in the three years he’d been her patient. But there wasn’t any room for new ones, not unless she threw some of the old ones away.

“Call me from Halifax if you get in trouble, Jack.”

“I won’t get in any trouble,” he told her.

Dr. García took a good look at the sky-blue, businesslike letterhead on Michele’s stationery before handing the letter back to him. “Call me from Cambridge, Massachusetts, then,” she said. “I can almost guarantee you, Jack—you’re going to get in trouble there.”

At the time, in the chronological-order part of his life story as told to Dr. García, he was up to what Miss Wurtz called “the second time in Amsterdam.” Understandably, he was in no hurry to relate that part of his life story to the doctor. Jack thought that a little trip to Halifax, with a stopover in Boston on the way back, might do him a world of good.

When he came out into the waiting room, Jack was distracted by a woman—one of the young mothers who was a regular patient of Dr. García’s. She commenced to scream the second she saw him. (Jack hated it when that happened.)

The receptionist quickly led him to the Montana Avenue exit. Jack saw that another young mother, or the screaming woman’s friend or nanny, was trying to comfort the screamer, whose wailing had frightened the children; some of the kids were crying.

He got into his Audi and tucked Michele Maher’s letter under the sun visor on the driver’s side. He was approaching the intersection of Montana Avenue and Fourth Street when Lucy’s face appeared in his rearview mirror. Jack almost had an accident when she said, “I’m not well enough behaved to eat in a grown-up restaurant.”

He still didn’t get it. Jack knew only that he’d last seen her in Dr. García’s waiting room, but he didn’t know who she was. (The nanny with groupie potential, as he’d thought of her.)

“I usually sleep on the floor, if I think anyone can see me sleeping on the backseat,” the strange girl said. “I can’t believe you keep buying Audis, and they’re always silver!”

“Lucy?” Jack said.

“It took you long enough,” she told him, “but I didn’t have any tits when you met me. I guess it’s understandable that you didn’t recognize me.”

An unfortunate coincidence, he realized. Lucy wasn’t anyone’s nanny; like Jack, she was one of Dr. García’s patients. (One of the less stable ones, he would soon discover.)

It was hard to see what faint resemblance she still bore to the worried but courageous little four-year-old Jack had picked up in his arms at Stan’s. Some of her courage had remained, or it had hardened into something else. Now in her late teens, Lucy wasn’t worried about anything—not anymore.

She had dead-calm, unblinking eyes—suggesting the steely recklessness of a car thief. If you dared her to do it—or bet her five bucks that she couldn’t—she would drive foot-to-the-floor through every red light on Wilshire Boulevard, all the way from Santa Monica into Beverly Hills. Unless she got broadsided in Brentwood, or shot by a cop in Westwood Village, there’d be no stopping her—her bare left arm would be lolling out the window, giving everyone the finger the whole way.

Jack turned right on Ocean Avenue and pulled the Audi to the curb. “I think you better get out of the car, Lucy,” he said.

“I’ll take off all my clothes before you can get me out of the backseat,” the girl told him.

Jack held the steering wheel in both hands, looking at Lucy in his rearview mirror. She was wearing a pink tank top—barely more than a sports bra—and black Puma running shorts, like a jogger. Jack knew she could take off everything she was wearing in the time it would take him to get out of the driver’s seat and open the back door.

“What do you want, Lucy?” he asked her.

“Let’s go to your house,” she said. “I know where you live, and I got a helluva story to tell you.”

“You know where I live?” he asked the girl.

“My mom and I drive by your house all the time,” she told him. “But we never see you. I guess you’re not there much or something.”

“Let’s just talk in the car,” Jack suggested.

“It’s kind of a long story,” the girl explained. In the rearview mirror, he could see that she was wriggling her running shorts down over her hips. Her thong was pink; it didn’t look as if it would be comfortable to run in.

“Please pull your shorts up,” he said. “We’ll go to my house.”

She was wearing dirty running shoes with those short socks that all the kids seemed to like—the kind that didn’t even cover your ankles. She walked all over Jack’s house on the balls of her feet, as if she were imitating Mr. Ramsey—or else she was too restless to sit down. Jack followed her around like a dog; it was as if they were in Lucy’s house and she was in charge.

“When you head-butted my dad, that was a life-changing moment,” Lucy told him. “That was when my mom decided she’d had enough of him. I remember she screamed at him all the way home. They would’ve been divorced before breakfast the next morning, if my mom could’ve arranged it.”

“In my experience, you don’t remember things with much accuracy when you’re four years old,” he cautioned her.

“You were my mother’s fucking hero,” Lucy said. “You think I wouldn’t remember that? When you got famous, we went to all your movies and my mom said, ‘There’s the guy who got me out of my miserable marriage.’ Of course my dad hated you. When they were divorced, I had to listen to him talk about you, too. ‘If I ever run into Jack Burns, he won’t know what hit him!’ my dad was always shouting.”

“Your dad didn’t handle himself too well the first time,” Jack pointed out to her.

“Let me tell you—if my mom ever ran into you, she’d fuck your brains out and then tell my dad all about it,” Lucy said. “All my life, you’ve been such a big fucking deal in my family.”

“I was just appalled that your mom and dad would leave a four-year-old in the back of their car—in Venice,” he said.

Lucy was fingering the tattoo magnets Alice had given Jack for his fridge. Japanese flash—irezumi, Henk Schiffmacher had called them. There were half a dozen magnets the size of quarters. Jack had used them to hold the four photographs of his mom’s naked torso against the refrigerator door—four slightly different views of her Until I find you tattoo, which he saw Lucy looking at very closely.

But Lucy wouldn’t settle down. She went off to have a look at the stuff on Jack’s desk. The flat glass paperweight, which slightly magnified the photo of Emma naked at seventeen, was an eye-catcher. (He’d always thought that one day he would regret keeping one of those photographs, which Claudia had asked him to get rid of.)

“I gotta use your bathroom,” Lucy said. There were two other bathrooms in the house, but she waltzed right through Jack’s bedroom and went into his bathroom and closed the door.

Jack had converted Emma’s former bedroom into a small gym—two kinds of stationary bikes, a treadmill, an ab machine, some benches, and a lot of free weights. There were no mirrors on the walls—just some of his favorite movie posters, including a couple from films he’d been in. There was a mat on the floor for stretching and rolling around—a long rectangle, about a third of a regulation-size wrestling mat.

Jack sat down on the mat and hugged his knees to his chest, wondering what he should do about Lucy. He heard the toilet flush and the water running in the sink; he heard the girl come out of the bathroom and pick up the telephone on the night table next to his bed. Jack could tell by her automatic tone of voice that she was talking to an answering machine.

“Hi, Mom—it’s me,” he heard Lucy say. “I’m in Jack Burns’s house, I’m naked, I’m in his bed. Isn’t this what you always wanted? Sorry I beat you to it, but what’s it matter? The thought of you or me with Jack Burns is gonna drive Dad crazy. Love ya!”

Jack went into his bedroom and saw that Lucy hadn’t been kidding. She’d pulled back the covers and was lying naked on his bed. “Now we’re going to get in trouble,” Lucy said.

“Maybe you are, Lucy, but I’m not,” he told her.

He walked past her into the bathroom; he was intending to bring her clothes to her, but he couldn’t see her clothes or imagine what she’d done with them. She’d put her dirty running shoes with the little socks on his bathroom scale, but the rest of her clothes were gone. (How could they just disappear? he was thinking.)

Jack went back into the bedroom. “You’re leaving now, Lucy. Where are your clothes?”

She shrugged. Yes, she was a pretty eighteen-year-old. Even Jack could count the years from 1987, when he first came to L.A., and add them to four. (And after all, he’d been doing a lot of thinking about four-year-olds lately.) But Jack wasn’t even considering having sex with Lucy, not even if it was legal—that wasn’t the issue.

She was one of those willfully grimy girls with flecks of gold glitter in her hair; every toenail was painted a different color. The finger-shaped citron known as Buddha’s Hand was tattooed on the inside of one thigh—high up, where her running shorts had covered it. Some young women were more arousing before they took their clothes off; besides, Jack had never liked being bullied.

“I’ll give you a T-shirt and some running shorts of mine,” he said. “I’ll dress you myself, Lucy, if you don’t get yourself dressed and get out of here.”

“My mom’s already called the cops,” she told him. “She’s home all day with nothing to do. She just screens all her calls, in case it’s my dad. I’m telling you, she’s already played my message twice—she’s already given the cops your address, and everything.”

Jack went into the kitchen and picked up the phone there. He called 911 and said he had an unwelcome eighteen-year-old girl in his house—she had hidden herself in his car. Now she’d undressed herself and called her mother. He hadn’t touched her, Jack said—he didn’t want to touch her. “If the girl won’t dress herself, maybe one of the officers you send should be female,” he said.

Jack was asked if this was a domestic dispute. Did he know the girl? “I haven’t had any contact with her since she was a four-year-old!” he shouted.

Well, that meant he did know her, didn’t it? Jack was asked. (He should have seen that coming.) “Look, she thinks I’m the reason her mother and father got divorced. She and her mother are obsessed with me. Her father hates me!”

“You know the whole family?” he was asked.

When Jack gave his address, he got a quick “Wait a minute” in response. A squad car had already been dispatched. Naturally, there’d been an earlier call—Lucy’s mother. The first caller had said something about a rape-in-progress.

“That’s not true!” Jack shouted.

“The toilet keeps flushing!” Lucy called from the bedroom. “Forget the cops. You better call a plumber!”

Jack hung up the phone and stomped back through his bedroom to the bathroom. Lucy had put her clothes in the water-tank part of the toilet. (They were soaked; Jack put them in the bathtub.) The rod that held the ball was bent out of shape; that was why the toilet kept flushing. At least he knew what to do about that.

When Jack went back into the bedroom, Lucy was writhing all around on his bed; the bedcovers were completely untucked, and one of the pillows had been flung on the floor. The bed looked as if he’d just had sex with several eighteen-year-olds—all of them gymnasts.

“This is nothing but a big nuisance,” he told the little bitch. “Believe me, you’re not going to think this is so funny when they check you for bodily fluids.”

“I’m just so sick of hearing how you fucked up my entire family!” the girl shouted.

Jack walked out of the bedroom, closing the door behind him. He went outside and stood leaning against his Audi in the driveway. He was still waiting for the police to arrive when he noticed the photographer, an overfamiliar paparazzo—best known for his photos of a young actress barfing in a swimming pool at a wedding in Westwood. Jack saw the paparazzo looking at him through the long telephoto lens from the far side of the street.

When the cops came, Jack was glad that one of the two was a female officer. Jack told her where Lucy was, and the policewoman went into the house to find her while he told his story to the other officer.

“Are you sure she’s eighteen?” the policeman interrupted Jack once; otherwise, he just listened. The paparazzo had crossed the street and was photographing them from the foot of Jack’s driveway.

“She can’t wear her own clothes—they’re all wet,” Jack was explaining to the officer, just before Lucy ran naked out the front door and threw her arms around Jack’s neck. The policeman tried to shield her from the photographer.

The female officer came out of the house carrying a bath towel. She tried to wrap the towel around Lucy, but Lucy kept wriggling out of the towel. It took both officers to disengage the girl from around Jack’s neck. Jack just stood there, doing his best not to touch Lucy, while the paparazzo kept snapping away. If the photographer had taken one step up the driveway, Jack might have broken all the fingers on the guy’s hands—one finger at a time, even with the police officers there.

“I suppose stuff like this happens to you on a regular basis,” the male cop was saying to Jack.

“Whatever he’s been telling you, I’ll bet it’s true,” the female officer told her partner. “If this girl were my daughter, I’d be tempted to drown her in a toilet.”

She was a tall, lean black woman with a despairing expression that was accented by a scar; the scar had dug a groove through one of her eyebrows. Her partner was a husky white guy with a crew cut and pale-blue eyes; his eyes were as calm and unblinking as Lucy’s.

“Be sure to check her for evidence of bodily fluids,” Jack told the officers, “in case I’m lying.”

The black woman smiled. “Don’t you get in trouble, too,” she told him. “Behave yourself.”

“We’d like to have a look inside your house, just to corroborate a few things,” the husky policeman said.

“Sure,” Jack told him.

It was a long day. Jack kept looking out the window. He was hoping the paparazzo would come onto his property, but the photographer maintained his vigil at the foot of the driveway. After the police took Lucy away—Jack insisted on giving Lucy the bath towel—the photographer went away, too.

Jack was surprised that both police officers never once appeared to doubt his story, but the female officer had cautioned him about the photos of Alice’s breasts and her tattoo on the refrigerator. When Jack explained the history of the photographs, the policewoman said: “That doesn’t matter. If there’s ever any trouble here, you don’t want pictures like those on your fridge.”

He showed her the photo of Emma naked at seventeen—the one under the paperweight on his desk. “Ditto?” he asked her.

“You’re learning,” the female officer said. “I sense that you have real potential.”

After everyone had gone, Jack found Lucy’s thong in his bathtub; it was so small that the police must have missed it. He put it in the trash, together with the four photos of his mom and the old one of Emma.

If he hadn’t been leaving for Halifax in the morning, Jack might have been more careful about the trash. It would make sense to him later—how the magazine that bought the paparazzo’s photographs had sent someone to the house on Entrada Drive to sort through Jack’s trash. It made sense that the magazine would talk to Lucy, too—and that she would dismiss the incident as a “prank.”

All Jack said, when the magazine later asked him for a comment—allegedly for a follow-up story—was that the police had behaved properly. First of all, they’d believed Jack. Wasn’t Lucy the one they’d taken away? “You figure it out,” Jack said to the woman from the magazine, who called herself a “diligent fact-checker.” (He meant that the police hadn’t taken him away, had they?)

But Jack knew nothing about any of this when he left in the morning for Halifax. Given all the things that had happened to him—the bad choices he’d made, those years he would regret—the Lucy episode struck him as a virtual nonevent. He didn’t even call Dr. García and tell her about it. (Let her wait; let her hear about it in chronological order, Jack thought.)

But sometimes even a nonevent will be registered in the public consciousness. Jack had done nothing to Lucy—except try to look after her, when she was four. But in a scandal-mongering movie magazine, complete with photos, the girl’s irritating “prank” would carry with it a whiff of something truly scandalous; it would appear as if Jack Burns had gotten away with something.

This would be hard to say to Dr. García, when the time came, but—although it didn’t yet exist—a trap had been set for Jack. Lucy wasn’t the trap, but she was a contributing factor to a trap that waited in his future. That nice female officer had tried to tell him. Jack had thrown away the photographs, but the photos hadn’t been all she was warning him about.

“If there’s ever any trouble here—” Wasn’t that how she’d put it?

34. Halifax

Jack called Michele Maher’s office on his cell phone en route to the airport. It was very early in the morning in L.A., but Dr. Maher’s nurse answered the phone in the doctor’s Cambridge office; it was three hours later in Massachusetts. The nurse was a friendly soul named Amanda, who informed him that Dr. Maher was with a patient.

Jack told Amanda who he was and where he was going. He said he’d gone to school with Michele—that was as far as he got with their history.

“I know all about it,” Amanda said. “Everyone in the office wanted to kill her for not going to the Oscars with you.”

“Oh.”

“Are you going to have lunch with her?” Amanda asked. Jack guessed that everyone in the office knew about the letter Michele had written him; possibly Amanda had typed it.

Jack explained that he was hoping to see Dr. Maher on his return trip from Halifax. He’d booked a stopover in Boston. If Michele was free for dinner that night, or lunch the next day—that was as far as he got.

“So now it’s dinner!” Amanda said eagerly. “Maybe lunch and dinner. Maybe breakfast!”

Jack told Amanda that he would call later in the week from Halifax—just to be sure Dr. Maher had the time to see him.

“You should stay at the Charles Hotel in Cambridge. You can walk to the hospital and our office. I can reserve a room for you, if you want,” Amanda told him. “The hotel has a gym and a pool, and everything.”

“Thank you, Amanda,” he said. “That would be very nice—if Dr. Maher has the time to see me.”

“What’s with the Dr. Maher?” Amanda exclaimed.

Jack didn’t bother to tell Amanda to reserve a room for him at the Charles under a different name, although not only Michele but everyone in the office would know that Jack Burns was in town and where he was staying. As interested as Jack was in the Halifax Explosion, or the idea of making a movie in his birthplace, he was by no means committed to the role of the amnesiac transvestite prostitute in Doug McSwiney’s screenplay; in fact, the more Jack thought about the issues he had with McSwiney’s script, the less he felt like registering in any hotel as an amnesiac transvestite prostitute. (At the hotel in Halifax, he’d made the reservation in his own name.)

Jack thanked Amanda for her friendliness and help and gave her the phone number of his hotel in Halifax, and his cell-phone number—just in case Michele wanted to call him.

Jack had sufficient airplane reading for the trip, beginning with Doug McSwiney’s screenplay, which he read two more times. Called The Halifax Explosion, McSwiney’s script was purportedly based on Michael J. Bird’s The Town That Died—a chronicle of the Halifax disaster first published in 1967. Bird’s book, which was by far the best of Jack’s airplane reading, had been rendered a disservice.

On December 6, 1917, two ships collided in the Narrows—a mile-long channel, only five hundred yards wide, that connects Bedford Basin with Halifax Harbor and the open sea. A French freighter, the Mont Blanc, was bound for Bordeaux, loaded with munitions for the war effort. A Norwegian vessel, the Imo, had arrived in Halifax from Rotterdam and was sailing to New York. The Mont Blanc’s cargo included more than two thousand tons of picric acid and two hundred tons of TNT.

Upon impact, the Mont Blanc caught fire; less than an hour later, the ship’s lethal cargo blew up. People were watching the burning ship from almost everywhere in town; they didn’t know they were about to be blown up, too. Almost two thousand people were killed, nine thousand injured, and two hundred blinded.

The explosion leveled the North End of the city, which Bird describes as “a wilderness, a vast burning scrap yard.” Hundreds of children were killed. There was incalculable damage to other ships in the harbor, and to the piers and dockyards and the Naval College—in addition to the Wellington Barracks and the Dartmouth side of the Narrows, where the captain and crew of the Mont Blanc had swum ashore.

Jack thought that the character of the French captain, Aimé Le Medec, was the most challenging for an actor. Bird describes him as “not more than 5 feet 4 inches in height but well built, with a neatly trimmed black beard to add authority to his somewhat youthful face.” A contemporary of Le Medec called the captain “a likeable but moody man, at times inclined to be truculent,” and “a competent, rather than a brilliant, sailor.”

Jack Burns wasn’t that short, but—as an actor—even Le Medec’s physique appealed to him, and Jack was good at accents.

In the inquiry following the disaster, much was made of the fact that the Mont Blanc’s pilot, Frank Mackey, didn’t speak French. Le Medec, who spoke English, was disinclined to speak the language because he didn’t like it when people misunderstood him. Mackey and Le Medec had communicated with hand signals.

Jack liked everything he read about this “truculent” French captain. In Jack’s view, that was the role he should have been offered. (And the screenplay should have stuck to the facts, which were interesting enough without creating fictional characters to coexist with the historical figures.)

The Canadian authorities in Halifax found Captain Le Medec and his pilot, Frank Mackey, responsible for the collision in the Narrows. The Supreme Court of Canada later found that both ships were to blame—they were equally liable. But Le Medec and his crew were French; in the eyes of many English-speaking Canadians, not just Nova Scotians, the French were to blame for everything.

The French director Cornelia Lebrun took the view that Le Medec deserved only half the blame. (The French government would take no action against Le Medec, who didn’t retire from the sea until 1931—whereafter he was made a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur.) But this didn’t explain Madame Lebrun’s attachment to Doug McSwiney’s script, in which Le Medec is a minor character and the Halifax Explosion itself is given merely a supporting role.

McSwiney had an eye for the periphery. Following the disaster, Bird comments in passing, many Halifax prostitutes moved to Toronto or Montreal—“to return later when conditions had improved.” As for those prostitutes who never left town, “business was brisk.”

Perhaps it was from this small mention of the life of prostitutes in Halifax that Doug McSwiney invented his peripheral story. At some Water Street location (this is given scant mention in Bird’s book), a prostitute watches a customer—“a merchant seaman”—leaving her door and going off in the direction of the waterfront. It’s early morning; the Mont Blanc is about to explode.

In McSwiney’s screenplay, this prostitute (or someone based on her) breathes in the cold morning air a little too long. The blast rips the whore’s clothes off, detaches her wig, and hurls her into the air—revealing to the audience that the prostitute, now naked and burning, is a man! Jack Burns, of course—who else?

While devastation reigns, the amnesiac transvestite prostitute is taken to a hospital. Pitiful sights abound. As Bird writes: “Two hundred children, the matron and every other member of the staff, died under the fallen roof and walls of the Protestant Orphanage on Campbell Road. Those who were not killed outright were slowly burned to death.”

Yet the audience is supposed to feel sympathy for Jack’s character, an amnesiac transvestite prostitute? Despite the many burned women and children in the hospital, an attractive nurse feels especially sympathetic toward Jack’s character. The historical background of the film, which is given short shrift, is intercut with the amnesia victim’s slow recovery and the evolving love affair with his nurse.

The transvestite prostitute can’t remember who he is—not to mention what he was doing naked, flying, and burning in the air above Water Street at a little after 9:00 A.M. on that fateful Thursday. When he is well enough to leave the hospital, the nurse takes him home with her.

There then comes the inevitable scene in which the amnesia victim recovers his memory. (Knowing Jack Burns, you can see this coming.) The nurse has gone off to work at the hospital, and Jack’s character wakes up in her bedroom. He spots one of her uniforms on a chair—her clothes from the day before. He puts them on, and when he sees himself in the mirror—well, you can imagine. Flashbacks galore! Unseemly behavior in female attire!

Thus the audience is treated to a second version of the Halifax Explosion. We get to see the disastrous life of a transvestite prostitute, leading up to that other disaster—the real one. As Bird observes: “In this moment of agony a greater number had been killed or injured in Halifax than ever were to be in any single air raid on London during the whole of World War II.” But what was Doug McSwiney thinking?

Jack hated those movie meetings where he went in knowing that he detested the script, but he liked the director and the idea behind the film. He knew he would be perceived as the interfering movie star who was trying to distort the material to better serve himself. Or in this case—in Doug McSwiney’s eyes, without a doubt—the Academy Award–winning screenwriter (talk about beginner’s luck!) who was trying to tell a writer of McSwiney’s vastly greater experience how to write.

Aside from Halifax being his birthplace, Jack was beginning to wonder why he had come—this being well before he touched down in Nova Scotia, where he had last landed in utero thirty-six years before. Maybe this would set back his therapy, as Dr. García had warned.

Jack checked into The Prince George; he made a dinner reservation at a nearby restaurant called the Press Gang. The restaurant was virtually across the street from the corner of Prince and Barrington, where William Burns had once played the organ in St. Paul’s. Close by, on Argyle and Prince, was the St. Paul’s Parish House, where the Anglicans had put up Jack’s pregnant mother; it might even have been the building where Jack was born, no C-section required.

St. Paul’s was built with white wooden clapboards and shingles in 1750. In memory of the Halifax Explosion, the church had preserved an unfrosted second-story window—a broken window, facing Argyle Street. When the Mont Blanc exploded, a hole had been blown in the window in the shape of a human head. The face in profile, especially the nose and chin, reminded Jack of his mother’s.

The organ in St. Paul’s had been erected in memory of an organist who’d died in 1920. The organ pipes were blue and white, and there was a second commemoration of another organist.

TO THE GLORY OF GOD

AND IN GRATEFUL MEMORY

OF NATALIE LITTLER

1898–1963

ORGANIST 1935–62

They must have needed a new organist in ’62. There was no commemoration of William Burns, who Jack hoped was still among the living. He’d come to Halifax to play the organ in St. Paul’s in 1964. (God knows how long William had stayed; there was no mention of his ever being there.)

Jack went outside the church and stood in the Old Burying Ground on Barrington Street, looking in the direction of Halifax Harbor. He was wondering what would have happened if he and his mother had stayed in Halifax—if they might have been happy there.

Jack knew that what was called “the explosion window” in St. Paul’s Church—that perfectly preserved head, in profile, which memorialized the 1917 disaster—was better material for a movie about the Halifax Explosion than that piece-of-crap screenplay Doug McSwiney had written. Jack was embarrassed to have come all this way for a meeting about a film he knew would never be made—not with Jack Burns as the amnesiac transvestite prostitute, anyway.

Furthermore, Jack didn’t ever want to meet Doug McSwiney. He decided he should just tell Cornelia Lebrun how he felt about the project, and leave it at that. (Jack knew there were a lot of movie meetings that could be avoided if people just told one another how they felt before they met.)

Jack knew that Cornelia Lebrun was staying at The Prince George, too, but he’d learned from Emma that it was better to express yourself in writing—especially if you’re pissed off about something. Before dinner, Jack had just enough time to go back to the hotel and write out what he should have told the French director in a simple phone call from Los Angeles.

He had a personal interest in spending a little time in Halifax, Jack explained to her, but he would not be associated with a film about the Halifax Explosion that trivialized the disaster. Jack wrote that he was attracted to the character of Le Medec, and wanted to know more about him. Jack pointed out to Cornelia Lebrun that his physique was suitable for the role of Le Medec, and that the sea captain’s reported moodiness and truculence were well within Jack’s range as an actor. (He mentioned his gift for accents, too.)

Another good role, among the real people involved in the historical disaster, was that of Frank Mackey, the pilot who didn’t speak French. And there was a third role of interest to any actor—that of C. J. Burchell, the counsel for the Norwegian shipping company. At that time, Burchell was the best-known maritime lawyer on the Eastern Seaboard. Representing the Imo’s owners, Burchell was—in Bird’s words—“capable of the most ruthless court-room tactics.” Given the judge’s bias in favor of the Imo, and how local opinion was stacked against the Mont Blanc (and the French), Burchell must have been further encouraged “to attack and browbeat witnesses.”

What need was there for a fictional story? Jack asked Cornelia Lebrun in his letter. With almost two thousand people killed and nine thousand injured—with nearly two hundred blinded—who cared about an amnesiac transvestite prostitute who gets burned a little and loses his (or her) clothes and his memory and his wig? Jack told the French director that McSwiney’s screenplay, in a word, sucked. (Dr. García would have cautioned Jack against this particular interjection, and—as things turned out—she would have been right. But that’s what he wrote in the heat of the moment.)

He apologized for wasting Madame Lebrun’s and Mr. McSwiney’s time by agreeing to a meeting in Halifax, which he now believed was pointless. Jack added that his one look at the so-called explosion window in St. Paul’s Church drove home to him how McSwiney had managed to write a disaster movie both prurient and banal; he’d made a sordid love story out of the Halifax Explosion.

Jack forgot to tell Cornelia Lebrun that he remained interested in working with her as a director, which of course had initially persuaded him that the meeting in Halifax was a good idea. He also forgot to tell her that he’d been involved in enough cross-dressing to satisfy whatever slight yearning he might have felt for transvestite roles; as an actor, Jack didn’t feel it was asking too much to be allowed to be a man.

Notwithstanding these omissions, he left a great mess of pages at the front desk of the hotel—a virtual ream of Prince George stationery, to be delivered to Madame Lebrun’s room. Then Jack went off to the Press Gang restaurant for a solitary dinner. When Jack returned to the hotel, he inquired at the front desk if Cornelia Lebrun had left a message for him; he was told she was in the bar.

Jack had only a dim idea of what the French director looked like. (A small woman in her sixties—about the same age as Miss Wurtz, he thought.) He spotted her easily. How many women in Halifax were likely to wear a suede pantsuit in lily-pad green?

“Cornelia?” Jack said to the little Frenchwoman, whose lipstick was a bold orange.

“Zzzhhhack Burns!” she cried, but before he could kiss her offered cheek, a large, hirsute man forced his way between them.

The man was bigger than any of his book-jacket photographs, and more hairy than a lumberjack. Jack had been unable to read the fur-faced author’s novels due to the persistence of the rugged outdoors on every page—a characteristic relentlessness in the prose. (Fir trees bent by the wind, the gray rock of the Canadian Shield, the pitiless sea—harsh weather and hard drinking.) Even the whisky on the author’s breath was bracing—Doug McSwiney, of course. Jack was reaching to shake his hand when McSwiney’s left hook caught him on the right temple. Jack never saw it coming.

“Suck on that!” McSwiney said, but Jack heard only the suck; he was out on his feet before he fell. He should have had the brains to expect a cheap shot from a writer insensitive enough to turn the Halifax Explosion into an unwholesome love story.

Jack came to in his hotel room. He was lying on his back on his bed with his clothes on but his shoes off; his head was pounding. Cornelia Lebrun was sitting on the bed beside him. She had wrapped a wet washcloth around some ice cubes, which she held against the swollen bruise on Jack’s right temple. The drunken, bearded bastard could have killed me, Jack was thinking.

“Eet’s my fauld,” Madame Lebrun was saying. “I can’t read English when eet’s in writing-by-hand.”

“Longhand,” Jack corrected her.

“I asked Dougie to read your notes out lout to me. Beeeg faux pas, oui? I theenk the word sucked was what deed eet to heem.”

“Or banal—or prurient, maybe.”

“Oui. Alzo hee’s dreenking.”

“I’ve had bad reviews myself,” Jack told her. “I didn’t try to club Roger Ebert to death with my Oscar.”

“Clup who to dead?” the little Frenchwoman asked.

“It doesn’t matter. I don’t want to be in the movie,” he told her.

“I would cast a Frenchman to play Le Medec, Zzzhhhack—no matter how goot your axzent ees.”

She would never get the movie made, anyway. Later that year, after the terrorist attacks on September 11, it would be too difficult to find financing for a film about the Halifax Explosion—even with a movie star in it. Suddenly, disaster movies weren’t all that appealing. (This feeling would persist for a whole year or more.)

Something about the Halifax Explosion appeared on Canadian television, but that happened a couple of years later and Jack never saw it. He didn’t even know if it was a documentary or what Miss Wurtz would have called a dramatization. Jack only knew that Doug McSwiney had had nothing to do with it. And after that introduction in the bar of The Prince George, Jack doubted that he would ever work with Cornelia Lebrun.

The hotel sent a female doctor to Jack’s room while Madame Lebrun was still attending to his head injury. The doctor told Jack that he had a mild concussion; from the beat of his pulse in his right temple, he might have disputed the word mild with her. She also told him that he shouldn’t sleep for more than two hours at a time. The doctor left instructions at the front desk to give Jack Burns a wake-up call every two hours; if he didn’t answer his phone, someone had to go into his room and wake him up. And he shouldn’t travel for another day, the doctor said.

That night, between the wake-up calls, he had dreams of being on a movie set. “Hold the talking, please,” someone on the set would say, for what seemed like the hundredth time.

“Picture’s up.”

“Stand by.”

It made Jack realize that he missed the process. Maybe it had been too long since he’d made a movie.

In the morning, Jack walked along Barrington Street, looking for something to read. He found a bookstore called The Book Room. The owner recognized him and invited him to have a coffee with him. Jack volunteered to sign some books—just what they had on hand of the screenplay of The Slush-Pile Reader. (Emma’s paperback publisher had published the script; in most bookstores, the screenplay was on the shelf alongside the movie tie-in edition of Emma’s novel.)

The bookseller’s name was Charles Burchell; he turned out to be the grandson of C. J. Burchell, the legendary maritime lawyer who’d led the court-room attack on the Mont Blanc’s captain and pilot. When Jack told Charles that he thought he’d been born in the St. Paul’s Parish House, Charles told Jack that the vestry of the church had been used as an emergency hospital in the days following the Halifax Explosion; the bodies of hundreds of victims had been laid in tiers around the walls.

Charles was kind enough to take Jack on a tour of the harbor. Jack wanted to see the ocean terminals, particularly the pier where the immigrants landed. Charles also drove Jack to the Fairview Lawn Cemetery. Jack was curious to see the Titanic grave site. Halifax had seen its share of disasters.

Jack walked with Charles among the gravestones.

ERECTED TO THE MEMORY

OF AN

UNKNOWN CHILD

WHOSE REMAINS

WERE RECOVERED

AFTER THE

DISASTER TO

THE “TITANIC”

APRIL 15, 1912

There were many more.

ALMA PAULSON

AGED 29 YEARS

LOST WITH FOUR CHILDREN

Some were just names with their ages.

TOBURG DANDRIA AGED 8

PAUL FOLKE AGED 6

STINA VIOLA AGED 4

GOSTA LEONARD AGED 2

Others were just numbers.

DIED

APRIL 15, 1912

227

A small headstone marked J. DAWSON had the largest number of flowers—bouquets of flowers dwarfed the headstone, almost obscuring the oddly familiar name. Charles told Jack why the name was familiar. The character Leonardo DiCaprio played in the Titanic movie was named Jack Dawson.

“You don’t mean he was real,” Jack said.

“I have no idea,” Charles said.

The J. DAWSON on the headstone could have been a different Dawson. Jack Dawson, DiCaprio’s character, might have been invented. But since the movie had been released, visitors to the Titanic grave site put flowers on J. DAWSON’s headstone because they believed he was that character. Worse—whether or not Jack Dawson in the movie was related to J. DAWSON on the headstone, the young girls bringing flowers thought there was someone in that grave who had once looked like Leonardo DiCaprio.

“Movies,” Jack said with disgust. Charles laughed.

But Jack saw it then—this was where that hair-faced novelist and screenwriter had gotten the idea to make a love story out of the Halifax Explosion. It was a bad idea to begin with, but it hadn’t even been McSwiney’s idea. He’d stolen it from the Titanic movie; he’d ripped it off from a graveyard full of children!

“Does Doug McSwiney come from Halifax?” Jack asked Charles Burchell. Since Charles was a bookseller, Jack knew that Charles would know.

“Born and raised,” Charles said. “He’s an awful man—he’s always punching people.”

The Titanic grave site gave Jack additional grounds for wanting to kick the crap out of McSwiney, and Jack still had a headache. (As cheap shots go, a blow to someone’s temple is asking for trouble.)

Jack went back to the hotel and took a short nap. He probably did have a concussion, mild or not, because he wasn’t feeling well. He was wondering why Michele Maher hadn’t called him—just to say she was looking forward to lunch or dinner, or whatever. Maybe she was shy; probably she was busy. Jack didn’t sleep very soundly, or for long. At the first ring of the wake-up call, he sat up too suddenly and saw stars. The stars continued to twinkle while he brushed his teeth.

A separated shoulder would be a justifiable injury to inflict on Doug McSwiney, Jack was thinking. Given that McSwiney had hit Jack with a left hook, he was probably right-handed; if so, a separated right shoulder would be a good idea.

Jack called Dr. Maher’s office and once again got Michele’s nurse, Amanda, on the phone. “Hi, Amanda—it’s Jack Burns. I’m calling to confirm breakfast, lunch, and dinner.”

He could tell right away that something was wrong; the formerly friendly Amanda was ice-cold to him. “Dr. Maher is with a patient,” the nurse said.

“What’s with the Dr. Maher, Amanda?”

“No breakfast, no lunch, no dinner,” Amanda said. “Dr. Maher doesn’t want to see you—she won’t even talk to you. I canceled your reservation at the Charles.”

“Maybe I’ve misunderstood you,” Jack said. “I have a concussion.”

“That girl gave you a concussion?” Amanda asked.

“What girl?”

“I’m talking about the Lucy business—the photographs, the whole story. Don’t they have news in Canada?”

Jack could see that flaming paparazzo as if the photographer were still standing at the foot of the driveway, snapping away. One of the sleazier movie magazines had bought the photographs. The story, and the tamer of the photos, had also been on television.

“You don’t come off very well,” Amanda explained.

“I did not have sex with that young woman!” he told her.

“I’m sure you didn’t,” Amanda said. “The girl just knew that you wanted to, and that you definitely would have had sex if she hadn’t called her mother.”

“That’s not true! I called the cops and asked them to come get her! I waited outside my own house until the police came!”

“You had a naked eighteen-year-old in your bed—you even have the same psychiatrist,” Amanda pointed out. “You knew Lucy when she was a child—you beat up her father! And why did you keep her thong, and those terrible pictures? There was a photo of what looked like another naked eighteen-year-old on your desk! There were photographs of a naked woman’s tattooed breast on your refrigerator!”

“I threw all that away!” Jack shouted.

“Where? On your front lawn?” the nurse asked.

“Please let me speak to Michele,” he begged her.

“Michele said, ‘If Jack calls, tell him he’s just too weird for me.’ That’s what the doctor said,” Amanda told him, hanging up the phone.

Jack turned on the television in his hotel room. It took him a while to find an American network among the Canadian TV channels, although (as Leslie Oastler would soon inform him) the Lucy story had already been picked up by the Canadian media. When he found Headline News, Jack discovered that he was the lead item in the entertainment segment.

When Lucy was told that her pink thong had been recovered from Jack’s trash—together with those incriminating photographs, which Lucy had earlier described to reporters—she speculated that Jack must have wanted to have some keepsake of her visit and had therefore hidden her thong from the police. Apparently, he’d had second thoughts and had thrown out the thong with the other “evidence.” (The thong looked really small on TV; it appeared that Jack had stolen it from a child.)

Jack needed to see the sleazy magazine itself before he could understand everything that was incriminating about the photographs—that is, the ones not fit for television. He left the hotel and walked over to The Book Room. Charles Burchell was a bookseller; Charles would know where every newsstand in Halifax was. Naturally, Charles already had a copy of the movie magazine.

“I called you at the hotel, Jack, but they said you were napping.” None of the saleswomen in The Book Room would look at Jack; they’d all seen the photos and had read the insinuating story.

The magazine’s cover photo was of Lucy hanging naked from around Jack’s neck, resembling a pornographic ornament. Both police officers appeared to be struggling as much with Jack as with Lucy. The photographs inside the magazine—particularly the ones that had been rescued from his trash—were no less condemning. The pink thong was not only very small; it was still wet. Emma naked at seventeen had been doctored for magazine propriety. Jack thought that the black slash across Emma’s eyes made her unrecognizable, even to anyone who knew her at that age. And who but Jack had really known her naked at that age? (He’d forgotten that Mrs. Oastler was familiar with that photograph.)

In the case of those photos of his mother, the movie magazine had selected only one; there were two black slashes, across Alice’s nipples. The photo of Emma had been so badly mangled in the trash that you couldn’t see her nipples very distinctly; the magazine hadn’t bothered to conceal them, although they’d had the decency to crop the photograph above Emma’s waist.

Dr. García was mentioned in the article. Jack was sure that she would have refused to comment. But a former patient, whose name was withheld and who described the therapist’s methods as “unorthodox, to say the least,” said that Dr. García strongly discouraged her patients from dating one another. Jack knew perfectly well that Dr. García didn’t believe for a moment that he was dating Lucy, but everyone knows what kind of magazine would do this; the story is implied, and nothing is stated. Even the headline, the very name of the article, was deliberately misleading; in the case of the Lucy story, the headline was a real winner.

JACK BURNS DENIES ANY HANKY PANKY,

BUT WHAT’S HE HIDING IN HIS TRASH?

Jack hadn’t done anything, but he looked guilty. It was too weird, as Michele would say.

Charles Burchell was a good guy; he gave Jack his heartfelt condolences. Jack had a pounding headache by the time he got back to The Prince George. He took a couple of Tylenol, or maybe it was Advil—he wouldn’t remember taking anything.

Jack had fun calling his number in L.A. and listening to all the messages on his answering machine. Commiserations from Richard Gladstein, Bob Bookman, and Alan Hergott; Wild Bill Vanvleck had called from Amsterdam. (Jack found out later that The Mad Dutchman’s anchorwoman girlfriend had been the first to report the scandal in the Netherlands.) Someone with a St. Hilda’s connection had alerted Leslie Oastler to the story; Mrs. Oastler was hopping mad. “I can’t believe you kept that photograph of Emma, and those pictures of your mother. You idiot, Jack!”

“I’m surprised you haven’t called me,” he heard Dr. García’s voice say on his answering machine. “I trust you’ve changed your mind about the stopover in Boston, or that Michele has changed her mind about it. And I wouldn’t recommend any further contact with Lucy, Jack. We might want to reconsider how much time you spend in the waiting room. You might run into Lucy’s mother.”

Jack wondered how the sleazy movie magazine had missed that little tidbit—namely, that Lucy’s mom was also Dr. García’s patient. (It made perfect sense that she would be somebody’s patient.)

Once, in the waiting room, one of the young mothers had explained to Jack that Dr. García was unique among all the psychiatrists she’d ever seen. You didn’t have to make an appointment. Apparently, this young mother tended to feel the need to see her psychiatrist on the spur of the moment. Many of the young mothers in Dr. García’s waiting room said that they found the presence of other young mothers comforting. It was such a loose arrangement, no therapist in New York or Vienna would have allowed it. (No psychiatrist’s patient in New York or Vienna would have accepted the situation, either.) But loose arrangements were what Jack appreciated about living in Santa Monica.

He gave his plane tickets to the concierge at The Prince George and asked her to do what she could to change his flights. “Just get me back to Los Angeles tomorrow—the most direct way you can,” he told her. “No stopover in Boston, please.”

Then Jack went off to the Press Gang, where he had made another dinner reservation; he hadn’t eaten all day and was hungry.

Jack sat alone at his small table and ordered one of the appetizers. Except for his table for one, the restaurant was crowded and noisy. Maybe the Press Gang seemed noisier than it was because Jack was alone and had a concussion. He sat facing a window, with his back to the other tables. He’d brought a book with him—something Charles had recommended—but when he tried to read, his headache came back and the noise in the restaurant was amplified. The table nearest him was the loudest, but Jack couldn’t see the people at that table; if they were looking at him, all they could see was his back.

One loudmouth in particular was the dominant storyteller. He was braying about an altercation in a hotel bar—according to him, it had been a fair fight. “Fucking wrestlers!” he shouted. “They can’t take a punch.” That certainly got Jack’s attention, concussion and all. “Jack Burns landed like a dead fish,” the man was telling his friends.

As someone engaged in telling the story of his life in chronological order, Jack had discovered that what many people lazily referred to as coincidences weren’t necessarily coincidental. One might think, for example, that it was coincidental for Jack to find himself in the same restaurant with Doug McSwiney—only one night after the fat, fur-faced author had coldcocked Jack with a sucker punch. But Halifax was not a big city, and the Press Gang was a popular place.

Jack tried to get a look at him, but McSwiney’s broad back was all there was to see. The way one of the writer’s friends suddenly recognized Jack, Jack could tell that none of them had known he was there—McSwiney hadn’t been telling his tale for Jack’s benefit. Jack got up from his table and walked over to McSwiney. The big man’s friends let McSwiney know that Jack was there, but the bastard didn’t stop his story. “The little lightweight just lay there,” McSwiney was saying.

Jack stood beside McSwiney but a little behind him. There were three couples at the table; Jack couldn’t tell which of the women was with McSwiney. The two men were smiling at Jack—they were almost smirking—but the women were expressionless as they observed the unfolding drama.

“I want to apologize,” Jack said to Doug McSwiney. “Those notes I wrote about your screenplay weren’t meant for you. I would never have expressed myself that frankly, that personally—not to you directly. It was only because Cornelia couldn’t read my handwriting that she showed those notes to you. She can’t read English if it’s in longhand. I hope you know it was an accident. I wouldn’t have said anything to intentionally hurt your feelings.”

Now McSwiney’s two male friends were definitely smirking, but the women were smarter; women had always known how to read Jack Burns.

Jack wasn’t really apologizing—he was just being nice twice, as Mrs. Wicksteed had taught him. (Back in the bar at The Prince George, when he’d offered to shake Doug McSwiney’s hand, that had been being nice the first time.) Of course Jack knew that McSwiney was too drunk and too belligerent to understand this. The author just went on with his story.

“That little Frenchwoman called the bellman and together they loaded Jack Burns on a luggage cart—they wheeled him off to his room like a baby in a stroller!” McSwiney was saying. The two men laughed but the women didn’t; the women were tense and watchful.

When Jack put his hand on the back of McSwiney’s neck and gently pushed the big, shaggy head in the direction of the fat man’s dinner plate, he already knew that McSwiney was the stronger of the two. Jack was prepared for the big man to place both hands on the table and push himself to his feet. Jack never expected to hold McSwiney down with one hand; Jack just wanted McSwiney to spread his arms and brace himself against the table, because that made it easier for Jack to slap the full nelson on him before McSwiney could stand up.

Jack overlapped one hand with the other on the back of McSwiney’s neck and drove the writer’s face into his paella, up to his ears; Jack could feel the warm food on his wrists. An errant shrimp, coated with saffron-colored rice, flew off the plate—also a sausage. McSwiney rooted around in the paella, trying to clear some space to breathe.

In wrestling, there’s more than one reason why a full nelson is illegal. Yes, you can break someone’s neck with the hold, but—from a wrestling point of view—that’s not the only thing wrong with it. It’s nearly impossible to pin someone with a full nelson—unless you break your opponent’s neck in the process. And the hold is very hard to get out of; in addition to a full nelson being dangerous, it’s also a stalling tactic.

McSwiney wasn’t going anywhere; he had no leverage, especially sitting in a chair. Jack kept pushing McSwiney into the paella. The fur-faced writer’s forehead was pressed against the bottom of the plate; from the sound of him, he must have gotten some rice up his nose. McSwiney’s two male friends weren’t smirking now; Jack never took his eyes off them. If one of them had stood up, Jack would have changed the full nelson to a chicken-wing, with which he would have driven McSwiney’s right elbow past his right ear—in all likelihood breaking the collarbone but almost certainly separating McSwiney’s right shoulder. Then Jack would have gone after one of the other two guys, starting with the tougher-looking one.

But Jack could see that there wasn’t going to be any trouble; the two men just sat there. McSwiney was bigger than both of them together, and they could observe for themselves that their friend wasn’t doing too well. The women were more fidgety than the men. They exchanged glances with one another, and they kept looking at Jack’s face—not at McSwiney’s head in the paella.

McSwiney sounded as if he were still eating, but there was something more nasal than eating involved. If the big man had started to choke, Jack would have tipped him out of his chair and put a gut-wrench on him until McSwiney threw up on the floor. But that wasn’t necessary; the writer was breathing okay, just noisily. A fat man doesn’t breathe too comfortably with his chin on his chest, even without the paella factor.

“Writers!” Jack said, more to McSwiney’s friends than to McSwiney. “They can’t even eat without saying too much.”

One of the women smiled, which may or may not have eliminated her as the woman who was with McSwiney.

Jack ground his chin into the top of McSwiney’s head; he wanted to be sure that McSwiney could hear him. “There’s another thing about your screenplay,” Jack told him. “Just what do you think would have happened to a transvestite prostitute in a town full of sailors in 1917? Some sailor would have killed him—long before the Halifax Explosion could have done the job. The story isn’t only prurient and banal—it’s also unbelievable.”

Jack could tell that McSwiney was trying to say something, but Jack wasn’t about to let the overweight author wriggle out of his paella. The woman who’d smiled at Jack spoke for McSwiney.

“I think Dougie is trying to say that we’re all dying to hear about Lucy,” the woman said. Jack guessed that she probably was the woman with McSwiney, if not his wife. She was about the writer’s age, which Jack estimated to be late forties—maybe early fifties.

“Well, Lucy is a lot younger than anyone at this table—better tits, and everything,” Jack told them—the way Billy Rainbow would have said it. No one was smiling now.

“Please don’t hurt him,” the woman said.

“That’s all anyone ever had to say,” Jack told them. He lightened up on the full nelson. “I hope you know that I could have hurt you,” Jack said to McSwiney, who tried to nod.

Jack let him go and stepped away from their table. He half expected McSwiney to stagger to his feet and come at him, swinging. But the fat man just sat there, looking more subdued than combative.

The woman who’d spoken to Jack wet her napkin in her water glass and began to fuss over McSwiney. She picked the rice out of his hair and beard, finding a shrimp or two and some sausage—also a piece of chicken. She cleaned him up as best she could, but there was nothing she could do about the saffron; the writer’s beard and forehead were stained a pumpkin-orange color.

A waiter who’d been watching the whole time kept his eye on Jack, who returned to his table but sat with his back to the window, facing McSwiney’s party. Jack didn’t look at any of them directly, but he wanted to see McSwiney coming if the big man came at him. The woman who’d asked him not to hurt McSwiney looked at Jack from time to time, with no discernible expression.

Jack waved the waiter over and told him: “If they’re staying, please offer Mr. McSwiney another paella. I’ll pay for it.”

“They’re not staying,” the waiter said. “Mr. McSwiney is experiencing chest pains—that’s why they’re leaving.”

It would be bad luck to have contributed to the death of the drunken lout—the overweight writer was a blustering god of Canadian letters. The autopsy might reveal that McSwiney had rice in his lungs. He’d been murdered with food; the murder weapon had been the paella! Eulogies would abound, nationwide; a voice blowing over the Canadian landscape like a gale-force wind had been silenced. Worst of all would be the lengthy quotations from McSwiney’s prose, gargantuan descriptions of rocks and trees and seagulls in Quill & Quire.

“Would you know if Mr. McSwiney has experienced chest pains before?” Jack asked the troubled-looking waiter.

“Oh, all the time,” the waiter said. “He has terrible heartburn.”

Jack ordered a beer. He hadn’t had one since the Heineken he’d had at that party in the Polo Lounge after the Academy Awards. He noticed that a large gob of McSwiney’s paella had landed on his pants; he’d been busy and had somehow missed seeing it. The shrimp coated with saffron-colored rice, the sticky sausage—Jack wiped off the mess with a napkin, but (like McSwiney) there was nothing he could do about the saffron stain.

Whenever he saw the troubled-looking waiter, Jack was distracted by his thoughts of McSwiney’s chest pains. He sincerely hoped it was just heartburn. McSwiney was an asshole, but he was too young to die. Jack had restrained himself from hurting the bastard; it would have been too cruel for it to turn out that Jack had had even an inadvertent hand in killing Doug McSwiney!

And that was Halifax. Jack would beg Dr. García to allow him to tell her a little bit about what happened there. (After all, it might be a year or more before Jack got around to that part of his life story in chronological order.) Because his psychiatrist could see that Jack was agitated, and because she’d already talked to Lucy and Lucy’s mother about the Lucy business, Dr. García indulged him. She at least let him tell her the part about Doug McSwiney.

Jack was fortunate, he admitted to Dr. García, that McSwiney’s chest pains hadn’t amounted to anything. Mrs. Oastler found a small account in the newspaper of a “drunken brawl” in the Press Gang restaurant in Halifax—a case of “two feuding writers who’d earlier come to blows in the bar of The Prince George Hotel,” one Canadian journalist had reported. Because Leslie knew that Jack didn’t drink, she was all the more perplexed by the reporter noting that Jack had calmly sipped a beer while McSwiney was attended to by his friends.

“Jack,” Dr. García said, “it seems to me that you should hire a bodyguard.”

“I don’t need a bodyguard,” he told her. “I just need to watch out for a left hook.”

“I meant that you need a bodyguard to keep you from hurting someone else,” she said.

“Oh.”

“Well, we’ve got our work cut out for us—let’s leave it at that,” his psychiatrist said.

“What should I do?” Jack asked her sincerely.

“You better find a movie to be in soon,” Dr. García told him. “I think you should take a break from being Jack Burns, don’t you?”

35. Forgettable

The following year, Jack was in three movies; the year after that, he did two more. His handicapped math notwithstanding, even Jack could count that he’d been in five films in two years. He’d taken a big break from being Jack Burns.

In two years’ time, he’d not heard from Michele Maher; she made no response to his letter of explanation about the Lucy episode. Dr. García had urged Jack to recognize that the Michele Maher chapter of his life was behind him, or should be. It was a good thing that he hadn’t heard from Michele, the doctor said.

In those two years, Jack made a lot of money and spent very little. About the only expensive thing he bought was a new Audi; naturally, it was another silver one. He could not motivate himself to sell the place on Entrada Drive and buy something more suitable. This was because what he really wanted was to get out of L.A.—although no other city beckoned, and Jack held fast to Emma’s idea that it was somehow good to be an outsider. Besides, as long as his life story was a work-in-progress, he couldn’t imagine cutting his ties to Dr. García. She was the closest Jack had come to a good marriage, or even a possible one. He saw her twice a week. Putting his life in chronological order for Dr. García had become a more regular and restorative activity in Jack’s life than having sex.

As for sex, in the last two years—since adamantly not having sex with Lucy—Jack had briefly comforted Lucia Delvecchio, who was in the throes of a nasty divorce. Lucia’s divorce was obdurately ongoing—one of those drawn-out battles involving children and credit cards and summer homes and motor vehicles and dogs—and because her irate husband viewed Jack as the root cause of their marital difficulties, Jack’s presence in Lucia’s unmarried life was of little comfort to her and not long-lasting.

He was romantically linked with three of his co-stars—in three out of his last five films—but these rumors were false in two out of three cases. The one co-star Jack did sleep with, Margaret Becker, was a single mom in her forties. She had a twelve-year-old son named Julian and a house on the ocean in Malibu. Both Margaret and Julian were very sweet, but fragile. The boy had no relationship with his father, and he’d had unrealistic expectations of every boyfriend his mother had had—they’d all left her.

As a result, Julian’s expectations of Jack were aimed a little lower. The boy kept anxiously looking for signs that Jack was preparing to leave him and his mom. Jack liked the boy—he loved having a kid in his life—but Julian was very needy. Margaret, Julian’s mom, was a full-fledged clinger.

Whenever Jack had to go away, she stuffed his suitcase with photographs of herself; in the photos, which were pointedly taken for the occasion of Jack’s trip, Margaret looked stricken with the fear that he would never come back to her. And Jack would often wake up at night and find Margaret staring at him; it was as if she were attempting to penetrate his consciousness, in his sleep, and brainwash him into never leaving.

Julian’s sorrowful eyes followed Jack as if the boy were a dog Jack had neglected to feed. And Margaret said to Jack, at least once a day: “I know you’re going to leave me, Jack. Just try not to walk away when I’m feeling too vulnerable to handle it, or when it would be especially harmful to poor Julian.”

Jack was with her six months; it felt like six years, and leaving Julian hurt Jack more than leaving Margaret. The boy watched him go as if Jack were his absconding father.

“We take terrible risks with the natural affection of children,” Jack would one day say to Dr. García, but she complained that he had told her about these relationships in a sketchy fashion. Or was it that he’d had nothing but sketchy relationships?

Months later, although the dominant sound in Jack’s house on Entrada Drive was the traffic on the Pacific Coast Highway, he would lie in bed hearing the ocean—the way he had listened to it in Margaret’s house in Malibu, while waiting for Julian to come into the bedroom and wake him and Margaret. Jack sincerely missed them, but they had driven him away—almost from the first moment Jack entered their lives. It was Dr. García’s assessment that they were “even needier” than Jack was.

“I’m not needy!” Jack replied indignantly.

“Hmm,” Dr. García said. “Have you considered, Jack, that what you crave most of all is a real relationship and a normal life, but you don’t know anyone who’s normal or real?”

“Yes, I have considered that,” he answered.

“I’ve been seeing you for five years, yet I can’t recall hearing you express a political opinion—not one,” Dr. García said. “What are your politics, Jack?”

“Generally more liberal than conservative,” he said.

“You’re a Democrat?”

“I don’t vote,” Jack admitted. “I’ve never voted.”

“Well, there’s a statement!” Dr. García said.

“Maybe it’s because I started my life as a Canadian, and then I became an American—but I’m really not either,” he said.

“Hmm.”

“I just like my work,” Jack told her.

“You take no vacations?” she asked. “The last vacation I remember hearing about was a school vacation.”

“When an actor isn’t making a movie, he’s on vacation,” Jack said.

“But that’s not exactly true, is it?” Dr. García asked. “You’re always reading scripts, aren’t you? You must spend a lot of time considering new roles, even if you eventually turn them down. And you’ve been reading a lot of novels lately. Since you’ve been credited with writing a screenplay, aren’t you at least thinking about another adaptation? Or an original screenplay, perhaps?”

Jack didn’t say anything; it seemed to him that he was always working, even when he wasn’t.

“You go to the gym, you watch what you eat, you don’t drink,” Dr. García was saying. “But what do you do when you’re just relaxing? Or are you never relaxed?”

“I have sex,” he said.

“The kind of sex you have is not relaxing,” Dr. García told him.

“I hang out with my friends,” Jack said.

“What friends? Emma’s dead, Jack.”

“I have other friends!” he protested.

“You have no friends,” Dr. García said. “You have professional acquaintances; you’re on friendly terms with some of them. But who are your friends?”

Jack pathetically mentioned Herman Castro—the Exeter heavyweight, now a doctor in El Paso. Herman always wrote, “Hey, amigo,” on his Christmas cards.

“The word amigo doesn’t make him your friend,” Dr. García pointed out. “Do you remember his wife’s name, or the names of his children? Have you ever visited him in El Paso?”

“You’re depressing me,” Jack told her.

“I ask my patients to tell me about their life’s most emotional moments—the ups and downs, Jack,” Dr. García said. “In your case, this means what has made you laugh, what has made you cry, and what has made you feel angry.”

“I’m doing it, aren’t I?” he asked her.

“But the purpose for doing this, Jack, is that when you tell me your life story, you reveal yourself—at least that’s what usually happens, that’s what’s supposed to happen,” Dr. García said. “I regret that, in your case, you’ve been a very faithful storyteller—and a very thorough one, I believe—yet I don’t feel that I know you. I know what’s happened to you. Do I ever know it—ad nauseam! But you haven’t revealed yourself, Jack. I still don’t know who you are. Please tell me who you are.”

“According to my mother,” Jack began in a small voice, which both he and Dr. García recognized as Jack’s voice as a child, “I was an actor before I was an actor, but my most vivid memories of childhood are those moments when I felt compelled to hold my mother’s hand. I wasn’t acting then.”

“Then I guess you better find a way to forgive her,” Dr. García told him gently. “You might learn a lesson from your father. I’m just guessing, but when he forgave your mom, maybe it enabled him to move on with his life. You’re thirty-eight, Jack—you’re rich, you’re famous, but you don’t have a life.”

“My dad shouldn’t have moved on with his life without me!” Jack cried. “He shouldn’t have left me!”

“You better find a way to forgive him, too, Jack.” Dr. García sighed. (Jack hated it when she sighed.) “Now you’re crying again,” she observed. “It doesn’t do you any good to cry. You have to stop crying.”

What a bitch Dr. García could be! That’s why Jack didn’t tell her when he heard from Michele Maher. He went to the national convention of dermatologists without letting Dr. García know that he was going, because he knew that she would do everything in her power to persuade him not to go; because Jack was afraid of what the doctor would say; because he knew she was always right.

As for Michele—as if there’d been no hard feelings between them, as if the twenty years they’d not been in each other’s company were shorter than those fleeting summer vacations when they’d been at Exeter—Michele Maher wrote Jack that she was coming to Los Angeles, where she very much looked forward to seeing him.

She didn’t attend the dermatology convention every year, she wanted him to know—usually only when it was in the Northeast. But she’d never been to L.A. (“Can you imagine?” she wrote.) And because the convention this year provided Michele with an opportunity to see Jack—well, she made it sound as if he were the reason she’d decided to blow a long weekend in a glitzy Hollywood hotel with a bunch of skin doctors.

The dermatologists had chosen one of those annoying Universal City hotels. Rising out of a landscape of soundstages that resembled bomb shelters, the Sheraton Universal overlooked the Hollywood Hills and was across the street from Universal Studios—the theme park. The hotel had the feeling of a resort, the look of a place where conventioneers not infrequently brought their families.

While the dermatologists talked about skin, their children could go on the rides at the theme park. In the southern California climate, Jack imagined that the children of dermatologists would be sticky with sunscreen and wrapped up to their eyes; in fact, he was surprised that dermatologists would hold a convention in such a sunny place.

Michele Maher’s letter was positively perky; she wrote to Jack with the flippancy of a prep-school girl, her former self. Her letter caused him to remember her old Richard III joke. “Where’s your hump, Dick?” she had asked him.

“It’s in the costume closet, and it’s just a football,” Jack had answered, for maybe the hundredth time.

But she’d been a good sport when he’d beaten her out for the part of Lady Macbeth, and of course Jack also remembered that Michele was over five-ten—a slim honey-blonde with a model’s glowing skin, and (in Ed McCarthy’s vulgar estimation) “a couple of high, hard ones.”

“Why don’t you have a girlfriend, Jack?” Michele had asked him—when they were seventeen. She was just kidding around, or so he’d thought.

But he had to go and give her a line—Jack was just acting. “Because I get the feeling you’re not available,” he’d said.

“I had no idea you were interested in me, Jack. I didn’t think you were interested in anyone,” she’d told him.

“How can anyone not be interested in you, Michele?” he’d asked her, thus setting in motion a disaster.

What had drawn them together in the first place was acting. The one honest thing Jack had done was not sleep with her—only because he thought he’d caught the clap from Mrs. Stackpole, the dishwasher, and he didn’t want Michele to catch it. But this was hardly honest, as Dr. García had already pointed out to him. Jack didn’t tell Michele why he wouldn’t sleep with her, did he?

Of course he’d thought at the time that almost no one would have believed he was banging Mrs. Stackpole—especially not Michele, who was so beautiful, while Mrs. Stackpole was so unfortunate-looking. (Even in the world of much older women.)

Why, then, didn’t the flirtatious chirpiness of Michele’s letter warn Jack away from her? How desperate was he to connect with someone, to have a so-called real or normal relationship outside the world of acting, that he failed to see the crystal-clear indications? Michele and Jack had never had a real relationship; they hadn’t even almost had a relationship. If he had slept with her—and not given her the clap, which Jack hadn’t caught from Mrs. Stackpole—how soon after that would they have broken up? When Michele went off to Columbia, in New York City, and Jack went off to the University of New Hampshire? Probably. When he met Claudia? Definitely!

In short, Michele Maher had always been Jack’s illusion. The concept of the two of them together had been more the fantasy of other students at Exeter than it had ever been a reality between them. They were the most beautiful girl and the most handsome boy in the school; maybe that’s all they ever were.

“I have meetings all day, and there are lectures every night,” Michele wrote to him about the dermatologists’ convention at the Sheraton Universal. “But I can skip a lecture or two. Just tell me which night, or nights, you’re free. I’m dying to see where you hang out. What I mean, Jack, is that you must own that town!”

But Hollywood wasn’t that kind of town. It was a perpetual, glittering, ongoing award; for the most part, Hollywood kept escaping you. There was one night when you owned the town—the night you won the Oscar. But then there came the night (and the next night) after that. How quickly it happened that Hollywood was not your town anymore, and it wouldn’t be—not unless or until you won another Academy Award, and then another one.

The studios once owned Hollywood, but they didn’t own it anymore. There were agents who behaved as if they owned it; there were actors and actresses who thought they owned it, but they were wrong. The only people who truly owned Hollywood had more than one Oscar; they just kept winning Oscars, one after the other, and Jack Burns was not one of those people and never would be. But to Michele Maher, he was a movie star. She believed that was all that mattered.

According to Dr. García, Jack had come closest to having a real or normal relationship with Claudia—it was, at least, an actual relationship, before they went their separate ways. But Michele Maher was both more dangerous and more unforgettable to Jack, because she’d only ever existed as a possible relationship. “They’re the most damaging kind, aren’t they?” Dr. García had asked him. (Of course she also meant the relationship that Jack could only imagine having with his father.)

Thus warned, Jack drove out to Universal City to pick up Michele Maher—Dr. Maher, a thirty-eight-year-old unmarried dermatologist. What was he thinking? He already suspected that he might have a better time with an amnesiac transvestite prostitute. That was Jack’s state of mind when he walked into the lobby of the Sheraton Universal, which was overrun with hyperactive-looking children returning from their day of theme-park rides. Michele had said she would meet him in the bar, where he found her drinking margaritas with three or four of her fellow dermatologists. They were all sloshed, but Jack was heartened to see that Michele could manage to stand; at least she was the only one who stood to greet him.

She must have forgotten how short Jack was, because she was wearing very high heels; at five-ten, even barefoot she towered over him. “You see?” she said to the other doctors. “Aren’t movie stars always smaller than you expect them to be?” (The unkind thought occurred to Jack that, if Penis McCarthy had been there, he would have observed that Jack came up to her high, hard ones.)

He took Michele out to dinner at Jones—a trendy Hollywood hangout. It was not Jack’s favorite place—crowded, irritatingly thriving—but he figured that Michele would be disappointed if he didn’t provide her with an opportunity for a little sightseeing. (The food wasn’t all that interesting, but the clientele was hip—models, starlets, lots of fake boobs with the pizzas and pasta.)

Of course Jack saw Lawrence with one of the models; Jack and Lawrence automatically gave each other the finger. Michele was instantly impressed, if a little unsteady on her feet. “I haven’t eaten all day,” she confessed. “I should have skipped that second margarita.”

“Have some pasta,” Jack said. “That’ll help.” But she downed a glass of white wine while he was still squeezing the lemon into his iced tea.

He kept looking all around for Lawrence, who probably wanted to pay Jack back for the bottle of Taittinger Jack had poured on him in Cannes.

“My Gawd,” Michele was saying—a conflation of the worst of Boston and New York in her accent. “This place is cool.”

Alas, she wasn’t. Her skin, which he’d remembered as glowing, was dry and a trifle raw-looking—as if she’d just emerged from a hot bath and had stood outside for too long on a New England winter day. Her honey-blond hair was dull and lank. She was too thin and sinewy, in the manner of women who work out to excess or diet too rigorously—or both. She hadn’t had all that much to drink, but her stomach was empty—Michele was one of those people who looked like her stomach was empty most of the time—and even a moderate amount of alcohol would have looped her.

She was wearing a streamlined gray pantsuit with a slinky silver camisole showing under the jacket. New York clothes—Jack was pretty sure you couldn’t buy a suit like that in Boston or Cambridge, and she probably didn’t get those very high heels anywhere but New York, either. Even so, she looked like a doctor. She held her shoulders in an overerect way, the way someone with a neck injury does—or as if she’d been born in a starched lab coat.

“I don’t know how you do what you do,” she was telling Jack. “I mean how you’re so natural doing such unnatural things—a cross-dressing ski bum, for example. A dead rock star—a female one! A limo driver who’s married to a hooker.”

“I’ve known a lot of limo drivers,” he told her.

“How many homophobic veterinarians have you known, Jack?” Michele asked him. (She had even seen that unfortunate film.)

“I’m weird, you mean,” he said to her.

“But you bring it off. You’re a natural at being weird,” Michele told him.

Jack didn’t say anything. She was fishing for something that had fallen to the bottom of her second glass of white wine, which was half empty. It was a ring that had slipped off her finger.

“I’ve lost so much weight for this date,” she said. “I’m two sizes smaller than I was a month ago. I keep moving my rings to bigger fingers.”

Jack used a spoon to scoop her ring out of her wineglass. The ring had slipped off the middle finger of her right hand; the middle finger of her left hand was even smaller, Michele explained, but the ring was too small to fit either index finger.

It was a somewhat old-fashioned-looking ring for a woman her age to wear. A little clunky—a big sapphire, wreathed by diamonds. “It has some sentimental value, this ring?” Jack asked her.

Michele Maher knocked over her wineglass and burst into tears. Against Jack’s advice, she’d ordered a pizza—not pasta. The pizza at Jones had a pretty thin crust; Jack didn’t think the pizza had a rat’s ass of a chance of absorbing the alcohol in her.

It had been her mother’s ring—hence the bursting into tears. Her mother had died of skin cancer when Michele was still in medical school. Michele had instantly developed a skin ailment of her own; she called it stress-related eczema. She’d specialized in dermatology for personal reasons.

Her father was remarried, to a much younger woman. “The gold digger is my age,” Michele said. She’d ordered a third glass of white wine, and she hadn’t touched her pizza.

“You remember my parents’ apartment in New York, don’t you, Jack?” she asked. She had placed her dead mother’s unwearable ring on the edge of her plate, where it seemed poised to eat the pizza. (The ring honestly looked more interested in eating the pizza than Michele did.)

“Of course,” Jack answered. How could he forget that Park Avenue apartment? The beautiful rooms, the beautiful parents, the beautiful dog! And the Picasso, toilet-seat-high in the guest-room bathroom, where it virtually dared you to pee on it.

“That apartment was supposed to be my inheritance,” Michele said. “Now the gold digger is going to get it.”

“Oh.”

“Why didn’t you sleep with me, Jack?” she asked. “How could you have proposed that we masturbate together? Mutual masturbation is much more intimate than having conventional sex, isn’t it?”

“I thought I had the clap,” he admitted. “I didn’t want you to get it.”

“The clap from whom? You weren’t seeing anyone else, were you?”

“I was sleeping with Mrs. Stackpole, the dishwasher. You probably don’t remember her, Michele.”

“Those women who worked in the kitchen were all old and fat!” she cried.

“Yes, they were,” Jack said. “Well—Mrs. Stackpole was, anyway.”

“You could have slept with me, but you slept with an old, fat dishwasher?” she asked, in a ringing voice. (She said dishwasher the way she’d said gold digger.)

“I was sleeping with Mrs. Stackpole before I knew I could sleep with you,” Jack reminded her.

“And your relationship with Emma Oastler—what was that, exactly?” Michele asked.

Here we go, Jack thought; here comes “too weird,” and all the rest of it. “Emma and I were just roommates—we lived together, but we never had sex.”

“That’s so hard to imagine,” Michele said, toying with the ring on the edge of her plate. “You mean you just masturbated together?”

“Not even that,” he told her.

“What did you do? You must have done something,” Michele said.

“We kissed, I touched her breasts, she held my penis.”

In reaching for her wineglass, Michele’s elbow came down on the edge of her plate; her mother’s ring went flying. The ring landed on an adjacent table, startling two models who were on a red-wine diet.

One of the models picked up the ring and looked at Jack. “Oh, you shouldn’t have,” she said, slipping the ring onto one of her pretty fingers.

“I’m sorry—it’s her mother’s ring,” Jack told the model; she pouted at him while Michele looked mortified.

“You don’t remember me, do you, Jack?” the other model asked.

Jack got up and went over to their table, holding his hand out to the model who was still wearing Michele’s ring. He was trying to buy a little time, struggling to remember who the other model was.

“I was afraid you’d forgotten me,” he told her. (It was one of Billy Rainbow’s lines—Jack had always liked it.)

It was not the answer the model had been expecting. Jack still couldn’t place her, or else he’d never met her before in his life and she was just playing a game with him.

The model who had Michele’s ring was playing another kind of game with Jack; she was trying to put the ring on one of his fingers. “Who would have thought Jack Burns had such little hands?” she was saying. (The ring was a loose fit on his left pinkie; Jack went back to his table wearing it.)

“Jack Burns has a little penis,” the other model said.

Jack guessed that she did know him, but he still didn’t remember her. Michele just sat there looking glassy-eyed. “I don’t feel very well,” she told Jack. “I think I’m drunk, if you want to know the truth.”

“You should try to eat something,” he said.

“Don’t you know that you can’t tell a doctor what to do, Jack?”

“Come on. I’ll take you back to the hotel,” he said.

“I want to see where you live!” Michele said plaintively. “It must be fabulous.”

“It’s a hole in the wall,” the model who knew Jack said. “Don’t tell me you’ve actually moved out of that nookie house on Entrada, Jack.”

“We’re much closer to your hotel than we are to where I live,” he told Michele.

“Did you sleep with that girl?” Michele asked him, when they were back in the Audi. “You didn’t look like you knew her.”

“I don’t remember sleeping with her,” Jack said.

“What’s a nookie house?” she asked him.

“It’s slang for brothel,” Jack explained.

“Do you really live in a hole in the wall on La Strada?” Michele asked.

“Yes, I do,” he admitted. “It’s on Entrada.”

“But why do you live in a hole in the wall? Why wouldn’t Jack Burns live in a mansion?”

“I don’t really know where I want to live, Michele.”

“My Gawd,” she said again.

Michele fell sound asleep on the Hollywood Freeway. Jack had to carry her into the lobby of the Sheraton Universal. He didn’t know her room number; he couldn’t find her room key in her purse. He carried her into the bar, where he was sure he would find a few of her drunken colleagues. Jack hoped that one of them would be sober enough to recognize Michele.

Another woman dermatologist came to Jack’s assistance; she was a homely, caustic person, but at least she hadn’t been drinking. Together they got Michele to her room. The other doctor’s name was Sandra; she was from somewhere in Michigan. Sandra must have assumed that Jack was sleeping with Michele, because she proceeded to undress Michele in front of him.

“Run a bath for her,” Sandra said. “We can’t let her pass out like this. If she vomits, she might choke. People who are dead-drunk often aspirate their vomit. It’s better to wake her up, and let her be sick when she’s awake.”

Jack did what the doctor said. Then he carried Michele to the bath and, with Sandra’s assistance, slid her into it. Naked, she was much too thin—emaciated. Like a woman who’d been recently pregnant, Michele had stretch marks on her small breasts; the skin there looked wrinkled. (It was the weight loss; she hadn’t been pregnant.)

“Christ, how much weight has she lost?” Sandra asked Jack, as if he were the one who’d put Michele up to it.

“I don’t know what she weighed before,” Jack said. “I haven’t seen Michele in twenty years.”

“Well, this is a wonderful way to see her,” Sandra said.

Michele had told him more about the stress-related eczema; it occurred on her elbows and knees. When it was bad, the eczema was the color and nubbly texture of a rooster’s wattle. Jack kept staring at Michele’s elbows and knees while she lolled in the bath; he half expected her mysterious skin ailment to suddenly appear.

“What are you looking at?” Sandra asked him. (Michele, even in the bathwater, was still out cold; Jack held her under her armpits so her head wouldn’t slip underwater.)

He explained about the stress-related eczema, but Sandra assured him that it wasn’t about to blossom before his eyes. “It’s not like time-lapse photography,” she said. Sandra looked at his hands. “Nice ring,” she commented. (Michele’s mother’s ring was still on Jack’s left pinkie.)

When Michele started coming around, she was unaware that Sandra was with them. “I’ll leave you two lovebirds alone. Just don’t let her throw up in her sleep,” Sandra said. “You seem to enjoy staring at her, anyway.”

“Did we do it yet?” Michele asked him. He heard Sandra letting herself out of the hotel room, the door closing on her harsh laugh.

“No,” Jack said. “We didn’t do it.”

“When are we going to do it, Jack? Or do you think you have the clap again?”

“I didn’t have it the first time. I just thought I might have it,” he explained to her.

“But you can’t even remember who you’ve slept with,” Michele reminded him. “And it’s not as if you drink or anything. You must sleep with an awful lot of women, Jack.”

“Not really,” Jack said.

He felt nothing for her but the kind of pity and contempt you feel for people who aren’t in control of themselves. (As a nondrinker, Jack would have admitted to feeling superior to people who drank too much—whatever the circumstances.) And the pity he felt for Michele was all caught up in those expectations she’d had—for their big night out on the town together; for her parents’ New York apartment, which the gold digger had stolen from her; even for her dead mother’s ring, which didn’t fit any of her fingers. (Jack took the ring off his left pinkie and put it in the soap dish above the bathroom sink.)

He helped Michele dry herself off; she was a little shaky. She wanted to be alone in the bathroom for a moment.

The hotel maid had already turned down the bed and closed the curtains, but Jack opened the curtains to get a look at the view of the Hollywood Hills. The room had floor-to-ceiling windows; it was a spectacular view, but not even the Hollywood Hills could divert him from the sound of Michele retching in the toilet. Jack went and stood next to the bathroom door, to be sure she wasn’t choking. Later, when he heard the toilet flush and the water in the sink running, Jack went back and stood at the giant windows.

It was 2003. He’d been in Los Angeles for sixteen years. He was trying to remember sleeping with that model at Jones—the one who’d said that his penis was small—but he couldn’t remember anything about her. When he closed the curtains, Jack was thinking that he’d seen enough of the Hollywood Hills.

When Michele came out of the bathroom, she was wearing one of the hotel’s terry-cloth robes; she seemed shy, and relatively sober, and she smelled like a whole tube of toothpaste. Jack was sorry that she wanted to sleep with him—he’d been hoping that she wouldn’t want to. But he couldn’t turn her down a second time, not when he knew she was still thinking about the first time he’d rejected her.

It was only later that it occurred to Jack that Michele probably felt as resigned to the act as he did. And there was nothing remarkable about their sexual performance, nothing that would override the longer-lasting impression—namely, that they hadn’t really wanted to sleep with each other. (They had simply expected it would happen.)

“Just what is so terribly universal about this place, anyway?” Michele asked him, after they’d had sex and Jack was touching her breasts. She was lying on her back with her long arms held straight against her sides, like a soldier.

Jack guessed that she meant the name of the hotel, the Sheraton Universal—or where the hotel was located, which was Universal City—but before he could say something, Michele said: “I can tell you one thing that’s universal about tonight, and that is it’s a universal disappointment—like loneliness, or illness, or death. Or like knowing you’ll never have children. It’s just one big universal letdown, isn’t it?”

“Actually, it’s the name of a studio,” Jack said. “Universal Studios.”

“Your penis isn’t too small, Jack,” Michele Maher said. “That model was simply being cruel.”

“Maybe she had a nose job since I last saw her,” he speculated. “I mean, she’s a model—she could have had her chin done, or her eyes done. I’ll bet she had some kind of face-lift. There’s got to be a reason why I don’t remember her.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Michele said. “What about us? In a few years, this isn’t going to be memorable, is it?”

So much for that expectation, as he would one day tell Dr. García. It would come as no surprise to Dr. García, but one can appreciate what a blow it was to Jack to discover how quickly Michele Maher could become forgettable.

36. Claudia’s Ghost

Bad things happened after that. Jack’s psychiatrist tried to shed a positive light on his failure to connect with Michele Maher. Maybe this would disabuse Jack of what Dr. García called his “if-only romanticism about the past”—meaning if only it had worked out with Michele Maher the first time, he might have been spared the ensuing years of incomplete relationships.

“You always attached too much importance to your botched opportunity with Michele, Jack,” Dr. García said. “You never attached enough importance to what worked with Claudia. At least that relationship lasted.”

“Only four years,” Jack reminded her.

“Who else lasted an eighth as long, Jack? And don’t say Emma! The penis-holding doesn’t count as complete, does it?”

But Jack resisted his psychiatrist’s efforts to shed a positive light on anything. He was down. He embraced the movie-magazine version of himself, his bad-boy image. Jack didn’t care how many models he wouldn’t remember a month later. He had ceased caring about what kind of “nookie house” he lived in, too. (His “Entrada Drive state of mind,” Dr. García called it.)

Jack was in that state of mind in May 2003 when he went to New York to make a movie. He had accepted the Harry Mocco role in The Love Poet—a film by Gillian Scott, the Australian director. Gillian had also written the screenplay.

Harry Mocco is a crippled male model—“half a model,” Harry calls himself. His legs were crushed in a New York elevator accident. He has always wanted to be an actor; he has a great voice. But there aren’t a lot of roles for a guy in a wheelchair.

Even as a model, Harry’s career is marginal. He is often seen sitting up in bed in the morning—just his top half, naked. (The rest of him is under the sheets.) These are advertisements for women’s clothes; the female model, usually in the foreground of the photograph, is already dressed or half dressed. Her clothes are what’s being sold; the top half of Harry, in the background, is depicted as one of her accessories.

Or, if he’s the one modeling the clothes, you see Jack-as-Harry sitting at a desk or in the driver’s seat of an expensive car. He does a lot of ads for wristwatches, usually in a tuxedo—but the naked, half-a-male accessory in those advertisements for women’s clothing are his specialty.

Harry Mocco doesn’t really need the money. He made a fortune suing the building with the elevator that crushed his legs; in and around New York, where the film is set, Jack-as-Harry is quite a famous and photogenic cripple. The modeling is more for what little remains of his dignity than it is a financial necessity. He actually lives pretty well—in one of those New York buildings with a doorman. Naturally, Harry’s gym is wheelchair-accessible. He lifts weights half the day and plays wheelchair basketball—even wheelchair tennis.

Jack-as-Harry also memorizes and recites love poems, or parts of love poems—not always a welcome activity, especially since he’s not with anyone. He’s always urging his friends—gym friends, male-model friends—to woo their girlfriends with love poetry. No one seems interested. Harry knows a lot of supermodels—some of the hottest female models in New York. But they’re just friends; the supermodels are unmoved by the love poetry.

Jack-as-Harry has sex only once in the first hour and fifteen minutes of the film; to no one’s surprise, it’s a disaster. His partner is a young woman who frequently dresses him for the photo shoots—she’s very plain and nervous, an unglamorous girl with a pierced lower lip. The love poetry works on her, but his being crippled doesn’t. Jack had to give Gillian Scott credit for capturing a sex scene of award-winning awkwardness.

The voice-over, which is Harry Mocco’s, is all love poetry. Everything from the grimmest of the grim, Thomas Hardy, to Philip Larkin; everything from George Wither to Robert Graves. (There was too much Graves, in Jack’s opinion.)

Harry Mocco usually doesn’t get to recite more than a couplet, rarely a complete stanza. Nobody he knows wants to hear a whole poem.

“I’m not sure about the suitability of this role for you,” Dr. García had forewarned Jack. “A crippled male model who hasn’t found his audience. Isn’t that coming a little close to home?” Nor, in Dr. García’s opinion, was the length of his separation from her advisable. “I don’t do house calls as far away as New York, Jack—although I could stand to do a little shopping.”

Why don’t your children, if that’s who they are, grow older? he’d wanted to ask her. The photographs in Dr. García’s office were an irreplaceable, seemingly permanent collection. The older husband—or her father, if that’s who he was—was fixed in time. All of them seemed fixed in time, like bugs preserved in amber. But Jack didn’t ask her about it.

He just went to New York and made the movie. “Work is work, Dr. García,” he’d said defensively. “A part is just a part. I’m not Harry Mocco, nor am I in danger of becoming him. I’m not anybody.”

“That’s part of your problem, Jack,” she had reminded him.

The whole movie had a fifty-two-day shooting schedule. For the Harry Mocco part, including rehearsals, Jack had to be in New York a couple of months.

He was in the habit of seeing Dr. García twice a week—two months without seeing her would necessitate a certain number of phone calls. He couldn’t tell her his life story over the phone; in an emergency, he could talk to her, but the chronological-order part would have to wait.

In Dr. García’s view, the chronological-order part was what determined how Jack was doing. It was one thing to babble out loud about an emotionally or psychologically disturbing moment; it was quite another obstacle to organize the story and tell it (exactly as it had happened) to an actual person. In this respect, the chronological-order part was like acting; in Dr. García’s view, if Jack couldn’t tell the story in an orderly fashion, that meant that he couldn’t handle it psychologically and emotionally.

Jack Burns put everything he had into Harry Mocco. He remembered how Mrs. Malcolm had tyrannized the classroom, her head-on crashing into desks—her racing up and down the aisles in the St. Hilda’s chapel, skinning her knuckles on the pews. He remembered how Bonnie Hamilton could climb into her wheelchair, or extricate herself from it, the second his head was turned. He never saw her slip or fall, but he noticed the bruises—the evidence that she wasn’t perfect.

Jack not only did wheelchair tricks on the set of The Love Poet; he insisted on using the wheelchair when he was off the set, too. He pretended he was crippled. Jack wheeled around the hotel like a psycho invalid; he made them load him into limos, and unload him. He practiced falling, too. He did a fantastic, head-over-heels wheelie in the lobby of the Trump International on Central Park West—the startled bellman and concierge running to assist him.

They had a great gym at the Trump. Jack went there in his wheelchair; he would get on the treadmill and run for half an hour with the wheelchair parked alongside, as if it were for another person.

When Harry Mocco has wheelchair accidents in The Love Poet, the voice-over is heavy on Robert Graves. (A little of Graves goes a long way. “Love is a universal migraine,” for example.)

Or:

Why have such scores of lovely, gifted girls

Married impossible men?

Simple self-sacrifice may be ruled out,

And missionary endeavour, nine times out of ten.

When Jack-as-Harry is crawling on all fours from the bed to the bathroom, the girl who’s just slept with him is watching him—repulsed. The voice-over is Harry’s, reciting e. e. cummings.

i like my body when it is with your

body.

Jack-as-Harry tries to win over the pierced-lip girl with a love poem by Ted Hughes, but a little of Hughes goes a long way, too. The girl is out the door before he can finish the first stanza.

We sit late, watching the dark slowly unfold:

No clock counts this.

Harry’s more self-pitying moments—repeatedly banging his head on a bathtub drain, unable to climb out of the slippery tub—are pure pathos. (The voice-over to the bathtub scene is Harry’s recitation of George Wither.)

Shall I, wasting in despair,

Die because a woman’s fair?

The Love Poet is a noir love story—more noir than love story for three quarters of the film, more love story than noir at the end. Jack-as-Harry meets a recently crippled young woman in his gym. She is wheelchair-bound, too. Harry can tell it’s her first public outing in her new but permanent condition; she’s tentative. She’s being introduced to various weight machines and exercises by a blowhard personal trainer whom Harry despises. The girl is what wheelchair veterans like Harry call a “newborn.”

“Leave the newborn to me,” Jack-as-Harry tells the trainer.

Harry then proceeds to demonstrate every weight machine and exercise in slapstick; he drops things, he stages spectacular falls.

“See? This is easy!” he tells the newborn, imitating the hearty bullshit of the personal trainer. Jack-as-Harry hurls himself out of his wheelchair as awkwardly as possible, demonstrating to the recently crippled young woman that nothing is going to be easy for her.

When they fall in love, the voice-over is Harry’s; he’s reciting A. E. Housman. (In a gym, of all places.)

Oh, when I was in love with you,

Then I was clean and brave,

And miles around the wonder grew

How well did I behave.

Shame on Jack Burns—that month in New York, he was not as well behaved as Harry Mocco. He met a transvestite dancer at a downtown club. Jack was distracted by her strong-looking hands and her prominent Adam’s apple. He knew she was a man. Still, he went along with the seduction-in-progress—up to a point. Jack let her wheel him through the lobby of the Trump, and into the hotel’s bar. She sat in his lap in the wheelchair and they sang a Beatles song together, the bar crowd joining in.

When I get older losing my hair,

Many years from now.

Will you still be sending me a Valentine,

Birthday greetings bottle of wine?

Jack tried to say good night to the transvestite dancer at the elevator, but she insisted on coming to his room with him. All the way up on the elevator, they kept singing. (She sat in his lap in the elevator, too.)

If I’d been out till quarter to three

Would you lock the door,

Will you still need me, will you still feed me,

When I’m sixty-four?

The transvestite wheeled him down the hall to his hotel room. At the door, Jack tried again to say good night to her.

“Don’t be silly, Jack,” she said, wheeling him inside the room.

“I’m not going to have sex with you,” Jack told her.

“Yes, you are,” the pretty dancer said.

Jack soon had a fight on his hands. When a transvestite wants to have sex, she feels as strongly about it as a guy—because she is a guy! Jack had a battle on his hands. The room got trashed a little—one lamp, especially. Yes, Jack was aroused—but even he knew the difference between wanting to have sex and actually having it. Not even he would submit to every desire.

“Look, it’s obvious you want me,” the dancer said. “Stop fighting it.” She’d taken off all her clothes and had managed to destroy most of Jack’s. “You have a hard-on,” she kept pointing out, as if Jack didn’t know.

“I get a hard-on in my sleep,” he told her.

“Look at me!” she screamed. “I have a hard-on!”

“I can see that you do,” Jack said. “And you have breasts.” (They were as hard as apples; Jack knew, because he was trying to push them out of his face.)

This time, he saw the left hook coming—and the right uppercut, and the head-butt, too. She may have been a dancer, but she was not without some other training; this wasn’t her first fight.

Naturally, the phone was ringing—the front-desk clerk, Jack assumed. There had probably been calls to the front desk from those rooms adjacent to Jack’s, within hearing distance of the destroyed lamp and all the rest. Well, wouldn’t Donald Trump love this! Jack was thinking. (The Trump’s fabulous view of Central Park—for the time being, utterly ignored.)

He heard the security guys picking at the lock on his hotel-room door, but Jack had a Russian front headlock on the dancer and he wasn’t letting go—not even to open the door. Her fingernails were like claws, and he had to give up the front headlock when she bit him in the forearm.

“You fight like a girl,” Jack told her.

He knew that would really piss her off. When she came at him, Jack hit a pretty good duck-under and got behind her. He held her chest-down on the rug with a double-armbar, where she couldn’t bite him. The security guys finally got the door open; there were two of them, plus the night manager.

“We’re here to help you, Mr. Burns—I mean Mr. Mocco,” the night manager said.

“I have a distraught dancer on my hands,” Jack told them.

“He had a hard-on. I saw it,” the transvestite said.

One of the security guys had thought that Jack really was a cripple. He’d never seen Jack out of the wheelchair—not even in the movies. (He wasn’t a moviegoer, clearly.) From the other security guy’s reaction when the three of them were forcibly dressing the dancer, chicks with dicks were new to him.

Jack never went to bed; he stayed up, rehearsing how he would tell this part of the story of his life to Dr. García. He knew this episode wouldn’t wait for chronological order. Jack kept a cold washcloth on his forearm, where the transvestite dancer had bitten him. She hadn’t broken the skin, but the bite marks were sore and ugly-looking.

In the late morning, when Jack talked to Dr. García from the set of The Love Poet, he told her that the unfortunate incident was out of character for Harry Mocco but sadly typical of Jack Burns. (Jack thought he might preempt her criticism by criticizing himself.)

“You acquiesce too much, Jack,” Dr. García said. “You should never have let the transvestite into the elevator—you should have had the fight in the lobby, where it would have been a shorter fight. For that matter, you should never have let her sit in your lap in the bar.”

“It wouldn’t have been a good idea to have had that fight in the bar,” he assured Dr. García.

“But why did you leave the nightclub with her in the first place?” Dr. García asked him.

“She turned me on. I was aroused,” he admitted.

“I’m sure you were, Jack. That’s what transvestites do, isn’t it? They go to great lengths to turn men on. But what does that lead to, Jack? Every time, where does that go?”

He couldn’t think of what to say.

“You keep getting in trouble,” Dr. García was saying. “It’s always just a little trouble, but you know what that leads to—don’t you, Jack? Don’t you know where that goes?”

It was July 2003 when they had the wrap party for The Love Poet in New York, and Jack flew back to L.A. He’d succumbed to Harry Mocco’s habit of reciting fragments of love poems to total strangers, but in the case of the attractive stewardess on his flight from New York to Los Angeles, this wasn’t entirely Jack’s fault. She’d asked him to tell her about his next movie, and Jack began by explaining to her that Harry Mocco compulsively memorizes love poems and recites them at the drop of a hat.

“For example, do you know the poem ‘Talking in Bed’ by Philip Larkin?” he asked her. (She was probably Jack’s age.)

“Do I want to know it?” she asked him warily. “I’m married.”

But he kept trying. (Jack hadn’t slept with a stewardess in years.) “Or ‘In Bertram’s Garden’ by Donald Justice,” he went on, as if the flight attendant were encouraging him. “ ‘Jane looks down at her organdy skirt / As if it somehow were the thing disgraced—’ ”

“Whoa!” the stewardess said, cutting him off. “I don’t want to hear about it.”

That’s what happens when you ask an actor to tell you about his next movie.

When Jack walked into his place on Entrada Drive, he immediately called a real estate agent and asked to have the house put on the market. (Sell the fucker! Jack was thinking; maybe that would force me to live a little differently.)

He headed off for his appointment with Dr. García—his first in two months—feeling like a new man.

“But you haven’t really made a decision about where you want to live, Jack,” Dr. García pointed out. “Aren’t you pulling the rug out from under your feet, so to speak?”

But if Jack couldn’t make up his mind about his life, he had at least decided to make something happen.

“Is it the house itself that let Lucy come inside?” Dr. García asked him. “Is it because of your mother’s lies to you, or your missing father, that you are an unanchored ship—in danger of drifting wherever the wind or the currents, or the next sexual encounter, will take you?”

Jack didn’t say anything.

“Think about Claudia,” Dr. García said. “If you want to make something meaningful happen—if you really want to live differently—think about finding a woman like that. Think about committing yourself to a relationship; it doesn’t even have to last four years. Think about being with a woman you could live with for one year! Start small, but start something.”

“You asked me not to mistake you for a dating service,” Jack reminded her.

“I’m recommending that you stop dating, Jack. I’m suggesting that, if you tried to live with someone, you would have to live a lot differently. You don’t need a new house. You need to find someone you can live with,” Dr. García said.

“Someone like Claudia? She wanted children, Dr. García.”

“I don’t mean someone like Claudia in that respect, but a relationship like that—one that has a chance of lasting, Jack.”

“Claudia is probably very fat now,” he told Dr. García. “She had an epic battle with her weight ahead of her.”

“I don’t necessarily mean someone like Claudia in that respect, either, Jack.”

“Claudia wanted children so badly—she’s probably a grandmother now!” he said to Dr. García.

“You never could count, Jack,” she told him.

Jack didn’t blame Dr. García. He would take full responsibility for what happened. But the very idea of Claudia—the reason she was recently on his mind—surely came from the Claudia conversation in his therapy session with Dr. García. Jack was thinking about her—that’s all he would say in his own defense—when he drove back home to Santa Monica from a dinner party one warm night that summer.

Jack was remembering the first time Claudia let him borrow her Volvo—the incredible feeling of independence that comes from being young and alone and driving a car.

He pulled into his driveway on Entrada—his headlights illuminating the arrestingly beautiful, incontestably Slavic-looking young woman who sat on her battered but familiar suitcase on Jack’s absurdly small lawn. She sat so serenely still, as if she were placidly posing for a photograph beside the FOR SALE sign, that for a moment Jack forgot what was for sale. He thought she was for sale, before he remembered he was selling his house—and that thought would come back to haunt him, because she was more for sale than Jack could possibly have imagined.

He knew who she was—Claudia, or her ghost. It was a wonder he didn’t lose control of the Audi and drive over her—either killing Claudia on the spot, or killing her ghost again. But how can it be Claudia? Jack was thinking. The young woman on his lawn was as young as Claudia had been when he’d known her, or younger. (Besides, Claudia had always looked older than she was, and she had the habit of lying about her age.)

“God damn you, Jack,” Claudia had said. “After I die, I’m going to haunt you—I promise you I will—I might even haunt you before I die.”

Since Claudia had promised that she would haunt him, wasn’t it forgivable that Jack assumed the apparition sitting beside his FOR SALE sign was Claudia’s ghost? A ghost doesn’t usually travel with a suitcase, but maybe Heaven or Hell had kicked her out—or her mission to haunt Jack had required her to have several changes of clothes. After all, Claudia was (or had been) an actress—and she’d loved the theater, more than Jack had. In the case of Claudia’s ghost, the suitcase could have been a prop.

Jack somehow managed to get out of the Audi and walk up to her, although his legs had turned to stone. He knew that driving away, or running away, wasn’t an option—you can’t get away from a ghost. But he left the Audi’s headlights on. When approaching a ghost, you at least want to see her clearly. Who wants to walk up to a ghost in the dark?

“Claudia?” Jack said, his voice trembling.

“Oh, Jack, it’s been too long,” she said. “It’s been forever since I’ve seen you!”

She was the same old Claudia, only younger. The same stage presence, the same projection of her voice—as if, even one-on-one, she was making sure that those poor souls in the worst seats in the uppermost balcony could hear her perfectly.

“But you’re so young,” he said.

“I died young, Jack.”

“How young, Claudia? You look even younger than you were! How is that possible?”

“Death becomes me, I guess,” she said. “Aren’t you going to ask me inside? I’ve been dying to see you, Jack. I’ve been sitting on this freakin’ lawn for an eternity.”

The word freakin’ was new, and not at all like Claudia. But who knew where she’d been—and, among the dead, with whom? She held out her hands and Jack helped her to her feet. He was surprised that he could feel her not-inconsiderable weight. Who would have guessed that ghosts weighed anything at all? But from the look of her—even in Heaven, or that other place—Claudia still had to watch her weight.

She was still self-conscious about her hips, too. She wore the same type of long, full skirt that she’d always liked to wear—even in the summer. She was as heavy-breasted as Jack remembered her; in fact, given what people who believed in ghosts were generally inclined to believe, she was disarmingly full-figured for a spirit.

Jack ran to the car and turned off the Audi’s headlights, half expecting Claudia’s ghost to disappear. But she waited for him, smiling; she let him carry her old leather suitcase inside. She went straight to Jack’s bedroom, as if they were still a couple and she’d been living with him all these years—even though Claudia had never been in that house. He waited in shock while she used his bathroom. (The things ghosts had to do!)

Jack was deeply conflicted. He both believed her and suspected her. She had the same creamy-smooth skin, the same prominent jaw and cheekbones—a face made for close-ups, he’d always said. Claudia should have been in the movies, despite the problem with her weight; she had a face that was wasted in the theater, Jack had always told her.

When Claudia’s ghost emerged from the bathroom, she came up to Jack and nuzzled his neck. “I’ve even missed your smell,” she said.

“Ghosts have a sense of smell?” he asked.

Jack held her by the shoulders, at arm’s length, and looked into her eyes; they were the same yellowish brown they’d always been, like polished wood, like a lioness’s eyes. But there was something about her that wasn’t quite the same; the resemblance was striking but inexact. It wasn’t only that she seemed too young to be the Claudia he’d known—even if she’d died the day after they parted company, even if death (as the ghost had said) did become her.

“A thought occurs to me, Claudia,” he said. Holding her, even at arm’s length, Jack could feel her body’s heat. And all this time, he’d thought that ghosts (if you could feel them at all) would feel cold. “Since my mother died, I’ve been wondering about this,” he told her. “If ghosts get to keep the tattoos they had in life—I mean in the hereafter.”

Again, the smile—but even her smile wasn’t exactly as Jack remembered it. He didn’t think that Claudia’s teeth had ever been quite this white. She slowly lifted the long, full skirt. The seductiveness in her eyes was unchanged, and there, high up on her inner thigh, which was even a little plumper than he remembered it, was the tattoo of the Chinese scepter—the short sword symbolizing everything as you wish.

“It took long enough, but it finally healed,” she told him.

It was a pretty good Chinese scepter, Jack thought, but it was not as perfect as the one his mom had learned from Paul Harper.

“It’s real,” the young woman said. “It won’t rub off on your hand. See for yourself, Jack—go on and touch it.”

The voice, her projection, may have been the same, but the language lacked Claudia’s exactness—her correctness of speech, her good education. The “go on and touch it”—the casual use of the word and—was no more like Claudia than the word freakin’ that had caught Jack’s attention earlier.

He touched the young woman’s tattoo, high up on her inner thigh—her imitation Chinese scepter, as Jack thought of it.

“Who are you?” he asked her.

She took his hand and made him touch her, higher up. She wasn’t wearing any panties, not even a thong. “Doesn’t it feel familiar, Jack? Don’t you want to be back there—to be young again?”

“You’re not Claudia,” Jack told her. “Claudia was never crude.” And ghosts, he could have said, not only don’t have body heat; female ghosts don’t get wet. (Or do they?)

“You have a hard-on, Jack,” the girl said, touching him.

“I get a hard-on in my sleep,” he told her, as if the episode with that transvestite dancer at the Trump had been a dress rehearsal. “It’s no big deal.”

“It’s big enough,” the young woman said, kissing him on the mouth; she didn’t come close to kissing like Claudia. But it took no small amount of will power on Jack’s part to stop touching her. To make her stop, he had to let her know that he knew who she was.

“What would your mother say about this?” Jack asked Claudia’s daughter. “The very idea of you having sex with me! That wouldn’t make your mom happy, would it?”

“My mom’s dead,” the girl told him. “I’m here to haunt you—it’s what she would have wanted.”

“I’m sorry your mother’s dead,” he replied. “But what would she have wanted?”

“I don’t believe in ghosts,” Claudia’s daughter said. “I’m here to haunt you because I don’t believe that Mom can do it.”

“What’s your name?” Jack asked her.

“Sally,” the girl said. “After Sally Bowles, the part in Cabaret Mom always wanted—the part she told me you wanted, too. Only you probably would have been better at it, Mom said.”

“What did your mom die of, Sally? When did she die?”

“Cancer, a couple of years ago,” Sally said. “I had to wait till I was eighteen—so it would be legal to haunt you.”

She looked like a woman in her early twenties, but then her mother had always looked older than she was, too.

“Are you really eighteen, Sally?”

“Just like Lucy. Wasn’t Lucy eighteen?” Sally asked him.

“I guess everyone knows about Lucy,” Jack said.

“The Lucy business was the last thing my mom knew about you—it happened just before she died. Maybe it made it easier for her to die without you,” Sally said.

Like Lucy, Sally was walking around in Jack’s house as if she owned it. He noticed she had kicked off her shoes; she walked barefoot on the wrestling mat in his gym. Her beige, sleeveless blouse was a gauzy, fabric; her bra, which Jack could see through the blouse, was the same beige or light-tan color. Sally’s skirt made a swishing sound as she walked. She paused at his desk, reading the title page of a screenplay lying there. (That was when she picked up Jack’s address book.)

“My mom never stopped loving you,” Sally said. “She always wondered what might have happened if she’d stayed with you—if you ever would have given her a child, or children. She regretted breaking up with you, but she had to have children.”

The way Sally said children, Jack got the feeling that she didn’t like kids—or that the need to have them wasn’t as urgent an issue to her as it had been to Claudia.

Sally plopped herself down on Jack’s living-room couch and opened his address book. He sat down beside her.

“Do you have siblings, Sally?”

“Are you kidding? Mom popped out four kids, one right after the other. Lucky me—I was the first. I got to be the babysitter.”

“And your dad?” Jack asked her.

“He means no harm,” Sally said. “Mom would have married the first guy she met after she split up with you. He just had to promise to give her children. My dad was the first guy she met, the pathetic loser.”

“Why is he a pathetic loser, Sally?”

“He got to go to all your movies with Mom. What a kick that had to be for him, if you know what I mean,” Sally said. “Of course, when I was old enough, I got to watch all your movies, too—with Mom and Dad. There wasn’t anything she didn’t tell Dad about you. There wasn’t anything she didn’t tell me about you, too. That trip you took to the Toronto film festival; how your mother tattooed her. How you made Mom show her tattoo to the customs agent—that was a good one. How she gave you the clap she caught from Captain Phoebus, when you were a gay Esmeralda in The Hunchback of Notre Dame; how you were such a prick about it, as if you’d never fooled around yourself.”

“But your dad loved her?” Jack asked Sally.

“Oh, he worshiped her!” Sally said. “Mom got as big as a cow—she completely let herself go—and it was painfully evident that she never got over you. But Dad adored her.”

“You’re very beautiful, Sally,” he told the girl. “You look so much like your mom, I almost believed you. For a moment, I thought you were Claudia’s ghost.”

“I can haunt you as good as any ghost—believe me, Jack.” She wasn’t looking at him; she just kept thumbing through the pages of his address book, as if she were searching for someone. Suddenly she flipped to the front of the book; she began with the A’s. In her mother’s stage voice, she read aloud the first woman’s name.

“Mildred (‘Milly’) Ascheim,” Sally said; then her tone of voice became insinuating. “Did you screw her, Jack? Are you still screwing her?”

“No, never,” he replied.

“Uh-oh. Here’s another Ascheim—Myra. You crossed her name out. That’s a pretty clear indication that you fucked her. Then you dumped her, I suppose.”

“I never had sex with her. I crossed out her name because she died. Sally, let’s not play this game,” Jack said.

But she kept reading; she became very excited when she got to Lucia Delvecchio’s name. “Even Mom said you must have slept with her,” Sally said. “Mom said she could tell you were going to sleep with her when she saw you with her in the movie.”

Jack let it go on too long. Sally was into the G’s when the trouble really started. (Jack knew what Dr. García would say—namely, that he shouldn’t have been sitting next to Sally on the couch in the first place.)

“Elena García,” Sally said. This must have registered on Jack’s face; he clearly found this disrespectful to Dr. García, whom he never called by her first name. Dr. García was the most important person in this stage of Jack’s life, and Sally saw it. “Your cleaning lady, or former cleaning lady?” Sally asked, more disrespectfully. “You definitely fucked her.”

“She’s my doctor—my psychiatrist,” Jack said. “I don’t even call her by her first name.”

“Oh, yes—she’s Lucy’s shrink, too, isn’t she? How could I forget that!” Sally said. “I’ll bet Lucy’s mom is stalking you now.”

The girl was good; she had her mother’s talent, if not half her training. And at that moment, when she was teasing him, she reminded Jack more of Claudia than at any time when he’d imagined she was Claudia’s ghost.

“Please don’t be angry with me, Jack,” Sally said, very much the way her mother would have said it. “I just miss my mom, and I thought that being with you might bring her back to me.”

Jack couldn’t move; he just sat there. In his experience, women, even young women, knew when they had frozen you. Claudia had known those moments when Jack couldn’t resist her. Sally knew, too. She pressed herself against him on the couch; she started unbuttoning his shirt. He didn’t stop her. “Remember when you were John the Baptist?” Sally asked him.

“I was just his head—a small part,” he answered her. “His severed head—that’s all I was.”

“His decapitated head, on a table,” Sally reminded him, slipping off his shirt. Jack didn’t know when she’d unbuttoned her blouse; he noticed only that it was unbuttoned. “Mom was Salomé, wasn’t she?” Claudia’s daughter asked him.

“Yes,” Jack answered; he could barely talk. The girl had undressed him and herself. Naked, she was more like Claudia than Claudia—Chinese scepter and all.

“Mom said that was the best kiss she ever gave 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. García—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. García 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-boned and pretty as Sally.

When Jack pulled up to the curb at The Georgian Hotel on Ocean Avenue, Sally kissed him on his forehead. “You seem like a good guy, Jack—just a sad one,” she said.

“Please give your mother my fondest regards,” he told the fifteen-year-old.

“Thanks for the money, Jack. It means a lot—I’m not kidding.”

“How does this constitute haunting me?” he asked her. “I mean, it was a sting. A pretty good one—I’ll give you that, Sally. But how have you haunted me, exactly?”

“Oh, you’ll see,” Sally said. “This will haunt you, Jack—and I don’t mean the money.”

He went back to Entrada Drive—the scene of the crime, so to speak. It was a crime, not only according to the California Penal Code; it felt very much like a crime to Jack Burns. He’d had sex with a fifteen-year-old girl, and it had cost him only $100,000.

Jack stayed up late reading every word of the brochure Sally had left with him; he looked at all the pictures, over and over again. The Nuts & Bolts Playhouse was dedicated to that noble idea of theater as a public service. A neighbor who was an electrician had installed the new stage lights for free; a couple of local carpenters had built the sets for three Shakespearean productions, also at no charge. In a small southern Vermont town, virtually everyone had contributed something to the community playhouse.

The area schoolchildren performed their school plays in the theater; a women’s book club staged dramatizations of scenes from their favorite novels. A New York City opera company rehearsed there for the month of January, before going on tour; some local children with good voices were taught to sing by professional opera singers. Poets gave readings; there were concerts, too. The summer-stock productions, while pandering to tourists’ fondness for popular entertainment, included at least two “serious” plays every summer. Jack recognized a few of the guest performers in the summer casts—actors and actresses from New York.

There were two pictures of Claudia; in both she looked radiant and joyful, and fat. Her daughters were most photogenic—self-confident girls who’d been taught to perform. Certainly Claudia could be proud of Sally for possessing both poise and determination beyond her years. Did Claudia and her husband know that Sally was a model of self-assurance and independent thinking? Probably. Did her parents also know that Sally was as sexually active (on her family’s behalf) as she was? Probably not.

Claudia had made the theater her family’s business—perhaps more successfully than she knew. But no matter how hard Jack tried to understand the financing, he couldn’t grasp how a so-called nonprofit foundation worked. (His math let him down again.) All Jack knew was that he would be writing out checks to The Nuts & Bolts Foundation for the rest of his life; regular donations of $100,000, or more, seemed a small price to pay for what he had done.

He wanted to call Dr. García, but it was by now two or three in the morning and he knew what she would say. “Tell me in chronological order, Jack. I’m not a priest. I don’t hear confessions.” What she meant was that she didn’t give absolution, not that there was any forgiveness for his having had sex with Claudia’s daughter—not even if Jack could have convinced himself that Sally really was Claudia’s ghost.

Jack was turning out the lights in the kitchen, before he finally went to bed, when he saw the rudimentary grocery list he had fastened to the refrigerator with one of his mom’s Japanese-tattoo magnets.

COFFEE BEANS

MILK

CRANBERRY JUICE

It didn’t add up to much of a life. He was already beginning to see how Claudia had kept her promise to haunt him.

Jack discovered that when you’re ashamed, your life becomes a what-if world. Claudia’s daughter Sally was fifteen; it wasn’t hard to imagine a girl of that age having some sort of falling-out with her mom. Teenage girls didn’t need legitimate provocation to hate their mothers. What if, for some stupid reason, Sally wanted to hurt her mom? What if Sally told Claudia that she’d slept with Jack?

Or what if, later in her life, Sally came to the illogical conclusion that Jack had taken advantage of her? What if—for a host of reasons, possibly having nothing to do with what had inspired Sally to seduce Jack in the first place—the wayward girl simply decided that he deserved to pay for his crime, or that Jack Burns should at least be publicly exposed?

“Well, Jack, I’m sure your shame is even greater than your fear of the California Penal Code,” Dr. García would later tell him. “But in our past, don’t many of us have someone who could destroy us with a letter or a phone call?”

“You don’t have someone like that, do you, Dr. García?”

“I’m not the patient, Jack. I don’t have to answer that kind of question. Let’s just say, we all have to learn to live with something.”

It was August 2003. Jack’s house on Entrada Drive was still for sale, but he felt that Claudia’s ghost had moved in to stay; it was as if she were living with him. Wherever else he might go, before or after that wretched house was sold, Jack had no doubt that Claudia’s ghost would come with him.

Krung, the Thai kickboxer from that long-ago gym on Bathurst Street, had told him once: “Gym rats always gotta find a new ship, Jackie.” Well, Jack was a gym rat who would soon have to find a new ship, but now he was a gym rat with a ghost.

Jack found that you don’t sleep well when you’re living with a ghost. He had meaningless but disturbing dreams, from which he would awaken with the conviction that his hand was touching Emma’s tattoo. (That perfect vagina, the not-a-Rose-of-Jericho, which his mom had tattooed on Emma’s right hip—just below the panty line.)

Jack took his real estate agent’s advice and moved out; this allowed her to empty the house of all the old and ugly furniture, most of which Emma had acquired for their first apartment in Venice, as well as the rugs and Jack’s gym equipment; the floors were sanded and the walls were painted white. The house became a clean and spare-looking dump, at least—and Jack moved into a modest set of rooms at the Oceana in Santa Monica.

It was a third-floor suite with four rooms, including a kitchen, overlooking the courtyard and the swimming pool. He could have chosen a view of Ocean Avenue, but the Oceana was a moderately priced residential hotel that appealed to families; Jack liked the sound of the children playing in the pool. Some of the families were Asian or European; Jack liked listening to the foreign languages, too. He accepted the transience of staying there, because Jack Burns was transient—impermanent, almost ceasing to exist.

He kept next to nothing from Entrada Drive. He gave three quarters of his clothes to Goodwill and his Oscar to his lawyer for safekeeping.

Jack kept his most recent Audi, of course. The gym at the Oceana was a joke, but there were two gyms in Venice that he liked—and, from the Oceana, Jack was even closer to Dr. García’s office on Montana Avenue than he’d been on Entrada Drive.

Jack registered at the Oceana as Harry Mocco; as usual, the few important people in his life knew where to find him. Somehow it seemed fitting (to a man in limbo) that Jack would hear from Leslie Oastler shortly after his move. Mrs. Oastler called because she hadn’t heard from him in a while—which was all right with her, she added quickly. And just fine with Dolores, no doubt.

Dolores had made such a fuss about the ongoing presence of Jack’s clothes that Mrs. Oastler had donated them to St. Hilda’s, where Mr. Ramsey had happily accepted the clothes as costumes for the school’s dramatic productions. Mr. Ramsey and Miss Wurtz had called to thank Leslie for the unusual gift. (“We never have enough men’s clothes for the dramatizations,” Caroline had explained.)

Jack’s former bedroom, Mrs. Oastler told him, had been converted to a studio for Dolores. (Leslie’s blonde must have been a poet or a painter—some kind of artist, surely—but Jack didn’t ask.) As for Emma’s old bedroom, it was now the official guest room. The wallpaper was different—“more feminine,” Leslie said. The furniture and curtains were “more feminine,” too. All this was Dolores’s doing, Jack guessed, but again he didn’t ask.

“When you’re back in town, you’ll probably prefer to stay in a hotel,” Mrs. Oastler said.

“Probably,” Jack replied. He couldn’t tell why she had called.

“Any new news from or about your dad, Jack?” Leslie asked.

“No. But I’m not looking for him,” Jack explained.

“I wonder why not,” Leslie said. “He would be a man in his sixties, wouldn’t he? Things happen to men at that age. You might lose him before you find him, if you know what I mean.”

“He might die, you mean?”

“He might be dead already,” Mrs. Oastler said. “You were so curious about him. What happened to your curiosity, Jack?” (This was what Dr. García was always asking him.)

“I’ve been seeing a psychiatrist,” he half explained.

“I’m glad you’re seeing somebody!” Leslie exclaimed. “But you used to be able to do more than one thing at a time.”

“What Mrs. Oastler may mean, Jack,” Dr. García would soon tell him, “is that seeing a psychiatrist is not something you necessarily do in lieu of having a little natural curiosity.”

But Jack was guilty of an indefensible crime. He’d not only had sex with a fifteen-year-old girl—he had acquiesced to it. He carried an awful secret, and—provided Claudia’s daughter let him—Jack would bear its burden to his grave. Shame had robbed him of his curiosity. When you’re ashamed, you don’t feel inclined to undertake another adventure—at least not right away.

The thank-you letter from Claudia and her husband (whom Jack would forever imagine as a bearded, betrayed king) came with family photographs—among them one of Sally as a little girl and one of Claudia when she was noticeably thinner. There was also a photo of the husband and father of four when he was clean-shaven; Jack could understand why the king had grown a beard.

“Should you ever be inclined to return to the theater,” Claudia wrote, “just say the word!” A month or six weeks in Vermont in midsummer, a stage so small it would seem his very own, his pick of the play and the part. Under the circumstances, Jack was both touched and repelled by the offer.

“We’re all so grateful to you, Jack,” Claudia went on.

“And we’re so proud of Sally for having the temerity to approach you!” Claudia’s husband (Sally’s father) wrote.

Jack would write back to Claudia and her husband that he was glad to have helped, in what modest way he could. But he lacked Sally’s temerity; Jack wrote that he no longer had the nerve to stand alone on a stage. “The out-of-context moments of filmmaking, which I’ve grown used to, allow the actor room to hide.” (Whatever that meant!) But Jack would think of their little theater often, he wrote—and every summer he would regret the missed opportunity of an idyllic month or six weeks in Vermont. (In truth, he would rather die!)

Jack felt Claudia’s ghost watching over him; she was all smiles when he mailed that letter.

Immediately following this insincere correspondence, Jack experienced contact of another kind. There was nothing insincere about Caroline Wurtz’s phone call, which woke him early one August morning from his umpteenth dream of touching Emma’s vagina tattoo. A family from Düsseldorf, with whom he’d been testing the limits of his Exeter German, were already up and swimming in the Oceana pool.

“Jack Burns, as Mr. Ramsey might say,” Miss Wurtz began. “Rise and shine!” The Wurtz, of course, had no idea of what a shameful thing Jack had done. (That he would rise, and go on rising, seemed likely; that he might ever shine again seemed unthinkable.)

“How nice to hear your voice, Caroline,” he told her truthfully.

“You sound awful,” Miss Wurtz said. “Don’t pretend I didn’t wake you. But I have news worth waking you for, Jack.”

“You’ve heard from him?” Jack asked, wide awake if not exactly shining.

“I’ve heard of him, not from him. You have a sister, Jack!”

Biologically speaking, if his father had remarried—as it appeared that William had—it was conceivable that Jack had a half sister, which was indeed news to him and Miss Wurtz.

Her name was Heather Burns, and she was a junior lecturer on the Faculty of Music at the University of Edinburgh, where (some years earlier) she’d also completed her undergraduate studies in the Department of Music. Heather was a pianist and an organist, and she played a wooden flute. She’d done her Ph.D. in Belfast.

“On Brahms,” Caroline informed him. “Something about Brahms and the nineteenth century.”

“My dad is back in Edinburgh?” he asked The Wurtz.

“William isn’t well, Jack—he’s in a sanatorium. He was playing the organ again at Old St. Paul’s, and teaching in Edinburgh, but he has osteoarthritis. His arthritic hands have put an end to his playing, at least professionally.”

“He’s in a sanatorium for arthritis?” Jack asked her.

“No, no—it’s a mental place,” Miss Wurtz said.

“He’s in an insane asylum, Caroline?”

“Heather says it’s very nice. William loves it there. It’s just that it’s very expensive,” Miss Wurtz said.

“My sister was calling for money?” Jack asked.

“She was calling for you, Jack. She wanted to know how to reach you. I told her I would call you. As you know, I give your phone number to no one—although in this case I was tempted. Yes, Heather needs money—to keep William happy and safe in the sanatorium.”

Jack’s sister was twenty-eight. A junior lecturer at the University of Edinburgh didn’t make enough money to afford to have children, The Wurtz explained. Heather couldn’t be expected to pay for William’s confinement.

“Heather is married?” Jack asked Miss Wurtz.

“Certainly not!”

“You mentioned children, Caroline.”

“I was being hypothetical—about the poor girl’s meager salary,” Miss Wurtz elaborated. “Heather has a boyfriend. He’s Irish. But she’s not going to marry him. Heather merely said that her income didn’t permit her to even think about starting a family, and that she needs your help with William.”

I have a sister! Jack was thinking; that she needed his help (that anyone needed him) was the most wonderful news!

Better still, Jack’s sister loved their father. According to Miss Wurtz, Heather adored William. But she’d not had an easy time of it; nor had he. After talking with Jack’s sister, The Wurtz had quite a story to tell.

If not surpassing or even equaling his feelings for the commandant’s daughter, the next love of William Burns’s life was a young woman he’d met and married in Germany. Barbara Steiner was a singer; she introduced William to Schubert’s songs. The singing of German lieder, accompanied by the pianoforte—“the ancestor of the modern piano,” as Miss Wurtz described it to Jack—was new and exciting to William. It was no minor art to him, nor was Barbara Steiner a passing infatuation; they performed and taught together.

“I have a son, but I may never see him again,” William told Barbara, from the beginning.

Jack Burns was an emotional and psychological presence in her childhood, Heather told Miss Wurtz—even before Jack became a movie star and his dad began to watch him obsessively on the big screen, and on videotape and DVD. (According to The Wurtz, William had Jack’s dialogue—in all the movies—“down pat.”)

William Burns and Barbara Steiner had lived in Munich, in Cologne, in Stuttgart; they were together in Germany for about five years. When Barbara was pregnant with Heather, William was offered an opportunity to return “home” to Edinburgh; he seized it. Heather was born in Scotland, where both her parents taught in the Department of Music at the University of Edinburgh before her.

William was once again playing the Father Willis at Old St. Paul’s—not that the organ hadn’t been altered and enlarged since he’d last played it. Given the church’s fabled reverberation time, this hardly mattered; it was Old St. Paul’s Scottish Episcopal Church, which William loved, and Edinburgh was his city.

Miss Wurtz, bless her heart, too quickly jumped to the conclusion that William’s life had come full circle. Wasn’t it wonderful that, for all his wanderlust and the upheavals of his younger days, William Burns had at last “settled down”? He’d found the right woman; their daughter would give Jack’s father some measure of peace, a sense of replacement for losing his son.

But it was not to be. Barbara Steiner was homesick for Germany. In her view, Edinburgh was not a great city for classical music; there was a lot of music, but much of it was mediocre. The climate was damp and dreary. Barbara believed that the weather exacerbated her chronic bronchitis; she half joked that she had become a singer with a permanent cough, but the cough was persistent and more serious than she knew.

What Heather, Jack’s sister, imparted to Miss Wurtz—in one phone call—was a portrait of her mother as a complainer. According to Barbara, Scottish men (excluding William) were unattractive and dressed badly; the women were even less attractive and didn’t know how to dress at all. Whisky was a curse, not only for the drunkenness it caused (William didn’t drink); it also killed the taste buds and made the Scots incapable of recognizing how bad their food was. Kilts, like lederhosen, should be worn only by children—or so Barbara believed. (William wouldn’t have been caught dead in a kilt.) In the summer, when the weather finally improved, there were too many tourists—especially Americans. Barbara was allergic to wool; no tartan would ever please her.

Her mother, Heather told Miss Wurtz, found one child such an overwhelming burden that she resisted William’s wishes to have one or two more. Barbara was not a natural mother, yet she reduced her teaching duties (by half) in order to spend more time with Heather, although time spent with an infant was torture to her.

Barbara Steiner was a child of divorced parents; she had such a dread of separation and divorce that she periodically suspected William of planning to divorce her. He wasn’t; in fact, William was (in Heather’s words) “slavishly devoted” to his griping wife. He held himself accountable for her unhappiness, for taking her away from her beloved homeland; he offered to move back to Germany, but Barbara believed that such a move would make her husband so unhappy that he would be driven to divorce her all the more quickly.

Before Barbara Steiner’s parents had separated, she had cherished the family ski holidays they would take—every winter and spring—to the Swiss and Austrian Alps. After the divorce, the ski trips, which Barbara took alone with her mother, or alone with her father, became a form of enforced exercise—athletic stoicism and silent dinners, where one or the other of her parents drank too much wine. Yet the names of these ski resorts in Austria and Switzerland were reverentially repeated to Heather by her unhappy mother; it was as if they were saints’ names, and Barbara had converted to Catholicism.

St. Anton, Klosters, Lech, Wengen, Zermatt, St. Christoph. When they’d lived in Germany, Barbara Steiner had actually taught William Burns how to ski—albeit badly. (Jack had trouble envisioning his dad, a tattooed organist, on skis.) But the Swiss and Austrian Alps were a long way from Scotland.

“We’ll take you skiing when you’re old enough,” Heather’s mom had told her.

One can imagine how The Wurtz’s account of this had echoes of Alice’s litany to Jack.

But the so-called chronic bronchitis turned out to be lung cancer, which Barbara believed she had “caught” (like the flu) in Edinburgh. “I wouldn’t be surprised if lung cancer originated in Scotland,” she half joked between coughs. It was the death of her singing, but not of her.

Heather was too young at the time to remember anything positive about her mother’s recovery from the cancer. Heather recalled nothing about the radiation, Caroline told Jack—and only “the vomiting part” and “the wig part” of her mother’s chemotherapy. Heather would have been five, Miss Wurtz speculated. The child could barely remember the first ski trip of her life, to Klosters—except that her mother, Barbara, had been depressed because she was too tired to ski.

Jack suggested to Caroline that, when Heather was five, her memory of anything was unreliable. Miss Wurtz countered this argument; although she was only five at the time, his sister’s most enduring memory of her mother had prevailed. Barbara Steiner had hated how the Scots drove on the wrong side of the road. She cited the numerous deaths of foreign tourists in Edinburgh every summer. (They stepped off the curb, looking left instead of right.)

“If the cancer doesn’t come back and kill me,” Barbara used to say to William, and to their five-year-old daughter, “I swear I shall be struck down by a car going the wrong way on the street.” She was.

She stepped off the curb, where it was written—as plain as day—LOOK RIGHT. She looked left instead, although she’d lived in Edinburgh for almost six years, and a taxi killed her.

“I believe Heather said it was in the vicinity of Charlotte Square,” Miss Wurtz informed Jack. “A children’s book author was reading at some sort of writers’ festival. Her mother had taken Heather to the reading, which was in a tent. When they were leaving, and about to cross the street, Heather reached for her mother’s hand. Heather looked the right way and saw the taxi coming; her mother looked the wrong way and stepped off the curb. The taxi killed Barbara instantly. Heather remembers that her fingers only slightly grazed her mother’s hand.”

Whether Jack’s sister had freely divulged these painful details to Miss Wurtz, or whether Caroline had coaxed the details out of her, Jack didn’t know. He knew only that The Wurtz was a tireless believer in dramatizing important information—hence the detail that Barbara Steiner’s wig flew off on impact was conveyed to Jack, and the fact that Heather and her mom (at her mother’s insistence) spoke only German when they were alone together.

That Jack’s five-year-old sister was crying for her dead mother in German confused the witnesses to the accident. (There were many parents with children among the witnesses; they’d also attended the reading by the children’s book author at the writers’ festival.) The police reconstructed the accident incorrectly: a German tourist had been struck down by a car in the unexpected lane; the astonishingly bald woman was carrying no identification, and her five-year-old daughter, who was hysterical, spoke only German.

Actually, Barbara had been carrying a purse. It must have been flung far away from her when the taxi hit her—lost forever, like the wig. Heather, when she calmed down, told a policeman, in English, that she wanted to go “home”; she took the cop by the hand and showed him the way. Heather had walked everywhere in Edinburgh with her mother and father; no one in the family (including Heather, when she grew up) drove a car.

Thus William Burns became a single parent to a five-year-old girl. “Knowing William,” Miss Wurtz said, “he would have held himself accountable for the death of the poor child’s mother, too.”

“Did Heather say that?” Jack asked.

“Of course she didn’t say it, Jack! But I know William. He forgave your mother for everything, but he never forgave himself.”

“And now he’s crazy?” Jack asked.

“You should talk to your sister, Jack. You should meet Heather before it’s too late.”

But did Heather want to meet him? he inquired of The Wurtz. (Jack wondered if he should send his sister a check first.)

“You have to call her and talk to her yourself,” Miss Wurtz said. “I’m sure you have some things in common.”

“Name one, Caroline.”

“Your mothers weren’t your favorite people,” Miss Wurtz said.

“I loved my mom when I was a little boy,” Jack pointed out.

“Goodness, Jack, I’m sure your sister loved her mom when she was a little girl. But, with hindsight, Heather has at least considered what a difficult woman her mother could be. Doesn’t that sound familiar?”

It was The Wurtz’s view that Jack’s father had not abandoned him; on the contrary, William had provided for Jack. William’s deal with Alice at least made her responsible for doing all the outwardly correct things. Jack had gone to good schools, he’d worn clean clothes, he wasn’t beaten or abused—that is, not to Alice’s knowledge.

It was also Miss Wurtz’s view—and Caroline was no fan of Jack’s mother—that Alice had, to some degree, shielded Jack from what The Wurtz called the “adult choices” in Alice’s own dark life. (Notwithstanding Leslie Oastler and some of Alice’s friends in the tattoo world.)

“You must tell me how William is when you find him,” Miss Wurtz said. “Meanwhile, be thankful you have a sister.”

“I have a sister,” Jack repeated.

That was the message he would leave on the answering machine in Dr. García’s office, because it was too early in the morning to make an appointment to see her. Merely discovering that he had a sister was in the category of what Dr. García called “incomplete information”—by which she meant that Jack’s news didn’t merit calling her at home.

Jack called his sister, Heather Burns, instead. It was only 7:00 A.M. in Santa Monica—10:00 A.M. in Toronto, where Miss Wurtz had been calling from. But it was already midafternoon in Edinburgh. There was music playing when Heather answered the phone—voices and an organ, maybe trumpets.

“Give me a moment,” his sister said, turning down the volume on the CD player.

“It’s Jack Burns, your brother,” he told her.

“It’s Heather—your half sister, actually,” she said. “But I feel I know you. It was almost as if I grew up with you. ‘If your brother knew you, he would love you,’ Daddy said every night, when he put me to bed. And there was always this refrain: ‘I have a son!’ he would shout. ‘I have a son and a daughter!’ Daddy would say. It could be tiresome, but I got the point.”

“I wish I’d grown up with you,” Jack told her.

“You don’t know that yet,” she said. Her voice was crisp and even, with less of a Scottish accent than he’d expected. (There was some Irish in her accent, Jack thought—the effect of those years in Belfast, perhaps, or the Irish boyfriend.) Above all, she sounded very practical.

“I want to meet you,” he told her.

“You don’t know that, either, Jack Burns,” Heather said. “I’m not comfortable asking you for money, but I need it. Our father needs it, I should say—not that he knows he needs it.”

“He took care of me; I’ll take care of him,” Jack told her.

“Don’t act with me, Mr. Movie Star,” Heather said. “Say only what you mean.”

“I mean it,” he told her.

“Then you better come meet me. Let’s see how that goes,” she said.

“I should have been there, when you had your first date,” Jack told his sister. “I could have warned you about the guy.”

“Don’t go there, as Billy Rainbow would say,” Heather said. “I could have warned you about some of your dates, too.”

“No doubt about it,” he told her. It was another Billy Rainbow line. (That character never said anything that hadn’t been said a million times before, but Billy said the most mundane things sincerely.)

“You sound just like him,” Heather said. “Like Billy Rainbow, I mean.”

“But I’m not like him—I’m really someone else,” Jack said, hoping it was true. His sister made no response. Jack could hear the music playing; it sounded like a hymn. “I have a sister,” he said. (It seemed to go with the hymn.)

“Yes, you do, Jack Burns. You have a father, too. But I’ll tell you how it is,” his sister said. “You have to go through me to get to him. Not for all your money, Mr. Movie Star, do you see him without seeing me first—not for all the money in the world!”

“You can trust me, Heather.”

“You have to go through me to get to him,” she said again. “I have to trust you with him.”

“I swear to God—you can trust me,” he told her.

“You swear to God? Are you religious, Jack Burns?”

“No, not really,” Jack admitted.

“Well, he is. You better prepare yourself for that, too,” his sister said.

“Are you religious, Heather?”

“Not so religious that I can ever forgive your mother,” she told him. “Not that religious. But he is.”

After Barbara Steiner’s death, William Burns and his daughter really learned to ski. They went only once a year, for a week or ten days, to one of those sacred-sounding places; they eventually added Davos and Pontresina to the list. Skiing, like music—like everything they did together—became a ritual. (According to Jack’s sister, she and her father became halfway-decent skiers.)

Heather told Jack that she’d started practicing the piano a year after her mother died, when she was six years old. William Burns encouraged his daughter to practice for five hours a day, alone. As a teenager, Heather took up the wooden flute. “The flute is more sociable,” she explained to Jack; that there was a lot of Irish music for the flute led her to do her doctorate in Belfast.

The Irish boyfriend was still in Ireland. Heather held out little hope for the future of any long-distance relationship. But they’d played together in a band in Belfast, and they’d traveled together—a trip to Portugal the previous Easter. (“I like him, in small doses,” was all Heather would say about him.)

As a junior lecturer, she made £22,000 a year. In Belfast, she’d paid £380 a month for a two-bedroom flat; in Edinburgh, she paid £300 for a single room in an apartment she shared with five roommates. However, Heather’s one-year contract had been extended; she would get a raise and be making £23,000 next year. For the time being, Heather liked Edinburgh and her job; if she stayed another five or six years, and if she was successful in getting published, she’d be doing well enough to start a family. But Heather doubted she would stay in Scotland. (All she would tell Jack was that she had “other plans.”)

Her last year in Belfast, she’d played the organ in a church. One of her senior colleagues at the University of Edinburgh, John Kitchen, had been the organist at Old St. Paul’s since 1988, when William Burns’s arthritis had forced him to retire as principal organist. For almost fifteen years, William had continued to play the organ at Old St. Paul’s—officially, he’d been John Kitchen’s assistant. Heather was the backup organist to John Kitchen at Old St. Paul’s now. Kitchen had long been their father’s friend, Heather told Jack. (He was “like an uncle” to her, she said.)

She played Irish music on her wooden flute one night a week at the Central Bar, a pub at the bottom of Leith Walk. “I’ll show you the Central when you’re here,” Heather told him.

“I want to know everything about you,” Jack said.

“You don’t know that yet,” his sister reminded him.

Jack parked the Audi at the curb on Montana Avenue; he was waiting for Elizabeth, Dr. García’s receptionist, to arrive and unlock the office. Elizabeth would be the first to play Jack’s I-have-a-sister message. Jack would give her time to play all the messages on the answering machine before he asked her if he could be Dr. García’s first appointment.

Jack never waited in the waiting room anymore. He waited in his car for his therapy sessions with Dr. García. When it was Jack’s turn, Elizabeth would call him on his cell phone; then Jack would put some money in the parking meter and go inside. His presence in the waiting room made the young mothers—and, occasionally, their friends or nannies—“borderline hysterical,” Dr. García had said.

Jack was listening to an Emmylou Harris CD, his fingers keeping time on the steering wheel to “Tougher than the Rest,” when Elizabeth came into view on the sidewalk. She shook her key ring at him, but Jack couldn’t hear the keys jingle—not over Emmylou.

“I’ll show you tougher than the rest,” Elizabeth said, letting him into the office. She was a tall, hawk-faced woman in her fifties; her gunmetal gray hair was always in a ponytail. There was something of Mrs. McQuat’s severity in the tensed muscles of her neck.

“I left a message on Dr. García’s machine,” Jack said.

“I heard it. Nice message. I always access the messages from my car,” she explained. “I suppose you want the first appointment.”

“I would appreciate it, Elizabeth.”

He sat in Dr. García’s office, not in the waiting room, while Elizabeth made a pot of coffee. Jack had never been alone in that office; he took the time to look more closely at the family photographs, noting that Dr. García was much younger in the photos than he’d first assumed. If those children were hers, they were grown now—probably with children of their own.

“How old is Dr. García?” he asked Elizabeth, when she brought him a cup of coffee.

“Sixty-one,” Elizabeth said.

Jack was amazed. Dr. García looked much younger. “And the gentleman in the pictures?” he asked Elizabeth. “Is he her husband or her father?”

“He was her husband,” Elizabeth said. “He’s been dead for almost twenty years—he died before I met her.”

Perhaps this explained the older-looking man’s spectral presence in the photographs; he was a spirit who haunted the family, no longer a participant.

“She didn’t remarry?” Jack asked.

“No. She lives with one of her daughters, and her daughter’s family. Dr. García has too many grandchildren to count.”

It turned out that Elizabeth had been Dr. García’s patient before becoming the doctor’s receptionist. Elizabeth had been divorced; she was a former alcoholic who’d lost custody of her only child, a little boy. When she stopped drinking and got a job, the boy—who was then a teenager—chose to come live with her. Elizabeth credited Dr. García with saving her life.

Jack sat alone with his coffee in Dr. García’s office; he felt inconsequential in the company of her family, who were frozen in time. It was instructive to Jack that his therapist had chosen to decorate her office with those photographs of herself and her children that predated her husband’s death, as if she needed to be reminded that self-pity was not allowed. (Feeling sorry for yourself was not part of the healing process, or so Dr. García told her patients.)

Live with it, the photos said. Don’t forget, but forgive the past.

In her daughter’s house, where Dr. García lived as a grandmother—a somewhat stern one, Jack imagined—there were probably newer photographs. (Of her children as grown-ups, of her countless grandchildren—possibly of family pets.) But in her place of business, where she counseled those who felt terminally sorry for themselves, Dr. García had assembled an austere reminder of her earlier joy and abiding sorrow. She’d once told Elizabeth that she’d always known, when she married an older man, that her husband would predecease her. “I just never guessed by how many years!” she’d said, with a laugh.

“With a laugh?” Jack asked Elizabeth. “Did Dr. García really laugh when she said that?”

“That’s the trick, isn’t it?” Elizabeth said.

Here was another loose arrangement that would never have been tolerated in Vienna or New York, where Elizabeth’s candor to Jack would have been considered unprofessional—where, Jack suspected, Dr. García’s insistence on chronological order as therapy probably would have been considered “unprofessional,” too. But it was working, wasn’t it?

There was a prescription pad on Dr. García’s desk. Jack thought about what he wanted to say to her, and if it would fit on one page of the prescription paper. He decided he could make it fit, if he kept his handwriting small.

Dear Dr. García,

I’m going to Edinburgh to meet my sister—maybe my father, too! I’ll put it all in chronological order for you, when I get back.

I’m sorry about your husband.

Jack

Then he went into the waiting room, where a nanny was reading a children’s book to a four- or five-year-old. (In a world of loose arrangements, Jack had learned not to question why the young mothers didn’t just leave their kids at home with their nannies.) The nanny looked up at Jack when he came out of Dr. García’s office, but the child didn’t bother to look. On a small couch, one of the young mothers lay curled in a fetal position with her back to the waiting room. Jack couldn’t hear her crying, but her shoulders were shaking.

“I left Dr. García a note—it’s on her desk,” he told Elizabeth.

“Is there anything else you want me to tell her? I mean in addition to the note,” Elizabeth said.

“Tell her I don’t need to see her today,” he said. “Tell her I looked happy.”

“Well, that’s a stretch. How about I say ‘happier than usual’?” Elizabeth suggested.

“That’s okay,” he said.

“Be safe, Jack. Don’t go crazy, or anything like that.”

37. Edinburgh

Jack was thirty-eight; his sister, Heather, was twenty-eight. How do you meet someone you should have known most of your life? In Jack’s case, he stalled. He arrived in Edinburgh a day before he’d told Heather he was coming. He had his mother’s business to attend to. It was his father who had brought Jack and Heather together. Jack wanted to keep Heather separate from his mom’s history in Edinburgh.

The hotel doorman at the Balmoral, a strapping young man in a kilt, was the first to ask Jack if he was in town for “the Festival”—a question he would repeatedly be asked.

Jack had a corner suite overlooking Princes Street. (He had a view of a chaotic-looking trampoline park.) Princes Street was clogged with pedestrian traffic: people carrying shopping bags, tourists folding and unfolding maps. With the concierge’s assistance, Jack hired a car and driver to take him to Leith—Alice’s old turf. It was less crowded there—not everybody’s favorite part of town, apparently.

The driver’s false teeth were too loose. His name was Rory, and his teeth clicked when he talked.

Jack wanted to see St. Thomas’s, where Alice had sung in the choir—innocently, before she met William in South Leith Parish Church. St. Thomas’s no longer existed, but Rory, who’d been born in Leith, remembered its location and knew what it had become. For more than twenty years, St. Thomas’s had been a Sikh temple. The view of what was once Leith Hospital, which had so depressed Alice that she’d left St. Thomas’s for another church, was depressing still. The former hospital, Rory told Jack, was only an outpatient clinic now. The unused parts looked neglected and broken; half the ground-floor windows were smashed.

Jack knew what Dr. García would have said if she’d been with him and Rory at that moment. “If St. Thomas’s is gone, if an entire church can let go of the past, why can’t you let go, too, Jack?”

South Leith Parish Church, where Alice first sang for William, made a more complex impression on Jack. The high walls along Constitution Street, which were meant to keep people out of the popular graveyard, stood in juxtaposition to a toppled gravestone. It read: HERE LYE THE REMAINS OF ROBERT CALDCLEUGH. The date, which was hard to read, was 1482. Among the gravestones, Jack saw that the most recent burial was in 1972.

Jack wouldn’t have wanted to be buried there. If you were lying in that graveyard, facing south, you would be looking at an ugly seventeen-story high-rise for the rest of your death.

As for that area of Leith Walk where a rail bridge once joined Mandelson Street to Jane Street—Aberdeen Bill’s tattoo parlor, Persevere, had been situated under the rumble of the trains—there was little or no evidence of the “old tenements” Alice had described to Jack. (In her childhood, these were mostly small shops with flats above them, “meeting the minimum standards of comfort and safety”—or so she’d said.) But only the railway arches remained, and these were used as car garages; a Volkswagen repair place was prominent among them.

The apartments were newer here than the shabby late-nineteenth-century buildings along much of Leith Walk—not the “old tenements” Alice had deplored, but sheltered housing for the elderly. Built in the late seventies—according to Rory, “for widows and widowers.”

Jack couldn’t find the cinema house, which his mom had maintained was “within a stone’s throw of Persevere.” But Rory remembered where the local cinema had been—it was now a bingo parlor called The Mecca.

Elsewhere on Leith Walk, there were convenience stores, which Rory called “corner shops.” While Leith Walk appeared largely residential, there were pubs, and places serving carry-out food, and the ever-present video stores. Young people seemed to live here, many Asians among them.

Alice had once spoken of her excitement upon first seeing the Leith Central Station, when she was a child, but the former station was now the Central Bar, where Jack’s sister played her wooden flute. Rory said that strippers had performed there as recently as the late seventies or early eighties. It was midafternoon when Jack looked inside the Central; there were no strippers. The jukebox was playing Frank Sinatra’s “My Way.” Smoke blurred the tiled walls and the long mirrors and half concealed the high Victorian ceiling, which was heavily patterned.

At the intersection of Constitution Street and Bernard Street, there was a bank on the corner and what looked like a shipping agency. Jack and Rory crossed a bridge over the Water of Leith and ran into Dock Place. Jack remembered the song his mom sang, if only when she was drunk or stoned—the song he’d first heard her sing in Amsterdam. It was his mom’s mantra, he’d thought at the time—to never be a whore.

Oh, I’ll never be a kittie

or a cookie

or a tail.

The one place worse than

Dock Place

is the Port o’ Leith jail.

No, I’ll never be a kittie,

of one true thing I’m sure—

I won’t end up on Dock Place

and I’ll never be a hure.

Jack’s Scottish accent needed practice, but he sang the song to Rory, who said he’d never heard it before. As for Dock Place, it didn’t look like such a bad place to end up—not to Jack, not anymore. (The “hures,” if they’d ever been there, had moved on.)

Rory drove Jack back to the Balmoral, where he had a late-afternoon nap. He slept for only two or three hours, but it was enough to shake the jet lag. After dinner at the hotel, he walked out on Princes Street and asked the doorman to recommend a good pub in Leith. Jack didn’t want to drink, but he felt like sipping a beer in the unnameable atmosphere of his mother’s birthplace. (Maybe he was pretending to be his grandfather Aberdeen Bill.)

The doorman recommended two places; they were both on Constitution Street, very near each other. Jack took a taxi and asked the driver to wait—he was sure he wouldn’t be long. The Port o’ Leith, where he went first, was small and crowded; it was a very mixed bar. There were the obvious regulars—locals, old standbys—and sailors off the docks, and young students having their first glass. (The legal age was eighteen, which appeared to Jack to mean sixteen.)

The ceiling was a mosaic of flags; on the walls, there were ribbons from sailors’ hats and life preservers from ships. There was a KEEP LEITH sign on the mirror. The barmaid explained to Jack that this was a political issue—in response to an unpopular plan to rename Leith “North Edinburgh.”

Jack declined the offered bar snacks—something called “pork scratchings” among them—and sipped a Scottish oatmeal stout.

Farther down Constitution Street was a cavernous Victorian pub called Nobles Bar; it was as empty as The Port o’ Leith had been crowded, but even with the mob from The Port o’ Leith, Nobles would have seemed empty by comparison. There were no women in the bar, and fewer than half a dozen unfortunate-looking men—squinty eyes, pasty complexions, noses of all sorts. Jack deliberated between ordering a Newcastle Brown Ale and something called Black Douglas; it didn’t really matter, since he knew he would finish neither. Jack Burns couldn’t remember the last time he’d been in a bar and no one had recognized him; now, on the same night, he’d been in two.

Back at the Balmoral, Jack had a mineral water at the bar, where they were playing Bob Dylan’s “Lay, Lady, Lay.” The old song, which he’d once liked, took Jack by surprise. He’d been saying good-bye to his mother, never suspecting that nothing in Edinburgh, the city of her birth, would resurrect her—not the way Bob Dylan could bring her back to him every time.

“Are you here for the Festival, Mr. Burns?” the bartender asked.

“Actually, my mother was born here,” he told the man. “I just spent a little time in her old neighborhood, in Leith. And my sister lives here. I’m meeting her tomorrow.” Jack didn’t say, “For the first time!”

He had arranged to meet Heather the next morning in a coffee shop called Elephants and Bagels on Nicolson Square. This was less than a ten-minute walk from his hotel, and very near her office at the university. The music department offices and practice rooms were in Alison House on Nicolson Square.

Jack walked along North Bridge, over the train yards for British Rail. He passed the big glass building on Nicolson Street, the Festival Theatre, and turned right into Nicolson Square. He was early, as usual. In Elephants and Bagels, Jack sat at a table near the door and ordered a mug of coffee. An advertisement for the coffee shop said: THE BEST HANGOVER CURE IN EDINBURGH.

The walls were painted a bright yellow. There were plants in the windows, and a glass case filled with elephant figurines—carved stone, painted wood, ceramic, and porcelain elephants. A large, round support column was covered with children’s drawings—birds, trees, more elephants. The coffee shop had the educational yet whimsical atmosphere of a kindergarten classroom.

When Heather came in the shop, Jack didn’t at first see how she resembled him. She had short blond hair, like her German mother, but her brown eyes and sharp facial features were Jack’s, or William’s, and she was both lean and compact—as small and fit as a jockey. Her tortoiseshell eyeglasses were almond-shaped; she was as nearsighted as her mother had been, she explained, but she refused to wear contacts. She hated the feeling of something in her eyes. She was waiting to be a little older before trying the new laser surgery. (She told Jack all this before she sat down.)

They had shaken hands, not kissed. She ordered tea, not coffee. “You look just like him,” she said. “I mean you look less like Jack Burns than I thought you would, and more like our dad.”

“I can’t wait to see him,” he told her.

“You have to wait,” she said.

“It’s just an expression,” Jack explained. They were both nervous.

She talked about her five roommates. She was moving out soon, with one other girl. Two of her flatmates directed a nonsmoking clinic; they were vegans who believed that everything with a spiky shape attracted bad energy. Heather had started a small cactus garden in the kitchen area, but this had to go—“too many spikes.” The vegans had also beseeched the landlord to remove the weather vane from the top of the apartment building. My sister is living with lunatics! Jack was thinking.

Jack explained that he was selling his house in Santa Monica, but that he had no idea where he wanted to live.

Heather knew he was registered at the Balmoral as Harry Mocco; she wondered why. Jack wanted to know what she taught at the university. (She taught five courses—historical and theoretical music classes, mostly to beginners, and keyboard skills.)

“Our department is all old men!” Heather said good-naturedly.

Jack thought that his sister was a pretty girl with glasses; she had an air of academic aloofness or detachment about her. She wore little or no makeup, but an attractive linen skirt with a fitted T-shirt and sensible-looking walking shoes.

Jack asked to see where she worked and where she lived. Heather moved her fingers all the while they were walking, as if she were unconsciously playing a piano or an organ.

The music practice rooms in the basement of Alison House were like prison cells. They were small cubicles, poorly ventilated; the walls were a dirty, pea-soup green, and the floors were a hideous orange linoleum. The lighting, which was adequate, was of a fluorescent variety that Heather said was bad for your sanity.

Jack thought that the word sanity might lead them into a conversation about their dad, but Jack and Heather were experiencing the equivalent of a first date. (They needed to get through an unbearable amount of trivia before the more serious subjects could emerge.)

The lecture room in Alison House was more pleasant than the practice rooms. The large windows let in lots of natural light, although the view was a limited one—of an old stone building. There were two pianos and a small organ in the room, but when Jack asked Heather to play something for him, she just shook her head and directed him to a narrow, twisting staircase, which led to her office. Jack got the feeling that she wanted him to go ahead of her, up the stairs.

“Can we talk about him?” he asked her. “Maybe we could begin with the arthritis, if that’s an easy part to talk about.”

She stared at the blue carpet on her office floor, her fingers seemingly searching for the right keys on a keyboard only she could see; she plucked at her skirt. The cream-colored walls had a spackled, unsmooth finish. There were two desks—the larger one with a computer on it, the smaller with a German dictionary. The stereo equipment was probably worth more than everything else in the office, including the small piano; there were more CDs than books on the bookshelves, and a bulletin board with a sepia photograph of Brahms tacked to it. There was also a postcard pinned to the bulletin board—a color photo of a very old-looking pianoforte, the kind of thing you’d find in a museum of musical history. A friend might have sent her the postcard—her Irish boyfriend, perhaps—or maybe William had sent it to her, if William was capable of sending a postcard.

“I want to get to know you a little at a time,” Heather said, still staring at the rug. She had Jack’s thin lips; her upper lip was a small, straight line.

“It’s a tight space, but nice,” Jack said, meaning her office.

“I don’t need more space—I need more time,” she told him. “The summer is good—no teaching, and I can get a lot of research done. In the school year, Easter is about the only time I have to do my writing.”

Jack nodded, glancing at the photo of Brahms—as if Brahms had understood what Heather meant. (Jack hadn’t a clue.)

Heather turned out the lights in her office. “You go first,” she said, before they started down the stairs. Maybe she found it easier to talk when he couldn’t look at her. “Daddy hides his hands, or he wears gloves, because of the deformities. The disfiguration of osteoarthritic joints is quite noticeable—not just a gnarling of the knuckles but actual bumps. They’re called Heberden’s nodes.”

“Where are the bumps?” Jack asked, descending the stairs ahead of her.

“At the far knuckles of his fingers—that junction between the middle bone of the finger and the little bone at the tip. But his hands don’t look as deformed as he imagines they do; it’s mainly how his hands hurt when he plays.”

“Can’t he stop playing?” Jack asked.

“He goes completely insane if he doesn’t play,” Heather said. “Of course he also wears gloves because he feels cold.”

“Some people with full-body tattoos feel cold,” Jack told her.

“No kidding,” his sister said. (He assumed that she got the sarcasm from her German mother.)

They walked through a parking lot, past more university buildings, down Charles Street to George Square. Heather was a fast walker; even when they were side by side, she wouldn’t look at Jack when she talked. “The arthritis has affected his playing for more than fifteen years,” she said. “The disease involves degeneration of cartilage and what they call hypertrophy—overgrowth of the bones of the joint. For a pianist or an organist, there’s a wear-and-tear factor. The pain of osteoarthritis is increased by activity, relieved by rest. The more he plays, the more it hurts. But the pain makes him feel warm.” She smiled at this. “He likes that about it.”

“There must be medication for it,” Jack said.

“He’s tried all the nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs—they upset his stomach. He’s like you—he doesn’t eat. You don’t eat, do you?”

“He’s thin, you mean?”

“To put it mildly,” Heather said. They had passed some tents for the Festival and were walking through the Meadows—a large park, the paths lined with cherry trees. A woman with a tennis racquet was hitting a ball for her dog to fetch.

“Where are we going?” Jack asked his sister.

“You said you wanted to see where I lived.”

They passed Bruntsfield Links, a small golf course where a young man (without a golf ball) was practicing his swing; the fields, Heather told Jack matter-of-factly, had been an open mass grave during the plague.

“Daddy takes glucosamine sulfate, a supplement—it comes mixed with chondroitin, which is shark cartilage. He thinks this helps,” she said, in a way that implied she didn’t believe it did anything at all. “And he puts his hands in melted paraffin, which he mixes with olive oil. The hot wax dries on his hands. He makes quite a mess when he picks the wax off, but he seems to enjoy doing that. It fits right in with his obsessive-compulsive disorder.”

“His what?”

“We’re not talking about the mental part, not yet,” his sister told him. “He puts his hands in ice water, too—for as long as he can stand it. This is a bit masochistic for someone who feels cold most of the time, but the hot wax and the ice water work—at least they give him some temporary relief.”

It was a warm, windy day, but the way Heather walked—with her head down, her arms swinging, and her shoulders rolling forward—you would have thought that they were marching into a gale.

“All the years I was growing up, Daddy told me every day that he loved you as much as he loved me,” Heather said, still not looking at Jack. “Because he never got to be with you, he said that every minute he was with me, he loved me twice as much. He said he had to love me enough for two people.”

Her fingers were playing on an imaginary keyboard of air; there was no way for Jack to follow the music in his sister’s head. “Naturally, I hated you,” Heather said. “If he had to love me enough for two people, because of how much he missed you, I interpreted this to mean that he loved you more. But that’s what kids do, isn’t it?” She stopped suddenly, looking at Jack. Without waiting for an answer, she said: “We’re here—my street, my building.” She folded her arms across her small breasts, as if they’d been arguing.

“You don’t still hate me, do you?” he asked her.

“That’s a work-in-progress, Jack.”

The street was busy—lots of small shops, a fair amount of traffic. Her apartment building was five or six stories tall—a wrought-iron fence surrounding it, a bright-red door. There were tiled walls in the foyer, a wood-and-iron banister, a stone staircase.

“You go first,” Heather said, pointing up the stairs.

Jack wondered if she was superstitious about stairs. He went up three flights before he turned to look at her. “Keep going,” she told him. “No woman in her right mind would want Jack Burns watching her go up or down stairs. I would be so self-conscious, I would probably trip and fall.”

“Why?” he asked her.

“I would be wondering how I compare to all the beautiful women you’ve seen—from behind and otherwise,” Heather said.

“Is the elevator broken?” Jack asked.

“There’s no lift,” she said. “It’s a fifth-floor walk-up. Lots of high ceilings in Edinburgh—high ceilings mean long flights of stairs.”

The colors in the hallway were warm but basic—mauve, cream, mahogany. The flat itself had the high ceilings Heather had mentioned, and brightly painted walls; the living room was red, the kitchen yellow. The only indication of the five roommates was the two stoves and two refrigerators in the kitchen. Everything was clean and neat—as it would have to be, to make living with five roommates tolerable. Jack didn’t ask how many bathrooms were in the flat. (There couldn’t have been enough for five roommates.)

Heather’s room—with a desk and a lot of bookshelves and a queen-size bed—had mulberry-colored walls and giant windows overlooking Bruntsfield Gardens. The books were mostly fiction, and—as at her office at the university—there were more CDs than books, and some serious-looking stereo equipment. There was a VCR and a DVD player, and a television facing the bed. Jack saw some of his films among the DVDs and videotapes on her bedside table.

“I watch you when I can’t fall asleep,” his sister said. “Sometimes without the sound.”

“Because of the roommates?” he asked.

She shrugged. “It doesn’t matter to them if the sound is on or off,” she said. “It’s because I know all your lines by heart, and sometimes I feel like saying them.”

There was nowhere to sit—only the one desk chair or the bed. It was basically a dormitory room, only larger and prettier.

“You can sit on the bed,” Heather said. “I’ll make some tea.”

On her desk was a framed photograph of a young-looking William Burns playing the organ with Heather-as-a-little-girl in his lap. When Jack sat down on the bed, Heather handed him a leather photo album. “The pictures are reasonably self-explanatory,” she said, leaving him alone in her room.

She was kind to have left him alone; she must have known he’d not seen many photographs of their father and would prefer seeing so much of him, so suddenly, by himself.

The album was chronological. Barbara Steiner was small and blond, but fuller in the face than her daughter—not nearly as pretty. Heather’s good looks came from William. He had kept his long hair—Miss Wurtz would have been pleased—and he got thinner as he grew older. There were many more pictures of him with Heather—as a little girl, and as a teenager—than there were of Heather with her mother, or of William Burns with Barbara Steiner. Of course it was Heather’s album, and she must have selected which photos to put in it.

She seemed to be most fond of the photographs from those father-and-daughter ski trips; postcards from Wengen and Lech and Zermatt were intermingled with photos of Heather and William on skis. (A cold sport for someone who was inclined to feel cold, Jack thought, but William Burns looked comfortable in ski clothes—or else he was so happy to be skiing with his daughter that the feeling warmed him.)

There was nothing complaining about Heather’s mother’s expressions in any of the photographs, nor could you tell that she’d once had a wonderful singing voice. There was something overposed about her—especially in the photos when she was wearing a wig—and then she simply disappeared without a trace. Jack turned a page in the album and Barbara Steiner was gone. He knew exactly when he had passed the moment of her death; all the photographs from that point forward were of Heather and her dad, just the two of them, or one or the other alone.

There had been concert brochures attached to the earlier pages, but from the time Heather appeared to be twelve or thirteen, there had been no more concerts for William Burns.

Jack recognized the interior of the Central Bar, where—in addition to Heather playing her wooden flute—there were photos of William playing a piano-type instrument, both alone and with his daughter accompanying him on her flute. It was some kind of electric keyboard—a synthesizer, Jack thought it was called—and from the look on William’s and Heather’s faces, Jack doubted they were playing anything classical.

Jack knew why his father appeared to be overdressed in many of the photos—that is, too warmly dressed for the season. (William often felt cold, except when he was skiing.) But even in those summer-vacation snapshots, when William was on a beach in a bathing suit, his tattoos were not very clear or distinguishable from one another. Music, when it’s too small to see in detail, looks like handwriting—especially to someone like Jack, who couldn’t read music.

Jack was ashamed he’d 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,” was how he’d put it to her.

Well, Jack held the evidence of that in his lap—Heather’s photo album was a record of her love for their dad and William’s love for her. Jack had finished the album, and had composed himself sufficiently to be making his way through the pictures a second time, when Heather came back to her room with the tea. She sat down beside him on the bed.

“There are some places where you removed photos, or they fell out of the album by themselves,” he said to her.

“Old boyfriends. I removed them,” she said.

Jack hadn’t seen anyone who could have been the Irish boyfriend; he got the impression that the boyfriend was clearly less than the love of her life, but he didn’t ask.

He turned to the photos of Heather and William Burns playing their instruments at the Central. “I went there yesterday, to have a look at where you play your flute,” he said.

“I know. A friend saw you. How come you didn’t ask me to go with you?”

“I was looking around Leith, mostly at places I remembered hearing about from my mother,” Jack explained.

He turned to the end pages of the album, where their father was wearing gloves. “What’s wrong with him?” Jack asked. “I mean the mental part, not the arthritis.”

Heather tilted her head; it rested on Jack’s shoulder. He held her hand in one hand, his teacup in the other. The album lay open on his lap, with the man who looked so much like Heather and Jack looking up at them. “I want you to hear the Father Willis in Old St. Paul’s,” Heather said. “I want to play something for you, just to prepare you.”

They went on sitting together; Jack sipped his tea. With her head on his shoulder, it would have been awkward for Heather to sip hers. “Don’t you want to drink your tea?” he asked.

“I want to do exactly what I’m doing,” Heather told him. “I want to never take my head off your shoulder. I want to hug you and kiss you—and beat you with both fists, in your face. I want to tell you every bad thing that ever happened to me—especially those things I wish I could have talked to you about, when they happened. I want to describe every boyfriend you might have saved me from.”

“You can do all of that,” Jack told her.

“I’ll just do this, for now,” she said. “You want everything to happen too fast.”

“What is he obsessive-compulsive about?” Jack asked.

She squeezed his hand and shook her head against his shoulder. She’d had to sell the flat William had lived in—where she’d grown up, in Marchmont. “It’s a big student area, but some lecturers live there, too,” Heather said. It would have been perfect if she could have stayed there, but she’d had to sell the flat and find a less expensive place.

“To pay for the sanatorium?” he asked. Heather nodded her head against him. Most of her things, and all of William’s, were in storage. “Why don’t I buy you a flat of your own?” Jack said.

She took her head off his shoulder and looked at him. “You can’t buy me,” she said. “Well, actually, I suppose you can. But it wouldn’t be right. I don’t want you to do everything for me—just help me with him.”

“I will, but you haven’t told me what to do,” he said.

She sipped her tea. She’d not let go of his hand, which she pulled into her lap and examined more closely. “You have his small hands, but his fingers are longer. You don’t have an organist’s hands,” she said. She held up her fingers to Jack’s, palm to palm; hers were longer. “Every inch of his body is tattooed,” she began, still looking at their hands pressed together. “Even the tops of his feet, even his toes.”

“Even his hands?” Jack asked.

“No, not his hands, not his face or neck, and not his penis,” she said.

“You’ve seen his penis, or did he tell you it wasn’t tattooed?” Jack asked her.

“You’d be surprised how many people have seen Daddy’s penis,” Heather said, smiling. “I’m sure you’ll get to see it, too—it’s bound to happen.”

She had put together a smaller photo album for Jack; it was about the size of a paperback novel, with some of the same photos from the larger album or slightly different angles of those moments in time. The smaller album had no pictures of her mother—only of Heather and William. Jack and Heather sat looking at the pictures, drinking their tea.

“I could learn to ski,” Jack said. “Then we could all ski together.”

“Then you could ski with me, Jack. Daddy’s skiing days are over.”

“He can’t ski anymore?”

“The first thing you’ll think when you see him is that there’s nothing wrong with him—that he’s just a little eccentric, or something,” his sister said. She took off her glasses and put her face so close to Jack’s that their noses touched. “Without my glasses, I have to be this close to you to see you clearly,” Heather said. She pulled slowly back from him, but only about six or eight inches. “I lose you about here,” she said, putting her glasses back on. “Well, when you meet him, he’ll make you believe that you could take him to Los Angeles—where you would have a great time together. You’ll think I’m cruel or stupid for sending him away, but he needs to be taken care of and they know how to do it. Don’t think you can take care of him. If I can’t take care of him—and I can’t—you can’t take care of him, either. You may not think so at first, but he’s where he belongs.”

“Okay,” Jack said. He took her glasses off and put his face close to hers, their noses touching. “Keep looking at me,” he told her. “I believe you.”

“I’ve seen close-ups of you half my life,” she said, smiling.

“I can’t look at you enough, Heather.”

She ran her hand through her hair, wiping her lips with the back of her other hand. Jack recognized the gesture. It was the way he’d removed his wig and wiped the mauve lip gloss off his lips with the back of his ski glove in My Last Hitchhiker. In a near-perfect imitation of Jack’s voice, Heather said: “You probably thought I was a girl, right?”

“That’s pretty good,” he told her, looking into her brown eyes.

“This isn’t a very safe place to stop,” Heather said, just the way he’d said it in My Last Hitchhiker. “I’m sorry for the trouble, but I catch more rides as a girl,” she went on. “I try not to buy my own dinner,” Heather said, with a shrug; she had Jack’s shrug down pat, too.

“How about Melody in The Tour Guide?” he asked her.

Heather cleared her throat. “It’s a good job to lose,” she said perfectly.

“How about Johnny-as-a-hooker in Normal and Nice?” (No girl can get that right, Jack was thinking.)

“There’s something you should know,” his sister said, in that hooker’s husky voice. “Lester Billings has checked out. I’m afraid he’s really left his room a mess.”

“Put your glasses back on,” Jack told her, getting up from the bed. He went to her closet and opened the door. Jack picked out a salmon-pink camisole and held it up by the hanger, against his chest.

“Boy, I’ll bet this looks great on you,” Heather said, just the way Jack-as-a-thief had said it to Jessica Lee.

He hung up the camisole in her closet, and they went into the kitchen and washed and dried their teacups and put them away in the cupboard. To someone like Jack, the five-roommates idea was unthinkable.

“It must be like living on a ship,” he said to Heather.

“I’m moving out soon,” she told him, laughing.

They walked back the way they had come, through the Meadows. Jack carried the small photo album in one hand, although Heather had volunteered to carry it in her backpack.

Just before they got to George Square, they saw an old man with snow-white hair playing a guitar and whistling. He was always there, every day, Heather told Jack—even in the winter. The old man was often there at eight o’clock in the morning and would stay the whole day.

“Is he crazy?” Jack asked her.

“Crazy is a relative word,” his sister said.

She talked about playing squash, which she seemed to take very seriously. (The music department had a squash team, and she was one of the better players on it.) She also spoke of “a plague of urban seagulls.”

“Urban seagulls?” Jack said.

“They’re all over Edinburgh—they attacked one man so badly, he had to go to hospital!” Heather told him.

They came along South Bridge to where it intersected with the Royal Mile. Jack was not aware that he had looked the wrong way, but as they started to cross the street, Heather took his hand and spoke sharply to him: “Look right, Jack. I don’t want to lose you.”

“I don’t want to lose you,” he told her.

“I mean crossing the street,” she said.

Jack doubted that he could have found Old St. Paul’s without a map and some detailed directions. The church was built into a steep hill between the Royal Mile and Jeffrey Street, where the main entrance was. There was a side entrance off Carruber’s Close, a narrow alley—and an even narrower alley called North Gray’s Close, where there was no entrance to the church.

Jack began to tell Heather the story his mom had told him. One night, shortly before midnight, William was playing the organ in Old St. Paul’s—a so-called organ marathon, a twenty-four-hour concert, with a different organist playing every hour or half hour—and their dad’s playing had roused a drunk sleeping in one of the narrow alleys alongside the church. The foul-mouthed down-and-out had complained about the sound of the organ.

That was as far as Jack got before Heather said: “I know the story. The drunk said something like ‘that fucking racket—that fucking bloody fuck of a fucking organ making a sound that would wake the fucking dead.’ Isn’t that the story?”

“Yes, something like that,” Jack said.

“I’ll play that piece for you,” Heather told him. “You can’t hear much outside the walls of this church. Either the story is exaggerated, or that drunk was asleep in a pew. Not even Boellmann’s Toccata could wake a drunk in Carruber’s or North Gray’s Close.”

While the side door to Old St. Paul’s, on Carruber’s Close, was locked, the front entrance on Jeffrey Street was open. The church was empty, but the oil lamps by the altar were lit. They were always lit, Heather told Jack—even when she played the organ very late at night. “It’s a bit spooky here at night,” she confessed. “But you have to practice playing in the dark.”

“Why?” he asked her.

“Lots of interesting things begin in darkness,” his sister told him. “The Easter vigil service, for example. You can learn to play in the dark, provided you’ve memorized the music.”

From the nave of the church, looking toward the high altar, the organ pipes stood nearly as tall as the stained-glass windows. The church was not vast, but dark and contained. One had no sense of the season outside, and—except for the muted light that made its way through the stained-glass windows and portals—no real sense of day or night, either.

Heather saw Jack looking at the Latin inscription on the altar. As Mr. Ramsey had observed, Jack struggled with Latin.

VENITE

EXULTEMUS

DOMINO

“ ‘Come let us praise the Lord,’ ” his sister said.

“Oh, right,” he said.

“You’ll get used to it,” she told him.

Heather crossed herself at the altar and took off her backpack. Jack sat on one end of the bench beside her.

“I’ll play something softer for you later,” Heather said, “but Boellmann’s Toccata isn’t supposed to be quiet. And when you hear him play it, it’ll be louder. A different church,” she said softly, shaking her head.

Jack wasn’t prepared for the way her hands pounced on the keyboard, transforming her. It was the loudest, most strident piece of music he’d ever heard inside a church. As the new chords marched forth, the old chords kept reverberating; the organ bench trembled under them. It was the soundtrack to a vampire movie—a Gothic chase scene.

“Jesus!” Jack said, forgetting he was in a church.

“That’s the idea,” Heather said; she had stopped playing, but Old St. Paul’s was still reverberating. “Now go outside and tell me if you can hear it.” She began the Boellmann again; it made his heart race to hear it.

Jack went out the Jeffrey Street door to the church and walked up North Gray’s Close, toward the Royal Mile. The alley was dirty and smelled of urine and beer; there were broken pieces of glass where bottles had been smashed against the church, and empty cigarette packages and chewing-gum wrappers were littered everywhere. Halfway up the alley, Jack pressed his ear to the stone wall of the church; he could barely hear the Boellmann, just enough to follow the tune.

On the Royal Mile, you couldn’t hear the organ at all—probably because of the traffic, or the other street sounds—and in Carruber’s Close, either a restaurant’s air conditioner or a kitchen’s exhaust fan made too much noise in the alley for the toccata to be followable. The organ was a distant, intermittent murmur. But when Jack went back inside Old St. Paul’s, the sound of the Father Willis was deafening. His sister was really putting herself into it.

As Heather said, the story about the drunk had been exaggerated—or the down-and-out must have been sleeping in a pew when the Boellmann came crashing down on him. The more important part of the story, Heather decided, was that William Burns had played the toccata so loudly that everyone inside the church—including Alice and the organist who was waiting his turn to play—had been forced to flee from the nave and stand outside in the rain.

“It was one of Daddy’s bipolar moments,” Jack’s sister said. “I think that’s what the story is really about. He drove your mother out in the rain, so to speak—didn’t he?”

“He’s bipolar?” Jack asked.

“No, he’s obsessive-compulsive,” Heather said, “but he has his bipolar moments. Don’t you, Jack?”

“I suppose so,” he said.

Heather was playing more softly now—she had moved on from the Boellmann. “This is from an aria in Handel’s Solomon,” she said, as softly as she was playing.

“Do you have bipolar moments, too?” Jack asked her.

“The desire to never leave your side, the desire to never see you again,” his sister said. “The desire to see your face asleep on the pillow beside my face, and to see your eyes open in the morning when I lie next to you—just watching you, waiting for you to wake up. I’m not talking about sex.”

“I know,” he told her.

“The desire to live with you, to never be separated from you again,” Heather went on.

“I get it,” he said.

“The constant wish that I never knew of your existence, and that our father had never said a word to me about my having a brother—this in tandem with the desire to never see another Jack Burns movie, and that every scene in every film you were ever in, which I have committed to memory, would vanish from my mind as if those movies had never been made.”

She had not stopped playing, but her pace had quickened. The organ’s volume was increasing, too; Heather was almost shouting to be heard over the reverberations.

“We just need to spend more time together,” Jack told her.

She brought both hands down on the keyboard, which made a harsh, discordant sound. She slid toward her brother on the organ bench and threw her arms around his neck, hugging him to her.

“If you see him once, you have to keep seeing him, Jack. You can’t suddenly appear in his life and then go away again. He loves you,” Heather said. “If you love him back, I’ll love you, too. If you can’t bear to be with him, I’ll despise you forever.”

“That’s pretty clear,” he told her.

She pushed herself away from him so violently that Jack thought she was going to hit him. “If you’re not Billy Rainbow, don’t give me his lines,” she snapped.

“Okay,” he said, holding his arms out to her. When she let him take her in his arms, he kissed her cheek.

“No, not like that—that’s not how you kiss your sister,” Heather said. “You should kiss me on the lips, but not the way you kiss a girl—not with your lips parted. Like this,” she said, kissing him—her dry lips brushing Jack’s, their lips tightly closed.

Who would have thought that Jack Burns could ever love kissing someone as chastely as that? But he was thirty-eight and had never kissed a sister.

They spent the night together in Jack’s suite at the Balmoral. They ordered dinner from room service and watched a bad movie on television. In the backpack, Heather had brought her toothbrush and an extra-large T-shirt, which she wore as a nightgown, and a change of clothes for the morning. They would be getting up early, she’d warned Jack.

She had planned everything, including the reenactment of what she’d told Jack in Old St. Paul’s: that desire to see his face asleep on the pillow beside her face, and to see his eyes open in the morning when she was lying next to him—just watching him, waiting for him to wake up.

Heather told Jack that the Irish boyfriend was no one special; the love of her life, so far, had been one of her professors in Belfast. She’d known he was married, but he told her he was leaving his wife; he left Heather instead.

Jack told his sister about Mrs. Machado—and Mrs. Adkins, and Leah Rosen, and Mrs. Stackpole. (They were the early casualties; they were among the first to mark him and disappoint him in himself.) He told Heather about Emma and Mrs. Oastler, and Claudia and her daughter—and all the rest. Even that crazy woman in Benedict Canyon—the one who was driven mad by the screams and moans of the Manson murder victims whenever the Santa Anas were blowing.

Heather told Jack that she’d lost her virginity to one of William’s music students, someone who was in university when she was still in secondary school. As she put it: “We had comparable keyboard skills at the time, but I’m much better than he is now.”

Jack told Heather that, for the past five years, Dr. García had been the most important woman in his life.

Heather said that she was spending almost as much time improving her German as she was playing the organ—or the piano, or her wooden flute. She’d spoken a child’s German with her mother, and had originally studied German because of her interest in Brahms; now she had an additional reason to learn the language. If she taught in Edinburgh for another two or three years, her teaching credentials would greatly enhance her résumé. By apprenticing herself to John Kitchen at Old St. Paul’s, she was already a better organist. In two or three years’ time, if her German was good enough, she could move to Zurich and get a job there.

“Why Zurich?” Jack asked.

“Well, there’s a university, and a music conservatory, and a disproportionate number of churches for such a small city—in other words, lots of organs. And then I could visit Daddy every day, instead of only once a month or every six weeks.”

“He’s in Zurich?”

“I never said he was in Edinburgh, Jack. I just said you had to see me first.”

Jack propped himself up in bed on his elbows and looked down at his sister’s face on the pillow; she was smiling up at him, her golden hair pushed back from her forehead and tucked behind her small ears. She cupped the back of Jack’s neck and pulled his face closer to hers. He’d forgotten that she couldn’t be more than a few inches away from his face—not if she wanted to see him clearly without her glasses.

“So we’re going to Zurich?” he asked her.

“You’re going alone, this trip,” Heather told him. “You should see him alone, the first time.”

“How can you afford to go to Zurich once a month, or every six weeks?” he asked her. “You should let me pay for that.”

“The sanatorium costs three hundred and fifty thousand Swiss francs a year—that’s two hundred and twelve thousand U.S. dollars—to keep him in the private section of the clinic. If you pay for that, I can pay for my own travel.” She pulled his head down to the pillow beside her. “If you want to buy me a flat, why don’t you buy something big enough for both of us—in Zurich,” she suggested. “I was born in Edinburgh. I don’t need your help here.”

“I’ll buy a whole house in Zurich!” Jack said.

“You want everything to happen too fast,” she reminded him.

He didn’t know when or if she slept. When Jack woke up, Heather was staring at him—her large brown eyes close to Jack’s, her small nose almost touching his face. “You have four gray hairs,” she told him.

“Let me see if you have any,” he said, but Heather’s hair was golden to its roots. “No, not yet, you don’t.”

“It’s because I’m pretty happy, all things considered,” she said. “Look at me. I just slept with a movie star, and it was no big deal—‘no biggie,’ as Billy Rainbow would say.”

“It was a big deal to me,” Jack told her.

Heather gave him a hug. “Well, actually, it was a big deal to me, too—a very big deal.”

While Jack was in the shower, Heather took his plane tickets down to the concierge’s desk in the lobby; she booked his flight to Zurich, with a connection out of Amsterdam, and his return trip to L.A. from Zurich.

She also arranged for his first meeting, later that afternoon, with a team of doctors at the Sanatorium Kilchberg; there were five doctors and one professor, in all. Heather gave Jack a brochure of the buildings and grounds of the clinic, which overlooked Lake Zurich. Kilchberg was on the western shore of the lake—in Zurich, they called it the left shore—about fifteen minutes by car from the center of the city.

So Jack was leaving for Switzerland as soon as they finished their breakfast; Heather had reserved a room for him at the Hotel zum Storchen in Zurich.

“You might like the Baur au Lac better,” she told him, “but the Storchen is nice, and it’s on the river.”

“I’m sure it will be fine,” he said.

“The doctors are excellent—I think you’ll like them,” Heather said. She had stopped looking at him. They were in the breakfast café at the Balmoral—a few tired tourists, families with small children. Jack could tell that Heather was nervous again, as they both had been when they’d first met. Jack tried to hold her hand, but she wouldn’t let him.

“People will think we’re sleeping together—I mean really sleeping together,” she told him. “Being with you in public takes a little getting used to, you know.”

“You’ll get used to it,” he said.

“Just don’t let anything happen to you—don’t do anything stupid,” Heather blurted out.

“Can you read lips?” Jack asked her.

“Jack, please don’t do anything stupid,” Heather said. She looked cross, in no mood to play games.

Jack moved his lips without making a sound, forming the words as slowly and clearly as he could. “I have a sister, and I love her,” he told her, without actually saying it out loud.

“You want everything to happen too fast,” Heather said again, but Jack could tell that she’d understood him. “We should go to the airport now,” she announced, looking at her watch.

In the taxi, she seemed distracted—lost in thought. She was once again not looking at him when she said: “When you’ve seen him, I mean after you’ve spent a little time together, please call me.”

“Of course,” Jack said.

“All you have to say is, ‘I love him.’ You don’t have to say anything more, but don’t you dare say anything less,” his sister said. Her fingers were playing Boellmann’s Toccata, or something equally strident, on her tensed thighs.

“You can relax about me, Heather,” he told her.

“Can you read lips?” she asked, still not looking at him.

“All actors can read lips,” Jack said. But Heather just stared out the window, not saying anything—her lips as tightly closed as when she’d given him his first kiss as a brother.

It was still early in the morning when they got to the airport. Jack hadn’t expected Heather to come to the airport with him, much less accompany him inside; now she led him to the check-in counter. Obviously, it was a trip she was familiar with.

“I hope you like Switzerland,” Heather said, scuffing her feet.

She was wearing blue jeans and a darker-colored T-shirt than she’d worn the day before; with the backpack and her cropped hair, she looked more like a university student than a junior lecturer. If you didn’t notice her constantly moving fingers, you could discern nothing musical about her. She was simply a small, pretty girl—made more serious-looking by her glasses and the determined way in which she walked.

Near the metal-detection equipment, where a security guard had a look at Jack’s passport and examined his carry-on bag, there was a Plexiglas barrier that kept Heather from accompanying her brother to his gate. Jack wanted to kiss her, but she kept her face turned away from him.

“I’m not saying good-bye to you, Jack. Don’t you dare say good-bye to me,” she said, still scuffing her feet.

“Okay,” he said.

With the Plexiglas barrier between them, Jack could still see her as he started walking toward his gate. He kept turning to look at her; Jack stopped walking away from her when he saw she was finally looking at him. Heather was pointing to her heart, and her lips were moving—slowly, without uttering a word.

“I have a brother, and I love him,” Jack’s sister was saying, although he couldn’t hear a syllable.

“I have a sister, and I love her,” he said back to her, not making a sound.

Other people were getting between them. Jack had momentarily lost sight of Heather when two young women stepped up close to him, and the black girl with the diamond nose-stud said, “You aren’t Jack Burns, are you? You simply can’t be, right?”

“I’ll bet you anything he isn’t,” her companion said. She was a white girl with sunburned shoulders in a tank top; her nose was peeling a little.

They were Americans, college kids on their way home from a summer trip to Europe—or so Jack guessed. When he looked for his sister, she was gone.

“Yes, I’m Jack Burns,” he said to the girls. (Jack couldn’t have explained it, but he felt that—for the first time in his life—he really was Jack Burns!) “You’re right—it’s me. I actually am Jack Burns.”

For some reason, he was delighted that they’d recognized him. But the young women’s expressions radiated disbelief; they were as suddenly indifferent to Jack as they had at first seemed curious about him.

“Good try,” the white girl told him sarcastically. “You’re not going to fool anyone into thinking you’re Jack Burns—not that way.”

“Not what way?” he asked her.

“Not by being so normal,” the young white woman said.

“Not by looking like you’re happy or something,” the young black woman said.

“But I am Jack Burns,” he told them unconvincingly.

“Let me tell you—you’re awful at this,” the white girl said. “And you’re too old to get away with it.”

“Since when was Jack Burns so sincere or something?” the black girl asked him.

“Let me hear you do noir,” the white girl said.

“Let me hear you say one thing Jack Burns ever said,” the black girl challenged him.

Where was Heather when he needed her? Jack was thinking. Where was his dad, who allegedly had Jack Burns down pat?

The girls were walking away. Jack untucked his T-shirt and held the bottom hem up to his chest, as if he were holding up a dress on a hanger. “Boy, I’ll bet this looks great on you,” he said, in no way resembling the thief whom Jessica Lee caught messing around in her closet.

“Give it up!” the young white woman called to him.

“You know what?” the black girl asked Jack, her diamond nose-stud winking in the bright airport light. “If the real Jack Burns ever saw you, he wouldn’t look twice!”

“It’s a good job to lose!” Jack called after them, but they kept walking. He was so bad as Melody, even Wild Bill Vanvleck would have made him repeat the line.

The point was—he wasn’t acting. It was as if he’d forgotten how! Jack still knew his lines, but he was out of character. He had a sister, and he loved her; she’d said she loved him, too. Jack had stopped acting. He was just Jack Burns—the real Jack Burns at last.

38. Zurich

When that last unmarked area of skin has been tattooed and their bodies become a completed notebook, full-body types don’t all react the same way.

Alice had maintained that some full-bodies simply started tattooing over their old tattoos. But if you keep doing that, the skin eventually turns as dark as night—the designs become indiscernible. Jack once saw a client of his mother’s whose arms, from his wrists to his armpits, were an unvarying black; it was as if he’d been burned. In less radical instances, twice-tattooed skin appears to be covered with curved, abstract figures—the body wrapped in a skin-tight paisley shawl.

But for other full-bodies, the completed notebook amounts to a sacred text; it is unthinkable to tattoo over a single tattoo, or even part of one. Most of William’s tattoos had been done by accomplished tattoo artists, but even his bad or clumsy tattoos were of music that mattered to him. Both the music and the words had marked more than his skin for life.

Heather had told Jack that their father had no gaps of bare skin between his tattoos. The toccatas and hymns, the preludes and fugues, overlapped one another like loose pages of music on a cluttered desk; every inch of the desk itself was covered.

On William’s back, Heather said, where he would have had to make a considerable effort to see it, was a sailing ship—a distant view of the stern. The ship was pulling away from shore, parting the waves of music that all but engulfed it. The full sails were also marked with music, but the ship was so far from shore that the notes were unreadable. It was their father’s Herbert Hoffmann, but Heather said it was “almost lost on a vast horizon of music”—a Sailor’s Grave or a Last Port tattoo, but smaller than Jack had imagined and completely surrounded by sound.

The piece from his dad’s favorite Easter hymn, “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today,” was partially covered by Walther’s “Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme”—the top two staffs beginning where the alleluia chorus to “Christ the Lord” should have been. Elsewhere, Bach’s mystical adoration for Christmas (“Jesu, meine Freude”) was overlapped by Balbastre’s “Joseph est bien marié”; the word Largo, above the top staff of the Bach, was half hidden.

Both the familiar words and music in the soprano aria (“For Unto Us a Child Is Born”) from Handel’s Messiah ran into Widor’s Toccata—from the Fifth Symphony, Op. 42—with even the Op. 42 being part of the tattoo, which included the composer’s full name. It surprised Jack to hear that the composers’ names were always tattooed in full—not Bach and Widor, but Johann Sebastian Bach and Charles-Marie Widor—and the names were tattooed not in cursive but in an italic font, which (over time, and subject to fading) was increasingly hard to read.

Time and fading had taken their toll on some of William’s other tattoos as well—among them John Stanley’s Trumpet Voluntary, his Trumpet Tune in D, which marked Jack’s father’s chest in the area of his right lung, where the bottom or pedal staff (indicating the notes you played with your feet) had faded almost entirely from view, as had the word Vivo above the first staff of Alain’s “Litanies,” but not the quotation from Alain on William’s buttocks. The French was tattooed in cursive on the left cheek of his bum, the English translation on the right; they would fade from Jack’s father’s skin more slowly than youth itself.

Reason has reached its limit. Only belief keeps rising.

Reason had reached its limit in William Burns, too. Evidently that was what Jack’s sister had been saying. Every inch of their dad’s body was a statement; each of his tattoos existed for a reason. But now there was no room left, except for belief.

“You’ll know what I mean when you see him naked, and you will,” Heather had told Jack.

“I will?”

His sister wouldn’t elaborate. To say that Jack was apprehensive when his plane landed in Zurich would be an understatement.

The Swiss, Heather had forewarned him, made a point of remembering your name; they expected you to remember theirs. As an actor, Jack had confidence in his memorization skills—but his abilities, not only as an actor, were severely tested by the task at hand. The cast of characters he would be meeting at the Sanatorium Kilchberg had daunting names, and their specific roles (like his father’s tattoos) were interconnected—at times overlapping.

With Heather’s help, Jack had studied these five doctors and one professor; he’d tried to imagine them, as best he could, before their first meeting. But he was not acting in this performance—they were. They were in charge of his dad; it was Jack’s job to learn from them.

The head of the clinic, Professor Lionel Ritter, was German. His English was good, Heather had told Jack, and the professor took such pains to be diplomatic that one forgave him for being a bit repetitious. He was always neatly but casually dressed—a trim, fit-looking man who took pride in the Sanatorium Kilchberg’s 136-year history as a private psychiatric clinic. (Jack had envisioned Professor Ritter as looking a little like David Niven dressed for tennis.)

The deputy medical director, Dr. Klaus Horvath, was Austrian. Heather had described him as a handsome, hearty-looking man—an athlete, most notably a skier. William enjoyed talking about skiing with Dr. Horvath, who had great faith in the psychological benefits of the Sanatorium Kilchberg’s jogging program—in which William Burns, at sixty-four, was an enthusiastic participant. Jack had some difficulty seeing his dad as a fully tattooed jogger, and he could imagine Dr. Horvath only with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s accent—possibly in combination with Arnold’s cheerful, optimistic disposition, which was best on display in that comedy where the former bodybuilder is supposed to be Danny DeVito’s twin.

The second German, Dr. Manfred Berger, was a neurologist and psychiatrist; he was head of gerontopsychiatry at the clinic. According to Jack’s sister, their dad was a youthful-looking sixty-four-year-old—not yet a candidate for Dr. Berger’s principal area of expertise. Dr. Berger, in Heather’s view, was “a fact man”—little was given to speculation.

Upon his arrival in Kilchberg, William Burns had exhibited the kind of mood swings common to a bipolar disorder. (Euphoric moments, which crashed in anger; he would be high for a whole week, with no apparent need of sleep, but this would end in a stuporous depression.) As it turned out, William was not bipolar. But before this diagnosis could be made, Dr. Berger had insisted on a neurological examination.

Dr. Berger, Heather had informed Jack, was a man who liked to rule things out. Did William have a brain tumor? Dr. Berger doubted that William did, but what was most dire simply had to be ruled out. Something called temporal lobe epilepsy could also present itself with mood swings not unlike William’s—in particular, his flights of euphoria and his clamorous episodes of anger. But William Burns was not afflicted with temporal lobe epilepsy, nor was he bipolar.

There was no aura of discouragement about Dr. Berger; it was as if he expected to be proved wrong, but he was not one to be deterred by failure.

Jack refrained from jumping to the conclusion that the most interesting psychiatric ailments were not easily diagnosed or cured. After all, upon seeing his dad’s full-body tattoos, who wouldn’t have guessed that William Burns was obsessive-compulsive? And that it physically hurt him to play the organ, yet it drove him completely insane not to play—well, who wouldn’t have been depressed and subject to mood swings about that?

But Dr. Berger was “a fact man”; his role was ruling things out, not zeroing in. He was an essential member of the team, Jack’s sister said—if not the easiest of the doctors to like. Although a German, he had adopted the Swiss habit of shaking hands zealously for prolonged periods of time, which Dr. Berger did with what Heather called “a competitive vengeance.”

This guy confused Jack in advance; someone vaguely resembling Gene Hackman or Tommy Lee Jones came to mind. (As it would turn out, Jack couldn’t have been more wrong.)

The rest of the team members were women. In Heather’s view, they were the most formidable. Dr. Regula Huber, for example—she was head of internal medicine. She was a Swiss woman in her forties, blond and tireless. There were many elderly patients at the Sanatorium Kilchberg; an internist was kept busy there. Most of the older patients had been committed by family members; these patients were not free to leave.

Heather told Jack that she’d had many meetings with Professor Ritter and the team of doctors looking after William; on every occasion, Dr. Huber’s pager had gone off and she’d left to attend to an emergency. In the case of William Burns, who’d been committed to the psychiatric clinic by his daughter but had stayed of his own volition—happily, without protest—Dr. Huber, like Dr. Berger, first wanted to rule out a few things.

Did their father have an underfunctioning thyroid gland? (This could make you feel cold.) No, he did not. Did he have Curshman-Steinert disease? Thankfully, no! And why was William Burns so thin? Because he didn’t drink, and he thought that overeating was a sin; their dad kept to a strict diet, as if he were a fashion model or a jockey or an actor. (Like father, like son!)

It was Dr. Huber who treated, or attempted to treat, their dad’s arthritis. She’d recently tried a new class of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs that were supposed to be more stomach-friendly than the older anti-inflammatories, but they gave William so much gastric irritation that Dr. Huber instead applied a conventional drug topically.

And it was Dr. Huber who took the view that some so-called placebos worked—that is, if the patients thought they did. She raised no objection to William’s fondness for hot wax and ice water, or his taking glucosamine with the extract of shark cartilage. William Burns also wore copper bracelets, except when he was playing the piano or the organ.

Heather liked Dr. Huber, whom she called a pragmatist. (Jack thought inexplicably of Frances McDormand, one of his favorite actresses.)

The third German, Dr. Ruth von Rohr, had a curiously incomplete title—she was some sort of department head. Of what department was unclear, or perhaps deliberately not stated. She was a tall, striking woman with a wild mane of tawny hair that had a silver streak, which Heather said looked natural but couldn’t have been. Dr. von Rohr had a regal, head-of-department demeanor. She usually let others speak first, although her impatience was demonstrable and calculated. She knew when to sigh, and she had considerable dexterity in her long fingers—in which she frequently twirled a pencil, almost never dropping it. When she spoke—usually last, and often dismissively—she turned her prominent jaw and angular face in profile to her audience, as if her head were about to be embossed on a coin.

“On the other hand,” she liked to begin, as if she were head of the doubt department—as if the silver streak in her hair were a banner to that gray area of every argument. It was Dr. von Rohr’s job to make the others feel less sure of themselves; she liked opening the door to those things that could never be ruled out.

Everyone at the Sanatorium Kilchberg thought that William Burns was a model patient. He had to be happy there; after all, he’d not once attempted to run away. He rarely complained about the place, or his treatment. Yes, he occasionally gave in to his demons; he had his rages and irrational moments, but he had far fewer of these episodes in Kilchberg than he’d experienced in the outside world. Jack’s sister maintained that their father was where he belonged; remarkably, William seemed to accept this. (Hadn’t he positively embraced the idea? Dr. Horvath had enthusiastically asked.)

Yet it was Dr. von Rohr’s department to raise the unasked question. “Isn’t hospitalism a second disease for some of our patients?” she would inquire, just when everything seemed fine. “What if we’re too successful with William? In a sense, if he’s happy here, haven’t we made him dependent on us and this place? I’m just asking,” she was fond of saying, once a seed of doubt had been sown.

It was Dr. von Rohr who would not stop asking why William often felt cold. “But what triggers this?” she frequently inquired. (At the Sanatorium Kilchberg, Jack’s sister had told him, the word triggers was hugely popular.)

It was Dr. von Rohr who suggested that William Burns might have a narcissistic personality, or even a narcissistic personality disorder. He shampooed his gray-white, hippie-length hair daily; he was very particular about which conditioner and gel he used. (He’d had a fit—a running-naked-and-screaming episode—because his hair dryer had blown a fuse!) And then there was the meticulousness of his tattoos, not to mention how protective he was of them. For the most part, he concealed them. He wore long-sleeved shirts, buttoned at the throat, and long pants, and shoes with socks—even in the summer. (Yet when William Burns wanted you to see his tattoos, he showed you all of them.)

It was not uncommon among schizophrenics to wear long pants and long-sleeved shirts; they felt so unprotected. But Jack and Heather’s dad wasn’t diagnosed with schizophrenia. The issue Dr. von Rohr had raised was William’s fastidiousness, his vanity—the way he watched his weight, for example. “Isn’t William an impossible perfectionist?” Dr. von Rohr would say. “I’m just asking.”

The osteoarthritis was the reason William Burns could no longer play the organ professionally—hence his early retirement, which had precipitated his mental decline. But he could have kept teaching—even keyboard skills, albeit to a limited degree, Heather had said. William certainly could have continued to teach musical theory and musical history; yet he had retired totally, and perhaps unnecessarily.

“A failure to live up to previous standards or expectations, which can also lead to someone’s early retirement, is a signature feature of a narcissistic personality, isn’t it?” Dr. von Rohr had said to the team. (The “I’m-just-asking” part was always implied, if not stated.)

“A piece of work,” Jack’s sister had called her. “A head-of-department type, if I ever met one.”

Trying to envision Dr. Ruth von Rohr, Jack thought of Dr. García, who was a good listener, and who raised a lot of unasked questions. Boy, was Dr. García ever a head-of-department type!

Last, but not least, was the sixth member of the team—an attractive young woman, authoritative but self-contained—Dr. Anna-Elisabeth Krauer-Poppe. She always wore a long, starched, hospital-white lab coat—seemingly not to assert her medical credentials but to protect her fashionable clothes. (She was Swiss but her clothes weren’t, Heather had claimed.)

Like the two unambiguous hyphens in her name, Dr. Anna-Elisabeth Krauer-Poppe was as perfectly assembled as a Vogue model in Paris or Milan; she seemed too chic to be Swiss, although she’d been born in Zurich and her knowledge of the city was as irreproachable as her command of her field. Dr. Krauer-Poppe was head of medication at the Sanatorium Kilchberg, where it was everyone’s opinion that she knew her prescriptions as well as she knew her clothes.

It had frustrated her that William was not treatable with those new (and so-called stomach-friendly) nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs and that he could tolerate only the topical solution. His hot-wax routine made Dr. Krauer-Poppe cringe, not least for what a mess William made of what he was wearing when he picked the dried wax off. And to see him with his hands plunged in ice water must have made Dr. Krauer-Poppe want to change her entire ensemble. (As for the copper bracelets, she couldn’t even look at them; the glucosamine, particularly the extract of shark cartilage, she dismissed as “a folk remedy.”)

But when it came to William Burns’s obsessive-compulsive disorder, Dr. Krauer-Poppe had prescribed an antidepressant; the medication had had a calming effect. She’d tried two drugs, in fact, Zoloft and Seropram. Each one had its merits, both being selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors used to treat depression.

As for the side effects, Heather had said, their father had tolerated the dizziness, the dry mouth, the drowsiness, and the loss of appetite; the latter was the most persistent problem. (But William was so devoted to being thin that his loss of appetite probably thrilled him.) He’d complained about occasionally painful and prolonged erections, and there were certain “changes”—which Heather had not specified to Jack—in William’s sexual interest and ability. But over time, William Burns appeared to have tolerated—or at least accepted—these side effects, too.

The drugs did not impair William’s motor functions. His keyboard skills were unaffected by the antidepressants. The music he’d committed to memory remained intact, and he could sight-read music as quickly as ever.

Dr. Krauer-Poppe had worried that William’s ability to concentrate might suffer, and he admitted to being more easily distracted; it took him longer to memorize new pieces, and he occasionally complained of fatigue, which was unusual for him. He was used to having more energy, he said; on the other hand, he was sleeping better.

Dr. Krauer-Poppe had also watched William closely for signs that prolonged administration of the drugs might make him feel indifferent or less emotional; this was sometimes referred to as “the poop-out syndrome,” Dr. Krauer-Poppe said, but William had shown no such signs. According to Heather, their father was indifferent to nothing or no one—and he was, “regrettably,” as emotional as ever.

Dr. Krauer-Poppe thought that, in William’s case, the antidepressants had been successful. She noted that his sexual “changes” did not include impotence, another possible side effect; she called the drugs “an acceptable trade-off.” (Dr. Krauer-Poppe was a woman at ease with hyphens, apparently. No one like her came to Jack’s mind.)

Jack couldn’t wait to meet these people, and he was relieved that he was meeting them first—that is, before he would see his father.

William Burns had been twenty-five when he met Jack’s mom; he’d been twenty-six when Jack was born. At that age, how long would Jack have stayed married to anyone? And what if he’d fathered a child at twenty-six, when he and Emma were burning the candle at both ends in L.A.? What kind of dad would he have been?

Jack knew what Dr. García’s answer would be—her less-than-one-word response: “Hmm.”

Jack checked into the Hotel zum Storchen on the Weinplatz. His room overlooked the Limmat, where he watched a tour boat drifting past the hotel’s riverfront café. He was staying in the Old Town—cobblestoned streets, many of them for pedestrians only. The church bells seemed to ring every quarter hour, as if Zurich were obsessed with the passage of time. He shaved and dressed for dinner, although it was still only midafternoon.

In the taxi—at the airport, in Kloten—Jack had considered going directly to the Sanatorium Kilchberg, but his appointment with Professor Ritter and the others wasn’t until late afternoon. He didn’t want to risk running into his father before he’d met with the doctors. Although he wasn’t expecting Jack, William would surely have recognized him.

Jack had questioned the clinic’s decision not to tell his father that he was coming, but both Heather and the psychiatric team had thought it best if Jack’s dad didn’t know; if he knew, he would be too anxious.

Nor had Dr. Krauer-Poppe recommended upping William’s dosage of the Zoloft or the Seropram, whether they told him about Jack or not. Even Dr. von Rohr had refrained from making her usual, on-the-other-hand argument; in fact, she said that giving William more antidepressants might make him near-catatonic or completely out of it for his son’s first visit.

Dr. Horvath, the hearty Austrian and deputy medical director who often jogged with William, had told his patient to expect “a special visitor.” Since it was too soon for more visiting time with his daughter, William was probably expecting someone from the world of music—a musician from out of town, a fellow organist making a guest appearance at a concert or playing in a church in Zurich. (Such distinguished visitors occasionally came to Kilchberg to pay William Burns their respects.)

Jack had asked the concierge at the Storchen to recommend a restaurant within walking distance of the hotel. William would be allowed to have dinner with his son, although Professor Ritter or one (or more) of the doctors at the clinic would accompany him.

“Better make the reservation for three or four people,” Heather had told Jack. “They won’t want you to take him away from the sanatorium alone. And believe me, Jack, you wouldn’t want to do that—not the first time, anyway.”

The concierge—a laconic man with a hoe-shaped scar on his forehead, probably from hitting a car’s windshield with his head—had booked a table for four at the Kronenhalle. It was an excellent restaurant and a pleasant walk, the concierge had assured Jack. “And because you’re Jack Burns, I actually managed to get you a table—even on such short notice.”

Jack went outside the hotel and watched the swans and ducks swimming in the Limmat. He checked the time on his watch against the clock towers of the two most imposing churches he could see from the Weinplatz, where he could also see a taxi stand. It was only a ten- or fifteen-minute drive to Kilchberg from the Storchen, and he didn’t want to be early or late.

Jack felt guilty about how much he had blamed his mother for everything. If she’d been alive and Jack were waiting to meet her for the first time, he believed he would have felt as nervous and excited about that as he felt about meeting his dad. It suddenly seemed ridiculous that he couldn’t forgive her; in fact, Jack missed her. He wished he could call her, but what would he have said?

It was Miss Wurtz who was waiting to hear from him; it was Caroline Jack should have called. But all he could think about was talking to his mother.

“Hi, Mom—it’s me,” he wanted to tell her. “I’m not doing this to hurt you, but I’m on my way to meet my dad—after all these years! Got any advice?”

Jack took a taxi out of town, along the shore of Lake Zurich—a nice drive, the road passing close to the lake the whole way. A theater festival had set up tents along the waterfront. It was sunny and warm, but the air was dry—mountain air, not nearly as humid as it had been in Edinburgh. There were these sudden, dramatic moments when Jack could see the Alps beyond the lake. Everything was clean, almost sparkling. (Even the taxi.)

Kilchberg was a community of about seven thousand. Because of all the sailboats on the lake—and the stately homes, many with gardens—the town somewhat resembled a resort. Jack’s taxi driver told him that the right shore of the lake was slightly more prosperous. “Europeans prefer to face west,” he said. Kilchberg, on the left shore of Lake Zurich, faced east.

But Jack thought Kilchberg was charming. There was even a small vineyard, or at least what looked like a working farm, and the sanatorium was high on a hill overlooking the lake, with a spectacular view of Zurich to the north; to the south were the Alps.

“Most of the patients take the bus from the Bürkliplatz—there’s a sanatorium stop in Kilchberg,” his taxi driver told him. “I mean the patients who are free to come and go,” he added—looking warily at Jack in the rearview mirror, as if he were certain that Jack had escaped. “You might want to consider taking the bus next time—the number one-sixty-one bus, if you can remember that.”

The driver was Middle Eastern, or possibly Turkish. (He’d mentioned “Europeans” with evident distaste.) His English was much better than his German, which was as clumsy and halting as Jack’s. When they’d first tried to speak German together, Jack’s driver had quickly switched to English instead. Jack wondered why he’d been mistaken for a patient at the clinic; the taxi driver was not much of a moviegoer, maybe.

Not so the preternaturally thin young woman in running shoes and a jogging suit who greeted Jack in what he thought was the main entrance to the hospital part of the clinic. There was a waiting room and a reception desk, where the young woman was pacing back and forth when Jack came in. A fitness expert, he assumed—perhaps she was the nurse in charge of physical therapy, or a kind of personal trainer to the patients. She should put on a little weight, Jack was thinking; one can take the athletic-looking thing too far.

“Stop!” she said, in English—pointing to him. (There was no one else in the entranceway or the waiting room; there was no one behind the reception desk, either.) Jack stopped.

A nurse appeared, emerging hurriedly from a corridor. “Pamela, er ist harmlos,” the nurse said.

“Of course he’s harmless—he’s not real,” Pamela said. “The medication is working. You don’t have to worry about that. I know he’s harmless—I know he’s not real.”

She sounded American, yet the nurse had spoken to her in German and she’d understood the nurse. Maybe the thin young woman had been a patient in the clinic for a long time—long enough to learn German, Jack speculated.

“Es tut mir leid,” the nurse said to Jack, leading the young American woman away. (“I’m sorry,” she said.)

“You should speak English to him,” Pamela said. “If he were real, he would speak English—like in his movies.”

“I have an appointment with Professor Ritter!” Jack called after the nurse.

“Ich bin gleich wieder da!” the nurse called back to him. (“I’m coming right back!”)

They had disappeared down the corridor, but Jack could still hear the too-thin patient—her voice rising. It registered as a kind of insanity on his part that he’d mistaken her for someone who worked at the place.

“They don’t usually say anything,” Pamela was telling the nurse. “Normally they just appear—they don’t talk, too. God, maybe the medication isn’t working!”

“Das macht nichts,” the nurse told her, gently. (“It doesn’t matter,” she said.)

Jack Burns was a movie star in a psychiatric clinic; not surprisingly, the first patient who saw him thought he was a talking hallucination. (Not a bad definition for an actor, Dr. García might have said.)

When the nurse came back, she was shaking her head and talking to herself—almost inaudibly and in German. Were it not for her uniform, and if he hadn’t seen her before, Jack would have believed that her self-absorbed muttering marked her as a patient. She was a short woman in her fifties, stout and brusque with curly gray hair—a former blonde, Jack guessed.

“It’s funny that the first person you, of all people, should meet here is our only American,” the nurse said. “Bleibel,” she added, vigorously shaking Jack’s hand.

“Excuse me?”

“Waltraut Bleibel—I’m telling you my name!”

“Oh. Jack Burns.”

“I know. Professor Ritter is expecting you. We’ve all been expecting you, except for poor Pamela.”

They went outside the building and walked across a patio; there was a sculpture garden and a shallow pond with lily pads. (Nothing anyone can drown in, Jack was thinking.) Most of the buildings had big windows, some of them with those black silhouettes of birds painted on the glass. “Our anti-bird birds,” Nurse Bleibel said, with a wave of her hand. “You must have them in America.”

“I guess I went to the wrong building,” Jack told her.

“A women’s ward wouldn’t be my first choice for you,” Nurse Bleibel said.

The grounds were beautifully maintained. There were a dozen or more people walking on the paths; others sat on benches, facing the lake. (No one looked insane.) There must have been a hundred sailboats on the lake.

“I take William shopping for clothes, on occasion,” the nurse informed Jack. “I’ve never known a man who likes shopping for clothes as much as your father does. When he has to try things on, he can be difficult. Mirrors are a challenge—triggers, Dr. von Rohr would call them. But William is very well behaved with me. No fooling around, generally speaking.”

They went into what appeared to be an office building, although there were cooking smells; maybe a cafeteria, or the clinic’s dining hall, was in the building. Jack followed the nurse upstairs, noting that she took two steps at a time; for a short woman in a skirt, this required robust determination. (He could easily imagine his dad not being inclined to fool around with Waltraut Bleibel.)

They found Professor Ritter in a conference room; he was sitting all alone, at the head of a long table, making notes on a pad of paper. He jumped to his feet when Nurse Bleibel brought Jack into the room. A wiry man with a strong handshake, he looked a little like David Niven, but he wasn’t dressed for tennis. His pleated khaki trousers had sharply pressed pant legs; his tan loafers looked newly shined; he wore a dark-green short-sleeved shirt.

“Ah, you found us!” the professor cried.

“Er hat zuerst Pamela gefunden,” Nurse Bleibel said. (“He found Pamela first,” she told him.)

“Poor Pamela,” Professor Ritter replied.

“Das macht nichts. Pamela just thinks it’s her medication again,” the nurse said as she was leaving.

“Merci vielmal, Waltraut!” Prof. Ritter called after her—a bilingual “Many thanks!” in French and Swiss German.

“Bitte, bitte,” Nurse Bleibel said, waving her hand as she had at the anti-bird birds on the big windows.

“Waltraut has a brother, Hugo, who takes your father to town—on occasion,” Professor Ritter told Jack. “But Hugo doesn’t take William shopping for clothes. Waltraut does a better job of that.”

“She mentioned something about mirrors,” Jack said. “She called them triggers, or she said one of the doctors did.”

“Ah, yes—we’ll get to that!” Professor Ritter said. He was a man used to running a meeting. He was friendly but precise; he left no doubt about who was in charge.

When the others filed into the conference room, Jack wondered where they’d been waiting. On what signal, which he hadn’t detected, had they been summoned forth? They even seemed to know where to sit—as if there were place cards on the bare table, where they put their almost identical pads of paper. They’d come prepared; they looked positively poised to take notes. But first Jack had to endure the obligatory handshakes—which, in each case, went on a shake or two too long. And each doctor, as if their meeting had been rehearsed, had a characteristic little something to say.

“Grüss Gott!” Dr. Horvath, the hearty Austrian, cried—pumping Jack’s hand up and down.

“Your on-screen persona may precede you, Mr. Burns,” Dr. Berger (the neurologist and fact man) said, “but when I look at you, I see a young William first of all!”

“On the other hand,” Dr. von Rohr said, in her head-of-department way, “should we presume that we know Jack Burns because of our familiarity with William? I’m just asking.”

Dr. Huber had a look at her pager while shaking Jack’s hand. “I’m just an internist,” she was telling him. “You know, a normal doctor.” Then her pager beeped and she dropped Jack’s hand as suddenly as she might have if he had died. She went to the telephone in the room, which was just inside the door. “Huber hier,” she said into the phone. There was a pause before she added: “Ja, aber nicht jetzt.” (“Yes, but not now.”)

Jack was sure that he recognized Dr. Anna-Elisabeth Krauer-Poppe—the fashion model who protected her clothes in a long, starched, hospital-white lab coat. She looked knowingly into his eyes, as if trying to discern what medication he was on—or what she thought he should be taking. “You have your father’s good hair,” she observed, “if not—I hope not—his obsessions.”

“I’m not tattooed,” Jack told her, shaking her hand.

“There are other ways to be marked for life,” Dr. on-the-other-hand von Rohr remarked.

“Not all obsessions are unhealthy, Ruth,” Dr. Huber, the internist, said. “It would appear that Mr. Burns adheres to his father’s diet. Don’t we all approve of how William watches his weight?”

“His narcissism, do you mean?” Dr. von Rohr asked, in her head-of-department way.

“Are you seeing a psychiatrist, Mr. Burns?” Dr. Berger, the fact man, asked. “Or can we rule that out?”

“Actually, I have been seeing someone,” Jack told them.

“Ah, well …” Professor Ritter said.

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of!” the deputy medical director, Dr. Horvath, shouted.

“I don’t suppose you have any indication of osteoarthritis,” Dr. Huber said. “You’re too young,” she added. “Mind you, I’m not saying that William’s arthritic hands are anything you need to worry about. You don’t play the piano or the organ, do you?”

“No. And I don’t have any symptoms of arthritis,” Jack said.

“Any medications we should know about?” Dr. Krauer-Poppe asked. “I don’t mean for arthritis.”

“No, nothing,” he told her. She looked somewhat surprised, or disappointed—Jack couldn’t be sure.

“Now, now!” Professor Ritter called out, clapping his hands. “We should let Jack ask us some questions!”

The doctors cheerfully tolerated Professor Ritter, Jack could tell. The professor was head of the clinic, after all—and he doubtless bore lots of responsibilities of a public-relations kind, which the doctors probably wanted nothing to do with.

“Yes, please—ask us anything!” Dr. Horvath, the skier, said.

“In what way are mirrors triggers?” Jack asked.

The doctors seemed surprised that he knew about the mirrors—not to mention triggers.

“Jack had a conversation with Waltraut, about taking William shopping for clothes,” Professor Ritter explained to the others.

“Sometimes, when William sees himself in a mirror, he just looks away—or he hides his face in his hands,” Dr. Berger said, sticking to the facts.

“But other times,” Dr. von Rohr began, “when he catches a glimpse of himself, he wants to see his tattoos.”

“All of them!” Dr. Horvath cried.

“It might not be the appropriate time and place for such a detailed self-examination,” Professor Ritter explained, “but William seems not to notice such things. Occasionally, when he starts taking off his clothes, he has already begun a recitation.”

“A what?” Jack asked.

“His body is a tapestry, which he can recite—both a history of music and a personal history,” Dr. Huber said. Her pager beeped, and she went back to the phone by the door. “Huber hier. Noch nicht!” she said, annoyed. (“Not yet!”)

“The problem for someone with your father’s meticulousness is that he can never be meticulous enough,” Professor Ritter told Jack.

“He’s proud of his tattoos, but he’s very critical of them, too,” Dr. Berger said.

“William thinks that some of his tattoos are in the wrong place. He blames himself for a lack of foresight—he has regrets,” Dr. Horvath elaborated.

“Other times,” Dr. von Rohr chimed in, “it’s a matter of which tattoo should have been closest to his heart.”

“But you can have only a limited number of things that are truly close to your heart,” Dr. Krauer-Poppe interjected. “He has marked his body with what he loves, but he has also recorded his grief. The antidepressants have calmed him, have made him less anxious, have helped him sleep—”

“But they don’t do much for the grief,” Dr. von Rohr said, bluntly—turning her head-on-a-coin profile to Jack.

“Not enough, anyway,” Dr. Krauer-Poppe admitted.

“It might be overwhelming to discuss specific diagnoses right away. For now, let’s just say that your father has suffered losses,” Professor Ritter told Jack. “The Ringhof woman, the German wife, but first of all you.”

“He is an absurdly emotional man,” Dr. Berger said, shaking his head—wishing that William Burns were more of a fact man, apparently.

“The antidepressants have helped—that’s all I’m saying,” Dr. Krauer-Poppe said.

“Keeping him away from mirrors helps,” Dr. von Rohr remarked in her silver-streaked, head-of-department way.

“Are there other triggers?” Jack asked the team.

“Ah, well …” Professor Ritter said. “Maybe Jack should meet his father first?” (The team, Jack could tell, didn’t think so.)

“Bach!” Dr. Horvath roared. “Anything by Bach.”

“Bach, Buxtehude, Stanley, Widor, Vierne, Dubois, Alain, Dupré—” Dr. Berger recited.

“Handel, Balbastre, Messiaen, Pachelbel, Scheidt—” Dr. von Rohr interrupted.

“And anything to do with Christmas, or Easter—any hymn,” Dr. Huber added; she was glaring at her pager, as if daring it to go off.

“Music is a trigger? Or even the names of certain composers?” Jack asked.

“Music and the names of certain composers,” Dr. Krauer-Poppe answered.

“And when he plays the piano, or the organ?” Jack asked.

“Ah, well …” Professor Ritter said.

“When the pain starts—” Dr. Krauer-Poppe began.

“When his fingers cramp—” Dr. Huber interjected.

“When he makes mistakes,” Dr. von Rohr said, with what sounded like finality—at least in her mind. With almost everything she said, Dr. von Rohr spoke with the emphasis and certainty of a concluding remark—this in tandem with the way, as a tall person, she was always looking down at others. Dr. von Rohr seemed no less tall sitting down. (When he’d shaken her hand, Jack had observed that he came up to her shoulder.)

“Yes, mistakes are triggers,” Professor Ritter worriedly agreed.

“William’s meticulousness, once again,” Dr. Berger pointed out.

“And, albeit only occasionally, when he sees your movies,” Dr. von Rohr said, looking at Jack.

“Particular lines of dialogue, mainly,” Professor Ritter said.

“But for the most part, the movies help him!” Dr. Krauer-Poppe insisted.

“But other times—” Dr. von Rohr started to say.

“Ah, well …” Professor Ritter said. “I think Jack should see his father, hear him play, talk to him—”

“In what order?” Dr. Berger asked, perhaps sarcastically; Jack couldn’t tell.

Dr. Huber’s pager beeped again; she got up from the table and went to the phone by the door. Dr. Krauer-Poppe covered her face with her hands.

“Maybe we should tell Jack a little bit about William’s schedule?” Professor Ritter asked.

“Talk about meticulousness!” Dr. Horvath cried.

“Your father likes to know in advance what he’s doing every day,” Dr. von Rohr explained.

“Every hour!” Dr. Horvath shouted.

“Just tell him the schedule,” Dr. Krauer-Poppe said. “Maybe it will help.”

“Huber hier,” Dr. Huber was saying into the phone by the door. “Ich komme sofort.” (“I’m coming right away.”) She came back to the table. “An emergency,” she told Jack, shaking his hand. “Noch ein Notfall.” (“Another emergency.”) Jack had stood up to shake her hand; all the others stood up, too.

The team and Jack, minus Dr. Huber, prepared to leave the conference room. (Dr. Huber had left in a flash.)

“Wake up, hot wax, ice water, breakfast—” Dr. Horvath was saying as they marched down the stairs. Jack realized that the recitation of his dad’s schedule had begun.

“Finger exercises in the exercise hall, immediately after breakfast,” Dr. Berger explained.

“Finger exercises?” Jack asked.

“What William calls playing the piano for the dance class, because he is blindfolded and plays only the pieces he has memorized,” Dr. von Rohr told him.

“Why is he blindfolded?” Jack asked.

“There are mirrors in the exercise hall,” Professor Ritter said. “Lots of mirrors. William always wears the blindfold there, or—sometimes, at night—he plays in the dark.”

“Jogging, after the finger exercises—depending on the weather,” Dr. Horvath carried on. “Or sometimes a trip to town, with Hugo.”

“We haven’t really talked about Hugo,” Professor Ritter told the others.

“Must we talk about him?” Dr. von Rohr asked. “Maybe not now? I’m just asking.”

“Sometimes—I mean after the finger exercises—William needs more ice water, doesn’t he?” Dr. Berger asked.

“It seems to help,” Dr. Krauer-Poppe said with resignation.

“Lunch—I mean after the jogging,” Dr. Horvath continued.

“Or after the Hugo business,” Dr. Berger said, shaking his head.

“Not now, Manfred!” Dr. von Rohr said.

“More hot wax, after lunch,” Dr. Krauer-Poppe noted. “More ice water, too. William often does this while he watches a movie.”

“One of yours, actually,” Dr. Berger told Jack. “A different Jack Burns film every afternoon.”

“And another one in the evening!” Dr. Horvath cried. “Always a movie before bed!”

“You’re jumping ahead, Klaus,” Dr. von Rohr said.

They entered the building with the exercise hall, which was outfitted like a dance studio; barres and mirrors ran the length of the interior walls. A piano, a C. Bechstein, shone a glossy black in the late-afternoon light—like the coat of a well-groomed animal.

“For the finger exercises, both the morning and the afternoon sessions,” Dr. Krauer-Poppe said, pointing to the piano. “He plays again after the movie, in the afternoon. This time, not for dancers—it’s a yoga class. The music he plays is more atmospheric, softer—like background music, you might say. But he’s always blindfolded if there’s any daylight in the room.”

“The finger-cramping can be disturbing to the yoga class,” Dr. Berger interjected. “Less so to the dancers, even if William is in obvious pain.”

“He hates to have to stop playing,” Dr. Krauer-Poppe said. “He pushes himself.”

“Ah, well …” Professor Ritter said. “After the yoga class, we have the ice water ready—and the hot wax, too, if he wants it.”

“And the ice water again,” Dr. Berger stated; he was making sure that Jack had all the facts, in proper order.

“Calisthenics!” Dr. Horvath continued, waving his arms. “Especially if there’s been no jogging. Just some abdominal crunches, some lunges, some jumping!” (Dr. Horvath was demonstrating the lunges and the jumping, his big feet thudding on the hardwood floor of the exercise hall.)

“We have group therapy three times a week—the patients discuss dealing with their disorders. Your father’s German is quite good,” Professor Ritter told Jack. “And his concentration is improving.”

“Just so long as no one starts humming a tune,” Dr. Berger interjected. “William hates humming.”

“Another trigger?” Jack asked.

“Ah, well …” Professor Ritter said.

“We have a movie night, every other Wednesday—in this case, usually not a Jack Burns movie,” Dr. Berger stated. “Once a week, we have an evening of lotto, which William doesn’t like, but he loves the storytelling café—this is when we read stories out loud, or the patients do. And we have a night when our younger patients visit the gerontopsychiatric ward. William is very sympathetic to our patients who are growing old.”

“Some nights we bring the older patients to the exercise hall, where they like to hear William play the piano in the dark,” Dr. von Rohr said.

“I like it, too!” Dr. Horvath cried.

“We have patients with schizophrenic or schizo-affective manifestations,” Dr. Krauer-Poppe told Jack. “I mean those who are in a relatively stable remission phase, the ones who have sufficient ability to concentrate. Well, you’d be surprised—the schizophrenics like listening to your father play the piano in the dark, too.”

“And the piano-playing seems to soothe our patients who suffer from panic attacks,” Dr. Berger said.

“Except for those who suffer from panic attacks in the dark,” Dr. von Rohr pointed out. (Jack saw that she was conscious of the light from the windows catching the silver streak in her hair.)

“Are there other patients in Kilchberg who have been committed by a family member—I mean for life?” Jack asked.

“Ah, well …” Professor Ritter sighed.

“It’s highly unusual for a private patient to stay here for a number of years,” Dr. Berger said.

“We are expensive,” Dr. von Rohr cut in.

“But worth it!” Dr. Horvath bellowed. “And William loves it here!”

“I’m not concerned about the cost,” Jack said. “I was wondering about the long-term effect.”

“Hospitalism, do you mean?” Dr. von Rohr asked in her just-asking way.

“What exactly is hospitalism?” Jack asked.

“The disease of being in a hospital—a condition in addition to your reason for being here, a second disease,” Dr. Berger stated, but in such a way that he didn’t seem to believe it—as if hospitalism were a speculative illness of the kind Dr. von Rohr was just asking about, an almost dreamy disease, which a fact man, like Dr. Berger, generally ruled out.

“There’s no medication for hospitalism,” Dr. Krauer-Poppe said—as if the disease didn’t really exist for her, either.

“But William is happy here!” Dr. Horvath insisted.

“He’s happier in St. Peter,” Dr. von Rohr corrected Dr. Horvath. “Die Kirche St. Peter—the church,” she explained to Jack. “Your father plays the organ there—Monday, Wednesday, and Friday morning, at eight o’clock.”

“Jack can hear him play tomorrow morning!” Dr. Horvath cried.

“That should be worth the trip—even all the way from Los Angeles,” Dr. Berger told Jack.

“One of us should go with Jack—he shouldn’t go with William alone,” Professor Ritter said.

“William never goes to St. Peter alone!” Dr. von Rohr exclaimed.

“They shouldn’t go with Hugo, either,” Dr. Krauer-Poppe suggested. “One of us should go with Jack and William.”

“That’s what I meant!” Professor Ritter said in an exasperated voice.

“I can take them!” Dr. Horvath shouted. “Your father will be excited to play for you!” he told Jack.

“Too excited, maybe,” Dr. Krauer-Poppe said. “I should go, too—just in case there’s a need for medication. A sedative might be in order.”

“Too excited can be a trigger,” Dr. Berger explained.

“Can be, usually isn’t,” Dr. von Rohr told Jack.

“Anna-Elisabeth and I will both go to St. Peter with them. Nothing can happen that we’re not prepared for!” Dr. Horvath said assertively.

“Your father is special to us, Jack. It’s a privilege to take care of him,” Professor Ritter said.

“It is an honor to protect him,” Dr. von Rohr countered—in her hair-splitting way.

“And what does he do with Hugo, when they go to town?” Jack asked the team.

Dr. Horvath jumped on the floor of the exercise hall. Professor Ritter restrained himself from saying “Ah, well …” for once. Dr. Krauer-Poppe emphatically folded her arms across the chest of her lab coat, as if to say there was no medication for what William and Hugo did in town. Dr. von Rohr uncharacteristically covered her face with her hands, as if she momentarily thought she were Dr. Krauer-Poppe.

“Sometimes they just go to a coffeehouse—” Professor Ritter started to say.

“They go to look at women, but they just look,” Dr. Horvath maintained.

“Is my father seeing someone?” Jack asked.

“He’s not oblivious to women,” Dr. Krauer-Poppe said. “And he’s very attractive to women; that hasn’t changed. Not a few of our patients here are attracted to him, but we discourage relationships of that kind in the clinic—of course.”

“Is he still sexually interested or active?” Jack asked.

“Not here, we hope!” Dr. Horvath cried.

“I meant in town,” Jack said.

“On occasion,” Dr. Berger began, in his factual way, “Hugo takes your father to see a prostitute.”

“Is that safe?” Jack asked Dr. Krauer-Poppe, who (he imagined) might have prescribed some medication for it.

“Not if he has sex with the prostitute, but he doesn’t,” Dr. Krauer-Poppe said.

“These visits are unofficial—that is, we don’t officially approve of them,” Professor Ritter told Jack.

“We just unofficially approve of them,” Dr. von Rohr said; she was back to her head-of-department self, sarcastic and on-the-other-hand to her core.

“He’s a physically healthy man!” Dr. Horvath cried. “He needs to have sex! Naturally, he shouldn’t have sex with anyone here—certainly not with another patient or with someone on the staff.”

“But you said he doesn’t have sex,” Jack said to Dr. Krauer-Poppe.

“He masturbates when he’s with the prostitute,” she told Jack. “There’s no medication required for that.”

“Like a picture of a woman in a magazine, I suppose—only she’s a real woman instead of a photograph,” Dr. Berger said.

“Like pornography?” Jack asked.

“Ah, well …” Professor Ritter said again.

“William has those magazines, too,” Dr. von Rohr announced disapprovingly.

“The magazines are safe sex, aren’t they?” Dr. Krauer-Poppe asked. “And the prostitute is safe, too—the way he sees her.”

“I get the picture,” Jack told them. “I’m okay about it.”

“We believe your sister is okay about it, too,” Professor Ritter said. “We’re just not officially okay about it.”

“Is there a logic I’m missing in being unofficially okay about it?” Dr. von Rohr asked.

Dr. Horvath was doing lunges across the exercise hall, the floor creaking. “Bitte, Klaus,” Professor Ritter said.

“Does my dad always see the same prostitute, or is it a different woman every time?” Jack asked.

“For those details, perhaps you should ask Hugo,” Dr. Berger told him.

“Must he meet Hugo? I’m just asking,” Dr. von Rohr said. (Dr. Berger was shaking his head.)

“Whether here, in Kilchberg, or in the outside world, we all eventually must meet a Hugo,” Professor Ritter said.

“There’s no medication for a Hugo,” Dr. Krauer-Poppe said.

“Leider nicht,” Dr. von Rohr remarked. (“Unfortunately not.”)

“Well, unless it’s a bad time, I think I’d like to meet my father now,” Jack told the team.

“It’s a good time, actually!” Dr. Horvath cried.

“It’s our reading hour. William is a good reader,” Dr. Berger said.

“It’s our quiet time,” Dr. von Rohr said.

“I believe he’s reading a biography of Brahms,” Dr. Krauer-Poppe said.

“Brahms isn’t a trigger?” Jack asked.

“Reading about him isn’t,” Dr. Berger said matter-of-factly.

“Your father has two rooms, plus a bath, in the private section,” Professor Ritter told Jack.

“Hence expensive,” Dr. von Rohr said.

“I made a dinner reservation for tonight,” Jack told them. “I don’t know who else wants to come along, but I booked a table for four at the Kronenhalle.”

“The Kronenhalle!” Dr. Horvath boomed. “You must have the Wiener schnitzel or the bratwurst!”

“There are mirrors at the Kronenhalle,” Dr. Krauer-Poppe said. “One by each entrance, and another one over the sideboard.”

“Surely they are avoidable,” Professor Ritter said to her.

“The one in the men’s room isn’t!” Dr. Horvath said.

“Who’s going to go with them?” Dr. Berger asked. “I can’t—not this evening.”

“I can go,” Dr. Krauer-Poppe said. “I had a date, but I can break it.”

“That would be best, Anna-Elisabeth—in case William needs some medication,” Professor Ritter said.

“I’m sure that Hugo is also available,” Dr. von Rohr suggested.

“I’d rather not go with Hugo, Ruth,” Dr. Krauer-Poppe said. “The Kronenhalle isn’t exactly Hugo’s sort of place.”

“I can’t go to the Kronenhalle tonight and to St. Peter tomorrow morning!” Dr. Horvath exclaimed.

“Maybe I can go—I’ll check my schedule,” Professor Ritter said. “Or perhaps Dr. Huber can go.”

“It makes sense to go to a restaurant with an internist,” Dr. Berger remarked. “In case anyone gets sick.”

“No one gets sick at the Kronenhalle!” Dr. Horvath cried.

“Dr. Huber has too many emergencies,” Dr. Krauer-Poppe said. “If she gets called away, I’m alone with William and Jack—and the mirrors. Besides, there should be another man—in case William wants to go to the men’s room.”

“But I’ll be there,” Jack reminded her.

“I mean another man who knows your father,” Dr. Krauer-Poppe said.

“I’ll check my schedule,” Professor Ritter said again.

Dr. von Rohr had a head-of-department look on her face, but she was smiling. The smile was something new to Jack, but the others seemed familiar with it.

“What is it, Ruth?” Dr. Krauer-Poppe asked her colleague.

“You couldn’t keep me away from a trip to the Kronenhalle with William and Jack Burns—not in a million years!” she said. “You couldn’t keep me out of the men’s room, not if William went there—not if you tried!”

Dr. Krauer-Poppe covered her face with her hands; there was no medication that could keep Dr. von Rohr away from the Kronenhalle, apparently. (Dr. Berger was shaking his head again.)

“Okay, that settles it,” Professor Ritter said uncertainly.

“Anyone but Hugo, I guess,” Dr. Krauer-Poppe, who had recovered herself, said philosophically. “Ruth and I will go with them, then.”

“I can’t tell you how I’m looking forward to it, Anna-Elisabeth,” Dr. von Rohr said.

“I think I’d like to go home and get ready for dinner,” Dr. Krauer-Poppe announced to Professor Ritter.

“Of course!” the professor said. They all watched Dr. Krauer-Poppe leave the room. She was so beautifully dressed; not even her lab coat looked out of place.

“I can’t wait to see what Anna-Elisabeth will wear tonight,” Dr. von Rohr said, after her colleague had gone. “She’s going home to get dressed, and I don’t mean to change her lab coat!”

“She had a date with her husband tonight,” Dr. Berger told everyone. “She’s probably going home to break her date, in a nice way.”

Jack felt sorry that he’d caused Dr. Krauer-Poppe to change her plans. (Dr. von Rohr, on the other hand, seemed pleased to have changed hers.)

“Don’t worry!” Dr. Horvath told Jack, pounding his shoulder. “Whatever else happens tonight, you’re going to the Kronenhalle!”

“I just want to see my father. That’s why I came,” Jack reminded them.

“We just want to prepare you for seeing him,” Dr. Berger stated.

Dr. Horvath had stopped pounding Jack’s shoulder, but he was massaging the back of Jack’s neck with his big, strong hand. “I have a favor to ask you, if you’ll indulge me,” the Austrian said.

“Of course. What is it?” Jack asked him.

“If you could say something—I mean the way Billy Rainbow says it. I know you can do it!” Dr. Horvath urged him.

“No doubt about it,” Jack-as-Billy said. (After the episode in the Edinburgh airport, he was relieved he could still act.)

“Wunderschön!” Dr. Horvath cried. (“Beautiful!”)

“How embarrassing, Klaus,” Dr. von Rohr said. “I hope you’ll forgive me,” she said to Jack, “but Billy Rainbow gives me the creeps.”

“He’s supposed to,” Jack told her.

“I must tell you, Jack,” Professor Ritter said, “William says that line the exact same way you say it!”

“Your father has made quite a study of you,” Dr. Berger told him.

“You should prepare yourself, Jack—William knows more about you than you may think,” Dr. von Rohr said. (Dr. Horvath had stopped massaging Jack’s neck, but Dr. von Rohr had put her arm around Jack’s shoulders in a comradely way.)

“Yes, Heather told me—he’s memorized all my lines,” Jack said.

“I didn’t mean only your movies, Jack,” Dr. von Rohr cautioned him.

“I think that’s enough preparation, Ruth,” Dr. Berger stated.

“Ja, der Musiker!” Dr. Horvath shouted to Jack. (“Yes, the musician!”) “It’s time for you to meet the musician!”

39. The Musician

There was a serenity to the private section of the Sanatorium Kilchberg, which Jack may have underappreciated on his first visit. (He was not in a serene state of mind.) The building itself, which was white stucco with shutters the same gray-blue color as the lake, looked more like a small hotel than a hospital. His father’s third-floor, corner rooms—overlooking the rooftops of Kilchberg—faced the eastern shore of Lake Zurich. The Alps rose in the hazy distance to the south of the lake.

The hospital bed where Jack’s father lay reading was cranked to a semireclined position. The bed and the fact that there were no carpets on the noiseless, rubberized floors were the only indications that this private suite was part of an institution—and that the man reading on the bed was in need of care. While the windows were open, and a warm breeze blew off the lake, William was dressed as if it were a brisk fall day—a thick flannel shirt over a white T-shirt, corduroy trousers, and white athletic socks. (If Jack had been dressed that way, he would have been sweating—although it instantly made him feel cold to look at his father.)

The bedroom, which opened into another room—with a couch, and a card table with a couple of straight-backed chairs—was not cluttered with furniture or mementoes. Jack saw only photographs—massive bulletin boards crammed with overlapping snapshots. There were also movie posters hung on the peach-colored walls of both rooms. They were posters of Jack Burns’s movies; at a glance, Jack thought that his dad had framed and hung all of them. Jack could see that the surrounding bookshelves displayed a more balanced collection of CDs and DVDs and videocassettes and actual books than he’d seen in his sister’s office, or in her bedroom.

The team of doctors, together with Professor Ritter and Jack, had entered his father’s attractive but modest quarters in the utmost silence. Jack first thought that his dad didn’t know they were there. (William had not looked up from his book.) But—as indicated by the door from the corridor, which had been ajar—living in a psychiatric clinic had made Jack’s father familiar with intrusions. William was accustomed to doctors and nurses who didn’t necessarily knock.

Jack’s dad was aware of their presence in his bedroom; he had deliberately not looked up from his book. Jack understood that his father was making a point about privacy. William Burns did indeed love the Sanatorium Kilchberg, as the hearty Dr. Horvath had maintained, but that didn’t mean he loved everything about it.

“Don’t tell me—let me guess,” Jack’s father said, staring stubbornly into his book. “You’ve had a meeting; remarkably, you’ve come to a decision. Oh, what joy—you’ve sent a committee to tell me your most interesting thoughts!” (William was still refusing to look at them—his copper bracelets glowing in the dull late-afternoon light.)

William Burns had spoken with no discernible accent, as if those years in foreign cities and their churches had replaced whatever was once Scottish about him. He certainly didn’t sound American, but he didn’t sound British, either. It was a European English, spoken in Stockholm and Stuttgart, in Helsinki and Hamburg. It was the unaccented English of hymns, of all voices put to music—from the Citadel Church, the Kastelskirken in Frederikshavn, to the Oude Kerk in Amsterdam.

As for William’s sarcasm, Jack realized that his sister, Heather, might not have inherited hers from her German mother, as he’d first thought.

“Don’t be childish, William,” Dr. von Rohr said.

“You have a special visitor, William,” Dr. Berger said.

Jack’s father froze; he wasn’t reading, but he wouldn’t look up from his book.

“Your son, Jack, has come all this way to take you out to dinner!” Professor Ritter cried.

“To the Kronenhalle!” Dr. Horvath thundered.

William closed the book and his eyes; it was as if he could see or imagine his son better with his eyes shut. Jack couldn’t look at him that way; he looked instead at the photographs on the nearest bulletin board, waiting for his father to open his eyes or speak.

“We’ll leave you two alone,” Professor Ritter said reluctantly.

Jack had expected to see photographs of himself—chiefly the ones snipped from movie magazines, all the film premieres, the red-carpet crap, and the Academy Awards. But not the personal snapshots, of which there were many. (There were more of Jack than of Heather!)

There he was in one of Miss Wurtz’s many dramatizations at St. Hilda’s. Naturally, he recognized himself as a mail-order bride—that pivotal and blood-soaked performance in Mr. Ramsey’s histrionic production. Miss Wurtz and Mr. Ramsey must have taken the pictures. (Jack was pretty sure it was Caroline who had sent his dad the photographs.)

But that didn’t explain the photos of Jack with Emma—though Lottie must have taken the ones in Mrs. Wicksteed’s kitchen, there were more pictures of Jack with Emma in Mrs. Oastler’s house—or the ones of Jack with Chenko in the Bathurst Street gym, or the ones of Jack wrestling at Redding! Had Leslie Oastler sent William photographs? Had Jack’s mother relented, if only a little?

But Mrs. Oastler and Jack’s mom had never been to Redding. Had Coach Clum sent those wrestling pictures to William? There were Exeter wrestling photographs, too; maybe Coach Hudson and Coach Shapiro had also been messengers.

Jack heard the door to the corridor close softly. When he looked at his father on the hospital bed, William’s eyes were open and he was smiling. Jack had no idea how long his father had been watching him. Jack had barely glanced at one of the dozen or more bulletin boards; he’d seen only a fraction of the photographs, but enough to know that his dad had surrounded himself with images of Jack’s childhood and his school years. (It explained something about Heather’s anger toward Jack—namely, that Jack’s past was more of a visual presence in their father’s confined quarters than hers.)

“I was afraid you’d forgotten me,” his dad said. It was one of Billy Rainbow’s lines. Jack had always liked that line, and his father delivered it perfectly.

Jack made a feeble gesture to all the photographs. “I was afraid you’d forgotten me!” he blurted out—in his own voice, not Billy Rainbow’s.

“My dear boy,” his dad said; he patted the bed and Jack sat beside him. “You don’t have children of your own; when you do, you’ll understand that it’s impossible to forget them!”

Jack only now noticed his father’s gloves. They must have been women’s gloves—close-fitting and of such thin material that William could turn the pages of his book as well as if he were bare-handed. The gloves were a light tan, almost skin-colored.

“My hands are so ugly,” Jack’s father whispered. “They got old before the rest of me.”

“Let me see them,” Jack said.

William winced once or twice, pulling the gloves off his fingers, but he wouldn’t allow Jack to help him. He put his hands in his son’s hands; Jack could feel his father trembling a little, as if he were cold. (The room now felt hot to Jack.) The gnarling of his dad’s knuckles was so extreme that Jack doubted his father could slide a ring on or off his fingers—William wore no rings. And the bony bumps, Heberden’s nodes, which had formed on the far-knuckle joints, disfigured his father’s hands more than Jack had anticipated.

“The rest of me is okay, Jack,” his dad said. He held one hand on his heart. “Except here, on occasion.” He put the index finger of his other hand to his temple, as if he were pointing a gun at his head. “And in here,” he added, giving Jack a mischievous little smile. “How about you?”

“I’m okay,” Jack told him.

It was like looking at himself on a hospital bed, in clothes he would never wear—as if Jack had fallen asleep one night when he was thirty-eight, and had woken up the next day when he was sixty-four.

William Burns was thin in the way that many musicians were. With his long hair and the small-boned, feminine prettiness of his face, he looked more like a rock musician than an organist—more like a lead singer (or one of those skinny, androgynous men with an electric guitar) than “a keyboard man,” as Heather had called him.

“Are we really going to the Kronenhalle?” Jack’s father asked.

“Yes. What’s so special about it?” Jack asked him.

“They have real art on the walls—Picasso, and people like that. James Joyce had his own table there. And the food’s good,” William said. “We’re not going with Dr. Horvath, I hope. I like Klaus, but he eats like a farmer!”

“We’re going with Dr. von Rohr and Dr. Krauer-Poppe,” Jack told him.

“Oh, what joy,” William said, as he had before—sarcastically. “They’re two of the best-looking shrinks you’ll ever see—I’ll give them that—but a little of Ruth goes a long way, and Anna-Elisabeth never takes me anywhere without bringing some medication along.”

Jack was struggling against the feeling that his sister had warned him he would have: his father seemed almost normal to him, or not half as eccentric as he’d expected. William certainly wasn’t as wound up as Professor Ritter, or as obstreperous as Dr. Horvath—nor was he a third as intense as Dr. Berger, or Dr. von Rohr, or Dr. Krauer-Poppe. In fact, among the team attending to William Burns, only Dr. Huber had struck Jack as normal—and she was an internist, not a psychiatrist. (A pragmatist, Heather had called her.)

“You have so many photographs,” Jack said to his dad. “Of me, I mean.”

“Well, yes—of course!” William cried. “You should have a look at them. You never knew that some of them were being taken, I’m sure!”

Jack got up from the bed and looked at the bulletin boards, his father following him in his socks—as closely and silently as Jack’s shadow.

There were more wrestling photos—too many, Jack thought. Who could have taken them all? There were as many as ten of the same match! This was true of one of his matches at Redding and two at Exeter. Jack wasn’t aware that he’d had such a devoted admirer at either school. Of course Jack knew that his father had paid the tuition, both at Exeter and at Redding; perhaps William had felt entitled to ask someone to take pictures of Jack wrestling, but who?

Jack felt his father’s arms around his chest, under his own arms; the long, knobby fingers of William’s small hands were interlocked on his son’s heart. Jack felt his father kiss the back of his head. “My dear boy!” his dad said. “It was so hard to imagine my son as a wrestler! I simply had to see it for myself.”

“You saw me wrestle?”

“I promised your mother that I wouldn’t make contact with you. I didn’t say I’d never see you!” he cried. “Your wrestling matches were public; even if she’d known, and she didn’t, she couldn’t have kept me away!”

“You took some of these photographs?” Jack asked him.

“Some of them, of course! Coach Clum was a nice man, if not a very gifted photographer, and Coach Hudson and Coach Shapiro—what wonderful people! Your friend Herman Castro is a great kid! You should keep in touch with Herman. I mean, more than you do, Jack. But I took many of the wrestling pictures myself. Yes, I did!” William seemed suddenly irritated that Jack looked so stunned. “Well, I wasn’t going to go all that way and not take a few pictures!” his father said, with a measure of indignation in his voice. “What a pain in the ass it is, to go to Maine—and it’s not a whole lot easier to get to New Hampshire.”

Jack was thinking that Heather had just been born when he was first wrestling at Redding; William might have traveled to Maine when Barbara was pregnant, or when Heather was an infant. And when William had come to New Hampshire, when Jack was wrestling at Exeter, Heather would have been a little girl—too young to remember those times when her father was away. But had those wrestling trips been difficult for Barbara? Jack wondered. First she’d had cancer; then she was killed by a taxi, and there’d been no more trips.

On one of William’s bulletin boards, there was a snapshot of Jack at Hama Sushi—the way he was smiling at the camera, only Emma could have taken the photograph. And another of Jack with Emma in his lap; he remembered Emma taking that one. They were in their first apartment, their half of that rat-eaten duplex in Venice. There was also a photo of Jack dressed for his waiter’s job at American Pacific; only Emma could have taken that one, too.

“Emma sent you these?” Jack asked his father.

“I know that Emma could be difficult, at times,” his dad replied, “but she was a good friend to you, Jack—loyal and true. I never met her in person—we just talked on the telephone from time to time. Look here!” his dad suddenly cried, pulling Jack to another bulletin board. “Your friend Claudia sent me pictures, too!”

There they were, Claudia and Jack—that summer they did Shakespeare in the Berkshires. He’d wanted to be Romeo but had played Tybalt instead. And there were photos from the theater in Connecticut where both Claudia and Jack were women in that Lorca play—The House of Bernarda Alba. (No pictures of the food-poisoning episode, thankfully.)

“Did you ever meet Claudia?” Jack asked his dad.

“Only on the telephone, alas,” William said. “A nice girl, very serious. But she wanted babies, didn’t she?”

“Yes, she did,” Jack said.

“You meet some people at the wrong time, don’t you?” his dad asked. “I met your mother at the wrong time—the wrong time for her and for me, as it turned out.”

“She had no right to keep you away from me!” Jack said angrily.

“Don’t be such an American!” his father said. “You Americans believe you have so many rights! I met a young woman and told her I would love her forever, but I didn’t. In fact, I didn’t love her very long at all. To tell you the truth, I changed my mind in a hurry about her—but not before I had changed her life! If you change someone’s life, Jack, what rights should you have? Didn’t your mom have a right to be angry?”

His father seemed as sane as anyone Jack had ever met. Why is my dad here? Jack kept thinking, although Heather had warned him against thinking any such thing.

There were photographs of Jack as a Kit Kat Girl, the summer both he and Claudia wanted to be Sally Bowles in Cabaret, and a bunch of pictures from the summer of ’86, when Jack had met Bruno Litkins, the gay heron, who’d cast him as a transvestite Esmeralda in The Hunchback of Notre Dame—thus sending Jack down a questionable career slope, but one he had survived with his heterosexual orientation mostly intact.

“You were good as a girl,” his dad was telling him, “but—quite understandably, as your father—I preferred seeing you in male roles.”

There were pictures of Jack with his mother and Leslie Oastler, and one of him and his mom in Daughter Alice. Had Mrs. Oastler or a tattoo client taken that photograph?

“Emma thought I should see what her mother looked like,” his dad explained, “because she worried about what hold her mother might have on you. I don’t mean a wrestling hold!”

“Did Mrs. Oastler send you photographs, too?” Jack asked. “Did you ever talk to her on the telephone?”

“I got the feeling that Leslie sent me pictures or called me only when she was angry at your mother,” Jack’s father explained.

“Probably when Mom was unfaithful to her,” Jack said.

“I never inquired about your mother, Jack. I only asked about you.”

There was a photograph of Jack with Miss Wurtz that time he and Claudia took her to the Toronto film festival. Miss Wurtz looked radiant, in her former-film-star attire. Claudia must have taken the picture, but there was no mistaking the way The Wurtz was smiling seductively at the camera; Caroline clearly knew that either she or Claudia would be sending the photo to William.

And there was one of Jack and Claudia, which Miss Wurtz had to have taken. Jack couldn’t remember if it was the night before the Mishima misunderstanding or the night after it. They’d successfully crashed a private party, because the bouncers had mistaken Miss Wurtz for a celebrity. In the snapshot, Claudia is looking fondly at Jack, but his eyes are elsewhere; he’s not looking at her or the camera. (Knowing Jack, he was scanning the party to see if he could spot Sonia Braga.)

“How did you find me, dear boy?” his dad asked.

“Heather found me. She called Miss Wurtz. Caroline always knows where to find me.”

“Dear Caroline,” William said, as if he’d been meaning to write her a letter. “Talk about meeting someone at the wrong time!”

“I was just in Edinburgh with Heather,” Jack told him.

“She’s a bossy little thing, isn’t she?” his dad asked.

“I love her,” Jack said.

“So do I, dear boy—so do I!”

There were more photos of Jack with Emma—for so much of his life, Emma had been there. In the Bar Marmont, around the pool at the Skybar at the Mondrian Hotel on Sunset Boulevard, and in one of those private villas on the grounds of the Sunset Marquis in West Hollywood. There were shots of Jack holding the steering wheel of his Audi, of one Audi after another. (He knew now that Emma had snapped all of these, but he’d never paid much attention to anyone taking his picture, because it was always happening.)

There were photographs of Heather and her mother, too—some were duplicates of those photos Heather had shown Jack—and there were more skiing pictures, but most surprising was the number of times that Alice appeared in the photographs of Jack. (He wondered why his father hadn’t cut her out of the pictures; Jack would have.) And some of these photos were from Jack’s first trip to those North Sea ports, when he’d been four and was still inclined to hold his mother’s hand.

There they were on the Nyhavn, in front of Tattoo Ole’s; either Ladies’ Man Madsen or Ole himself had to have taken the picture. And in Stockholm, posing by a ship from the archipelago—it was docked at the Grand. Had Torsten Lindberg taken that one? Jack would never forget that he’d met his father, but he hadn’t known it, in the restaurant of the Hotel Bristol—in Oslo, where William had never slept with Ingrid Moe. But who had taken the photograph of Jack holding his mom’s hand in front of the Domkirke, the Oslo Cathedral?

From his grave, Jack would not fail to recognize the American Bar in what was now the lobby of the Hotel Torni, but which of those lesbian music students in Helsinki had snapped that shot of Jack and his mom going up the stairs? (They were always climbing the stairs, because the elevator was never working, and they were always—as they were in the snapshot—holding hands.)

Why hadn’t William Burns removed every trace of Jack’s mother from his sight?

Jack was staring so intently at the pictures from Amsterdam that he hadn’t noticed how close to him his father was standing, or that William was staring intently at his son. There was a photograph of Jack with his mother and Tattoo Theo, and another of Jack with Tattoo Peter—the great Peter de Haan, with his left leg missing below the knee. Tattoo Peter had the same slicked-back hair that Jack remembered, but in the photo he seemed more blond; Tattoo Peter had the same Woody the Woodpecker tattoo on his right biceps, too.

“Tattoo Peter was only fifteen when he stepped on that mine,” William was saying, but Jack had moved on. He was looking at himself as a four-year-old, walking with his mom in the red-light district. Cameras were not welcome there; the prostitutes didn’t want their pictures taken. Yet someone—Els or Saskia, probably—must have had a camera. Alice was smiling at the photographer as if nothing were the matter, as if nothing had ever been the matter.

“How dare you look at your mother like that?” his father asked him sharply.

“What?”

“My dear boy! She’s been dead how many years? And you still haven’t forgiven her! How dare you not forgive her? Did she blame you?”

“She shouldn’t have blamed you, either!” Jack cried.

“De mortuis nihil nisi bonum. How’s your Latin, Jack?” (William clearly knew that Jack’s Latin wasn’t strong.) “Speak nothing but good of the dead.”

“That’s a tough one,” Jack said.

“If you don’t forgive her, Jack, you’ll never have a worthwhile relationship with a woman in your life. Or have you had a worthwhile relationship that I’m unaware of? Dr. García doesn’t count! Emma almost doesn’t count.” (He even knew about Dr. García!)

Jack hadn’t noticed when his father had started to shiver, but William was shivering now. He paced back and forth, from the bedroom to the sitting room—and into the bedroom again, with his arms hugging his chest.

“Are you cold, Pop?” Jack asked him. He didn’t know where the “Pop” came from. (Not Billy Rainbow, thankfully—not this time.)

“What did you call me?” his dad asked.

“ ‘Pop.’ ”

“I love that!” William cried. “It’s so American! Heather calls me ‘Dad’ or ‘Daddy’—you can’t call me that, too. It’s perfect that you call me ‘Pop’!”

“Okay, Pop.” Jack was thinking that his father might let him off the hook about his mom, but no such luck.

“It’s time to close the windows—it’s that time of the evening,” William was saying, his teeth chattering. Jack helped him close the windows. Although the sun hadn’t set, the lake was a darker color than before; only a few sailboats still dotted the water. His father was shaking so violently that Jack put his arms around him.

“If you can’t forgive your mother, Jack, you’ll never be free of her. It’s for your own sake, you know—for your soul. When you forgive someone who’s hurt you, it’s like escaping your skin—you’re that free, outside yourself, where you can see everything.” William suddenly stopped shivering. Jack stepped a little away from him, so that he could see him better; William’s mischievous little smile was back, once more transforming him. “Uh-oh,” Jack’s father said. “Did I say skin? I didn’t say skin, did I?”

“Yes, you did,” Jack told him.

“Uh-oh,” his dad said again. He was beginning to unbutton his flannel shirt, but he unbuttoned it only halfway before pulling the shirt off—over his head.

“What’s wrong, Pop?”

“Oh, it’s nothing,” William said impatiently; he was busy taking off his socks. “ ‘Skin’ is one of those triggers. I’m surprised they didn’t tell you. They can’t give me antidepressants and expect me to remember all the stupid triggers!”

On the tops of both feet, where it is painful to be tattooed, were Jack’s name and Heather’s—Jack on his father’s right foot, Heather on his left. (Since Jack couldn’t read music, he didn’t know what the notes were, but their names had been put to music.)

By now, Jack’s father had taken off his T-shirt and his corduroy trousers, too. In a pair of striped boxer shorts, which were too big for him—and which Jack could not imagine his father buying on one of the shopping trips with Waltraut Bleibel—his dad appeared to have the body of a former bantamweight. At most, William weighed one-thirty or one-thirty-five—Jack’s old weight class. The tattoos covered his father’s sinewy body with the patina of wet newspaper.

Doc Forest’s tattoo stood out against all the music as vividly as a burn. The words, which were not as near to his heart as William would have liked them, marked the left side of his rib cage like a whiplash.

The commandant’s daughter; her little brother

“It’s not the tattoos, my dear boy,” Jack’s father said, standing naked before him—the shocking white of William’s hands and face and neck and penis being the only parts of him that weren’t an almost uniform blue-black, some of which had faded to gray. “It’s everything I truly heard and felt—it’s everything I ever loved! It’s not the tattoos that marked me.” For a small man, he had overlong arms—like a gibbon.

“Perhaps you should put your clothes on, Pop—so we can go out to dinner.”

Jack saw that messy music, a wrinkled scrap of a page on his dad’s left hip, where Jack’s mom was once convinced that Beachcomber Bill had marked him—the tattoo that had failed in the planning phase, according to Tattoo Ole. Jack got only a glimpse of those notes that curled around the underarm side of his father’s right biceps; most of that tattoo was lost from view, either the Chinaman’s mistake or the Beachcomber’s. And that fragment of a hymn on his left calf—the “Breathe on me, breath of God,” both the words and the music—was every bit as good as Tattoo Ole had said. (It had to be Charlie Snow’s work, or Sailor Jerry’s.)

As for his dad’s favorite Easter hymn, “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today,” it was upside down to Jack—but when his father sat on the toilet, William could read the music. Since this tattoo was strictly notes, without the words, Jack knew it was “Christ the Lord” only because of where it was, and it was upside down—and of course Jack remembered that Aberdeen Bill had given it to William. As Heather had told Jack, this long-ago tattoo had been overlapped by a newer one, Walther’s “Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme”—the top two staffs beginning where the alleluia chorus to “Christ the Lord” should have been.

His father was leaping up and down like a monkey on the bed; with a remote, which William held in one hand, he had lowered the hospital bed to a flat position. It was hard to get a definitive look at all his tattoos—for example, to ascertain exactly which lengthy and complicated phrase by Handel was in the area of William’s kidneys. Jack knew only that Tattoo Ole had done that one. (“More Christmas music,” Ole had said dismissively.) But Jack got a good enough look to guess that this was the soprano aria (“For Unto Us a Child Is Born”) from Handel’s Messiah—and, in that case, Widor’s Toccata was right next to it.

All but lost in an ocean of music, Herbert Hoffmann’s disappearing ship was even more difficult to see because of William’s monkey business on the bed. And there, on his father’s right shoulder, Jack recognized another Tattoo Ole—it lay unfurled like a piece ripped from a flag. It was more Bach, but not the Christmas music Jack’s mother had thought it was—neither Bach’s Weihnachtsoratorium nor his Kanonische Veränderungen über das Weihnachtslied. It was tough to see his dad’s shoulder clearly, with all the bouncing up and down, but Jack’s Exeter German was getting better by the minute—“Der Tag, der ist so freudenreich.”

Jack also caught Pachelbel’s name, if not the particular piece of music, and—in a crescent shape on his father’s coccyx—Theo Rademaker’s cramped fragment, “Wir glauben all’ an einen Gott.” (The composer was Samuel Scheidt.)

Bach’s “Jesu, meine Freude” (“Jesus, My Joy”), which Tattoo Peter had given Jack’s dad in Amsterdam, was indeed missing part of the word Largo—as his sister had said. The Balbastre tattoo (“Joseph est bien marié”), which was newer and only slightly overlapped the Bach, was not by a tattoo artist Jack could identify.

Jack’s French, which was nonexistent, gave him fits with Dupré’s Trois préludes et fugues pour orgue—not to mention Messiaen’s “Dieu parmi nous,” which followed the Roman numeral IX.

Did that mean “God is among us”? Jack was wondering.

“I have a son!” his father was shouting, as he bounced up and down on the bed. “Thank you, God—I have a son!”

“Dad, don’t hurt yourself.”

“ ‘Pop,’ ” his father corrected him.

“Better be careful, Pop.”

You can give yourself a headache trying to decipher the tattoos on a naked man who’s leaping up and down on a bed. Jack was trying to identify the Bach tattoo Sami Salo was alleged to have given William on his backside—and the notes that Trond Halvorsen (the scratcher) gave him in Oslo, where Halvorsen also gave William an infection—but Jack was making himself dizzy with the effort.

“Do you know what toccata means, Jack?”

“No, Pop.”

“It means touch, basically—almost a hammered kind of touch,” his father explained; he wasn’t even out of breath. Jack saw no evidence that Dr. Horvath had been right about the psychological benefits of the Sanatorium Kilchberg’s jogging program, but the aerobic benefits were obvious.

Stanley’s Trumpet Tune in D, which marked William’s chest in the area of his right lung, seemed to make a visual proclamation. (Didn’t you need good lungs to play the trumpet?) And there was that fabulous Alain quotation, in French and English, on his dad’s bare ass—not that William was standing still enough for Jack to be able to read it.

“Pop, maybe you should get dressed for dinner.”

“If I stop, I’ll get a chill, dear boy. I don’t want to feel cold!” his father shouted.

For Professor Ritter and the doctors—they were listening outside, in the corridor—this must have been a familiar enough utterance to give them a signal. There was a loud, rapid knocking on the door—Dr. Horvath, probably.

“Perhaps we should come in, William!” Professor Ritter called; it wasn’t really a question.

“Vielleicht!” Jack’s father shouted. (“Perhaps!”)

William bounded off the bed; he put his hands on the rubberized floor and bent over, facing Jack while he lifted his bare bottom to the opening door. When Professor Ritter and the doctors entered, William was mooning them.

Reason has reached its limit. Only belief keeps rising.

“I must say, William—this is a little disappointing,” Professor Ritter said.

“Only a little?” Jack’s father asked; he’d straightened up and had turned to face them, naked.

“William, this is not what you should wear to the Kronenhalle!” Dr. Horvath admonished him.

“I won’t have dinner with a naked man—at least not in public,” Dr. von Rohr announced, but Jack could see that she instantly regretted her choice of words. “Es tut mir leid,” she added. (“I’m sorry,” she said to Jack’s father.) The other doctors and Professor Ritter all looked at her with dismay. “I said I was sorry!” she told them in her head-of-department way.

“I think I heard the word naked,” William said to his son, smiling. “Talk about triggers!”

“I said I was sorry, William,” Dr. von Rohr told him.

“Oh, it’s nothing,” Jack’s father said irritably. But Jack saw the first sign that his dad felt cold again—a single tremor. “It’s just that I’ve told you I’m not naked. You know that’s not how I feel!”

“We know, William,” Dr. Berger said. “You’ve told us.”

“But Jack hasn’t heard this,” Professor Ritter joined in.

Dr. von Rohr sighed; if she’d been holding a pencil in her long fingers, she would have twirled it. “These tattoos are your father’s real clothes, Jack,” Dr. von Rohr said. She put her hands on William’s shoulders—running her hands down the length of his arms, which she then held at the wrists. “He feels cold because so many of his favorite composers have died. Most of them are dead, in fact. Aren’t they, William?”

“Cold as the grave,” Jack’s father said, nodding his head; he was shivering.

“And what is here, and here, and here, and everywhere?” Dr. von Rohr asked, pointing to William’s tattoos repeatedly. “Nothing but praise for the Lord—hymns of praise—and prayers of lamentation. With you, everything is either adulation or mourning. You thank God, William, but you mourn almost everyone or everything else. How am I doing so far?” she asked him. Jack could tell that she had calmed his father down, but nothing could stop the shivering. (Dr. Horvath was trying, rubbing William’s shoulders while attempting to pull a T-shirt over his shaking head—more or less at the same time.)

“You’re doing a very good job,” Jack’s father told Dr. von Rohr sincerely. He was too cold for sarcasm; his teeth were chattering again.

“Your body is not naked, William. It is gloriously covered with hymns of jubilation, and with the passion of an abiding love of God—but also an abiding loss,” Dr. von Rohr continued.

Dr. Horvath went on dressing Jack’s father as if William were a child. Jack could see that his dad had completely succumbed, not only to Dr. Horvath dressing him but to Dr. von Rohr’s litany—which William had doubtless delivered to her on more than one occasion.

“You are wearing your grief, William,” Dr. von Rohr went on, “and your broken heart is thankful—it just can’t keep you warm, not anymore. And the music—well, some of it is triumphant. Jubilant, you would say. But so much of it is sad, isn’t it, William? Sad like a dirge, sad like a lamentation, as I’ve heard you say repeatedly.”

“The repeatedly was sarcastic, Ruth,” Jack’s father said. “You were doing fine till then.”

Dr. von Rohr sighed again. “I’m just trying to get us to dinner on time, William. Forgive me if I’m giving Jack the abridged version.”

“I think I get it,” Jack told Dr. von Rohr. (He thought she’d done a good job, under the circumstances.) “I get the idea, Pop—I really do.”

“Pop? Was heisst ‘Pop’?” Dr. Horvath asked. (“What is ‘Pop’?”)

“Amerikanische Umgangssprache für ‘Vater,’ ” Professor Ritter told him. (“American colloquial speech for ‘Father.’ ”)

“He doesn’t need to wear a tie, Klaus,” Dr. von Rohr said to Dr. Horvath, who was struggling to knot a necktie at William’s throat. “Jack’s not wearing a tie, and he looks fine.”

“But it’s the Kronenhalle!” Jack was certain Dr. Horvath was going to yell; however, Dr. Horvath put the tie away and was silent.

“There’s more to life than grieving and singing praise to God, William,” Dr. Berger intoned. “I mean, factually speaking.”

“I won’t use that word I used again, William,” Dr. von Rohr said carefully, “but allow me to say that you can’t go to the Kronenhalle wearing only your tattoos, because—as I know you know, William—they’re not socially acceptable.”

“Not socially acceptable,” Jack’s father repeated, smiling. Jack could see that being socially unacceptable pleased William Burns, and that Dr. von Rohr knew this about him.

“I want to say that I can see what good care you’re taking of my dad,” Jack told them all. “I want you to know that my sister and I appreciate it—and that my father appreciates it.” Everyone seemed embarrassed—except William, who looked irritated.

“You don’t need to make a speech, Jack. You’re not a Canadian anymore,” his dad told him. “We all can be socially acceptable, when we have to. Well, maybe not Hugo,” his father added, with that mischievous little smile Jack was getting used to. “Have you met Hugo yet, Jack?”

“Noch nicht,” Jack said. (“Not yet.”)

“But I suppose they’ve told you about the nature of the little excursions I take with Hugo, on occasion,” his father said, the mischief and the smile disappearing from his face, as if one word—not necessarily Hugo, but the wrong word—could instantly make him another person. “They’ve told you, haven’t they?” He wasn’t kidding.

“I know a little about it,” Jack answered him evasively. But his father had already turned to Professor Ritter and the others.

“Don’t you think a father and his son should have those awkward but necessary conversations about sex together?” William asked his doctors.

“Bitte, William—” Professor Ritter started to say.

“Isn’t that what any responsible father would do?” Jack’s dad went on. “Isn’t that my job? To talk about sex with my son—isn’t that my job? Why is that your job?”

“We thought that Jack should be informed about the Hugo business, William,” Dr. Berger said. “We didn’t know you would bring the matter up with him.”

“Factually speaking,” William said, calming down a little.

“We can talk about it later, Pop.”

“Perhaps over dinner,” his father said, smiling at Dr. von Rohr, who sighed.

“Speaking of which, you should be leaving!” Dr. Horvath cried. But when they started for the corridor—his father bowing to Dr. von Rohr, who preceded him—Dr. Horvath grabbed Jack by both shoulders, holding him back.

“Which of the triggers was it?” the doctor whispered in Jack’s ear; even Dr. Horvath’s whisper was loud. “Das Wort,” he whispered. (“The word.”) “What was it?”

“Skin,” Jack whispered. “It was the word skin.”

“Gott!” Dr. Horvath shouted. “That’s one of the worst ones—that one is unstoppable!”

“I’m glad some of the triggers are stoppable,” Jack told him. “Naked, for example. Dr. von Rohr seemed to stop that one.”

“Ja, naked’s not so bad,” Dr. Horvath said dismissively. “But you better not bring up the word skin at the Kronenhalle. And the mirrors!” he remembered, with a gasp. “Keep William away from the mirrors.”

“Is a mirror one of the unstoppable triggers?” Jack asked.

“A mirror is more than a trigger,” Dr. Horvath said gravely. “A mirror is das ganze Pulver!”

“What?” Jack asked him; he didn’t know the phrase.

“Das ganze Pulver!” Dr. Horvath cried. “All the ammunition!”

Their evening at the Kronenhalle began with William complimenting Dr. von Rohr on the silver streak in her tawny hair—how it had always impressed him that she must have been struck by lightning one morning on her way to work. By the time she met with her first patient, he imagined, she was acutely aware of that part of her head where the lightning bolt had hit her—mainly because the lightning had done such extensive damage to her roots that her hair had already died and turned gray.

“Is this actually a compliment, William?” Dr. von Rohr asked.

They had not yet been seated at their table, which was in a room with a frosted-glass wall. They’d entered the Kronenhalle from Rämistrasse. Dr. von Rohr, who was much taller than Jack’s father, purposely blocked any view he might have had of the mirror by the bar. They passed both the women’s and the men’s washrooms, which harbored more mirrors, but these mirrors were not within sight of the corridor they followed to their glassed-in room. (The mirror over the sideboard was in another part of the restaurant.)

William was looking all around, but he couldn’t see past Dr. von Rohr—he came up to her breasts—and Dr. Krauer-Poppe held his other arm. Jack followed them. His father was constantly turning his head and smiling at him. Jack could tell that his dad thought it was great fun to be escorted into a fancy restaurant like the Kronenhalle by two very good-looking women.

“If you weren’t so tall, Ruth,” William was saying to Dr. von Rohr, “I could get a look at the top of your head and see if that silver streak is dyed all the way down to your roots.”

“There’s just no end to your compliments, William,” she said, smiling down at him.

Jack’s dad patted the little purse Dr. Krauer-Poppe carried on her arm. “Got the sedatives, Anna-Elisabeth?” he asked.

“Behave yourself, William,” Dr. Krauer-Poppe said.

William turned and winked at Jack. Dr. Horvath had dressed Jack’s father in a long-sleeved black silk shirt; because William’s arms were long, but his body was small, every shirt looked too big on him. His silver shoulder-length hair, which was the same glinting shade of gray as Dr. von Rohr’s electric streak, added to the feminine aspect of his handsomeness—as did the copper bracelets and his gloves. His “evening” gloves, as William called them, were a thin black calfskin. The way his father bounced on the balls of his feet reminded Jack of Mr. Ramsey. As Heather had put it, William Burns was a youthful-looking sixty-four.

“Ruth, alas, is no fan of Billy Rainbow, Jack,” William said, as they were being seated.

“Alas, she told me,” Jack said, smiling at Dr. von Rohr, who smiled back at him.

“Even so,” Jack’s father said, clearing his throat, “I gotta say we’re with the two best-looking broads in the place.” (He really did have Billy Rainbow down pat.)

“You’re such a flatterer, William,” Dr. von Rohr told him.

“Have you had a look at Ruth’s purse?” Jack’s dad asked him, indicating Dr. von Rohr’s rather large handbag; it was too big to fit under her chair. “More like a suitcase, if you ask me—more like an overnight bag,” William said, winking at Jack. His father was outrageously suggesting that Dr. von Rohr had prepared herself for the possibility of spending the night at the Hotel zum Storchen with Jack!

“It’s not every day you meet a man who compliments a woman’s accessories,” Dr. von Rohr told Jack, smiling.

Dr. Krauer-Poppe didn’t look so sure, nor was she smiling; despite her supermodel attire, Dr. Krauer-Poppe’s dominant personality trait radiated medication.

Jack also knew that Dr. Krauer-Poppe was married, and she had young children, which was why his father had focused his embarrassing zeal for matchmaking on Jack and Dr. von Rohr. (She was no longer married but had been, Heather had said; she was a divorced woman with no children.)

“Jack’s been seeing a psychiatrist—for longer than I’ve known you two ladies,” William announced. “How’s that been going, Jack?”

“I don’t know if there’s a professional name for the kind of therapy I’ve been receiving,” Jack told them. “A psychiatric term, I mean.”

“It doesn’t need to have a psychiatric term,” Dr. Krauer-Poppe said. “Just describe it.”

“Well, Dr. García—she’s this truly wonderful woman in her early sixties, with all these children and grandchildren. She lost her husband some years ago—”

“Aren’t most of her patients women, Jack?” his dad interrupted. “I had that impression from one of those articles I read about the Lucy business—you remember that episode, the girl in the backseat of Jack’s car?” William asked his doctors. “Both she and her mother were seeing the same psychiatrist Jack was seeing! From the sound of it, you’d think there was a shortage of psychiatrists in southern California!”

“William, let Jack describe his therapy for us,” Dr. von Rohr said.

“Oh,” his father responded; it gave Jack a chill that his dad said, “Oh,” exactly the way Jack did.

“Well, Dr. García makes me tell her everything in chronological order,” Jack explained. Both doctors were nodding their heads, but William suddenly looked anxious.

“What things?” Jack’s father asked.

“Everything that ever made me laugh, or made me cry, or made me feel angry—just those things,” Jack told him.

Dr. Krauer-Poppe and Dr. von Rohr weren’t nodding their heads anymore; they were both observing William closely. The idea of what might have made his son laugh, or cry, or feel angry seemed to be affecting him.

His dad had moved his right hand to his heart, but his hand hadn’t come to rest there. He appeared to be inching his fingers over the upper-left side of his rib cage—as if feeling for something under his shirt, or under his skin. He knew exactly where to find it, without looking. As for what might have made William Burns laugh or cry, her name was Karin Ringhof—the commandant’s daughter. As for what might have made him cry and made him feel angry, that would have been what happened to her little brother.

“It sounds as if this therapy could be quite a lengthy endeavor,” Dr. Krauer-Poppe said to Jack, but she’d not taken her eyes from William’s gloved hand—black-on-black against his shirt, touching the tattoo she knew as well as Jack did.

The commandant’s daughter; her little brother

From the pained expression on his father’s face, Jack could tell that William had his index finger perfectly in place on the semicolon—the first (and probably the last) semicolon Doc Forest had tattooed on anyone.

“Your therapy sounds positively book-length,” Dr. von Rohr said to Jack, but her eyes—like those of her colleague—had never strayed from his father.

“You’re putting in chronological order everything that ever made you laugh, or made you cry, or made you feel angry,” his dad said, grimacing in pain—as if every word he spoke were a tattoo on his rib cage, or in the area of his kidneys, or on the tops of his feet, where Jack had seen his own name and his sister’s. All those places where Jack knew it hurt like Hell to be tattooed, yet William Burns had been tattooed there—he’d been marked for life everywhere it hurt, except for his penis.

“And has this therapy helped?” Dr. von Rohr asked Jack doubtfully.

“Yes, I think it has—at least I feel better than when I first went to see Dr. García,” he told them.

“And you think it’s the chronological-order part that has helped?” Dr. Krauer-Poppe asked. (In her view, Jack could tell, putting the highs and lows of your life in chronological order was not as reliable as taking medication.)

“Yes, I think so …” Jack started to say, but his father interrupted him.

“It’s barbaric!” William shouted. “It sounds like torture to me! The very idea of imposing chronological order on everything that ever made you laugh or cry or feel angry—why, that’s the most masochistic thing I’ve ever heard of! You must be crazy!”

“I think it’s working, Pop. The chronological-order part keeps me calm.”

“My son is obviously deluded,” William said to his doctors.

“Jack’s not the one in an institution, William,” Dr. von Rohr reminded him.

Dr. Krauer-Poppe covered her pretty face with her hands; for a moment, Jack was afraid that the word institution might have been a trigger. The Doc Forest tattoo on the upper-left side of his father’s rib cage was clearly a trigger, but a stoppable one—or so it appeared. Jack’s dad had returned both his hands to the table.

Just then their waiter materialized—a short man bouncing on the balls of his feet, as vigorously as William or Mr. Ramsey ever had, although the waiter was fat. He had a small mouth and an overlarge mustache, which seemed to tickle his nose when he spoke. “Was darf ich Ihnen zu Trinken bringen?” he inquired. (It sounded as if “What may I bring you to drink?” were all one word.)

“Fortuitous,” Jack’s father said, meaning the timely appearance of the waiter, but the waiter thought that William had ordered something.

“Bitte?” the waiter asked.

“Ein Bier,” Jack said—pointing to himself, to avoid further confusion. (“A beer.”)

“I didn’t know you drank!” his dad said with sudden concern.

“I don’t. You can watch me. I won’t finish one beer,” Jack told him.

“Noch ein Bier!” his father told the waiter, pointing to himself. (“Another beer!”)

“William, you don’t drink—not even half a beer,” Dr. von Rohr reminded him.

“I can have what Jack has,” William said, acting like a child.

“Not with the antidepressants. You shouldn’t,” Dr. Krauer-Poppe said.

“I can unorder the beer,” Jack suggested. “Das macht nichts.”

“Jack’s German will improve over time,” William said to his doctors.

“Jack’s German is fine, William,” Dr. von Rohr told him.

“You see? She likes you, Jack,” his father said. “I told you that was an overnight bag!”

The doctors, choosing to ignore him, ordered a bottle of red wine. William ordered a mineral water. Jack told the waiter that he’d changed his mind. Would the waiter bring them a large bottle of mineral water, please—and no beer?

“No, no! Have the beer!” William said, taking Jack’s hand in his gloved fingers.

“Kein Bier,” Jack said to the waiter, “nur Mineralwasser.” (“No beer, only mineral water.”)

Jack’s dad sat sulking at the table, making an unsteady tower of his knife and spoon and fork. “Fucking Americans,” William said. He looked up to see if that would get a rise out of his son. It didn’t. Dr. von Rohr and Dr. Krauer-Poppe gave each other a look, but they said nothing. “Don’t have the Wiener schnitzel, Jack,” his father continued, as if the menu, which he’d just that second picked up, had been all that was on his mind from the beginning.

“Why not, Pop?”

“They butcher a whole calf and put half of it on your plate,” William said. “And don’t have the Bauernschmaus,” he added. (A Bauernschmaus was a farmer’s platter of meats and sausages; it was very popular with Austrians and sounded like something Dr. Horvath would have ordered, but Jack could see that it wasn’t even on the Kronenhalle’s menu.) “And, above all, don’t have the bratwurst. It’s a veal sausage the size of a horse’s penis.”

“I’ll stay away from it, then,” Jack told him.

Dr. von Rohr and Dr. Krauer-Poppe were talking rapid-fire Swiss German. It was not the High German Jack had studied in school—Schriftdeutsch, the Swiss call it, meaning “written German.”

“Schwyzerdütsch,” Jack’s father said contemptuously. “They speak in Swiss German when they don’t want me to understand them.”

“If you didn’t talk about horses’ penises, maybe they wouldn’t have to talk about you, Pop.”

“I think you should find a new psychiatrist, Jack. Someone you can talk to about things as they come up—not necessarily in chronological order, for Christ’s sake.”

Jack was surprised by the for Christ’s sake, and not because it was exactly the way Jack always said it—he only occasionally said it—but because Jack had never said it in any of his films. (As Dr. Berger had told him, William had made quite a study of his son; as Dr. von Rohr had warned Jack, she didn’t mean only his movies.)

“Interesting what he knows, isn’t it?” Dr. von Rohr asked Jack.

The waiter—that timely, bouncing fat man—was back to take their orders. Jack’s father unhesitatingly ordered the Wiener schnitzel.

“William, I know how you eat—you can’t possibly eat half of it,” Dr. Krauer-Poppe said to him.

“I’m just like Jack with his one beer,” William said. “I don’t have to finish it. And I didn’t order the pommes frites that come with it—just the green salad. Und noch ein Mineralwasser, bitte,” he told the waiter. Jack was surprised to see that the liter bottle was empty.

“Slow down, William,” Dr. Krauer-Poppe said, touching the back of his black-gloved hand. William pulled his hand away from her.

The restaurant was lively, but not too crowded; their reservation was on the early side of when things get really busy at the Kronenhalle, or so the concierge had told Jack. But everyone in the restaurant had recognized Jack Burns. “Look around you, William,” said Dr. von Rohr—her voice as commanding as the silver-gray, lightning-bolt streak in her hair. “Be proud of your famous son.” But William wouldn’t look.

“And all these strangers who recognize Jack can’t help but see that you are his father—they are recognizing you, too, William,” Dr. Krauer-Poppe said.

“And what must they be thinking?” William asked. “ ‘There is Jack Burns’s old man with what must be his second or third wife’—that would be you, Ruth,” William said to Dr. von Rohr, “because you’re obviously the older of the two lovely ladies at this table, but you’re clearly not old enough to be Jack’s mother.”

“William, don’t—” Dr. Krauer-Poppe began.

“And what must they be thinking about you, Anna-Elisabeth?” William asked. “ ‘Who is that pretty young woman with the wedding ring? She must be Jack Burns’s date!’ They haven’t figured out the part about Ruth’s overnight bag.”

“Dad—”

“ ‘Pop’!” his father corrected him.

“Let’s just have a normal conversation, Pop.”

“Would that be the sex-with-prostitutes or the Hugo conversation?” William asked. Dr. Krauer-Poppe opened her purse with a snap. “Okay, I’ll stop. I’m sorry, Anna-Elisabeth,” Jack’s dad said.

“I was looking for a tissue, William. I have something in my eye,” Dr. Krauer-Poppe said. “I wasn’t even thinking about your medication; not yet.” She opened a small compact—it held a tiny mirror, no doubt, although Jack’s father couldn’t see it—and dabbed at the corner of her eye with a tissue.

“Perhaps we could talk about the time we all woke up at two in the morning and watched Jack win the Oscar!” Dr. von Rohr said, taking William’s gloved hand. He looked at her hand holding his as if she were a leper.

“You mean Emma’s Oscar, Ruth?” William asked her. “That screenplay had Emma written all over it. Didn’t it, Jack?”

Jack didn’t respond; he just watched Dr. von Rohr let go of his father’s hand. “When the food comes, William, I’ll help you take those gloves off,” she told him. “It’s better not to eat with them.”

“Ich muss bald pinkeln,” Jack’s dad announced. (“I have to pee soon.”)

“I’ll take him,” Jack told the two doctors.

“I think I should come with you,” Dr. von Rohr said.

“Nein,” William told her. “We’re boys. We’re going to the boys’ room.”

“Just behave yourself, William,” Dr. Krauer-Poppe warned him. Jack’s dad stuck his tongue out at her as he stood up from the table.

“If you’re not back in a few minutes, I’ll come check on you,” Dr. von Rohr said, touching Jack’s hand.

“Jack, your father cried when you won the Oscar—he cried and he cheered,” Dr. Krauer-Poppe said. “He was so proud of you—he is so proud of you.”

“I just meant that Emma must have helped him,” William said; he was indignant.

“You cried and cheered, William—we all did,” Dr. von Rohr replied.

It slowly registered with Jack, when he was walking with his father to the men’s room—that if they’d watched Jack Burns at the Academy Awards in 2000, his father had been in the Sanatorium Kilchberg for more than three years. No one, not even Heather, had told Jack how long William had been there.

“Of course Emma helped me, Pop,” Jack admitted. “She helped me a lot.”

“I didn’t mean I wasn’t proud of you, Jack. Of course I’m proud of you!”

“I know you are, Pop.”

In the men’s room, Jack tried to block his father’s view of the mirror, but William planted himself in front of the sink, not the urinal. They did a little dance. William tried to look over Jack’s shoulder at the mirror; when Jack stood on his toes to block his dad’s view, William ducked his head and peered around his son. They danced from side to side. It was impossible to prevent William from seeing himself in the mirror.

If mirrors were triggers, they didn’t affect Jack’s father in quite the same way as the word skin had. This time, he didn’t try to take off his clothes. But with every glimpse he caught of himself, his expression changed.

“Do you see that man?” Jack’s dad asked, when he saw himself. It was as if a third man were in the men’s room with them. “Things have happened to him,” his father said. “Some terrible things.”

Jack gave up trying to shield his dad and looked in the mirror, too. The third man’s face kept changing. Jack saw his father as William might have looked when he first caught sight of Jack as an infant, before the boy’s mother had whisked him away—a kind of expectancy giving way to wonder on William’s suddenly boyish-looking face. Jack saw what his father must have seen in a mirror that day in Copenhagen, when they pulled Niels Ringhof’s body from the Kastelsgraven—or when William learned that Alice had slept with the boy, and then abandoned him.

His dad was slumping in Jack’s arms, as if William wanted to kneel on the men’s room floor—the way he’d dropped to his knees at the waterfront in Rotterdam, when Els had to carry him to Femke’s car. Or when the policeman had brought Heather home—and the cop told William the story of how they’d mistaken Barbara, his dead wife, for a German tourist who looked the wrong way crossing the street at Charlotte Square.

“That man’s body is a map,” William said, pointing at the slumping man in the mirror. “Should we look at the map together, Jack?”

“Maybe later, Pop. Not now.”

“Nicht jetzt,” his father agreed.

“You said you had to pee, Pop,” Jack reminded him.

“Oh,” Jack’s father said, stepping away from his son. “I think I have.”

They both looked at his pants. William was wearing khaki trousers with the same pleats and sharply pressed pant legs that Professor Ritter favored, but William’s were stained dark; his feet were standing in a puddle of urine on the floor.

“I hate it when this happens,” his dad said. Jack didn’t know what to do. “Don’t worry, Jack. Dr. von Rohr will be coming to the rescue. What did you think her overnight bag was really for?” William turned abruptly away from the mirror—as if the third man in the mirror had insulted him, or made him feel ashamed.

Seemingly part of his father’s daily schedule, there came a head-of-department knock on the men’s room door. “Herein!” William called. (“Come in!”)

Dr. von Rohr’s long arm reached into the men’s room; she was offering Jack her oversize handbag without showing them her face. “Danke,” Jack said, taking the bag from her hand.

“It’s different when he sees himself in the mirror without his clothes,” she warned Jack, letting the door close.

Jack undressed his father and wiped his body down with paper towels, which he soaked in warm water; then he dried his dad off with more paper towels. William was as accepting of this treatment as a well-behaved child.

Jack was able to guide him out of sight of the mirror. But when William was standing there, naked—while Jack searched for the change of clothes in Dr. von Rohr’s big bag—a well-dressed gentleman entered the men’s room, and he and Jack’s father exchanged stares. To the gentleman, who looked like a middle-aged banker, Jack’s dad was a naked, tattooed man. To William Burns, if Jack could read his father’s indignant expression, the well-dressed banker was an intruder; moreover, he was intruding on a tender father-and-son moment. Furthermore, to the gentleman, William Burns was a naked, tattooed man with gloves on—and there was no telling what the gentleman might have made of the copper bracelets.

The banker gave Jack an overfamiliar, I-know-who-you-are look. (He had come to pee, but he’d walked into some twisted movie!)

“Er ist harmlos,” Jack said to the man, remembering what Nurse Bleibel had told poor Pamela. (“He’s harmless.”)

The banker clearly doubted this. Jack’s dad had filled his lungs and proceeded to puff out his chest like a rooster; he made two fists and held out his gloved hands.

Jack reached back for his Exeter German, hoping for the best. “Keine Angst. Er ist mein Vater,” he told the banker. (“Don’t be afraid. He’s my father.”) And this was the hard part: “Ich passe auf ihn auf.” (“I’m looking after him.”) The banker retreated, not believing a word of it.

Then the man was gone—the only actual third man to have momentarily shared the men’s room with Jack and his dad—and Jack dressed his father, trying to remember how efficiently and gently Dr. Horvath had dressed William in the clinic.

It seemed to soothe his dad to explain musical notes to Jack; William must have known that his son knew nothing about music. “Quarter notes are colored in, with stems,” his father told him. “Eighth notes are also colored in, with either flags or beams joining two or more together. Sixteenth notes are colored in, and they have a double beam joining them together.”

“What about half notes?” Jack asked.

“Half notes, which are white-faced—well, in my case, you could say flesh-colored,” his dad said; he abruptly stopped.

Flesh: they’d both heard it. But was it a trigger? (As unstoppable as skin, maybe, Dr. Horvath might have said.)

“Half notes, which are white-faced,” Jack prompted his father, to make him move on. “White-faced and what?”

“White-faced with stems,” Jack’s dad replied, haltingly—flesh perhaps flickering in the half-light, half-dark of his mind, where all the triggers lay half asleep or half awake. “Whole notes are white-faced and have no stems.”

“Stop! Hold everything,” Jack suddenly said, pointing to his father’s right side. “What’s that one?”

The tattoo was neither words nor music; it more closely resembled a wound in William’s side. Worse, at the edges of the gash, there was a blood-red rim—like a ring of blood. (As for the blood, Jack should have known, but he’d been only four at the time.)

“That is where Our Lord was wounded,” Jack’s father told him. “They put the nails in His hands,” he said, holding his black-gloved hands together, as if in prayer, “and in His feet, and here—in His side,” William said, touching the tattoo on the right side of his rib cage. “One of the soldiers pierced His side with a spear.”

“Who did the tattoo?” Jack asked his dad. Some scratcher, Jack expected him to say, but Jack should have known.

“There was a time, Jack, when every religious person in Amsterdam was at least tempted to be tattooed by a man named Jacob Bril. Maybe you were too young to remember him.”

“No, I remember Bril,” Jack said, touching the blood-edged gash in his dad’s side—then drawing his father’s shirt over the wound.

It was a great restaurant, the Kronenhalle. Jack had been foolish to order only a salad, but he ate two thirds of his father’s Wiener schnitzel. William Burns was a finicky eater.

“At least Jack brought his appetite to dinner, William,” Dr. Krauer-Poppe scolded him, but both William and Jack were in a fairly upbeat mood.

They had weathered the word flesh, which turned out to be in the stoppable category of triggers—not in the skin category—and while Jack had seen a third man’s sorrow on his father’s face, he knew that they had also escaped the men’s room without confronting the worst of what mirrors could do to his dad. It was different when William was naked in front of one, or so Dr. von Rohr had said. Jack guessed that was das ganze Pulver—all the ammunition, which Dr. Horvath had spoken of. Jack would get to see it one day, and that day would come soon enough. Tonight in the Kronenhalle, Jack was quite content to wait.

They talked briefly about the younger nurses at the Sanatorium Kilchberg. How they virtually stood in line, or took turns, to shave his dad every morning; how William was such a flirt.

“You don’t shave yourself?” Jack asked him.

“You try it, without a mirror,” his father said. “You should try it with the younger nurses, too, Jack.”

“If you don’t behave yourself, William, I’m going to put Waltraut in charge of shaving you,” Dr. von Rohr told him.

“Just so you don’t put Hugo in charge of it, Ruth,” Jack’s dad said.

That was how William managed to steer their conversation back to Hugo, and the sex-with-prostitutes subject. Dr. von Rohr, in her head-of-department way, was smart enough to see it coming, but she couldn’t prevent it.

“It is chiefly Hugo whom these lovely ladies object to, Jack,” his dad began, “not the prostitutes.” (Sighing from Dr. von Rohr, of course; the head-in-her-hands thing from Dr. Krauer-Poppe.)

“You said prostitutes—plural. You see more than one?” Jack asked his father.

“Not at the same time,” William said with that mischievous little smile of his. (Fork-twirling, spoon-spinning, knife-tapping from Dr. von Rohr’s part of the table—and Dr. Krauer-Poppe had something in her eye again.)

“I’m just curious to know, Pop, if you see the same two or three women—I mean one at a time—or a different prostitute each visit.”

“I have my favorites,” his father said. “There are three or four ladies I keep going back to.”

“You’re faithful in your fashion—is that what you mean, William?” Dr. Krauer-Poppe asked. “Isn’t there a song that goes like that?” (She’d had more red wine than Dr. von Rohr.) “Or have I got the translation all upfucked?”

“All fucked up, Anna-Elisabeth,” Dr. von Rohr corrected her.

“And it’s safe?” Jack asked his father.

“I don’t have sex with them, if that’s what you mean,” William answered, with that now-familiar tone of indignation in his voice.

“I know. I meant is it safe in every way?” Jack asked. “The place, for example. Is it dangerous?”

“I have Hugo with me!” his dad cried. “I don’t mean in the same room with me, of course.”

“Of course,” Jack said.

The silverware, which Dr. von Rohr had set in motion, came crashing down.

“Wait till you meet Hugo,” Dr. Krauer-Poppe told Jack. “Your father is safe with Hugo.”

“Then what is it you object to about him?” Jack asked both doctors.

“Wait till you meet him,” was all Dr. von Rohr would say.

“Don’t pity me, Jack,” his dad said. “Don’t think of me as resigning myself to masturbation with a prostitute. It isn’t an act of resignation.”

“I guess I don’t understand what it is,” Jack admitted.

They all saw William’s right hand reaching for his heart again; once more the fingers of his black-gloved hand inched their way toward that tattoo with the semicolon in it. (He had, with Dr. von Rohr’s assistance, removed the gloves to eat. But now that he’d finished his meal, the gloves were back on.)

“I have had women in my life that I wanted to have—if not for as long as I wish I’d had them,” William began sadly. “I couldn’t do that again. I can’t go through losing someone else.”

The doctors and Jack knew everything about the tattoo William Burns had for Karin Ringhof, and where it was. But Jack didn’t know if his father had a tattoo for Barbara, his German wife—or where it was, if he had it. Maybe that one was in the music; Jack would ask Heather about it.

“I get it, Pop. I understand,” Jack told him.

He wondered if William ever touched his rib cage on the other side, where Jacob Bril had pierced him and made him bleed. Jack wanted to know if that tattoo was ever as tender or sensitive to his father’s touch as the tattoo of the commandant’s daughter and her little brother. He hoped not. Of all his dad’s tattoos, Jacob Bril’s rendition of Christ’s blood was the only one with any color.

“It’s time for us to be going along, William,” Dr. Krauer-Poppe told him gently. “What are you going to play for us tomorrow—for Jack and me, and Dr. Horvath?”

It was a good trick, and Jack’s father seemed to be unaware of it. His right hand drifted away from the area of his heart and the upper-left side of his rib cage. He spread the fingers of his black-gloved hands on the white tablecloth—his feet shuffling under his chair, as if he were familiarizing himself with the foot pedals. You could see it in his eyes—there was a keyboard in his mind. There was an organ the size of the Oude Kerk in his heart; when Jack’s dad shut his eyes, he could almost hear it.

“You don’t expect me to hum it for you, do you, Anna-Elisabeth?” William asked Dr. Krauer-Poppe. She hadn’t fooled him, after all. In fact, she held her breath—as Jack and Dr. von Rohr did—because they all knew that hum was a possible trigger. As Dr. Berger had warned Jack, his father hated humming. (Although maybe it was the humming itself and not the word he hated.)

“Why not wait and surprise them in the morning, William?” Dr. von Rohr suggested. “I’m just asking.”

“Why not?” Jack’s dad said; he was looking tired.

“I have a little something to make you drowsy in the car,” Dr. Krauer-Poppe told William.

Jack’s dad was shaking his head; he was already drowsy. “I’m not going to be happy to say good-bye to Jack,” William said testily. “I’ve said good-bye to you before—too many times, dear boy. I’ve said good-bye to you here,” his father said, the gloved hand touching his heart again, “and here,” he said, pointing to his eyes, “and in here!” William was weeping now, holding his index finger to his temple.

“You’re going to see me in the morning, Pop.” Jack held his father’s face in his hands. “You’re going to see me again and again,” Jack promised him. “I intend to keep coming here. Heather and I are buying a house in Zurich.”

William instantly stopped crying and said: “You must be crazy! It’s one of the most expensive cities in the world! Ask Ruth, ask Anna-Elisabeth! Tell him!” he shouted at the women. “I don’t want my children to bankrupt themselves,” he moaned, wrapping both arms around his chest and hugging himself as if he were cold.

“Sehr bald wird ihm kalt werden,” Dr. von Rohr said to her colleague. (“Very soon he’ll feel cold.”)

“Mir ist nicht immer kalt,” Jack’s father argued. (“I don’t always feel cold.”)

Dr. Krauer-Poppe had stood up and put her hand on William’s shoulder; he sat shaking in his chair. “Open up, William,” she said. “If you take this, you won’t feel cold—you’ll just feel sleepy.”

Jack’s father turned his head and stuck his tongue out at her. (Jack realized that he might have misunderstood when his dad had done this before.) Dr. Krauer-Poppe put a pill on the tip of William’s tongue; she raised the water glass to his lips and he swallowed.

“I’ll just see if Hugo has the car here. He was supposed to,” Dr. von Rohr said, leaving the table.

“Professor Ritter has a home in one of those overpriced monstrosities across the lake from the sanatorium,” Jack’s father started up again, as soon as he’d swallowed the pill Dr. Krauer-Poppe had given him. “It’s in Zollikon or Küsnacht—one of those precious places.”

“It’s in Küsnacht, William—it’s very beautiful,” Dr. Krauer-Poppe assured Jack. “That side of the lake gets more sun.”

“My taxi driver told me,” Jack said.

“But do you know what it costs?” Jack’s father asked him. “Four million Swiss francs, and for what? A house of three hundred or four hundred square meters, and you pay more than three million dollars? That’s crazy!”

“The house has a view of the lake; it has a garden, too,” Dr. Krauer-Poppe explained. “The garden must be a thousand square meters, William.”

“It’s still crazy,” Jack’s dad said stubbornly; at least he wasn’t shivering. Dr. Krauer-Poppe stood behind William’s chair, massaging his shoulders. She was just waiting for the pill to kick in.

“William, Jack could buy a small house in town—something not that expensive,” Dr. Krauer-Poppe said. “I’m sure he doesn’t care if he can see the lake.”

“Everything in Zurich is expensive!” Jack’s father declared.

“William, you go shopping for clothes and prostitutes. What else do you go shopping for in Zurich?” Dr. Krauer-Poppe asked him.

“You see what I’m up against, Jack? It’s like being married!” his dad told him. William saw that Dr. von Rohr was back. “To both of them!”

“Believe it or not, Hugo’s here with the car,” Dr. von Rohr announced. “He actually remembered.”

“You’re too hard on poor Hugo,” William said to Dr. von Rohr. “Wait till you meet him, Jack. He’s a Herman Castro kind of fellow.”

A heavyweight, in other words—Jack could tell at first glance, when he saw Hugo hulking over the black Mercedes. Hugo was shining the hood ornament with the sleeve of his white dress shirt. He was attired more in the manner of a waiter than of either a limo driver or a male nurse, which he was. But—even in a long-sleeved white dress shirt—Jack could see that Hugo had the sculpted bulk of a bodybuilder.

Whereas his older sister, Waltraut—the other Nurse Bleibel—was short and stout, Hugo was unambiguously huge. He had made himself huge. He’d developed those powerful shoulders, and his bulging upper arms; he’d worked to make his neck nearly as big around as William’s waist. And Hugo had shaved his head, unfortunately—though it was not unthinkable that this might have been an improvement. His face had the flat, blunt purposefulness of a shovel. The one gold earring, signifying nothing, drew your attention to the fact that the other ear was missing a lobe. (An encounter with a dog in a nightclub, Jack’s dad had told him on their trip into Zurich from Kilchberg.)

“But don’t feel sorry for Hugo,” his father had said. “The dog got the worst of it.” (Hugo had killed the dog for eating his earlobe, Dr. Horvath would later tell Jack.)

It was easy to see what Dr. von Rohr and Dr. Krauer-Poppe held against Hugo. He was not the sort of young man women of education and sophistication liked, nor was he a man most women would feel attracted to. Alas, Hugo had not only the appearance of a bodyguard; he had the personality of one as well.

At Kilchberg, those younger nurses—the ones who stood in line to shave Jack’s father—wouldn’t have given Hugo the time of day. The older women there—Hugo’s sister and the doctors included—probably bossed him around. Hugo was a thug; he knew no other way to behave. But at least Jack had met someone who could tell him where a good gym was in Zurich, and Jack saw in their first meeting that Hugo doted on William.

For a young man who consorted with prostitutes, Hugo, by his association with a handsome older gentleman like William Burns, had doubtless upped his standing in that community of ladies.

“Hugo!” Jack’s father hailed the big brute, like an old friend. “I want you to meet my son, Jack—den Schauspieler.” (“The actor,” William called his son—exactly as he’d introduced Jack to everyone on the number one-sixty-one bus.)

William had insisted that Jack and Dr. von Rohr ride with him from Kilchberg into Zurich on the bus. Jack’s dad was proud of his knowledge of the public-transportation system, and he wanted Jack to see how he usually rode to and from the city—on his shopping trips with Waltraut, and his other shopping trips with Hugo. (The black Mercedes was for nighttime travel only.)

Most of the passengers on the bus seemed to know Jack’s father, and to all of them William had said: “I want you to meet my son, Jack—den Schauspieler.”

“I’ve seen all your movies,” Hugo said, introducing himself to Jack. “William and I have watched them together. They never get old!” he cried, shaking (and shaking) Jack’s hand.

Jack saw the look that passed between Dr. von Rohr and Dr. Krauer-Poppe—as if old were a trigger, maybe, or in certain contexts perhaps could be. But not this time. Jack’s dad was smiling—possibly swaying on his feet more than he was bouncing on them. (Either old was not a trigger or the pill that Dr. Krauer-Poppe had given William was taking effect.)

“I’m not saying good-bye to you, Jack,” his father told him. William put his arms around Jack’s neck; his head fell on Jack’s chest as lightly as a baby’s.

“You don’t have to say good-bye to Jack, William,” Dr. von Rohr said. “Just say ‘bis morgen’ to him.” (“Just say ‘until tomorrow’ to him.”) “You’re seeing him in the morning.”

“Bis morgen, Pop.”

“Bis morgen,” his dad whispered. “I am already imagining that I’m tucking you into bed, dear boy, or maybe you’re tucking me in.”

“I’m afraid it’s time for Hugo to tuck you in, William,” Dr. Krauer-Poppe told him.

“Oh, what joy,” Jack’s father said, releasing his son.

Jack kissed his father on the mouth—a dry kiss, just brushing his dad’s lips with his own lips tightly closed—the way Heather had taught him. William kissed Jack the same way.

“I know what you’ve been up to, dear boy. I can tell you’ve been kissing your sister!”

Jack took a chance, but he felt it was the right time. After all, Hugo and the two doctors were with them—in case anything went wrong.

“I love you, Pop,” Jack told his father, heedless of whether or not love was a trigger. “I love every inch of your skin. I really mean it.”

Hugo looked as if he might punch Jack. Dr. von Rohr and Dr. Krauer-Poppe closely watched William. How was skin going to affect him? they all wondered. Were they in unstoppable territory, or—in this context—was skin suddenly acceptable?

“Say that again, Jack,” his dad said. “I dare you.”

“I love you and every inch of your skin,” Jack told him.

William Burns put his black-gloved hands on his heart and smiled at Hugo and the doctors, not looking at Jack. “He’s got balls, hasn’t he?” his father asked them.

“That’s not an area of my expertise,” Dr. von Rohr answered.

“I just do medication, William,” Dr. Krauer-Poppe said.

But Jack’s father was fine. He was holding his heart because he wanted to feel it beating. “I love you and every inch of your skin, dear boy! Please don’t forget to call your sister.”

Suddenly William seemed exhausted. Hugo helped him into the backseat of the Mercedes, where William Burns looked as small as a child on his way to his first day of school. The bodybuilder had to buckle the seat belt for him, and—before he got into the driver’s seat—Hugo came up to Jack and shook (and shook) his hand again. Jack thought that Hugo might pull his arm off.

“You’ve got balls as big as der Mond,” Hugo told Jack. (“You’ve got balls as big as the moon.”) Then Hugo got in the car and they drove away.

“Bis morgen!” Dr. Krauer-Poppe called after them.

“Now I’m taking a taxi home,” Dr. von Rohr said. “I live in another part of the city,” she explained to Jack.

There was a taxi stand in the vicinity of the Bellevueplatz, where Dr. Krauer-Poppe and Jack waited with Dr. von Rohr until she found an available taxi. The two women kissed each other on both cheeks and said good night.

“I assure you, Jack, I was never struck by lightning,” Dr. von Rohr said, when they shook hands. “Not on my head, anyway. I think your father has hit me with a lightning bolt, not on my head but in my heart.”

Jack walked with Dr. Krauer-Poppe over the Quaibrücke; they walked back to the Hotel zum Storchen together. “Are you sure I can’t walk you home?” he asked her.

“I live near your hotel,” she said, “but you’d never find your way back. The streets are small and go every which way.”

“Your children are how old?” he asked her. It was a beautiful night, with the lights from the city winking up at them from the Limmat.

“They are ten and twelve, both boys,” Dr. Krauer-Poppe told him. “If I ever had to say good-bye to them, the way your father had to say good-bye to you, I would kill myself. Or, if I were lucky, I would be in a place like the Sanatorium Kilchberg. I don’t mean as a doctor.”

“I understand,” Jack said to her.

“I love your father and every inch of his skin,” she said, smiling.

“Will he ever get better?” Jack asked her.

“He can be much worse than he was with you tonight. He was on his best behavior for you,” she told him. “But he will neither get worse nor get better. William is what he is.”

“He’s very lucky to be with all of you, in Kilchberg,” Jack said to her.

“You have to thank your sister for that, Jack. She has made her share of sacrifices,” Dr. Krauer-Poppe told him. “Are you serious about buying a house here?”

“Yes, very serious,” he answered.

“My husband knows something about real estate—he can probably be of some help to you. I’m just in the medication business.”

They were back in the Weinplatz, in front of the Storchen.

“Are you sure—” Jack started to ask her again, about walking her home.

“Yes, I’m sure,” she interrupted him. “I’ll be home in bed while you’re still talking on the phone to Heather. Don’t forget to call her.”

But Dr. Krauer-Poppe stood there, not leaving. Jack could tell there was something more she wanted to say, but perhaps she felt that she didn’t know him well enough to say it.

“You’re not going home, Anna-Elisabeth?” he asked.

She covered her face with her hands again; for such a serious (and such a beautiful) woman, it was a curiously girlish gesture.

“What is it?” he asked her.

“It’s not my business—you have a psychiatrist,” she said.

“Please tell me what you’re thinking,” Jack said to her.

“I’m thinking that you should finish this chronological-order therapy,” she told him, “and when you do finish, you should ask your doctor about a little something she might give you. You just wouldn’t want to take this while you were still trying to put everything in chronological order.”

“You mean a pill?” he asked her.

“Yes, a pill,” Dr. Krauer-Poppe said. “It’s not unlike what we give your father, but it’s newer and a little different from Zoloft or Seropram. It’s Cipralex; it’s like the Seropram we give William, but this one has a new agent in it, escitalopram. You get a more rapid onset of action—a week compared to two or three weeks—and because of the higher potency, a normal dosage would be ten milligrams instead of twenty.”

“It’s an antidepressant?” Jack asked.

“Of course it is,” she said. “I think the brand name is Lexapro in the States, but Dr. García would know. With escitalopram, there were supposed to be fewer side effects. But not all studies have shown that this is true. You might not like the loss of libido, possible impotence, or prolonged ejaculation.” Dr. Krauer-Poppe paused to smile at him. “You definitely wouldn’t like what it might do to your ability to tell the story of your life in chronological order, Jack. So first finish what you’re telling Dr. García. Then try it.”

“Do you think I’m depressed, Anna-Elisabeth?”

“What a question!” she said, laughing. “If you’re putting in chronological order everything that ever made you laugh, or made you cry, or made you feel angry—and if you are truly leaving nothing out—then of course you’re depressed! I’m surprised you’re not in a place like the Sanatorium Kilchberg yourself, Jack. I don’t mean as a visitor.”

“But how will I know when I’m finished? It just goes on and on,” he said to her.

“You’ll know when you’re finished, Jack,” Dr. Krauer-Poppe said. “It ends when you feel like thanking Dr. García for listening to you. It ends when there’s someone else you feel like telling everything to—someone who isn’t a psychiatrist.”

“Oh.”

“Gott!” she said. “Who would have thought the way someone said, ‘Oh,’ could be genetic?”

Dr. Krauer-Poppe shook Jack’s hand; walking away, with her high heels somewhat unsteadily navigating the cobblestones, she called over her shoulder. “I’ll meet you right where you’re standing in the morning, Jack. I’ll take you to the church. William will come with Dr. Horvath.”

“Bis morgen!” he called to her. Then he went into the hotel and called his sister.

On the little pad of paper for messages—on the night table, next to the telephone—Jack recognized his handwriting in the morning.

Cipralex, 10 mg

(Lexapro in the States?)

Ask Dr. García

What had Professor Ritter said? “Your father has suffered losses.” The losses alone were enough to make anyone feel cold; maybe William’s tattoos had nothing to do with it.

The conversation with Heather had gone well; even though Jack woke her up, she was happy that he called.

“Well, I finally met him. It took long enough! I’ve been with him for several hours,” Jack began. “Dr. von Rohr and Dr. Krauer-Poppe and I took him out to dinner at the Kronenhalle. I met Hugo, of course—and all the others.”

“Just say it!” his sister yelled.

“I love him,” he told her quickly.

“That’s all you have to say, Jack,” she said; she started to cry.

“I love him and every inch of his skin,” Jack told her.

“My God—you didn’t say the word skin, did you?” she asked him.

“In the context of telling him I loved him, I got away with it,” Jack said. “He thought I had balls for saying it.”

“I’ll say you have balls!” Heather cried.

“There were just a few episodes—nothing too terrible,” he explained.

“There will always be episodes, Jack. I don’t need to hear about them.”

“Are you okay about the prostitutes?” he asked her.

“Are you okay about them, Jack?”

Jack told her that he was, all things considered. “He can’t get in trouble if Hugo’s with him,” was how he put it.

They talked about whether or not Jack should tell Miss Wurtz about the prostitutes. Jack was eager to call Caroline and tell her everything. (“Maybe not everything, Jack,” Heather had cautioned him. “Maybe save the prostitutes for a later conversation?”)

They asked themselves if Hugo—having lost part of one ear to a dog in a nightclub—could have conceivably done anything more preposterous than dangle a gold earring from his remaining earlobe. “Do you think Hugo wants to draw attention to the earlobe the dog bit off?” Heather asked Jack.

“He could have put the earring in the top part of the damaged ear, and not worn anything in the good one,” Jack suggested.

Heather wondered if Jack might meet the particular prostitutes their dad was in the habit of visiting—that is, if Hugo would introduce him. “Just to see if they’re nice, and to ask them to be nice to him,” Jack’s sister said.

“He has very little privacy as it is,” Jack said. They agreed that you have to give the people you love a little privacy, even if you’re afraid for their lives.

“Don’t you love them all?” she asked him. “I mean his doctors—even Professor Ritter.”

“Ah, well …” Jack started to say. “Of course I do!” he told her.

“Will you call me every day?” his sister asked.

“Of course I will! If I forget, you can call me collect,” he said.

She was crying again. “I think you’ve bought me, Jack. I’ve completely sold myself to you!” she cried.

“I love you, Heather.”

“I love you and every inch of your skin,” she said.

Jack told Heather how their dad had thrown a tantrum over how expensive Zurich was, and that the issue of his children buying a house there had struck him as crazy. (This objection from a man who had no idea how expensive the Sanatorium Kilchberg was—or that the money had run out to pay for his care, which was why Heather had contacted Jack in the first place!)

Jack and his sister also talked about mundane things—those things Jack had imagined he would never talk to anyone about. The specific details of the house they were going to share in Zurich, for example: the number of rooms they needed; how many bathrooms, for Christ’s sake. (Exactly as William would have said it.)

It seemed too obvious to put into words, but Jack realized that when you’re happy—especially when it’s the first time in your life—you think of things that would never have occurred to you when you were unhappy.

What a morning it was! First the light streaming into his room at the Storchen, then having coffee and a little breakfast in the café on the Limmat. Simple things had never seemed so complex, or was it the other way around? Jack was as powerless to stop what would happen next as he had been that fateful day William Burns impregnated Alice Stronach.

And standing in front of the Hotel zum Storchen—on the same cobblestones where Jack had stood when he’d called, “Bis morgen!” to her, in the Weinplatz—was that supermodel of medication, Dr. Anna-Elisabeth Krauer-Poppe. Once again, she was wearing something smashing; Jack could understand why she wore the lab coat in Kilchberg, just to tone herself down.

They walked uphill on the tiny streets to St. Peter; one day he would know the names of these streets by heart, Jack was thinking. Schlüsselgasse, opposite the Veltliner Keller, and Weggengasse—he would hear them in his head, like music.

“It’s a beautiful morning, isn’t it?” Dr. Krauer-Poppe asked him. She was nice about it, when she saw that he couldn’t speak. “St. Peter has the largest clock in Europe—a four-sided clock on its tower,” she told him, making small talk as they walked. “Would you like a tissue?” she asked, reaching into her purse. Jack shook his head.

The sun would dry the tears on his face, he wanted to tell her, but the words wouldn’t come. Jack kept clearing his throat.

By the blue-gray church, there was a small, paved square with lots of trees; there were plants in the window boxes of the surrounding shops and houses. Some construction workers were renovating what looked like an apartment building. The building was across the square from the church, and the workers were standing on the scaffolding—working away. A hammer was banging; two men were doing something complicated with a flexible saw. A fourth man was fitting pipes—to build more scaffolding, probably.

It was the pipefitter who first spotted Dr. Krauer-Poppe and waved to her. The three other workers turned to look at her; two of them applauded, one whistled.

“I guess they know you,” Jack said to Anna-Elisabeth, relieved that he had found his voice. “Or are they just like construction workers everywhere?”

“You’ll see,” she told him. “These workers are a little different.”

It seemed strange that there were people going into the church and it was not yet eight on a weekday morning. Was there some kind of mass? Jack asked Dr. Krauer-Poppe. No, the Kirche St. Peter was a Protestant church, she assured him. There was no mass—only a service every Sunday.

“We can’t keep them away,” Dr. Krauer-Poppe said. “St. Peter is open to the public.”

More people were walking up the broad, flat stairs to the church; they looked like locals, not tourists. Jack saw men in business suits, like the banker his dad had surprised in the men’s room at the Kronenhalle; he saw women with young children, and whole families. There were even teenagers.

“They all come to hear him play?” Jack asked Anna-Elisabeth.

“How can we stop them?” she asked. “Isn’t it what sells books and movies? What you call word of mouth, I think.”

The Kirche St. Peter was packed; there was standing room only. “You’re not going to sit down, anyway,” Dr. Krauer-Poppe told Jack. “And you’re going to leave, just before your father finishes. William doesn’t want you to see the end of it—not the first time.”

“The end of what?” Jack asked her. “Why would I leave before he finishes?”

“Please trust me,” Anna-Elisabeth said. “Klaus—Dr. Horvath—will take you outside. He knows the right moment.” She covered her face with her hands again. “We all know it,” she said, with her face hidden.

The stone floor of the church was polished gray marble. There were blond wooden chairs instead of pews, but the chairs stood in lines as straight as pews. The congregation faced front, with their backs to the organ—as if there were going to be an actual service, with a sermon and everything. Jack wondered why the audience didn’t turn their chairs around, so they could at least see the organist they had come to hear—so faithfully, as he now understood it.

The organ was on the second floor, to the rear of the church—above the congregation. The organ bench—what little Jack could see of it—appeared to face away from the altar. The organist looked only at the silver organ pipes, framed in wood, which towered above him.

How austere, Jack was thinking. The organist turns his back to the congregation, and vice versa!

A black urn of flowers stood beneath the elevated wooden pulpit. Above the altar was an inscription.

Matth. IV. 10.

Du solt anbätten

Den Herren deinen Gott

Und Ihm allein

dienen.

It was a kind of old-fashioned German. Jack had to ask Dr. Krauer-Poppe for a translation. “ ‘You shall worship the Lord your God and Him only you shall serve,’ ” she told him.

“I guess my dad is what you’d call a true believer,” Jack said.

“William never proselytizes,” Anna-Elisabeth said. “He can believe what he wants. He never tells me or anyone else what to believe.”

“Except for the forgiveness part,” Jack pointed out to her. “He’s pretty clear on the subject of my forgiving my mother.”

“That’s not necessarily religious, Jack,” Dr. Krauer-Poppe said. “That’s just common sense, isn’t it?”

She led Jack outside the church again, and they went in a door and up some stairs to the second floor—where the organ was. It was a smaller organ than Jack was used to seeing—very pretty, with light-colored wood. It had fifty-three stops and was built by a firm called Muhleisen in Strasbourg.

Jack looked down at the congregation and saw that even the people who were standing were facing the altar, not the organ. “Nobody wants to see, I guess,” he said to Anna-Elisabeth.

“Just leave with Dr. Horvath when he tells you,” Dr. Krauer-Poppe told him. “After William plays, he will need some ice water, and then the hot wax, and then more ice water. If you come out to Kilchberg in the late morning, maybe you can go jogging with him—and with Dr. Horvath. Later this afternoon, you can hear him play blindfolded—for the yoga class. Or you can watch one of your own movies with him!” she said excitedly. “Just leave when it’s time—okay? I’m not kidding.”

“Okay,” Jack said to her.

When Dr. Horvath and Jack’s father came up the stairs to the second floor, many people in the congregation turned their heads to look at William Burns. William was all business; he acknowledged no one, not even Jack. His dad just nodded at the organ. Jack felt Dr. Krauer-Poppe brush against his arm. Anna-Elisabeth wanted Jack to know that this was how William was before he played. (How had she put it the night before? “William is what he is.”)

There was no applause from the congregation to acknowledge him; there wasn’t a murmur, but Jack had never heard such a respectful silence.

Dr. Horvath was carrying the music. (There was what looked like a lot of music.) “Normally he plays for one hour,” Dr. Horvath whispered loudly in Jack’s ear. “But today, because you’re here, he’s playing a half hour longer!”

Naturally, Dr. Krauer-Poppe overheard him; perhaps everyone in the congregation could hear Dr. Horvath whisper. “Do you think that’s a good idea, Klaus?” Anna-Elisabeth asked Dr. Horvath.

“Is there a pill to make me stop?” Jack’s father asked Dr. Krauer-Poppe, but Jack could tell that his dad was just teasing her; his mischievous smile was intact. When William sat down on the organ bench, he looked into Jack’s eyes—as if Jack had told him, at that very moment, how much he loved him and every inch of his skin. “Did you remember to call your sister, Jack?” his dad asked him.

“Of course I called her. We talked and talked.”

“Dear boy,” was all William said. His eyes had drifted to the keyboard; Jack could hear his father’s feet softly brushing the pedals.

Anna-Elisabeth had taken the music from Dr. Horvath and was looking through it. “I see finger-cramping possibilities, William—lots of them,” she told him.

“I see music,” William said, winking at her. “Lots of it.”

Jack was nervous and counted the chandeliers. (They were glass and silver; he counted twenty-eight of them.)

“Later we’ll go jogging!” Dr. Horvath told Jack. “I’m going to dinner with you and William tonight. We’ll give the girls the night off!”

“Great—I’m looking forward to it,” Jack told him.

“Unfortunately, it’s not the Kronenhalle,” Dr. Horvath said. “But it’s a special little place. The owner knows me, and he loves your father. They always cover the mirrors when they know William’s coming!” Dr. Horvath whispered—for everyone to hear. “How brilliant is that?”

“Bitte, Klaus!” Dr. Krauer-Poppe said.

Jack could see that she was going to turn the music for his dad, who appeared ready to play. No one in the congregation was looking in their direction now. The congregation faced that stern command from the Gospel According to Saint Matthew: “You shall worship the Lord your God and Him only you shall serve.”

William held his hands at shoulder level, above the keyboard. Jack heard him take a deep breath. By the way the congregation straightened their backs, Jack could tell that they’d heard his father, too—it was a signal.

“Here comes!” said Dr. Horvath; he bowed his head and closed his eyes.

William’s hands appeared to be floating on a body of warm, rising air—like a hawk, suspended on a thermal. Then he let his hands fall. It was a piece by Bach, a choral prelude—“Liebster Jesu, wir sind hier.” (“Blessed Jesus, We Are Here.”)

“Tranquillo,” Dr. Horvath said with surprising softness, in Italian.

After that, Jack just listened to his father play. Jack couldn’t believe how William kept playing, or how no one in the congregation left—how they never moved a muscle. They were standing, Dr. Horvath and Jack—Dr. Krauer-Poppe stood the whole time, too. Jack couldn’t speak for the others, but his legs didn’t get tired; he just stood there, absorbing the sound. William Burns played on and on—all his favorites. (What Heather had called “the old standards.”)

William played for over an hour. They heard Handel, and everyone else. When his dad began Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor—the famous piece that had been such a crowd-pleaser among the prostitutes in the Oude Kerk in Amsterdam—Dr. Horvath nudged Jack.

“We are almost leaving,” Dr. Horvath said.

Naturally, Jack didn’t want to go, but he saw that Anna-Elisabeth was watching him. Jack trusted her; he trusted them all. It was a hard piece of music to go down the stairs to, but Dr. Horvath and Jack quietly descended. His father was too busy playing to see them go.

It was warm in the church; all the doors were open, and the windows that would open were open, too. The sound of the Bach poured into the little square; it came outdoors with them. The Bach was not as loud outside—in the trees, or on the stone stairs leading away from the church—but you could hear every note of it, almost as clearly as you could hear it in St. Peter.

That was when Jack saw all the people in the open windows and doorways of the surrounding buildings. Everywhere he looked, there were people—just listening.

“Of course it’s not quite like this in the winter!” Dr. Horvath was saying. “But still they come to hear him play.”

Jack stood at the bottom of the church stairs, in the middle of the little square—just listening and looking at all the people. There wasn’t a sound from the construction workers, who had long ago stopped working. They were standing at attention on the scaffolding, their tools at rest—just listening. The man who’d been wielding the hammer had his shirt off; the two men who’d been working with the flexible saw were smoking. The fourth worker, the pipefitter, held a small piece of pipe in one hand—like a baton. He was pretending to be a conductor, conducting the music.

“Those clowns!” Dr. Horvath said. He looked at his watch. “No finger-cramping episodes so far!”

The Bach sounded like it was winding up, or down. “There’s more?” Jack asked. “Another piece after this?”

“One more,” Dr. Horvath said, nodding.

Jack realized, from the way they were standing, that the construction workers on the scaffolding knew the program as well as Dr. Horvath knew it; they looked as if they were getting ready for something.

Suddenly the Bach was over. It happened simultaneously with a puzzling exodus—families with children were leaving the church. Some of the mothers with younger children were running; only the adults and the teenagers stayed.

“Cowards!” Dr. Horvath said contemptuously; he kicked a stone. “Get ready, Jack. I’ll see you later—for some jogging!” Jack realized that Dr. Horvath was preparing to leave him.

Jack also realized that he knew the last piece. In his case, he’d just heard Heather play it in Old St. Paul’s. How could he ever forget it? It was Boellmann’s horror-movie Toccata. The construction workers knew the Boellmann, too—perhaps William Burns always played it last. The construction workers clearly knew everything that was coming.

It wasn’t at all like not being able to hear it, when Jack had stood outside Old St. Paul’s. What poured out of the Kirche St. Peter was deafening. Jack was not familiar enough with the Boellmann to detect his father’s first mistake, the first finger-cramping episode, but Dr. Horvath obviously heard it; he winced and made a fist of one hand, as if he’d just shut his fingers in a car door. “Time for me to go back inside!” Dr. Horvath cried.

There came a second mistake, and a third; now Jack could hear the errors.

“His fingers?” he asked Dr. Horvath.

“You can’t believe how the Boellmann hurts him, Jack,” Dr. Horvath said, “but he can’t stop playing.”

Jack thought of those prostitutes within hearing distance of the Oude Kerk, no matter how late at night or how early in the morning; now he knew why they couldn’t go home if William Burns was playing.

At the fourth mistake, Dr. Horvath was off running. “I like to be there when he starts undressing!” he called to Jack, taking the stairs three at a time.

The music raged on—the soundtrack for a chase scene to end all chase scenes, Jack imagined. In his next movie, there might be such a scene. Maybe he could get his dad to play the Boellmann—mistakes and all.

The errors, even Jack could tell, were mounting. The construction workers were poised on the scaffolding.

“I have a son!” Jack heard his father yell, over the deteriorating toccata. “I have a daughter and a son!” his dad shouted. Then William’s fingers locked—his fists came crashing down on the keyboard. A flock of pigeons exploded from the clock tower of the Kirche St. Peter, and the construction workers started singing.

“I have a son!” they sang; they had even learned English, listening to William Burns. “I have a daughter and a son!” they sang out. They had more enthusiasm than talent, but Jack had to love them.

“Venite exultemus Domino!” his father sang, the way you would sing or chant a psalm.

One might assume that ordinary construction workers in Zurich wouldn’t necessarily know Latin, but this wasn’t the first time these men had listened to William Burns, and—as Anna-Elisabeth had told Jack—these workers were a little different.

“Venite exultemus Domino!” the four workers sang back to Jack’s father.

The man who’d earlier been hammering now held his hammer in one hand, his arm high above his head; the two workers with the flexible saw held it aloft, as if they were offering a sacrifice. The pipefitter had seized a long length of pipe, which he held straight up—like a flagpole.

“Venite exultemus Domino!” Jack’s dad and the workers sang out, together.

Jack knew the Latin only because he’d just been at Old St. Paul’s with his sister. “Come let us praise the Lord!” their father was singing. “I have a son. I have a daughter and a son! Come let us praise the Lord!”

The construction workers went on singing with William.

People were coming out of the church—now that the Boellmann no longer thundered on, now that there was no impending collision. Jack knew that his dad had taken off all his clothes, or he was in a partly undressed phase of the process. Back at the Sanatorium Kilchberg, Nurse Bleibel—either Waltraut or Hugo—would be getting the ice water ready. And then the hot wax, and then more ice water—as Anna-Elisabeth had explained.

Soon William Burns would be standing naked in the Kirche St. Peter, if he wasn’t naked already—his full-body tattoos his only choir. And then, both gently and efficiently, Dr. Horvath would begin to dress him—or both Dr. Horvath and Dr. Krauer-Poppe would dress him. After that, they would be on their way—back to the clinic.

The concert was over, but the construction workers were still applauding. That was when Jack knew that he and his father had always been playing to an audience of more than one—although it had helped Jack, as a child, to believe that he was performing only for his father. (Jack and his dad would have to have a conversation about William’s dispute with The Wurtz over the word audience—that and many other conversations.)

Jack walked away from the square, down those narrow streets. Some of his father’s congregation were in the streets; they walked along with him. It was quite a wonderful feeling to know that Zurich was where Jack belonged, at least until William Burns was sleeping in the needles.

Jack was thinking that he would go back to the Hotel zum Storchen and change into something more suitable for jogging.

It was after midnight in Los Angeles—too late to call Dr. García at home. But Jack didn’t need to have a conversation with his psychiatrist. He would call her office and leave a message on her answering machine. “Thank you for listening to me, Dr. García,” Jack would tell her.

It was four-thirty in the morning in Toronto, or some ungodly hour like that. Caroline would still be sleeping, but she wouldn’t mind a wake-up call from Jack—not if it was about his father, her dear William. In fact, Jack couldn’t wait to tell Miss Wurtz that he had found him.