Until I Find You - Page 233

"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 Salome, 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. Garcia--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. Garcia 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 drie

d 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!"

Tags: John Irving Fiction
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