Authors: John Irving
“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
W
hen 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.