Authors: John Irving
Ritva was the regular organist at the principal Sunday service, but Hannele often accompanied her. Jack had inquired if much music had been written for organ and cello—he certainly hadn’t heard any—but the woman from Sibelius Academy said that Ritva and Hannele were famous for being “improvisational.” They were a most improvisational
couple,
Jack had already imagined. Indeed, if they’d both slept with Alice—yet they’d managed to stay a couple, as Ingrid Moe had told Jack—Hannele and Ritva were no strangers to successful experimentation.
Even their rehearsals were famous. People often went to the Church in the Rock during their lunch break just to hear Hannele and Ritva
practice.
Jack imagined that it wouldn’t be easy to speak with them in such an atmosphere; in those surroundings, Hannele and Ritva and Jack were too well known to be afforded any privacy. Maybe he should just show up at the church in the early afternoon and invite them to dinner.
Jack was finishing his workout on the ab machine in the gym when his thoughts were interrupted. About half a dozen sweaty women from the pregnancy-aerobics class had surrounded him; Jack guessed that their workout, their dangerous-looking bouncing, was over. Given his Michele Maher state of mind—not to mention his disturbing memories of the
Schwangere Girls
magazine—these pregnant women were an intimidating presence.
“Hi,” he said, from flat on his back.
“Hi,” the aerobics instructor replied. She was a dark-haired young woman with an arresting oval face and almond-shaped eyes. Because her back had been turned to him during the aerobics class, Jack hadn’t noticed that she was pregnant, too; he’d watched her lead the leaping women from behind.
“You look like Jack Burns, that
actor,
” the most pregnant-looking of the women said. Jack wouldn’t have been surprised to learn, later, that these were her last words before going into labor.
“But you can’t be—not if you’re here,” another of the women said doubtfully. “You just
look
like him, right?”
“It’s a curse,” Jack told them bitterly. “I can’t help it that I look like him. I
hate
the bastard.” It was the last line that gave him away; it was one of Billy Rainbow’s lines. In the movie, Jack said it three times—not once referring to the same person.
“It’s
him
!” one of the women cried.
“I
knew
you were Jack Burns,” the most pregnant-looking woman told him. “Jack Burns always gives me the creeps, and
you
gave me the creeps the second I saw you.”
“Well, then—I guess that settles it,” Jack said. He was still lying on his back; he hadn’t moved since he’d noticed them surrounding him.
“What movie are you making here? Who else is in it?” one of them asked.
“There’s no movie,” he told them. “I’m just in town to do a little research.”
One of the pregnant women grunted, as if the very thought of what
research
Jack Burns might be doing in Helsinki had given her her first contraction. Half the women walked away; now that the mystery was solved, they were no longer interested. But the aerobics instructor and two other women stayed, including the most pregnant-looking woman.
“What kind of research is it?” the aerobics instructor asked him.
“It’s a story that takes place in the past—twenty-eight years ago, to be exact,” Jack told them. “It’s about a church organist who’s addicted to being tattooed, and the woman whose father first tattooed him. They have a child. There’s more than one version of what happened, but things didn’t work out.”
“Are you the organist?” the most pregnant-looking woman asked.
“No, I’m the child—all grown up, twenty-eight years later,” he told them. “I’m trying to find out what really happened between my mother and father.”
The pregnant woman who hadn’t yet spoken said: “What a depressing story! I don’t know why they make movies like that.” She turned and walked away—probably she was going to the women’s locker room. The most pregnant-looking woman waddled after her. Jack was left alone with the aerobics instructor.
“You didn’t say you were doing a little research for a
movie,
did you?” she asked him.
“No, I didn’t,” he admitted. “This research isn’t for a movie.”
“Maybe you need a
guide,
” she said. She was at least seven months pregnant, probably eight. Her belly button had popped; like an erect nipple, it poked out against the spandex fabric of her leotard. “I meant to say a
date.
”
“I’ve never had a pregnant date,” Jack told her.
“I’m not married—I don’t even have a boyfriend,” she explained. “This baby is kind of an experiment.”
“Something you managed all by yourself?” he asked.
“I went to a sperm bank,” she answered. “I had an anonymous sperm donor. I kind of forget the insemination part.”
From flat on his back on the ab machine, Jack made one of those too-hasty decisions that had characterized his sexually active life. Because he’d imagined that he wanted to be with
someone
who was pregnant, Jack chose to be with the pregnant aerobics instructor at the Motivus gym—this instead of even
trying
to make a dinner date with Hannele and Ritva, the lesbian couple who were the reason for his coming to Helsinki in the first place.
Jack rationalized that what he might learn from the organist and cellist, who were a couple when his mother and father knew them—and they were still a couple—was in all likelihood something he already knew or could guess. Jack’s mother had somehow misrepresented them to him; they had slept with her, not his dad. Of course there would be other revelations of that kind, but nothing that couldn’t be said over coffee or tea—nothing so complicated that it would require a dinner date to reveal.
Jack decided to go to the Church in the Rock about the time Hannele and Ritva would be finishing their rehearsal. He would suggest that they go somewhere for a little chat; surely that would suffice. Jack thought there was no reason
not
to spend his last night in Helsinki with a pregnant aerobics instructor. As it would turn out, there
was
a reason, but Jack was responding to an overriding instinct familiar to far too many men—namely, the desire to be with a certain
kind
of woman precluded any reasonable examination or in-depth consideration of the aerobics instructor herself, whose name was Marja-Liisa.
They made a date, which was awkward because they had to get a pen and some paper from the reception desk; other people were watching them. Marja-Liisa wrote out her name and cell-phone number for him. She was clearly puzzled by what Jack wrote out for her
—Jimmy Stronach, Hotel Torni—
until he explained the business of always registering under the name of the character he plays in his next movie.
When Jack left the gym and returned to the Torni, he went first to that porn shop where he’d seen the unlikely but alluring
Schwangere Girls
in the window. He took the magazine back to his hotel room—just to look at the pictures, which were both disturbing and arousing.
When Jack left the hotel for the Church in the Rock, he threw the disgusting magazine away—not in his hotel room but in a wastebasket in the hall opposite the elevator. Not that you can really throw pictures like those away—not for years, maybe not
ever.
What those pregnant women were doing in those photographs would abide with Jack Burns in his grave—or in Hell, where, according to Ingrid, you were deaf but you could see everyone you ever knowingly hurt. You just couldn’t hear what they were saying about you.
Since that afternoon in Helsinki, Jack could imagine what Hell might be like for him. For eternity, he would watch those pregnant women having uncomfortable-looking sex. They would be talking about him, but he couldn’t hear them. For eternity, Jack could only guess what they were saying.
To Jack, the dome of Temppeliaukio Church looked like a giant overturned wok. The rocks, which covered all but the dome, had a pagan simplicity; it was as if the dome were a living egg, emerging from the crater of a meteor. The apartment buildings surrounding the Church in the Rock had an austere sameness about them. (Middle-class housing from the 1930s.)
There were more rocks inside the church. The organist sat in view of those people on the left side of the congregation. The empty, rounded benches—for the choir—occupied a center-stage position. Choirs were important here. The copper organ pipes were very modern-looking against the darker and lighter woods. The pulpit was surrounded by stone; Jack thought it looked like a drinking fountain.
In the early afternoon, he sat and listened to Hannele and Ritva—Ritva in profile to him, on the organ bench, Hannele facing him with her legs wide apart, straddling her cello. A small audience quietly came and went while the two women practiced. Jack could tell that Hannele had recognized him as soon as he sat down; she must have been expecting him, because she merely smiled and nodded in his direction. Ritva turned once to look at Jack; she smiled and nodded, too. (The lady he’d spoken to at Sibelius Academy must have forewarned Hannele and Ritva that Jack Burns was looking for them.)
It wasn’t all church music—at least not the usual church music. As a former Canadian, Jack recognized Leonard Cohen’s “If It Be Your Will”—not that he was used to hearing it played on organ and cello. As an American, Jack also recognized Van Morrison’s “Whenever God Shines His Light on Me.” Hannele and Ritva were very good; even Jack could tell that their playing together had become second nature. Of course he was predisposed to like them. Jack gave them a lot of credit in advance, just for surviving whatever assault his mom might have made on them as a couple.
Jack also listened to them rehearse two traditional pieces—“Come, Sing the Praise of Jesus” and “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel.” The latter was an Advent hymn, and both hymns were better known in Scotland than in Finland, Hannele and Ritva told Jack later. But the hymns, they said, had been particular favorites of his father’s.
“William taught us those two,” Ritva said. “We don’t care that it isn’t the month before Christmas.”
They were having tea in Hannele and Ritva’s surprisingly beautiful and spacious apartment in one of those gray, somber buildings encircling the Church in the Rock. Hannele and Ritva had combined two apartments overlooking the dome of Temppeliaukio Church. Like the church, their apartment was very modern-looking—sparsely furnished, with nothing but steel-framed, black-and-white photographs on the walls. The two women, now in their late forties, were good-humored and very friendly. Naturally, they were not as physically intimidating as they’d seemed to Jack at four.
“You were the first woman I ever saw with unshaven armpits,” he told Hannele. The astonishing hair in Hannele’s armpits had been a darker blond than the hair on her head, although Jack didn’t mention this detail—nor the birthmark over Hannele’s navel, like a crumpled top hat the color of a wine stain, the shape of Florida.
Hannele laughed. “Most people remember my birthmark, not my armpits, Jack.”
“I remember the birthmark, too,” he told her.
Ritva was enduringly short and plump, with long hair and a pretty face. She still dressed all in black, like a drama student. “I remember how you fell asleep, Jack—how hard you were trying not to!” Ritva told him.
He explained that he’d thought, at the time, they had come for their half-a-heart tattoos because they’d both slept with his
father.
“With
William
?” Hannele cried, spilling her tea. Ritva could not stop laughing.
They were the kind of gay women who were so comfortable with each other that they could flirt unselfconsciously with him, or with other young men, because they were confident that they wouldn’t be misunderstood.
“I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised,” Hannele said. “William told us that your mom was capable of telling you
anything,
Jack. Ritva and I underestimated how far she would go.”
Hannele explained that her relationship with Ritva was new and still uncommitted when Jack’s mother had first hit on them; the young music students had even discussed sleeping with Alice as a kind of test of their relationship.
“It was 1970, Jack,” Ritva said, “and Hannele and I were young enough to imagine that you could treat any relationship as an experiment.”
William had warned them about Alice; he’d told Hannele and Ritva her history. Yet the girls had imagined that if they
both
were “unfaithful” with Jack’s mother, they wouldn’t hurt each other.
“It hurt us more than we expected,” Hannele told Jack. “We decided to hurt your mother back. The tattoo we shared was a symbol of how we had hurt each other—a reminder to
not
be unfaithful to each other again, a reminder of what sleeping with your mom had cost us. And we let her know that we were
brave
enough to sleep with anybody—even with William.”
“Of course we
wouldn’t
have slept with William, Jack—not that your father would have slept with either of us,” Ritva said. “But your mom was extremely sensitive about anyone your dad
might
sleep with, and it wasn’t hard to convince her that Hannele and I were lawless.”
“We even flirted with you, Jack—just to piss her off,” Hannele said.
“Yes, I remember that part,” Jack told them.
Their half-a-heart tattoos had been torn apart vertically; both women were tattooed on their heart-side breasts.
“You have eyelashes to die for, Jack,” Hannele had told him. Under the covers, her long fingers had lifted his pajama top and stroked his stomach. When she was sleeping beside him, he’d almost kissed her.
“Go to sleep, Jack,” his mom had told him.
“Tell me about the ‘Sweet dreams’ part,” Jack asked Hannele and Ritva in their beautiful apartment. It was growing dark outside; the lights shone through the dome of the Church in the Rock like a fire burning windows in an eggshell. (Jack remembered that he’d thought “Sweet dreams” was something his dad probably said to all of his girlfriends.)