Jaime dragged herself up the steps after Charlie let her off with a grin and a “See ya!” She did not get over to North Beach that often. She knew it was where most of the writers hung out, and for that reason she tried to avoid it. But there was a fascination, she had to admit. Charlie was attractive, too, but much too old for her, there were already wrinkles around the corners of his eyes. Pale eyes. Pale brown, almost green. Nice eyes. And he wrote well, though messily and with some of the worst spelling she’d ever seen. Somehow his terrible spelling made her feel good. She was one of those people who could spell.
She loved her front door. It was a thick heavy door, painted white, with a massive old brass decorated doorknob and a brass knocker just below the beveled glass windows. It was substantial, a door of respect. Jaime opened it with her Schlage key of respect. Inside, as usual, the house was cool and quiet, smelling of fresh flowers and floor wax. “Mom?” No answer. Her mother was out playing bridge. That was fine. Jaime loved having the place to herself. Her brother, now twenty-five, was living in Taipan, working for the government, and Jaime had taken his room, upstairs overlooking the backyard. She trudged up the stairs holding her books to her chest. The wallpaper showed country scenes, hunting scenes, from Victorian England, she supposed. The stairs were carpeted with a Persian runner and the hand railing was polished dark wood. All so respectable. There was even a chandelier of real crystals in the front hall. Why did Charlie’s monastic little apartment make her feel jealous?
Her room was bigger than Charlie’s whole apartment, with neat twin beds side by side, a little desk with her Hermes portable typewriter, an overstuffed chair covered in a flowered print, and a bridge lamp behind it where she sat and read. She had her own bookshelves, which of course couldn’t compete with her parents’ grand library downstairs, with the Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck, and Fitzgerald first editions in their glass cabinet, and the big signed Picasso etching over the funny purple brick fireplace. Riches she found herself rejecting, in favor of Charlie’s freedom.
What would she ever be able to write about? She took out her midterm blue books. B+. Maybe she wasn’t as talented as she’d hoped. Walter Van Tilburg Clark ought to know. He was the most respected of the writer-teachers at State. He had written The Ox-Bow Incident, a classic western story Jaime didn’t happen to like very much, even though it was beautifully written. She liked instead Clark’s story about Hook the Hawk. She had heard around school that Clark had thrown the finished story into his wastebasket, and his wife had fished it out and sent it to the Atlantic Monthly, and that he had also thrown away the final draft of Ox-Bow, which his wife dutifully fished out of the wastebasket and sent to Random House. Clark apparently suffered from these bouts of depression, where he thought his work stank badly enough to throw away. Jaime knew the feeling. In fact, it was coming over her now.
She heard the thump of the front door and assumed her mother was home. She undressed and was walking naked down the hall to take her shower when she saw her father coming up the stairs. She shrieked and ran back into her bedroom. “Daddy!” she screamed. With the door safely shut she gathered her wits and laughed. I’m so cool, she thought. Properly dressed in her old pink chenille bathrobe she ventured out of her room again. Her father was in the master bedroom, lying on the bed, fully dressed except for his jacket. He lay on his back, looking at the ceiling. He was a short plump man with round rimmed silver glasses, blue-and-white-striped shirt, a bright red knit tie, yellow-and-green-striped suspenders, oxford gray pants, and cordovan wingtip shoes buffed to a creamy shine. Jaime loved her father, but she knew he was drunk. Otherwise, why would he be home?
“I’m sorry I screamed at you,” she said.
He did not look at her. Instead he pursed his lips tightly and breathed heavily through his nose. The heavy smell of liquor floated through the room.
“Day off?” she asked brightly.
“I got fired,” her father said grimly. Jaime laughed and went into the bathroom to take her shower. She had the water running and was just stepping in when she realized he was not being sarcastic. He really had been fired. In an instant she saw it all going up in smoke, the house, the family, college, her career. Her father had been fired. Probably for being a drunk, although up to now she had assumed that most reporters were drunk most of the time. But maybe her father was an especially drunken reporter. She’d never gone down to see for herself, but she had heard about the long afternoons and evenings at Hanno’s, the bar in the alley behind the paper. Drunken reporters sitting around talking about sports and Hemingway. Her father right in the middle. Until now.
The fear lived in her stomach. She let the hot water hit her neck. She was nineteen. Could she get a job? Would she have to, to help support her old parents? Maybe her mother could get a job. Her mother had worked. She could work again. Jaime soaped her breasts and wondered if she could get a job as a call girl. She imagined herself walking down a hotel corridor, dressed in slut clothes, knocking at a numbered door. And having the door open to reveal a grinning Charlie Monel. No. She knew she could not work as a prostitute, not even for the experience. Not even for the money.
At dinner her father explained. He had napped, gotten up, drunk a couple of cups of coffee and then a Martini before dinner, and now he was charming and relaxed. Apparently he’d been fired in some sort of mix-up.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I have a grievance I can bring up before the Guild, I have my severance, we won’t be out on the street, and besides, I can always get a job at the Examiner. The Examiner’s been after me for years. Nothing to worry about. I’m sick of Abe and his goddamn nonsense anyway. It’s time I moved on.”
By the end of dinner he was talking about finishing his novel. This was very upsetting for Jaime, who remembered all her father’s stories about the great novel he would write, which would move them over the hill and into the real Pacific Heights. As a child she had ransacked his desk and everywhere else in the house, and she never saw any novel manuscript. Perhaps he kept it in his desk at the Chronicle. Perhaps he hid it in a tree trunk in the backyard. Perhaps it didn’t exist.
“Excuse me from the table, please,” she said, and went upstairs and threw herself on her bed. She could hear her mother and father bellowing at each other. She wondered what their net worth was. Did they have enough to survive, or was her father lying again? She heard them coming up the stairs, still arguing, and then in their bedroom changing and arguing. Her parents argued a lot, usually about unimportant things, things outside their lives, politics mostly. They were left-wing Marxists, Trotskyites, believers in World Revolution Now. Although, as Jaime had noticed and commented on, they were perfectly willing to live off the blood of the peasants a little while longer, perhaps just until the revolution was complete, when they would all presumably go off and live in a commune somewhere.
Her mother, in her dark blue wool coat, stuck her head in the door and said, “We’re off to the Knickerbockers’ for bridge, good night, dear . . .” In a few minutes the house was quiet.
4.
She couldn’t sleep. Her mind raced with thoughts, not of the future but of Charlie Monel. It was a bad sign that she couldn’t completely remember what he looked like. But she could remember the purring tone of his voice, and that spare tiny clean apartment where he lived and worked. It was odd that she hadn’t seen a typewriter. Maybe he wrote by hand. Even more literary. Charlie would probably write his novel about the Korean War and be a famous writer, admired, another Norman Mailer or James Jones. She had no war to write about. She thought about Stephen Crane, who had written his great war novel without ever having to go to war. He just made it up. She wondered if she could make up a war novel. Sure she could. She could be one of those upon whom nothing is lost, like Henry James’s woman who walked past a barracks and wrote about army life. Or maybe he made that up. She thought about submitting her war novel to Random House, her favorite publisher. She saw the manuscript as being about three feet thick, in several re
am boxes. They would open it and pass sections around the office to read excitedly, quoting passages to each other. She could see Bennett Cerf’s pipe drop out of his mouth at the stunning, tear-jerking, epiphany ending. Tears stream down his face as he murmurs in that growling Harvard voice, “We want this book!”
Imagine their surprise when they discover it was written by a little girl, barely out of college, who never heard a shot fired in anger. National Book Award. Pulitzer Prize. Uh, Nobel Prize. Pearl S. Buck won it, didn’t she?
But even in her fevered imaginings, she knew they wouldn’t publish a war novel by an inexperienced girl, no matter how good it was. They just wouldn’t. Her heart sank back down into reality. Her father had been fired. She might not even be able to finish college. She might have to go to work, although not as a prostitute.
Jaime got up to go to the bathroom. She missed her cat. Eliot had gone out the window one night and never returned. He was an unfixed cat, only because Jaime never got around to taking him in, and so was pretty scarred up. A big wide-faced orange-striped tabby, king of the neighborhood. As Jaime sat on the toilet she realized she was wide awake, too awake to go back to bed. She had two choices. She could get into her pajamas, get in between the covers and lie there all night worrying, or she could get dressed and go to North Beach. She went into her room and checked her wallet. Twelve dollars. Plenty of money.
She caught the 55 Sacramento bus. It wasn’t quite eleven thirty. There were only a couple of other people on the bus, sitting alone. Jaime, dressed in her jeans, an old yellow flannel shirt and her favorite brown sweater, sat behind the driver as the bus rolled down to Van Ness and then up and down Russian Hill. There were a few people out, mostly Chinese in this part of town. She watched them coming out of a brightly-lit Chinese delicatessen with their white bags of takeout, people happy and smiling and talking to each other, boy, that food was going to taste good when they got it home . . . She was hungry herself, and wondered what was in the mystery white bags. Probably all that Chinese stuff that looked so good in the tray and then when you got it home tasted awful, bitter or even rancid. She had an image of Charlie, wearing an army helmet, his head sticking out of a foxhole. He was eating a bowl of something with chopsticks, grinning and smacking his lips as the sky lit up with explosions. She sighed. Would they starve, now that her father was out of work? I’m so middle-class, she thought. What would Charlie say? He’d make light of it. In fact, that was why she was coming down to North Beach, to get Charlie to reassure her. And there was a small tickle of excitement way down somewhere, telling her that she might let him sleep with her, if he was especially nice and reassuring.
She got off at Grant Avenue, which was still crowded with Chinese, tourists, and drunks, the sidewalks jammed, traffic stopped in the street, brilliant garish lights from the tourist stores, bars and restaurants playing over everything. Jaime hadn’t been to Chinatown at night for a long time. She’d forgotten how remarkable it smelled, the smells of life and death, she decided, making a mental note to have a character looking for life come through here, not seeing the bustle of life all around him. Irony. At Grant and Broadway she turned right, walking past the open door of a nightclub from which loud Dixieland jazz blared. Jaime liked Dixieland. Her father had quite a collection of jazz records. Maybe they could sell them for money. Jaime stood listening for a while. There were plenty of people out, well-dressed men and women out for the evening, lots of Chinese going about their business, a few younger people dressed carelessly, a lot of them with beards. This really was a great part of town, she decided. I’ve been a snob.
Charlie wasn’t home. At least he didn’t answer his door. Up here on Telegraph Hill at this time of night there was little traffic and, after you got off Grant, almost nobody on the sidewalks. Jaime felt perfectly safe. Just disappointed. Where could he be? She pictured Charlie surrounded by people, raising a glass of beer in a salute. He’s probably in a bar, but which one? North Beach was full of bars, and plenty of them catered to poets and writers. The trouble was, she wasn’t sure which ones. She’d heard of the Co-Existence Bagel Shop, the Place, the Coffee Gallery, all on upper Grant. Only a couple of blocks away. She was sure they wouldn’t let her in without ID, and she didn’t have any. And she didn’t want to go in one of those places, find Charlie, and have everybody know she had come looking for him. It would have been different somehow if he’d been home, alone, in bed, reading or sleeping. But how foolish of her. Charlie didn’t seem to be the kind of guy who’d go to bed early with a good book. Of course he was out on the town. But instead of walking down to Grant, she walked over to Kearny and down the steep Kearny steps to Broadway. She was planning on catching a bus for home, but as she crossed Broadway, all lit up, the bars and restaurants all busy, the sidewalks busy, she saw Charlie, dressed in a long white coat, standing at the curb in front of the El Miranda supper club. When she was halfway across the street a car pulled up, Charlie opened the door, a nice-looking couple got out, and Charlie got in, driving off. So he parked cars for a nightclub. That was his job. For some reason, this made Jaime feel wonderful, protected, on the right path. She waited only a few minutes and Charlie was back, walking toward her through the crowd of merrymakers, grinning as if he had expected her and she was right on time.
“Hey, Jaime,” he said.
“Hi, Charlie,” she said.
“Well, you caught me at work.”
“Is the pay good?” she heard herself saying. How stupid. She wrapped her arms around her body.
“Are you cold? You only got a sweater. It gets real cold around here. The goddamn wind, you know. All these trucks. Wait a sec.” He was gone, a ticket in his hand. The customers were a well-dressed pair who looked at Jaime with what appeared to be contempt. She was the girlfriend of the guy who parked their car. Trash. Not even wearing a skirt. What a whore.
Charlie drove up in the customer’s car, a nice Cadillac, and came back to her. She was a little cold now.
“Fucker didn’t tip much,” he said. “Sorry about the dirty word.”
“Oh, I don’t mind,” she said. He hadn’t asked her what she was doing out so late at night. He hadn’t asked where her boyfriend was, he just acted natural. “I swear a lot myself,” she said. She smiled up at him. “Shit fuck hell,” she said, and he laughed a beautiful laugh.
“Hey, I’m off in a little while. How about waiting for me? We could have a drink.” She started to say yes but he interrupted, a sudden look of concern on his face. “Hey, you’re pretty cold. You better wait inside.”
“Here?”
“Naw, this’s a real expensive joint, they wouldn’t even let you in. Go around the corner to the Tosca Cafe. It’s a great place. Go in, sit at the bar, tell Mario that you’re waiting for me.”
Then customers came, and with a wink Charlie was gone. She waited, really chilly now, for him to come back. “When do you get off work?” she asked. “I really have to get home soon.”
“I’ll drive you home,” he said. “Hey, we could stop at the Hippo for burgers! We only got three cars left. It shouldn’t be more than an hour.”
“Okay,” she said. She didn’t mention she was underage, and all the way down Broadway she worried about being asked. Tosca was a few doors down on Columbus. She opened the big glass doors to be greeted by warmth, a wonderful smell of anise and the most stunning aria in the world, Cho-Cho San’s from Madame Butterfly. The place was jammed with well-dressed, good-looking people. The long bar was two deep, and the booths and tables in back were all full, people standing around the end of the bar talking and laughing against the music. Jaime felt as if she had found a home. There was a little red leather bench by the front door, and so she sat down, not even trying to approach the bar, and waited. Unfortunately, she had to go to the bathroom. She wondered where it was. She got up and walked down the bar, as casually as she could make herself look, so that no one would notice that a poorly dressed nineteen-year-old girl was passing through. No one stopped her. The o
ld table waiter smiled and pointed to the women’s room.
“Thank you,” she said, and saw her mother and father, sitting in a red leather booth, staring at her through the smoke.
5.
Walking toward them, her stomach suddenly tight, she noticed again how much her parents looked alike. They both had round red faces, her father’s decorated with glasses and his small moustache. Jaime was afraid that she would some day look just like them, plump and fastidious. They were supposed to be playing bridge.
“Hi, folks,” she said. “What a surprise.”
“How did you find us?” her father demanded. The ashtray in front of him was full of Kool butts, smoked down about two inches and then smashed and broken into the ashtray. Not knowing what else to do, Jaime sat down next to her mother, who made room for her and smiled, saying, “She wasn’t looking for us, were you, dear?”
“No, Mom,” Jaime said. “But now that we’re on the subject . . .”
The old waiter came up to them and looked inquiringly at Jaime’s father, who ordered two more cappuccinos.
“And for the young lady?” the waiter asked.
“I’ll have the same,” Jaime said, and the waiter went away. The three of them sat uncomfortably looking around at the other people in the room. Jaime noticed the chandeliers, with their fake candlesticks and little red lampshades. Charming, like everything else in this place except her parents. The waiter came and placed their drinks before them, with a glass holding what looked like ice cream cones, except that they were rolled round instead of into a cone. Her mother took one and bit into it with a crunch, and Jaime smelled the anise smell that had made her feel so at home when first came in. She now knew why. She’d been smelling that smell on her parents’ clothes for years. Years and years. She’d never known what it was.
Fridays at Enrico's Page 2