Everything should have been perfect. He had a job, money in the bank, an office to work in. He was having trouble with his novel, a bit of trouble, not much, just that the fucking thing was no good. It was, he’d begun to realize, very difficult to say anything new about war. The ground had been thoroughly gone over, from Homer to James Jones. Even Charlie’s POW experience had been touched on in a little book called The Enormous Room, by e.e. cummings. Charlie had been awfully depressed reading it. It described cummings’s experiences in a World War I French hospital, and when he finished it, tears streaming down his face, Charlie knew that cummings had said everything about being a prisoner. cummings immediately became one of his favorite writers. Of course nobody, not even e.e. cummings had said everything about anything. So Charlie wasn’t relieved of his obligation to finish his horribly long, terribly boring, totally unnecessary war novel. Which he was never going to show to anybody again unless it was at least halfway decent. This was part of the reason for coming to Portland. To get away from the intense literary competition. To a place where he could write in peace and begin to accept the realities of married life.
His teaching job was absurd but wonderful, and he decided he was glad no respectable school would hire him. Multnomah College was a practical, no-nonsense place for people who wanted to get ahead. Most of the students were young adults who’d presumably already been out into real life and didn’t like it. They wanted to learn from Charlie how to write competently, and he was damned well going to teach them. It took only a couple of classes to realize that because the school had no admission standards, his job was really very important. Charlie could teach his students how to succeed in all their other classes. He could see right away that most of them had never had any breaks. They were here to make their own, and Charlie meant to help.
So the job was great. The house was great. Everything was great except Jaime.
23.
She hated it all, from the rain at the border to their ranch style house buried in the woods. It was the first ranch style house she’d ever been inside. It seemed incredibly shabby and mean-spirited, with its boxlike rooms, low ceiling, tacky iron fixtures, and linoleum everywhere in the place of tile. Jaime was used to the California all-tile bathroom, and the hell with anything less. The only advantage to the house that she could see was that it was eight miles from Portland, a city almost as deliberately ugly as Oakland.
She was twenty years old with an infant daughter, living in the middle of nowhere with her crazy mother and a husband who taught at a third-rate business college. No wonder she was depressed. Just yesterday she’d been living in a dreamworld of wealth and social position, only she hadn’t realized it. Life on Washington Street had been unbelievably refined and secure, and San Francisco unbelievably sophisticated and full of life and variety. All gone now. Jaime lived among people who did not seem to know they were in Rain Hell. She felt like an exile.
She was astonished nonetheless by her mother. Edna had gone from an incomprehensible drunk to a bright active person in less than a year. Jaime liked it that her mother wasn’t stupid drunk all the time, but unsure how she liked having Edna live with them. She was meant to be there to care for Kira, but Jaime actually did that while Edna just criticized. Nice for Edna, living in her own apartment behind the garage, with its own tiny fireplace and upstairs sleeping loft, but she spent all day at Jaime’s kitchen table, drinking endless cups of tea and talking while Jaime took care of the house and the baby. Outside, rain. Charlie bought a cord of wood somewhere. He’d spent a whole afternoon outside with a couple of Oregonians in checked mackinaws and bill caps, stacking the wood in the covered area between the house and garage, and now just about the only time Jaime went outside was to retrieve wood from the stack. Every time she did she smelled winter Oregon, a heavy woody wet smell that she hated as badly as she hated the rain itself.
Then Edna shocked her by saying she felt useless and wanted a job.
“Good luck, Mom,” Jaime said.
Edna quickly bought herself a used Mercury out of her mystery horde of money, drove off to Portland and landed herself a job at the Oregonian, the state’s biggest newspaper. She worked proofreading classified ads, as she’d done at the Chronicle years before. This gave Jaime some relief, but not enough. When Charlie was home, which was rarely, he was either asleep or in his office writing. Jaime didn’t inquire how the writing was going, and he didn’t ask her, either. She’d never read Charlie’s entire manuscript. It filled two cardboard boxes and must have weighed forty pounds by now. She was frankly afraid of his novel-in-progress. She wasn’t sure why. The thing would change their lives no matter how it came out. If it was what they hoped, Charlie would move up into the world of letters, and that could be destructive. But if the book was a failure it would kill him, eviscerate the Charlie she loved, turn him into one of those bitter old teachers with a failed novel in their desk drawer.
As for her, she’d given up. Kira took all her energy. Even when she had Kira asleep, her mother off at work and Charlie gone, she still had no mind to write. It was enough to sit quietly at her kitchen table with a cup of tea in front of her and the radio playing insipid pop music. She thought of the girls she’d known with ambitions to be artists, the trombone players, the poets, the painters and actresses, those who like Jaime had dreamed of novels. What happened to them all? Was it the same as for Jaime? Their ambitions buried under marriage?
Jaime’s experience with snow was limited to trips to the mountains as a girl, and she’d never been in an actual blizzard. Her first was in many ways her best. It started on a Sunday morning, all of them at the kitchen table.
“It’s snowing,” Charlie said, looking out the window. Jaime was feeding Kira and didn’t turn to look.
“Great,” she said, but secretly she was a little excited. When she got the chance, after Kira was snoozing in her playpen, she went out on the back porch, where the overhang protected her from the snow, which came straight down. She watched it fall, wondering why it made her feel so good. The flakes were big ones, clumps really, and the ground covered fast. There was an incredible silence, too, the silence of falling snow, she tried in her mind. It hung on the trees and shrubs, altering the appearance of everything, and for the first time Jaime began to think she might enjoy Oregon. Then Charlie came out and like a little boy had to make snowballs and throw them at her.
“Come on!” he yelled. “This is your first snowstorm!”
She played along, getting wet and cold, running around in the snow. They watched it pile up all day, making comments like, “Boy, it’s really getting deep!” Charlie explained to Jaime and Edna that this wasn’t a real blizzard, you had to go to Montana to experience that. “I’ve seen the temperature drop from seventy to ten below in about forty minutes,” he told them as the snow blew silently against the windows.
“Oh, put it in your book,” Jaime said. There was something bizarre in her reaction to the snowfall. She wanted it to go on, to cover everything up to fifty feet, and then see what would happen. It was an anarchistic feeling, a don’t-give-a-damn feeling. Let the traffic go to hell, let the snow fall, let business and schools close, let everything stop while the snow covers everything.
“Remember ‘The Dead’?” Charlie said, interrupting her thoughts.
“Yes,” she said. The Joyce story, where the snow fell all over Ireland.
He grinned. “You want me to go out and stand in the snow, to prove I love you?”
“No, but thanks.”
The next day when they got up the snow was still there, and had developed a nasty icy crust. Charlie had to shovel out their circular drive and wait for the snowplow to find their road.
“What makes you think there’s a snowplow?” she asked him. She was standing on the front porch watching him shovel.
Charlie blew happy clouds of steam. “Of course there’s a snowplow.” An hour later the snowplow did pass, and Charlie and her mother went to work. It was eerie the way the ca
rs sounded, just the engine thrumming as the wheels moved over the silent snow. After they were gone she sat at her kitchen table. Kira slept in the corner. Snowflakes started coming down outside. Jaime thought about killing herself.
She considered keeping this random existential temblor to herself, but that night in bed she told Charlie. He lay on his back, and touched his leg without looking at her. “You got to get used to these winters.”
“You think that’s what it is?”
He turned to her and after a moment smiled. “It’s just the winters,” he said. “Let’s face it. Snow country is suicide country.”
“Have you ever thought about it?”
“Sure. Everybody in Montana all winter long thinks about nothing else. If the guns didn’t freeze up they’d all be dead.” He chuckled. “Joke.”
She’d touched something in him, she knew. His experiences as a prisoner of war, maybe? He never talked about those. “It’s all for the book,” he told her. “I don’t even think about it unless I’m working.” Had he considered suicide in the prison camp? Had it been horrible? Probably very cold. She wondered if the snow reminded Charlie of being a prisoner.
“Let’s make love,” he said, and put his warm hand on her belly.
“No,” she said.
24.
It wasn’t long before Charlie knew Stan was a thief. They’d drink beer at one of the downtown taverns and talk about writing, but after a while Stan was telling Charlie about his adventures in county jail. “You ought to write about it,” Charlie said. Stan was an enthusiastic writer of pulp stories, but Charlie thought he could do better. He didn’t criticize the pulp, he just kept urging Stan to write more about internal stuff.
“You don’t always have to have a surprise at the end,” he told Stan one night as they sat drinking beer at the Broadway Inn.
“That’s what they buy,” Stan said.
“You ought to read more classical stories,” Charlie said. He mentioned Maupassant, Chekhov, Hemingway, Steinbeck, and John O’Hara. Stan got out his little steno notepad and dutifully wrote down the names. A week later he came up to Charlie after composition class and said he was deep into Maupassant. “Boy, this guy can write,” he said with a big grin, and Charlie felt a burst of pleasure.
“You fuckin’ ay,” he said in a low voice so the other students wouldn’t hear. Stan winked, as if they had a conspiracy going. Sure enough, Stan’s writing improved at once. He wasn’t writing great stuff, but his dialogue was getting real.
One night Stan had news. A story he’d written, one he’d not shown to Charlie, had actually been bought, by Raymond Chandler’s Mystery Magazine. For fifty dollars.
“You just passed me by, son,” Charlie said ruefully. “I’ve never sold a thing.” Stan admitted he had a lot of help on the story, and asked Charlie to a party, to celebrate the sale.
“Bring your wife,” Stan said.
“I’ll try,” Charlie said.
The winter had been a long one, with snowstorm after snowstorm, melting and freezing, raining for long dull weeks on end, then snowing again. Charlie didn’t mind. His new Volkswagen loved the snow, and he could drive around in it when people with big cars and power steering were sliding off into snowbanks. He taught Jaime how to drive in snow but she was always tense behind the wheel and he ended up doing most of the shopping, and anything else that required leaving the house. He worried about Jaime. She stayed in all day, not writing, and while she usually seemed in good spirits, Charlie sensed a time bomb ticking away somewhere. He’d been invited to parties and evenings of beer-drinking by his students and even the college administrator, but Jaime always had some reason not to go. “You go ahead,” she said. “I’ll be fine.”
“I hate to leave you alone.”
“I’ve been alone all my life.”
Of course she had the baby twenty-four hours a day, and her mother at night, but Charlie knew what she meant. He tried to come home right after night classes, but the trouble was that after two hours of teaching he was always so jacked up. If he did come home Jaime would either be asleep or he would bore her to death talking about what happened in class. If he didn’t come home he’d go out beer drinking with Stan Winger, then come home drunk.
“Come this time,” he said. “Stan’s an interesting guy.” He paused. “He’s a thief.”
She didn’t get it right away. “He steals other people’s stories?”
“He breaks into houses.”
The party was on SW Cable, in the hills just west of downtown. The roads were clear of snow but it rained a very cold rain, and Jaime didn’t speak the whole eight miles into town. She’d been reluctant to spend an evening among Oregon hicks, especially a bunch of literary hicks. Charlie wasn’t worried, though. Jaime was so pretty she could act any way she wanted and people wouldn’t mind. He hoped she wouldn’t call anybody a hick, though. Californians were resented in Oregon as it was.
“They aren’t hicks,” he said over the sound of the windshield wipers. She made a little noise.
Walking up the slippery steps to the house, Jaime took Charlie’s hand and said, “I’m pregnant again.”
“That’s great,” Charlie said after too many steps. “Watch your feet.” They were at the front door, which opened wide, and Charlie felt the heat from the house against his frozen face. There was a bright-eyed little guy in front of him.
“I’m Dick Dubonet, welcome to my chalet,” the guy said.
Jaime smiled and held out her hand. “Hi, I’m Jaime Monel.” She walked into the party as if she owned the place.
“Ooh, what a beautiful wife!” Dick Dubonet said, and Charlie liked him at once. Not for calling Jaime beautiful, but for being such an enthusiastic asshole. Charlie had been prepared to dislike Dick Dubonet ever since he heard Stan’s hero-worshipful description of the guy. And he was everything Charlie expected, too loud, too literary, too short. What Charlie hadn’t expected was this openness, this lack of sophistication, even though the guy was obviously trying to act sophisticated.
“And this is my wife, Linda,” Dick said.
“I’m not your wife,” Linda said, smiling up at Charlie.
“I don’t see why we need the state to approve our relationship,” Dick said.
There were about twenty people at the party, and over by the couch several musicians with guitars and banjos. The music was loud and energetic, but nobody was dancing. On the dining room table, food and drink, mostly quarts of Blitz-Weinhard beer, and Charlie went to the food, trying to get his mind to work again. Another child, right now. Was that what he wanted? Was that why Jaime had been acting so strangely? He put potato salad and salami and olives on a paper plate and poured himself a glass of beer. Behind him people were starting to dance. Stan was beside him, filling a plate.
“The literary crowd,” Stan said. Proudly, Charlie thought. Well, why not? He turned around, prepared to enjoy himself, prepared for another child. What he was not prepared for was Linda McNeill, into whose eyes he found himself looking, as the five-string banjos hit their stride.
25.
Stan saw the look that passed between Charlie Monel and Linda, and it spoiled his evening. He knew what it meant, and being the all-observant one, he also saw that Dick Dubonet also saw the look, brief as it was, and if Stan was any judge, Dick didn’t like it any more than he did. The look was simple. The best-looking female in the room signaled to the best looking-man, “I’m yours.” And the banjos played on.
“Wake up, wake up, darlin’ Corey!” everybody yelled over the banjos, while Stan as usual sat in a corner not even tapping his foot. He’d been building up this gigantic fantasy of himself and Linda. All based on a look she’d given him, not that long ago, and based on her giving so much time to him, helping with his story. He’d made himself believe that getting the story published would change his life, and now he saw that what he’d meant was getting together with Linda. He had automatically assumed. He had forgotten himself. He had forgotten reality. W
omen like that were not for men like him. They were for men like Charles W. Monel.
But the kitty came back, the very next day,
The kitty came back, ’cause she couldn’t stay away . . .”
Of course Charlie’s wife had to be young and beautiful herself, with flaming red hair cut like a boy’s and her thin boyish body. She was dancing now with Jeffrey Lyman, a happy-go-lucky kid Stan figured was a homosexual, but a nice guy. Charlie would collect his due from Linda, Stan was sure. Why wouldn’t he? These people were artists, they probably swapped wives and girlfriends all the time. The couple kissing on the couch hadn’t come in together. Stan thought about getting laid, but Vancouver was a long way off through cold rain, and Stan didn’t feel like sitting on a bus. One of the things that made him stew in corners at parties was his own sexual inadequacy. Probably why he broke into houses, too. It explained his whole life. Including why, at this party in his honor, he felt so shitty. Get published had only highlighted his inadequacy as a human being. Take the matter of Linda.
She’d been the one to tell him his story had been bought. She did it by inviting him to lunch at the Buttermilk Corner. Then, when his mouth was full of roast beef, she said, “Bob Mills called. Guess what?”
“What?” he asked, after grinding up his food and swallowing. His heart was in his mouth anyway. He had hoped she invited him to lunch because she was falling in love with him. Now, his mouth hanging open, he listened to her tell him the good news. It was quite a letdown.
She reached out and touched his hand. “You don’t look happy. Cheer up, you’re a published author.”
“I’m not an author,” he said through a red flush of embarrassment.
“Yes you are.” Linda gave him that beautiful smile. “Not only that, you’re one of the best writers in Portland. With just one story.”
She probably knew he had an inferiority complex.
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