Fridays at Enrico's

by Don Carpenter

  Stan shook his head. He was beginning to wonder if Charlie and Linda weren’t lovers after all. She seemed to know a lot about him.

  “I guess you wish he was here instead of me,” he said, and immediately regretted it. The words just slid out of his mouth, and he watched her to see the curl of contempt. But she smiled at him sadly and put her hand on the back of his neck and pulled him in for a kiss, her tongue sliding into his mouth, the smell of her filling his mind so that he couldn’t think, only feel. He took hold of her unthinking and pushed her to the ground. They kissed passionately, and then she was lying on top of him and he could feel her breasts. She moaned heavily, kissing his face. His cock was hard and getting harder as she pushed her pelvis into his, and with a feeling of complete freedom he realized they were going to make love, right here in the woods, under the sky, Stan and Linda.

  But no. She pulled back, panting, and sat up. “Oh God,” she said. Stan sat up. His pants and shirt were wet and dirty, and he started brushing himself off. He panted a little himself, and could hardly believe that she’d pulled away just at the moment he was certain she wouldn’t. She had sticks and wet leaves stuck to her, and he helped brush her off, too.

  “Uh-oh.” She gestured and Stan saw they’d rolled on some of the little marijuana plants. Linda laughed, and tried to upright the plants, but some were crushed flat. “Good thing we didn’t fuck,” she said. “Or the whole crop would have gone.” She laughed again, a bright sharp laugh, and held out her hand. He scrambled to his feet and pulled her up.

  “Just one of those passionate moments,” she said to him as if it hadn’t meant much, but then she took his hands and kissed them. All his mixed-up emotions calmed at once. “Thank you for not taking advantage,” she said, and they walked back to the house. Charlie was going to know somebody had been rolling around on his marijuana, but Stan hoped he wouldn’t find out who. Actually, he didn’t give a damn. Caught rolling around with Linda? Guilty.

  The party went late. Stan had been going to catch a ride back to town, but Charlie said, “Hell, spend the night. I’ll take you back tomorrow.” And so Stan spent a quiet Sunday with the family. He slept in Charlie’s office, sleeping bag on a cot, but comfortable, and at some point during the night the little kitty jumped up and slept on him, purring loudly at first and then falling asleep pushed up against his legs. Stan was afraid to move. He didn’t want to irritate the cat. In the morning he was the first up, but after sitting at the kitchen table by himself for twenty minutes, afraid to make coffee for fear of waking anyone, Edna came to the door wrapped in a pink bathrobe. “I’ll make coffee,” she said, and started right in. Soon they all sat around the table, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. The radio was playing classical music and Jaime was feeding the baby in her high chair. Stan and Charlie both admitted having headaches from drinking all that beer. But Charlie didn’t have to write that day. They didn’t write on Sundays. “You have to take one day off a week,” Charlie said. “Or you go crazy.” Charlie wrote every morning for at least an hour, and Jaime wrote at least an hour during the day. What discipline, Stan thought. None of that “inspiration” crap, just turn it out, scribble scribble, every day but Sunday.

  They really did nothing. Picked up the house and put all the beer and wine bottles in the garbage. For lunch Jaime cooked fried chicken, and they sat out in back at the picnic table and talked about what vegetables they would grow this summer. It was time to plow and plant. Stan immediately volunteered to help with the truck garden. “If you need somebody to pull weeds,” he said. Maybe he’d gone too far, but no, Charlie grinned and said, “You can come out here any goddamn time you want to pull some weeds,” and Jaime said, “You’re welcome anytime anyway,” and Charlie said “Of course,” and they all smiled at each other. Stan felt like a member of the family. He napped in the afternoon like everybody else (he imagined Charlie and Jaime were making love, because Edna had the baby back in her apartment behind the garage). The kitty came and slept on Stan again, helping along that family-member feeling.

  Charlie drove him home, and by ten that night they were sitting in the Volkswagen outside Stan’s apartment building, a slum building in a slum neighborhood after a day in Lake Grove. The two sat side by side, smoking. Charlie had turned the motor off, so Stan knew he wanted to talk. Stan waited.

  “Are you still stealing?”

  They’d never discussed it before.

  Stan nodded. “I know, I oughta quit.”

  “I’m not going to get moral on you,” Charlie said. “But I’d hate to see you end up in jail.”

  “Well,” Stan said. He had nothing to say. He knew perfectly well he shouldn’t be a thief. Except he was.

  “I know it’s stupid to tell you to get some job somewhere. Hell, I don’t like hard work any more than you do.” Charlie explained about all the shitty jobs he’d held over the years. “Hateful shit, but God, man, better than jail.”

  “I don’t know,” Stan said. “Jail’s not bad.” He tried to make a joke of it. “Jail’s just jail, man.”

  “I’ve been in jail,” Charlie said. “I was a POW for fourteen months.”

  “Jesus,” Stan said.

  “I just wanted to say, if you need my help getting a straight job, just let me know. You’re my best student.”

  “I mostly make it gambling these days,” Stan lied, to let Charlie off the hook. “I play the card rooms up in Vancouver, you know?”

  “You must be a great poker player,” Charlie said in a flat voice, and dropped the subject.

  29.

  Sneaking through the woods was something Dick Dubonet was very good at. Like an Indian he did not step on the snapping twig, nor brush the random branch. Silently he tracked Stan and Linda through the trees, his heart still, his mind alert. Then he watched them in the clearing, just out of earshot. He didn’t want to move any closer, and various birds were making a lot of noise, so he could only watch. When they started kissing and rolling around on the ground, Dick got so excited he almost cried out, and he urgently wanted to jack off. He was in an anguish of jealousy and so turned on he wanted to shriek. He’d come out to Lake Grove expecting to be jealous, but not of Stan Winger. Winger wasn’t handsome, he wasn’t muscular, he owned nothing, and at heart he was a cheap criminal. What’s to be jealous of?

  Yet here he watched Linda and Stan like a voyeur through a window. To his relief and disappointment they didn’t strip and make love right before his eyes. He heard Linda’s peals of laughter, and when she and Stan started back for the picnic Dick froze and let them pass within ten feet of him. He waited until they were beyond hearing, then moved toward the clearing. It was as he had thought. Marijuana, about half the plants squashed into the ground. Without thinking, Dick squatted down and tried to restore the plants. They’d probably straighten up by themselves. Dick had never smoked marijuana, but he was willing to try, so he plucked a few of the bigger leaves and stuck them in his pocket. It was very hot in the clearing, and sweat popped out all over his body. He’d smoked some opium once, in Naples, while in the army. The opium had made him vomit, but then provided the sweetest dreams he could remember. He wondered how the marijuana would compare. All he knew was that Negroes and musicians used it a lot. So it must be great.

  Nobody had noticed his absence, certainly not Linda, who was in the house when he returned. Dick sat at the picnic table with Jaime and the little girl. He’d been prepared to dislike Jaime, since she was even better-looking than Linda and belonged to Charlie. She looked funny with her hair half red and half blonde, but it was also sexy, and Dick wondered if there was a chance. Not that he wanted a chance. But he was so afraid of losing Linda to Charlie that he thought about deliberately trying to seduce Jaime. A revenge seduction. Trouble was, he liked her. She’d been a lot of fun at the party at his house, and now at her own she was gracious, sweet, very nice to Dick, telling him how much she’d enjoyed reading his Playboy story, which quite frankly not many of his friends had done. Marty Gr
eenberg had almost sneered, since the story was no competition for Dostoevsky, but this lovely sophisticated San Francisco girl had made a point of mentioning that she liked it, and as far as Dick could tell there wasn’t a hint of patronage. Of course, maybe she and Charlie sat alone together and laughed and slapped their knees at his stupid little commercial story. But he didn’t think so.

  There was a big quilt on the back lawn at their feet, with a tarp beneath it to keep the damp out, and Jaime and the little girl sat on the quilt, Jaime holding her daughter’s hands up as she tried to walk.

  “She’s never taken a step,” Jaime said to Dick. A burst of rude laughter came from the house, where Charlie was holding court.

  “Is she supposed to? She seems awfully little.”

  “Any time now,” Jaime said.

  Dick lowered himself to the quilt and sat cross-legged a few feet from little Kira. He drank from his beer bottle and then dangled it before the girl. She smiled at the bottle and started walking toward it. Jaime let go of her hands and Kira toddled—that was the right word—over to Dick and fell on her butt. She laughed up at Dick and his heart broke. He picked her up and cuddled her in his arms and when she squealed with delight he felt like the King of England.

  “You’re magic,” Jaime said. Her eyes glowed. Dick passed the wiggling child over to her mother. “What a nice child,” he said softly. He’d been so touched. He had no idea. Jaime grinned at him, bouncing Kira. “It’s something, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “When are you and Linda going to have a baby?”

  “If this is what they’re like, soon.”

  “Will you watch her? I want to tell Charlie his daughter took a few steps and he missed it.”

  “I’ll be careful,” Dick said. Jaime handed Kira over and the child immediately started yelling, her face red and angry. Smiling, Jaime took her back and went into the house, leaving Dick to himself.

  An emotional day. It got no better driving home later than night. Linda talked all the way about Charlie’s novel, which she had taken a peek at.

  “He showed you his manuscript?” Dick said, seething with envy.

  “Oh no, I sneaked a peek. He keeps it in boxes, all this hand-written stuff and really badly typed stuff, tons of it. I just read a few typed pages. But this is the real thing.” Charlie’s dialogue. Charlie’s experience. Charlie’s thundering prose. Charlie’s awful handwriting, Charlie’s terrible spelling, Charlie’s clumsiness. “It’s raw,” she said, as if rawness was the highest quality in literature.

  Dick’s own military experiences were not the kind you put into a war novel. He’d been a reporter in the army, working on Stars and Stripes in Naples. While Charlie and a lot of other guys were in Korea, fighting, freezing, being captured and brainwashed, he weekended on Capri and sat around drinking with his S and S buddies talking about art. No fucking novel there. Dick’s military experience had been a bust, so far as writing was concerned. And Charlie had the Bronze Star. Give me a fucking break. Dick wondered how he’d gotten it, envisioning Charlie rushing through the smoke with his rifle at port arms, mouth open in a defiant scream. All Charlie had said about it, when pressed, was that he had been the best-looking man in his platoon, and so they’d given the decoration to him. Dick knew enough about the military to suspect there was more than a little truth to what Charlie said. But brave and modest? Charlie was getting to be a real pain in the ass.

  Even so, Dick liked him a lot. He didn’t really believe Charlie and Linda would do anything behind his back. In fact, he trusted Charlie more than he did Linda. And he was sure in his heart that Charlie was going to be a famous writer. Dick’s own work wasn’t going that well. He and Charlie even talked about it. Charlie had been very respectful of the Playboy sale, saying, “Their money spends real good, don’t it?”

  But the only other money he’d seen from his pal Hefner was at Christmas, when he’d received a check for one hundred dollars, a gift from the magazine. His stories they rejected, and so did everybody else. He’d sold only two little pieces since then, and none of the stuff he’d written after Playboy. The pay was meager, eighty-nine dollars for one story and one hundred fifty for another. No way to get rich. Everybody was right, you had to publish a novel. Then editors would remember your name. Trouble was, Dick was afraid to write a novel. It chilled his heart to think about working on something for that long and then having it rejected. Maybe he didn’t have a novel to write. No war or air strike, never killed anybody. Nothing to write about. His life? A laugh. Sure, most novelists just made up their plots. He could do that. He did it with stories. It was too many eggs in one basket, and so while daydreaming of his novel to come, Dick did nothing about it and kept at stories with a Playboy slant. If he could just sell one more, even at fifteen hundred instead of the big three thousand, he’d feel ready to embark on larger work. He could see it in the front of Playboy, under his picture. “Dubonet is hard at work on his first novel.”

  Meanwhile his friendship with Charlie needed attention. Dick tried to think of some adventure where he could show Charlie the beauties of living in Oregon. And show himself, too, because he was getting ready to move on. Could San Francisco be a destination? Linda was always full of San Francisco, North Beach, and all the rich cultural experiences of living in a truly creative environment. Likely Charlie and Jaime wouldn’t be in Oregon long. Charlie already spoke of jumping back to San Francisco right after he finished his novel.

  “Oregon’s a great place to write,” he said with a beaming smile. “But I wouldn’t want to die here.”

  30.

  Nothing is as pure as you thought it would be as a kid. Take writing. Take love. Take friendship. These had all been pure things to Dick Dubonet when he had been young and innocent. He still thought of himself as an idealist, but his ideals had come under a lot of attack recently and he was wondering. Just wonder, that’s all. When he and Linda had fallen in love they’d been able to talk to each other, and Dick felt he could say anything to her and she wouldn’t laugh or be offended. They’d lie in bed in the darkness and he would tell her his dreams of the future, of making good money as a writer, giving him in turn the freedom to expand himself into the world, to travel, to see the world as it is, and to write about what he saw. But first he’d have to build up his reputation with the magazines, then write the novel he hoped would get him the money and attention to carry out his life plans. Which now included Linda, in fact were meaningless without Linda.

  And suddenly he felt Linda slipping away. He wanted to bring it up but found he couldn’t. What if he said something like, “You seem awfully interested in Charlie”? She might reply. He didn’t know if he could handle any of the possible replies. “Yes, I am.” That would kill him. “No, I’m not.” He wouldn’t believe it. “Mind your own business.” Meaning, if the end came, it would be his fault for hounding her about Charlie. “Oh, baby, I just love you too much to fool around, and I apologize.” Sure.

  She wasn’t really fooling around, she was just making it look to everybody as if she was. Dick had walked into the Caffe Espresso one night when he thought Linda was home to find her sitting with Charlie and Stan and some tall homely girl he didn’t know. He joined them for an espresso and pretended he wasn’t at all surprised to see Linda. She made no explanation. Dick had come in hoping to find Charlie, who’d made the habit of dropping in every once in a while after his night classes. Dick hoped to engage him in a game of chess. He hoped Charlie knew how to play. Dick considered himself half-good, which, he felt, made him one of the best coffeehouse players in Portland. It would be fun whipping Charlie Monel at something, even only chess. But when he brought it up (there was a chess game going on at the next table, two Reedies in glasses, bent over their board) Charlie just laughed and waved his hand in surrender.

  “You’d whip my ass,” he said, and refused to be cajoled into a game.

  So writing, friendship, and love were all tangled in his heart. He couldn’t help thin
king Linda had come to him because of his potential as a writer. It hadn’t bothered him before, in fact he thought it part of his due. But then Charlie moved to town and everybody began talking about him as the hottest thing since Kerouac. So naturally Linda was attracted. Live by the sword, die cut to ribbons. Fair enough, except he was fond of Charlie himself, and could see what Linda saw in him. Here was a real writer, a big man, a strong man, a guy with combat experience, a killer and yet one of the slain, POW in hell. How could Dick fight that? He wanted Charlie for his best friend. He wanted to help Charlie with his writing, which Dick had heard was pretty rough, and he wanted Charlie to help him with his, which lacked passion, or lacked something, a something Charlie might be able to help him with. So Dick buried his feelings, but that was okay, because maybe buried feelings came out in the writing. Maybe this was how Charlie was meant to help him!

  The spring had been a hot wet one, and now the summer was promising to be a Portland Special, low clouds heavy over the city most of the time, rain falling, temp in the eighties, so that when the sun did break through the clouds the heat and humidity made you want to grab your throat and die. Dick and Linda often drove out to the Monels’, and beyond, to a place on Lake Oswego called Latourette’s where you could swim free. They all went down for long afternoons of swimming, drinking beer, and talking, and if it rained they didn’t care. Latourette’s was a big empty lot on the lake’s south shore, a mile from Charlie’s place, the lot steeply falling away from the road, with an old dock, and otherwise only wild greenery and some rocks along the shore. Usually Stan Winger would be with them. He’d been spending a lot of weekends at the Monels’, and was apparently part of the family now, or at least acted it, making his way down the cliff holding Kira and her baby bag as easily as if she were his own kid. Dick had to admit he was a little jealous of Stan’s closeness to Kira, when after all Dick had seen her take her first steps. He felt this made him part of the family too.