Fridays at Enrico's

by Don Carpenter

  Dick didn’t mind a bit when there were others at Latourette’s. High school boys came by, and it gave Dick a secret pleasure to see the way these kids covertly stared at Linda and Jaime in their bathing suits, these beautiful women, the kind most men never get to talk to, much less touch. Dick was with them, talking to them, and as the boys would soon find out, touching them intimately. Although Linda hated it when he was too affectionate in public. “Stop kissing me,” she said to him crossly one afternoon when they sat in Charlie’s kitchen listening to the rain. Thank God Charlie had been out of the room, but Stan, sitting right there, had a hard time keeping his face straight.

  Then something extraordinary happened. Dick wonder if reality existed at all, or if he was living in a dream. One night as they were eating dinner in their own home on Cable Linda said, as if asking him to pass the potatoes, “My son’s going to be with me for six weeks. If you don’t want him here, I’ll get a place of my own.”

  “What?” he said. “What?”

  Her son was nine. Which mean that she must have been only about fifteen when he had been born.

  “Of course he can live with us,” Dick said. “What’s his name?”

  Linda smiled. “His name is Louis. After his father.”

  His father! Who turned out to be just exactly who Dick didn’t want him to be, a big, muscular, tattooed man with a mop of dirty brown hair like Charlie’s and wide intense psychopathic eyes. He brought the boy over one Sunday afternoon. Louis the father drove a really noisy old Ford that had been chopped and channeled, painted with red and gray primer, and looked like the dream car of a high school boy. He came up the steps carrying the boy on his shoulder, looking like Paul Bunyan, all he needed was an axe over the other shoulder, really. But he wasn’t a logger. Dick got no satisfactory explanation of what he did or what had happened between him and Linda. All she’d say after her ex-husband left was that she’d met him sailing, and that they’d been divorced in Mexico.

  Little Louis was a different matter. An ordinary-looking nine-year-old except for his eyes, which were hard. Dick saw instantly that here was a kid who trusted no one. A kid with a lot of bad experience under his belt already. Like Stan, raised in foster homes. Sometimes Stan got that same hard-eyed look. It wasn’t going to be much fun, having this damaged kid for six weeks. But on the other hand, what better way to bind Linda to him, than to befriend her son?

  The three sat very formally at dinner that night, the boy barely eating his food, Linda obviously nervous. Dick’s heart went out to her. She was probably more scared of having a kid around than Dick was.

  “Listen,” Dick said as brightly as he could. “I have a great idea. Let’s get a cat!”

  “Oh, that sounds wonderful,” Linda said, looking at her son. Louis’s eyes didn’t soften.

  31.

  Linda’s job was too valuable for her to just quit, so it fell on Dick to oversee Louis. It wasn’t easy. On their first morning alone together Dick explained that he had to sit quietly and write all morning, and Louis would have to entertain himself.

  “Will you be okay?” he asked finally. He didn’t know what else to say. Louis nodded without meeting his eyes, and Dick went into his office and shut the door. He sat at his typewriter and cracked his knuckles, took the little glass paperweight off the manuscript and inserted the top page in the machine. He sighed. He was in the middle of a story about two men who fight over a woman, and now, staring at the page, he wondered why he bothered. He worried about the boy in the next room, who made no noise at all. He was nine. He should have been a Cub Scout, with a lot of Cub Scout friends to play with, as Dick had been. Dick had had all the amenities of a middle-class neighborhood, Cub Scouts, Boy Scouts, neighborhood friends, a mother who didn’t work. While the poor kid in the next room had nothing. He wondered what life must be like living with his father. Linda didn’t seem to know what the man did or where he lived or anything about him. “How come he got custody?” was one of Dick’s first questions, but Linda only said, “He wanted it.” Meaning, of course, that she hadn’t. What kind of woman was she?

  Poor Linda, her incompetence uncovered. A perfect woman except for this tragic flaw. She did not love her child. Dick thought maybe she was confusing the child with his father. Dick supposed he was a brute, a woman-beater, probably a child-beater as well, although Dick didn’t see any bruising on Louis. Or maybe Dick was just jealous, because big Louis was so big, with all the romantic energy of a motorcycle outlaw, although Linda insisted he wasn’t one. She’d met him sailing. “He doesn’t look like any of the yachtsmen I’ve ever met,” Dick said ironically.

  Linda threw him a look. “He was crewing,” she said. “He never owned anything.” She, too, had been crew. In fact, Linda had been around boats a lot, had lived in Newport, on the Oregon coast, for a couple of years.

  “Blowjobs for boat rides,” she said to him once, when they were drunk and talking about the past. He’d been shocked but laughed to show he wasn’t. “I love to sail,” she said wistfully. “When we get rich let’s get a boat of our own.” There were so many things they were going to get, when they were rich. A cabin in the mountains, where he’d teach her to ski. Trips to exotic places. Weekends in India. Life at the top. He looked at the page in his typewriter. No words had written themselves. He wondered what Louis was doing. He had to trust Louis. He couldn’t keep checking up on him, or the boy would feel oppressed. He went to the door, opening it. Louis sat in the middle of the living-room, cross-legged, staring at nothing.

  “You okay?” Dick asked. He felt pain just looking at the poor kid.

  “I’m okay,” Louis said. His eyes said, “Fuck you.”

  Dick looked out the window. The clouds hung low, but it wasn’t raining. The air was muggy, and it was going to be an oppressive day. “You know what?” Dick said. “I don’t feel like working. Let’s get out of here and go for a ride.”

  Once in the car and moving, Dick thought desperately about where to go. He found himself on the road south, toward Lake Grove. He didn’t know if he’d be welcome at Charlie and Jaime’s at nine on a weekday morning. They’d both be writing, if not otherwise busy. But Dick had nowhere else to go, and the kid was driving him crazy with his silence. “Isn’t this a great car?” Dick said, and Louis nodded, looking out the window at the trees. “In good weather we can take the top down,” Dick finished lamely.

  They pulled into the circular drive. There were no cars in the garage. Maybe nobody home. “We might have made a long trip for nothing,” Dick said. But Jaime opened the front door, looked out at them blankly, and then smiled and said, “Come in.” Now Dick was even more anxious. Jaime would see clearly that he was in over his head with the child.

  “Just cruising around with my pal,” he said brightly. They entered the house. “This is Linda’s son, Louis, who’s come to stay with us for a while.”

  “Hello, Louis.” Jaime didn’t wait for an answer, but took Louis by the hand and led him to the kitchen table. In a few minutes they were all having toast, and he and Jaime were having coffee. The little girl, Kira, was asleep. Jaime had been writing but was glad for the interruption, or so she said. “Charlie’s out at the air base today, teaching GED,” she said. Louis was looking at her hair, about half red and half blonde by now. She smiled. “I made a serious stylistic error, but I’m letting it grow out.” When the boy didn’t reply, she looked at Dick inquiringly.

  “He doesn’t talk much,” Dick said. He wanted to tell Jaime what was going on, but not in front of Louis. At that moment Isis the cat walked in and the whole day changed. The cat meowed and jumped up onto the table, and Louis’s eyes lit up. The cat walked right up to him, sniffed his toast, and meowed at Louis, as if to say, “Toast? Only toast?” Louis smiled for the first time, at least in front of Dick.

  “Cats are diplomats,” Jaime said.

  “Can I hold him?” Louis asked. Jaime smiled and nodded and Louis picked up the cat under the front legs and held her up in front o
f his face. The cat meowed, but didn’t squirm or try to get away. The hardness was gone from Louis’s eyes, and Dick felt the urgent need to keep it from coming back. Although he knew it would come back. Soon the boy and the cat were gone from the table and were playing on the living room rug, just out of sight.

  “What’s up?” Jaime asked, and Dick told her.

  “Do you know where I can get a good cat cheap?” he asked. The boy was walking around the house with the cat on his shoulder. Outside, the rain started up. Jaime smiled. “I’ll ask the neighbors,” she said.

  “A dog would be too much trouble.”

  She laughed and then said some very funny insulting things about dogs, the way they eat, slobbering over everything, the way they want to sleep in the middle, the way they need constant reassurance. Dick laughed his head off, having a fine time on this day that had begun so badly. He was really starting to like this girl. Then the little girl woke up and Jaime brought her out, looking sleepy and out of sorts. Jaime let Dick hold her while she fixed some baby food.

  “You’re going to have to buy a lot of games and puzzles and stuff,” Jaime said. “How did Linda lose custody, do you know?”

  “I think she just gave him up,” he said in a low voice. In the next room, Louis talked to the cat. The child in Dick’s arms was starting to blubber, and he thought he smelled something. “You better take her,” he said, and Jaime rescued him.

  Soon it was time to leave, no getting around it, and he had to separate Louis and the cat. “You’ll have one of your own soon,” he said, but Louis’s eyes hardened again. “Yeah,” he said, and got into the car. Jaime held Isis. Dick felt like crying.

  “Wait,” Jaime said. Dick stood holding the car door. “You can have Isis.”

  “You’re not serious.”

  “Sure I am.” Jaime handed the cat to the boy. The cat immediately started to purr, and Louis stroked her, his eyes softening at once. “You need her more than I do.” Jaime softly touched Dick on the arm.

  “Under these conditions, I accept.” He wanted to kiss her.

  Jaime bent down to speak to Louis. “If she gives you any trouble, just give her a swift kick in the pants.” The boy smiled happily. “Thank you,” he said.

  “See what a polite kid he is?” Dick said proudly.

  32.

  The three spent a lot of time together, Dick, Louis, and Isis the cat. Dick worked for two hours each morning, and it was a great relief to learn that Louis could not only take care of himself, he was such a quiet kid Dick could leave his office door open, keeping one ear cocked for sounds of trouble. Sometimes little Isis would come in and jump on his lap, purring loudly and then falling asleep, her claws lightly hooked into Dick’s jeans. Louis, after he made up the couch where he slept, folding the sheets and blankets into a cardboard box, spent mornings reading comic books from Dick’s collection, or drawing on the big pad of paper his mother bought him.

  He was good, too. He didn’t make childish pictures, but drawings of birds, usually hawks, and usually eating a mouse, or pinning a mouse beneath its claws. Dick watched from his doorway as Louis sharpened his crayons carefully, using a little red plastic pencil sharpener Dick had lent him. He sharpened the crayons slowly, watching the waxy material curl and break off, picking it up from the rug and putting it into his mouth. Then he’d get on his belly and begin to draw, spending a long time over the feathers, filling them in carefully and stopping to resharpen his crayons to the smallest point.

  “Where’d you learn how to do this?” Dick asked one day, looking at an osprey with a dying trout under its claws.

  “Out of a book.” Roger Tory Peterson’s Field Guide to Western Birds. Dick dug out his own copy and handed it to Louis, who grabbed it and said, “Oh boy!” But when Dick proudly showed Louis’s best drawings to Linda she said, “Why can’t he draw something nicer?” She saw only the predatory aspect. “Why can’t he draw houses or cows, like anybody else?” she said. Friend of Kerouac.

  In the afternoons Dick made sure they went out. Ordinarily he spent afternoons rewriting, reading, or napping, but now this was good, it got him out of himself, out of the house, into the world. He and Louis drove all over Portland, up into the West Hills to the zoo, way out to NE Marine Drive, along the Columbia River, up the Columbia to Rooster Rock and Multnomah Falls, once all the way to the fish hatchery, where they stood looking down into ponds filled with millions of baby salmon and the long pools where they kept the old sturgeons, six feet long and more, fish that looked ancient as dinosaurs. And they often drove out to Lake Grove to visit the Monels.

  Dick always thought he’d be a poor father. Now he was amazed at himself, and at the way it felt. The way Louis automatically reached for his hand when they were about to go anywhere. The way the hand felt in his. The way he and Louis shared jokes. And especially the way the little guy seemed to realize how serious Dick was about his writing, the respect, almost religious, with which Louis kept quiet during writing time. This so touched Dick that tears came to his eyes when he thought about it. One night in bed with Linda, after making love in what seemed an unusually tender way, he said, “Let’s have kids.”

  “I really don’t think so,” Linda said sleepily. She turned from him, indicating by her stillness that she didn’t want to talk, but he went on.

  “Isn’t there some way we could keep Louis with us? I mean, if you don’t want to get pregnant again.”

  She turned back toward him. He couldn’t make out her expression. “Leave things the way they are, okay?”

  “I don’t like the idea of sending him back with his father,” Dick said. There. It was out. “In fact, I don’t trust the father at all.”

  “Neither do I. But we can’t keep Louis.”

  “Why not?” Dick persisted.

  Linda sat up and looked him right in the eye. “I don’t want him.” Her voice wanted no response. It broke Dick’s heart to know that the woman he loved was so cold. On the other hand, if she hadn’t been, he probably would never have met her. This gave him no consolation. He was going to have to break with her. Just as soon as he could build up the courage.

  The hard look was gone from Louis’s eyes. Dick dreaded its return. He could envision it, when the father came back to take Louis away. Louis crying and holding onto his legs, the kitty crying, Linda strangely dry-eyed. He dreaded the day. Yet when it came it was nothing like Dick’s expectations. Louis was packed and ready to go at 6:00 a.m. though his father wasn’t expected until ten. Dick had, in a moment of love, given Louis his collection of DC comics from the forties and fifties, and it was like tearing out part of his heart now, to see the comics actually leaving the house. To say nothing of Louis. Dick feared crying or making a scene in front of the outlaw father, but he didn’t, and Dick had to reevaluate his opinion of Big Louis, who had tears streaming down his face as he came into the house. Little Louis grabbed his own father around the legs, not Dick, and cried happily to see him.

  “Daddy, can I take my cat?”

  Big Louis smiled inquiringly at Dick. “Cat?”

  Dick wanted to tell the man to dry his tears, but didn’t. “There’s a cat, yes.”

  “Please, Daddy? I’ll take care of her. Her name’s Isis—”

  At this, Isis walked into the room and gave a loud meow.

  “You can take her as far as I’m concerned,” Linda said. She wouldn’t look at Big Louis.

  “Well, sure,” Big Louis said. Off they went, the three of them, with Louis’s pitiful box of things.

  “I was wrong about him,” Dick said to Linda after they had gone.

  “No, you weren’t.” Dick was left with the disquieting feeling that he’d been conned by the McNeills, father and son. This was reinforced when at about two in the morning Isis came into the house and into their bedroom and woke them by jumping on Dick’s legs, letting out a single cry and settling there to sleep.

  “What’s the matter?” Linda asked sleepily.

  “The kitty came bac
k,” Dick said. He stroked Isis’s ears and she began to purr.

  The kitty came back, the very next day

  The kitty came back, ’cause she couldn’t stay away . . .

  “This worries me,” Dick said to no one.

  “The cat probably jumped out of the car,” Linda said, and went back to sleep.

  33.

  Jaime finished her novel in the hottest part of August, after three days of clear blue sky and rising temperature. Naked except for white cotton underpants, she sat at her desk with Kira sleeping fitfully beside the desk in her crib. She typed the final words, hesitated a moment, looked at her watch, then typed the end. 4:23 a.m., August 21, 1962. She put the fresh pages with the older ones and hefted the whole manuscript. It couldn’t be finished. But it was. Sweat ran down her sides. She considered waking Charlie and decided against it. She wasn’t sleepy. The humidity had been what got her working nights, and now the humidity seemed to have finished her book for her. All that was left was to title it, add a dedication, and send it off.

  She went out into the kitchen. At least she could celebrate with a morning cup of tea. Isis sprawled sleeping on the kitchen table, such a little cat, even stretched out. Jaime stroked the cat’s belly and Isis woke, yawned and stretched even more. Dick Dubonet brought her back because he said the cat reminded him of Louis. Poor Dick Dubonet. And poor Charlie. Poor all of them, she’d been the one to write a book. It sat in the next room innocently, like a time bomb. The current title, the working title, was Memories of My Father. By Jaime Froward. But it wasn’t just about her father, it hadn’t been for a long time. It was about her whole family and their life on Washington Street. It was a memory, a love poem, a recognition. She tried to think of a better title. Song of My Father. No. Sounded used. A Family Memory. Yes, but. The kettle whistled and she poured hot water into her mug. Charlie came into the kitchen, sleepy-eyed, wearing nothing.