Fridays at Enrico's

by Don Carpenter

  “Got enough water?” he asked.

  “It’s awfully early,” she said.

  “I can’t sleep either.” He threw a teabag into his big green mug and went to the stove. Jaime watched his back. Charlie had a beautiful behind, she decided for the hundredth time. For a guy. Nice big square butt, not too big, not too square, just a good solid working butt. “I finished my novel,” she said to his butt.

  Charlie turned easily, holding his mug, the Lipton’s tag hanging out, steam rising from the surface. “Great,” he said easily. “What’s it called?” He sat opposite her. The cat got up and arched her back in a yawn, then dropped off the table and walked out the open back door, tail high.

  “I don’t know yet.” They had a rule never to talk about each other’s work. This conversation was ground-breaking. Of course she was done, it was all right.

  “What’s it about?” He rubbed his face and grinned at her. “I’m taking it awfully well, aren’t I? Really. What’s it about?”

  She told him. Just scenes from their life on Washington Street. An affectionate family portrait. Nothing literary, nothing for the ages, just a little book about some ordinary people whose life was gone now.

  “Why don’t you call it Washington Street?”

  “Perfect,” Jaime said, and it was. She went into her office and typed the words on a blank sheet. It looked just fine.

  Charlie came in and picked up the manuscript, 309 pages, and weighed it in his hand. “Yep, it’s a novel,” he said, still curiously detached. “When can I read it?”

  “Let me get it retyped first.” She typed well enough, but not perfectly, and she wanted the manuscript to be perfect when she sent it to New York.

  Back out in the kitchen they sat at the table and sipped their tea as the sun came up, promising another smothering heat. What would she do with her day? Or at night, when she couldn’t sleep? Her novel had been her anchor, and now it was gone. All the pleasure of finishing, of knowing she was capable of writing a whole book, was submerged under this sense of loss. And she’d been working on the novel, let’s see, only three months and some days. Charlie had been working on his novel for years, she didn’t know exactly how many, but years and years. It seemed unfair. Charlie sat there, pretending to listen to the music on the radio, nodding his head, playing with his teabag, probably stabbed through the heart.

  They should celebrate by making love, she knew. But it was so hot, and Charlie probably didn’t feel much like it.

  “I’m going to shower,” she said, and stood up. Charlie just winked at her and said, “Go ahead and use all the hot water,” feeble joke, but he didn’t follow her into the bedroom or the shower. Getting cold and wet was some relief. What was she to do with the manuscript? Submit it cold, over the transom? Submit it cold to agents? Call Walter Van Tilburg Clark and ask his help? She decided against it. Time to get out of the bush leagues and into the majors. She didn’t want help, she was going to do this all on her own. At this moment Charlie came into the bathroom and pulled open the glass door, a big lewd grin on his face as he stepped in and joined her under the chilling water.

  After breakfast that morning they both worked in the garden while Kira played in her playpen on the back porch out of the sun. They had rows of sweet peas, carrots, beets, zucchini squash, a melon patch, and two rows of corn five feet tall and growing. The marijuana crop hadn’t worked out. That which hadn’t been crushed was eaten by forest animals. Not deer. Jaime had to ask one of the neighbors why there were no deer in the area. It seemed perfect for deer. The neighbor laughed. “Up here,” he said, “we eat deer.” So maybe the rabbits were eating the marijuana. They certainly acted strangely enough. Almost every night at dusk, if it wasn’t raining too hard, the little rabbits would come out of the woods to play at the far end of the clearing behind their house. A rabbit would be sitting there hunched up nibbling a bit of clover, then for no reason suddenly jump straight up in the air, somersaulting and landing on its feet, still chewing as if nothing had happened. Kira would scream with pleasure, but it didn’t seem to scare the rabbits.

  Jaime had to admit, even as the sweat stuck her tee shirt to her body, she was falling in love with Oregon. So was her mother, who’d found a boyfriend at the Oregonian, a sportswriter. If she married this guy, then Charlie and Jaime could rent out the little apartment behind the garage to Stan Winger, and get him out of that tenement. She worried about Stan. He seemed happy only when he was here, being part of the family. The look in his eyes when he had to go home broke Jaime’s heart. Poor guy, writing away at his pulp stories. Trying to better himself after a life of nothing good. Better to have him here. Maybe he could get a job. Jaime knew he made his living in some way nobody would talk about. She feared that one day he would be arrested and just disappear into prison. Horrible. Strange and silent as he was, Jaime liked Stan a lot. And he obviously worshiped her, though he was even more obviously in love with Linda McNeill. But it was a poet’s love, an unrequited love. She wasn’t sure Stan would always be satisfied with love from afar, but then Dick and Linda’s relationship seemed under a strain after Linda’s son left. Dick was getting autocratic, issuing orders to Linda in a tone nobody liked. Linda, instead of being defiant or funny about it, just obeyed, looking sullen. They were doomed, Jaime decided. Maybe little Stan had a shot.

  She pulled off her cotton gloves and wiped her face. She and Charlie had been on their knees digging weeds. She glanced at the porch to see if Kira was all right and saw Dick Dubonet in the shade in a white tee and jeans. He waved and she waved back, even though she didn’t really want company. She was still waiting for Charlie to explode.

  “Wanna do some weeding?” she cried out to Dick.

  “No thanks,” he said in his deep sexy voice. He pulled his nose and said, “I’ve come for my cat.”

  Jaime came up on the porch. Charlie kept weeding.

  “I made a mistake, bringing Isis back. I miss her. Linda misses her. Can we please have her back?”

  Isis was in the woods somewhere. Dick grimly walked through the trees, calling out, “Isis . . . Isis . . .” Jaime watched him from the porch. She didn’t want him to have the cat. The cat had been given to the child. But she couldn’t refuse Dick. He was too pathetic. He’d lost his child, given away his cat, and now he was about to lose his woman. As far as Jaime knew he hadn’t published anything in a long time, and according to Marty Greenberg he was desperate. “He keeps writing these shitty Playboy-type stories. No wonder nobody will print him. The stories have Playboy written all over them. Which of course Playboy would hate. So the man’s in a hole.”

  Jaime fixed lunch and set a place for Dick but he didn’t show up. It wasn’t until three in the afternoon that he emerged from the woods, defeated. “Something’s happened to her,” he said, and sat at the table. Charlie had gone to the store, taking Kira with him, and Jaime had nothing to do. Normally she’d spend this precious time writing. Dick sat opposite her, sweat and dirt on his face. He looked bad. An emotional man, despite his macho pose.

  “She’ll be fine,” Jaime said. She got two beers from the refrigerator. “She spends half her life in that jungle back there. And every time we let Kira loose she starts for the woods.”

  “How’s your book coming?”

  “I finished it,” she said. Into his blank stare she added, “I still have to go over it, you know, get it typed.”

  “How long is it?”

  “Oh, it’s short,” she said, to appease him. “Only about three hundred pages.”

  “Well, I think that’s great news,” he said, although his voice cracked slightly on the word great.

  Jaime laughed. She hadn’t felt this good in weeks. “It’s probably a piece of shit,” she said.

  “Oh, no,” Dick said. “I’m sure it’s a wonderful little book.”

  34.

  The only way Dick could recover from the blow Jaime had dealt him was to be generous. “I don’t know what you plan,” he said in his deepest vo
ice, “but if you need the name of a good agent . . .” Jaime looked surprised. Good. He went on, praising Robert P. Mills as a kind and generous man who would, because he was one of the little guys, give his clients a lot of personal attention. “He’s best for mystery and sci-fi, but he knows his way around ordinary regular fiction.”

  “I’m flattered that you would offer him,” Jaime said.

  Dick laughed. “Well, all I can do is recommend. After that you’re on your own.” They both laughed.

  Dick grew even more generous when Charlie came in with a bag of groceries and sleeping Kira in his arms and Jaime told him about Dick’s offer.

  “That’s great!” Charlie said.

  “If you want a really good typist,” Dick said, “Linda has plenty of time at work.”

  “Oh, I couldn’t ask her to do that,” Jaime said. “I’m willing to pay.”

  “She’ll take the money,” Dick said, and grinned at the others, who grinned back.

  Linda typed the manuscript for thirty bucks, one original and two carbons. Dick hadn’t read it, and hadn’t been at the meeting between Jaime and Linda when the manuscript changed hands. “What’s it like?” he asked Linda one night.

  “It’s good.” She sat on the living room couch reading a magazine.

  “How good?” he joked.

  She looked over. “It’s very female. People aren’t going to buy it.”

  “You can’t possibly know that,” he said happily. Later when she brought the completed job home in a cardboard box he sneaked a peek, pretending he was examining the typing. “It’s beautiful,” he said to Linda.

  “You mean the typing,” she said.

  But he was reading now. Very simple stuff. Sentimental. Mawkish, he’d have to say. He turned to another page. The same. Lightweight sentimental reminiscence. No competition. Dick felt happy, then was ashamed of himself. The time, the effort. He himself had never managed it, and Jaime deserved all possible praise, just for writing the damn thing. Even if it was only three-hundred-odd pages and she’d ripped through it in less than a year. Much less, if Dick remembered when she’d started it. But, he had to tell himself, she’d bulled her way through. Good for her.

  “Great typing,” he said to Linda later, “but I wouldn’t count on a quick sale. If I were Jaime.”

  “You aren’t,” she said.

  Jaime’s novel was not his greatest problem. It could be months before that issue resolved itself. Right now he had to worry about his own work. Was it time to start his novel? Had he set an artificial goal, by waiting for another big sale? Maybe the suspense was killing him, and it was time to stop watching Playboy. Maybe starting a novel would break his bad luck streak. He’d been thinking that writing a novel would take a year or two, maybe even more, if Charlie’s was any example. And he quailed at the thought. But Jaime had done it in months. He’d do the same. With his life experiences he’d write a far more interesting book.

  He could hear Linda’s contempt if she found out. “Monkey see, monkey do.” Uh-huh. If he did start a novel he’d have to keep it a secret from Linda and everybody else. That would mean eating up the rest of his bank account without sending any stories into the marketplace. He had nineteen stories out now, ten with Mills, and nine he was sending around to little magazines himself. What yield could he expect from these nineteen stories? He took out the carbons and looked them over one at a time. It was raining hard and he had the doors open to let in the fresh air. Usually an afternoon spent looking over his pile of work could be wonderfully pleasant, but not today. He realized with a sinking heart that most of the stuff, maybe even all of it, was, well, not as good as he remembered. Not good, and not very commercial. As the rain poured down Dick’s spirits slowly went through the floor. By the time Linda got home he felt exhausted and grubby.

  “Where’s dinner?” she asked. He’d totally forgotten to make any. He hadn’t even thawed the lamb chops.

  “Sorry.” He didn’t explain, just sat stiffly on the couch, feet straight in front of him, hands jammed in his pockets.

  “I’m hungry, damn it.” She went into the bedroom and he heard her undressing. He wondered if he had the manhood to go in there and just grab her, throw her to the floor, and make love to her. That would do it. But it would also kill him. And what if she just shrugged him off? “Oh, stop that!” He’d feel like an idiot. Besides, his groin felt cold, not warm.

  “I was working,” he said.

  She came to the bedroom door, bare to the waist. “Let’s just go out.”

  “In this rain?”

  “Well, fuck you,” she said and went back into the bedroom. It was too late to say “Fuck you!” back. Anyway he was afraid to. When she came out of the bedroom again she was dressed to go out, in cutoff jeans, men’s blue work shirt, Dick’s brown fedora, and her dark green raincoat. She looked wonderful.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’m going out to eat.”

  “We can’t eat out every night.”

  “That’s too bad,” she said, and left through the open front door. Outside the rain pissed down angrily. She’d gone off in the rain. He might never see her again. In his present mood he couldn’t do a damn thing about it. After a while he went into the kitchen, took the package of lamb chops out and opened it. No sense starving.

  Linda came home at nine, wet, and not speaking to Dick. He was just frying the chops. “Got room for a lamb chop?” he called out. No answer. Maybe she was getting her period.

  35.

  At first he’d been too stiff, sitting in his office scrutinizing the book instead of just reading it as he would any other damned book. He could hear Jaime and Kira out in the kitchen. She knew he was reading it. She went on about her housework pretending it didn’t matter to her, and half Charlie’s reading problem was that he was simultaneously trying to think up what to say after he finished. If he could. What excuse could he give, however, for not finishing it in one mammoth read? “So far, so good.” “Gee, it’s great. What’s for dinner?”

  He forgot himself and just read. He started giggling, then laughing out loud uncontrollably as he read his wife’s book. He knew Jaime could hear him, so he didn’t try to restrain it. The stuff was really funny. And touching, though so far from Charlie’s own early life that it seemed to be from another planet. Instead of having to make excuses, he finished it easily by five that evening. He sat at his desk, curiously empty. He had nothing to say to Jaime. He’d been sitting there laughing his ass off for three or four hours. She’d figured out by now that he thought the book was funny. Something his own book was not. And finished. And, as far as Charlie was concerned, literature. Which his book was decidedly not.

  The only question before Charlie was how to let Jaime know how much he loved her book without getting into the business of his own. He got to his feet and went to the door, placing his hand on the cold knob. Shitty old iron fixture, rusty and ratty like all the fixtures in this house. He turned the knob, put a big smile on his face and pushed open the door.

  Jaime sat feeding Kira. The kitchen smelled of spaghetti sauce, which simmered on the stove. Charlie looked around, conscious of Jaime’s eyes on him. He liked this kitchen. He’d been happy here, they all had. This had been a wonderful part of their lives.

  “Your book is everything you hoped,” he said.

  “What do you mean?” He heard anxiety in her voice, and it made him feel good. What was that? He’d have to get over that.

  “I always said, you’re twice the writer I’ll ever be,” Charlie heard himself saying, damn it. Just what he didn’t want to say, but here was Jaime coming into his arms.

  “Is it good?” she begged him.

  “Better than good,” he improvised. Was this to be his life? “I need a beer and some dinner,” he added lamely. What was he supposed to do, dance around the room?

  But dinner put things into perspective. As good as her book was, it at least had a chance of getting published, could even make money. It if
got through the agent barrier, the editor barrier, the publisher barrier, the critical barrier, then at last the public barrier. Wasn’t that the point? To make one’s living as a writer? And now his wife had proved, at least to him, that she was going to do exactly that. Never mind his feelings about his own book. Work In Progress. He was after a lot. He wanted to get it all in. Etc. He could not get away from the absurd feeling that if Jaime had been sent to Korea, captured, left to rot in a prison camp and then stuck in an army TB ward for over a year, she’d have come out of it with a great novel.

  “Well, you gonna send it to Mills?” he asked her the next morning.

  “Why don’t we go to New York? We could fly there, take a room at the Algonquin Hotel, and walk around introducing ourselves to agents.”

  “I have to teach,” Charlie heard himself saying. “But you could go.” It would be fun for her to see New York. He remembered Frankie Pippello from Kim Song. He wondered what Frankie was doing. He could look him up.

  “It wouldn’t be any fun without you,” she said, pretending to pout.

  “It’s so impractical.”

  “Expensive and foolish. I crave doing it.”

  Charlie had to remember that Jaime was a beautiful twenty-one-year-old girl, which wouldn’t hurt. Not that she needed it, but maybe she did, maybe everybody did. It was a tough game, just ask anybody they knew. Ask Dick Dubonet, fighting his lonely war against Playboy. There were things to be said in favor of not being published, Charlie realized.

  “Let’s do it,” he said. “Fuck ’em.”

  She laughed. “Let’s think about it.”

  Just before Charlie left for work the phone rang. “It’s for you,” Jaime said to him. She handed him the phone and then walked out onto the back porch where Kira played in her pen.

  “Hello?” he said.

  “Charlie,” said Linda. “I hate to interrupt your writing—”

  “I’m just on my way to the air base,” he said. “I teach typing today.”