Fridays at Enrico's

by Don Carpenter

  “I didn’t see that.”

  “Did you see From Here to Eternity?”

  “I thought you liked From Here to Eternity.”

  “I loved it,” he said. “But it was a real mess. They never went into the stockade scenes, and they had the army bust Captain Holmes instead of promoting him to major, as in the book.” Charlie was adamant about Hollywood. “It’s a whorehouse,” he insisted.

  Having just left a real whorehouse, Jaime wasn’t sure that was necessarily a bad thing. Noticing a police car behind her on the bridge, she looked at her speed. Fifty-two in a forty-five zone. She slowed to forty-eight. Surely that would mollify the CHP guy behind her, but no. He pulled her over on the Marin side of the bridge, then walked up to the car, a little guy, blond hair, tight mouth. He looked down at her grimly.

  “Hello, Officer,” she said, smiling what she hoped was a friendly smile.

  “Tell me something,” he said. “How come you didn’t slow down to forty-five when you saw me?” So she was going to get a ticket after all.

  “Conditions didn’t seem to warrant absolute conformity,” she said. She pulled her driver’s license from her wallet and handed it to him. He frowned at her. Did he recognize the name? Had he read her book?

  No. He just looked at her and wrote her a ticket. She had to laugh at her insane expectation. When the cop drove on, she decided not to follow him, but to take the Sausalito exit, drop down to the no name bar, and have a drink. Talking to the policeman had made her feel slightly soiled.

  The no name bar was almost empty, just a few afternoon alcoholics widely spaced at the bar, gazing down into their drinks. Neil Davis, the owner, was behind the bar, KJAZ playing over the sound system. Jaime sat in her husband’s favorite seat at the end of the bar, where she could look out the open front window at the people. “See Charlie?” she asked Neil.

  “Not today.” But he would have said that if Charlie had just walked out the door. Good old Neil. He ran the best bar Jaime had ever drunk in. Even better than Tosca. Tosca was a big-city bar, but the no name was a world bar. People from everywhere stopped in, and not just people, famous people, people who were doing things. Interesting people. Although none of them were here today.

  “What can I get you?” Neil asked.

  “Ramos Fizz,” Jaime decided. A candy-ass drink, according to her husband, but they made them so well here. The telephone behind the bar rang, but Neil continued making the Ramos Fizz. Only when the drink was perfect, sitting in front of Jaime on its napkin, did Neil turn to the telephone.

  “Jaime?” he said politely, his hand over the mouthpiece. “Are you here?”

  “Ah,” Jaime said, and slid off her chair, going to the telephone by the front doors. It was Tanya.

  “Where the hell have you been? I’ve been calling your house, your apartment, Charlie said you were at my place, then I thought about the no name. I’m only about a third of the way through, but I just had to call you. I love your book! You must have been following me around when I was a kid. Where did you learn all this stuff?”

  “So you liked it?” Jaime said. “You’re not just putting me on?”

  “Are you kidding? I want the first copy!”

  Jaime finally got off the telephone and went back to the bar. Her clothes were sticking to her. Praise, especially such wide open praise, made her sweat.

  47.

  Mills was infuriating. “I read the manuscript,” he told Jaime over the telephone. It was three in the afternoon, six in New York, and Bob sounded a little drunk. Maybe he always sounded like that. Jaime waited patiently. “I liked it. I’ll messenger it over to Harcourt in the morning.” The line crackled for a while, then he added, “Congratulations.”

  His first comment on Washington Street had been, “I don’t think I’ve ever read a better first novel manuscript.” A far cry from “I liked it.” Maybe Mills was tired. Maybe he didn’t think Jaime needed flattering anymore. Maybe he was treating her properly, when what she wanted was babying.

  “What’s the matter, Mommy?” Kira asked her.

  “Mommy’s ego has been stripped bare,” Mommy said. Kira was on her lap, dressed in her black and yellow sunsuit, a really horrible-looking outfit that had been bought by her adoring but distant grandmother in Portland. Kira was a beautiful child anyway, with her father’s large dark eyes and her mother’s pouting mouth. She wiggled down off Jaime’s lap and ran out through the French doors onto the lawn. She had acted remarkably adult on her first day of kindergarten at Old Mill School. Jaime remembered her own tearful separation from her mother on the same occasion, and was ready for crying and begging, but Kira merely looked up at her as if to say, “Are you leaving me here, in this mess?” Charlie and Jaime walked out into the sunshine afterward, and Charlie said, “Oppressive, isn’t it?”

  “It’s just that everything is so small.” But Jaime had felt it too. Now Kira loved school, and Cynthia drove her down in the morning, leaving Jaime to write. But of course Jaime had no writing to do. Her manuscript was being pawed over by the editors at Harcourt, who’d bound her to a two-book contract. Now they had to decide how much, if anything, to offer for the book. Mills had been vague. “It might be pretty good,” he said.

  “If they want it at all,” she said.

  Charlie hadn’t exploded or run off, but then his own book might be ready to publish fairly soon. He got long letters from Bill Ratto, whose enthusiasm was catching. Jaime liked talking to Bill on the telephone. His energy seemed to pour over the wire. “Let me talk to my novelist,” he might say. “I think we’ve got a breakthrough.” Ratto had the manuscript down to seven hundred pages or so, and wanted to present a novel of about five hundred. “I can’t just slash and burn,” he explained. “I have to make it integrate.” He wasn’t after more writing from Charlie. From here on it was a matter of “judicious pruning.”

  Charlie? He was tired of his book. If they were both home they’d sit out on their redwood garden furniture and have a civilized drink at sundown. The view from their lawn was wonderful, the bay, the East Bay hills, Angel Island, Alcatraz, the Bay Bridge. They’d sit side-by-side and watch the natural light fade and the sparkling artificial lights come on. One evening Charlie said to the declining light, “You know, there must be hundreds of guys out there who thought just because they were in combat, they had a big novel to write.” He laughed. Jaime hated the sound of it.

  “You have to keep fighting,” she said weakly.

  “Haven’t I done enough for my country?” Charlie said quietly to the pale sky. And then, oddly, “Don’t you wish we had some rabbits? This is the time of night they would come out.”

  Charlie was adrift. He showed nothing, but Jaime knew his heart was broken. Then she caught herself. She’d fallen into the same trap as Charlie, fighting off the possibility of good news. Charlie’s book hadn’t failed yet. Maybe it wouldn’t. But a brooding sense of gloom hung over the entire project. Ratto had been so enthusiastic, but Jaime wasn’t sure he actually belonged in editing. Her own editor, Dan Wickenden, was more like it. A novelist himself, he had a soft smooth Harvard voice and a real concern for literature. A gentleman. Ratto was a cheerleader. Maybe she was being harsh.

  Then Gentleman Dan offered her only a ten-thousand-dollar advance. He called to apologize, pointing out that Harcourt was going through a lot of stress, but now Jaime found his voice egregious and effete instead of gentlemanly. “You’d make twice that on the paperback,” she snapped at him. She hung up, making the excuse that Kira was calling her. Her body was covered in cold sweat. It was before eight in the morning. Kira and Cynthia were watching Captain Kangaroo and eating breakfast in the living room. Jaime came out of the bedroom. Kira let out a squeal of laughter. Jaime looked around her. All this depended on her making money, a lot of money. It could all dissolve. The ten-thousand-dollar offer meant Harcourt didn’t think this book would sell. They didn’t expect a paperback sale, or a movie sale, or foreign sales. They thought the book was terribl
e. And why wouldn’t they? What did she know about poverty or anything else? She was a child.

  She went to find Charlie, wanting his comfort. Charlie got up every morning around six and went into his office whether he had any writing to do or not. She wondered what he did in there. She never interrupted and she never went in. Her own office was in their bedroom. They’d argued and she’d won, taking the bedroom for her own and giving him the tiny half-bedroom. The roomier attic was for Cynthia, who’d not been in the plan when they bought the house, but instantly they’d seen that if they wanted to keep their schedules they’d have to have live-in help. With Jaime’s riches they could afford to, and even had Randy Wilde looking for another house with more room. Now, with the dreadful news from Harcourt, they’d be lucky to keep even this little house.

  She pushed open Charlie’s door. He sat at his desk in jeans, shirtless and barefoot. He was sweating, and had a pencil in his hand, a stack of manuscript before him. He stared at her. She’d never interrupted before. Then his eyes brightened. “You heard something,” he said.

  “Bad news.” She told him. He didn’t seem upset. “Ten grand is a lot of money,” he said. “And it’s only an advance. It’s your money.”

  “They must hate the book.”

  Charlie smiled and took her hand. His were warm, hot almost. “If they hated it,” he said softly, looking into her eyes, “they wouldn’t have offered you anything.”

  He couldn’t console her. She was insulted by the offer. She’d made money for these people, and now they were being cautious. It was infuriating. She called Mills after a few days of this and told him to refuse the offer and find her another publisher.

  “Are you sure?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  A month went by, only silence from the East. The Mysterious East. Jaime was now certain that she’d made a mistake turning down the Harcourt offer. They were her friends at Harcourt, they’d offered the most they honestly could. She recalled the sound of Dan Wickenden’s voice, the reassuring Harvard tones. He’d been a good editor, sending page after page of careful notes and suggestions, always respectful, treating her as an artist. Now she had, in effect, shit in his hat. Nobody would offer so much as a dime for her stupid book. Why should they?

  Charlie laughed at her. When that didn’t work, he became sympathetic. “Look, it takes time. A few weeks is nothing. Relax, your book is just fine.” She remembered his own less-than-perfect response. Was he hoping her book would fail? Or would she be carted off to the asylum for all this paranoia?

  She put some things in cardboard boxes, threw them into the back of the Porsche, and went to live in their little apartment on Telegraph Hill. Too hard pretending to be a suburban housewife, especially with Charlie around the house all the time. If she went out for a drink there would be Charlie at the no name. Her life was crushing her, so she got out for a while. Every few days Charlie would visit her in the city, sometimes bringing Kira with him. But Jaime wasn’t glad to see Kira. It broke her heart. She knew she was no mother. She didn’t have enough love in her. Kira had been a terrible mistake, though it was unthinkable that she not be alive.

  She tried short stories. A few stories in the New Yorker or the Atlantic Monthly would do her career some good. But she hated writing short stories. She hated the characters she made up, and she hated her attempts to write about real people. She wasn’t really a good writer, that was the problem. She’d fake it well enough for one book. One of those, you know, reminiscences, Cheaper by the Dozen, Life with Father, Washington Street, they were all alike. Except Life with Father was a pretty good book.

  Abandoning the stories, Jaime was filled with an anger no amount of standing in the shower could cure. She hated her life as a housewife. She ought to get a job. She could become a call girl, working for Tanya. Bringing in the money. What was the matter with that? Call girls weren’t evil, they were just working women. Tanya had strong ideas on the subject, and Jaime, considering this at one after another of the bars of North Beach, drinking heavily, had to agree. People thought of her as a successful novelist whose life wasn’t only under control but actually enviable. Everybody thought she was writing her new book. Nobody knew she was a fraud. Nobody knew she just lay around reading when she was supposed to be at work. Nobody knew she was waiting for the telephone to ring.

  48.

  Charlie began taking Kira for long afternoon walks along Bridgeway in Sausalito while he waited Jaime out. They’d park at the north end of town and walk the long boardwalk past all the sailboats and big power yachts. Sometimes they’d walk to the end of Pier Three where Neil Davis kept his little boat, a converted Monterey purse seiner. If the boat was there they might step aboard and pretend they were out on the bay. Or they’d sit on the end of the dock and watch the other boats navigating the flat calm harbor. Fish nibbled at the algae on the pilings, and Kira love to lie on the boards and stare down into the water, watching. Charlie sat next to her, dangling his feet, daydreaming in the sunshine. In Kim Song and later at Tokyo Army Hospital, Charlie learned the trick of savoring moments of peace, entering those moments and making them last. Letting his mind leave when his body couldn’t. There was nothing he could do about his wife’s suffering. He knew she was. She didn’t pull a long face, but he knew. And he would wait her out.

  Meanwhile, he spent a lot of time with Kira. Once he’d even taken her out on Neil’s boat, along with Captain Neil and two of his barmaids, Kazuko and tall skinny Rachel, who was called “The Praying Mantis” behind her back, because of the way she chewed on her boyfriends. Both barmaids had bad boyfriends, and Neil was taking them on a bay cruise as therapy. Charlie and Kira walked up just as they were casting off.

  “Glad to see you,” Neil said cheerfully. “Come aboard!”

  “Really?” asked Charlie. “Where to?”

  “Out there.” Neil pointed generally toward Alcatraz. He smiled down at Kira. She had on jeans and a striped polo shirt. “I have something warm for her, if it gets cold.” He held out his hand, and Kira took it, and with a glance at her father stepped aboard. Charlie had a sudden vision of Linda McNeill. Blowjobs for boat rides. What if Kira fell in love with boats?

  “What if she—?” Charlie completed the thought with a gesture from his gut. Neil smiled. “We’ll come back in,” he said. But Kira didn’t get sick or anything like it. She loved going out on the water, and with Charlie holding her up even took a turn at the wheel as they puttered past the Trident, with its deckload of late lunchers and early drinkers, several of whom waved. When they passed the point and got out on the bay proper Charlie kept watch on Kira, but her eyes were bright, her cheeks ruddy. Sure-footed, she walked bravely all over the boat, her hands lifted for balance, seldom grabbing the rail as Charlie had to do.

  “She’s a natural,” Neil said. The men smiled. The little Japanese barmaid had the wheel, with the Mantis beside her. The boat rocked in the waves and San Francisco popped white against the sky. As they moved toward the Golden Gate, Neil went into the little pilot house and took the wheel, heading straight out to sea.

  “Where are we going?” Kira asked. They stood out in the wind on the fantail.

  “Under the bridge,” Charlie said. “You cold?”

  “No.” Her face was so clean, so eager. Charlie wanted to cry, he loved her so much. Together they watched the bridge pass overhead, as the waves grew deeper and the wind blew colder. Neil gave the wheel back to Kazuko and brought out an old brown sweater. Charlie wrapped Kira in it, holding her in his arms to keep warm himself. He only wished Jaime could have been there. It was getting really cold. Her carried Kira into the pilot house, almost falling and grabbing Rachel. “Oops,” he said.

  “Give me that child,” said Rachel, and Charlie gratefully handed Kira over.

  “I guess we better turn back,” Neil said. Kazuko turned the wheel sharply left.

  “Jesus Christ!” Neil said, his face white. The boat turned broadside to the incoming waves and all but swamped, but K
azuko held the wheel sharply down and the boat made it crashing through the waves onto the reverse course. In seconds they coursed smoothly, as though nothing had happened.

  “What was that?” Charlie asked Neil. Kazuko could barely see over the wheel, her face set in determination. She showed no hint of concern, in fact none of the females were upset. Only Neil and, by contagion, Charlie. What horrible risk had he put his daughter through?

  “Nothing.” The color came back to Neil’s face. “Normally you don’t turn broadside to the wind, that’s all. We could have been swamped.”

  “If we sank would the sharks eat us?” Kira asked.

  Most of the time Charlie and Kira walked through town, window-shopping and people-watching. There was a little park, with a couple of pale brown stone elephants, palm trees, and a sunny patch of lawn, but they’d lost the privilege of sitting on the grass in the sunshine. Charlie heard the story at the no name. Ginsberg and Orlovsky and Ferlinghetti had been in Sausalito for some reason, and had found themselves in the park. They were clowning around, maybe Peter kissed Allen, there were people watching, and that night, that very night, the police came and put a fence around the lawn. No playing on the grass from now on. The first time in history that a park had been closed due to an infestation of poets.

  Now, the park closed, the hippies and other undesirables sat on the broad steps in front of the park or across the street on the steps up to Bulkley Avenue. “Look at the clowns,” Kira said loudly one day, meaning some colorfully dressed hippies.

  “Yes, dear,” Charlie said.

  The official end to their walk was always the bronze sea lion, which sat on a rock on the edge of the bay, down the long breakwater past the Trident. Charlie and Kira would sit on the bench there, side by side, looking at the sea lion and the boats on the bay. Kira usually fell asleep on his lap, and he’d carry her back through town to their car. Would this be one of Kira’s childhood memories? Charlie hoped so.