Exactly the life he led himself, if you stopped and considered it. Working behind the bar at the no name wasn’t exactly leisure, unless you compared it to the life he should have been leading. Working as a bartender, Charlie didn’t have to exert himself, didn’t have to think, didn’t have to face any hard conclusions. He stood on the plank and grinned and gave people what they wanted. He arbitrated disputes, gave advice to the lovelorn, guided destinies, and never had to take responsibility for the results. He was a bartender, what did you expect?
He often saw Kira afternoons. He hoped to today. To see her was to experience five minutes of relief, to know she was okay at least for the moment. Then she’d vanish. Jaime didn’t worry about Kira nearly as much as Charlie, but then when Jaime was home Kira didn’t come down to Bridgeway. She stayed home with her mother. They’d whisper together or go off in the car, and when Jaime was in residence there’d be kids over at the house, bunches of squealing girls, from whose activities Charlie was naturally excluded. His daughter was getting as normal a life as they could provide, given the circumstances. Kira did miss her mother, they both missed Jaime, but the advantage went to Kira, who spoke with Jaime on the telephone every day. And Jaime sometimes took Kira for a weekend in the city, and Charlie would be left alone. Not that he minded. Working afternoons took it out of him, and sometimes he’d just come home, wolf dinner, and go straight to bed. Of course usually by that time he’d be full of drugs, his head buzzing, his body in a pleasant state of nonexistence, or apparent nonexistence.
Kira’s face appeared in the open window at the front of the bar. She rested her arms on the windowsill and her chin on her hands. “Hi, Dad.”
“Hold on,” Charlie said. The bar wasn’t busy, so he wiped his hands and went outside, blinking into the brightness. Kira leaned against the building, her arms crossed. She wore jeans and her red blouse, and looked about eight to Charlie. “You okay?” he asked her.
“I’m fine. Can I have five dollars?”
“No.”
“Okay,” she said, which worried him.
“What do you want the money for?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
He reached into his pocket and gave her two dollars. “Make that do,” he said.
She smiled, took the money, and turned and ran down Bridgeway, slipping in amongst the people. Charlie’s heart nearly broke. So delicate, so beautiful, in a life that was so dangerous. He’d wanted to tell her about his call from Ratto, but she hadn’t allowed him the opening. Both his daughter and his wife were smarter than he was, at least about practical matters. Well, fine, maybe Kira would take care of him in his old age. Don’t plan for the future, his heart warned him. Children die. He returned to the bar.
When he got home that night Kira was there, sitting in the living room watching television. Mrs. Hawkins was in the kitchen making dinner, which smelled like pork chops. Mrs. Hawkins was only a few years older than Charlie, perhaps forty-five, and came over every day to clean and cook, going home to Marin if she wasn’t needed after dinner, or staying on as babysitter until either Charlie or Jaime came home. She was from Lacoumbe, Louisiana. She had mahogany skin and a cheerful singsong voice. Kira loved her, and Charlie almost did. Mrs. Hawkins was their anchor. Charlie yelled hello and went into the bathroom. When he came out he sat on the couch behind Kira, who was on the rug.
“Have you talked to your mother?”
Kira turned and lay on the rug looking up. “Yes,” she said.
“She still working?”
“I don’t think so,” Kira said. “She was pretty drunk.” She rolled back over to watch the news.
Charlie laughed and said, “I’ll give her a call.” But there was no answer when he did. He wondered if she was down at Enrico’s drinking. Or maybe at the corner store, talking to Old Rose, the Chinese woman who ran the place. Or she could be at the Caffe Sport, wining it up with the junior Mafia. Or just asleep, unable to answer the phone. Or in bed with somebody. He wished Kira didn’t know Jaime was drunk so much of the time, but what hypocrisy to keep it hidden. Even if they could keep it hidden.
“I think I’ll go into town,” he said aloud, and Kira turned and faced him again. “I wanna go with you.”
“I’m sorry, I won’t be home until late.”
Kira got up and sat beside him. Her warmth made him almost tearful. She was so fragile. She gave him her most innocent look and said, “Are you going to rescue Mother?”
He laughed and put his arm around her, pulling her warmth to him, as if he could keep her alive with his own life. Why was he worried about her mortality? He tried to remember what drugs he’d taken that day. None, unless you counted marijuana. “Kira,” he said, reaching for his deepest, most confident voice. “Your mother is just fine.”
“Then why are you so sad?”
No point trying to fool her. He gave her a big hug and kissed her on top of her head. The three ate at the dining room table, Mrs. Hawkins keeping her eyes to her plate as always. After dinner Charlie very deliberately showered and shaved, dressed in fresh jeans and a fresh blue work shirt. Mill Valley was warm tonight, but San Francisco might be foggy. He put on the old black leather jacket Jaime had given him. He looked at himself in their full length mirror. A big man, tall and thick, with a bushy dark red beard streaked with white. He looked into his own big brown eyes. Was anybody in there? He didn’t know.
65.
Charlie walked through the evening crowds on Columbus, his hands in his jacket pockets, wondering which way to go. Jaime wasn’t likely to be at City Lights or Vesuvio, it was too early for Tosca, and besides, they didn’t like any of these places quite as much as in the past. More likely either Enrico’s, sitting at the bar, or up at Gino and Carlo’s. Or at any one of a hundred other bars. Or a party in Pacific Heights. A literary party.
He walked down to Enrico’s. The outside tables were full but there were only a couple of people at the little bar. Charlie sat and waited for Ward the bartender to come over. Ward was a huge man, probably twenty pounds heavier than Charlie, but all muscle.
“Have you seen Jaime?” Charlie asked when Ward came over, just to get it out of the way.
“Who wants to know?” Ward growled. Then he smiled. “She’s in the toilet.” He went to the other end of the bar, picked up a half-finished glass of something and a napkin and brought them over. “I guess she’ll be sitting with you,” he said reluctantly. Because they were both so big, Charlie and Ward pretended to be antagonists.
“Yeah, well, I’ll have what she’s having,” Charlie said, to cover his feelings of relief. When Jaime slipped onto the barstool next to him he was drinking his drink, gin and tonic, ugh.
“Hi, honey,” she said, and leaned her cheek against his arm. She didn’t seem too drunk. He put his arm around her and kissed her hair.
“Hi, sweetie,” he said.
“You got here just in time,” she said. She straightened up and drank some gin and tonic. “I was about to leave. Now we can have a drink together, and you can take me home.” She put her hands in her jacket pockets. “I talked to Kira,” she said. “I knew you were coming.”
“How are you?” Charlie asked. “You okay enough to listen to something, or should I wait until morning?”
She smiled, looking into her drink. “How serious is it? If it’s serious, let’s wait.”
“It’s not serious.” He told her about Bill Ratto’s call. Her face hardened, and she held up a finger for Ward, who came over. She ordered two more drinks and then started going through her pockets again. She was in her green velour jacket with the puffy shoulders.
“Are you searching for a cigarette?” Charlie asked. “We quit, remember?”
“Just a habit,” she said. They’d both quit smoking a couple of years ago, and had almost divorced over it. Now she smiled. “I’ve been waiting for Hollywood to call, and they call you,” she said. “What’s that shit about?”
Jaime’s second book had been optioned for a te
levision series, but nothing had happened except that she made a lot of option money over the years, and they finally let it lapse. Of course her first book had been bought outright by the late Joseph E. Levine and then let die. Jaime always claimed that she hated Hollywood but loved their money.
“I think it’s a chance at some gold,” he said.
“Gee, you aren’t going to do it, are you?” she asked, and laughed.
“What the fuck else am I doing? Neil can take me off shift for a few weeks, I’ll fly to Hollywood, gather a few pesos and fly right back home. Wanna come?”
She pretended incredulity. “Me?” Then her face changed. She was drunker than she looked. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You’re serious. And he did call. Of course, we’ll go down there and beard the lion. We could also duck the fog for a while, no? Get a suite in a nice hotel and play movie star.”
“I’ll call the bastard tomorrow.” Charlie waved at Ward. “Bring me a Wild Turkey, Ward, please?”
Jaime was deep in a long story she thought might actually turn out to be a novel, or a novelette, or novella, whatever the hell you call them. Short novel. She’d been writing short stories lately, a string of them, and getting them mostly printed in the New Yorker. She talked of her work for a while, while Charlie had his Wild Turkey.
Then he said to his wife of twelve years, “Okay, what do you want to do?” They both looked through the glass at the people sitting outside at the marble tables. High grade drunks, the cream of San Francisco bar society.
“I want to fuck that girl over there,” Jaime said, pointing to a beautiful woman in a red evening dress, who sat at a table full of dressed-up people. The men looked like lawyers. Charlie, too, would have liked to screw the woman in the red dress, but he only smiled at Jaime.
“I mean us,” he said. “Shall we hit another bar, or do you want to cross the river? We could stop at the no name for a night. Or not. Or I could take you up to the apartment. Entirely up to you.”
“I’m sick of the apartment,” she said, putting hope in his heart. She put her hand on his cheek, her eyes almost wet with tears. “But I gotta stay. The old bitch won’t let me.” Charlie knew she meant that the story was keeping her. She wouldn’t come until it was done. Again he realized why she was a writer and he wasn’t. She was mystical about the work. The work really did come first. For Charlie the work had come first only until he’d met her. Then her, and Kira. Something had somehow put Jaime out of reach of these feelings. He’d read her first novel, about her wonderful family life, and couldn’t see anything there to make her this way. The only way she could love her family was to write about them.
Charlie smiled at her sadly. “Let’s have one more,” he said. “And I’ll walk you home.”
She smiled glassily. “I love you,” she said, and giggled.
66.
Charlie was met at LAX by a driver holding up a sign with his name on it. Actually the best part of the trip was getting into the limousine, Charlie’s first. He hoped his fellow passengers on the commuter flight could see him now. Him in his Levi’s, boots, garbage shirt, and black leather jacket. Them in their commuter suits. He knew he looked like a dope dealer or a rock musician, and they’d put him through the mill at SFO, making him put his hands against the wall while the little airport cops searched his bags and patted him down. They missed the baggie of marijuana he carried in his hip pocket under his dirty handkerchief.
“I’m Charles Monel,” he said to the driver, who was a young guy, thin, with very dark glasses and pale skin. The driver pulled open the back door and Charlie grinned at him. “Thanks,” he said, and bumped his head getting in. Bill Ratto’s sweet-voiced secretary had sent Charlie tickets and asked which hotel he’d prefer. Charlie didn’t know anything about L.A. hotels, so the secretary put him into the Beverly Wilshire. All the way there, driving mostly on backstreets and avoiding freeways, the driver talked about his own Hollywood ambitions.
“I’m not like most of the drivers,” he said. “They’re all writers or actors. I’m gonna produce.” He explained that in Hollywood only the man who controlled the purse strings had any creative power. “Everybody else has to suck his ass,” the driver said. His eyes met Charlie’s in the mirror. “Can I give you some advice?” he asked Charlie.
“Sure.”
“Don’t rub your eyes. It just makes it worse.”
Charlie stopped. “What the hell is it?”
“Particulate matter,” the driver said.
Charlie’s room at the Wilshire was nice, nothing special. He’d somehow been expecting luxury. There was a little red blinking light on his telephone. The message was from Bill, asking him to call at once.
“Charlie! How do you like Southern California?” Charlie couldn’t think of an answer and Bill didn’t wait for one. “I need to do a couple of things around here, then we can have lunch right downstairs in your hotel.”
Charlie found the restaurant, El Padilla, in the back of the hotel. He gave his name to the uniformed waiter, who took him to a banquette. The room was about three-quarters full, and buzzing. Charlie felt a kind of nervous excitement that had nothing to do with his meeting. What if a star walked in? Instead Bill Ratto slid in next to him and told the hovering waiter to bring them menus and a telephone. So every cliché was to be played out. Bill was wearing a suit and tie and had tucked his sunglasses into his lapel pocket, one temple bar hanging out raffishly. His shirt was white, his tie was silk, but still he looked Hollywood. The tan, maybe. Bill’s plump face had thinned, and his hair receded. He no longer looked like an owl, more like a hawk. A cartoon hawk.
He turned to Charlie and stuck out his hand. “We’re meeting my partner,” he said. “Meanwhile, how are you? You look great, a little heavy, but good. How’s your wife?”
“Jaime is fine,” Charlie said. She hadn’t come because her story had turned into something longer. “Don’t let them fix you up with any actresses,” she said, and kissed him wetly. Kira wanted a tee shirt from Hollywood.
The waiter plugged in the telephone, and with an apologetic smile Bill picked up the instrument and talked quietly into it. Charlie picked up the menu, trying not to listen. When he put down the menu another man was coming toward them, smiling brilliantly. He was very good-looking in a Hollywood way, with dark hair, and dressed in jeans and a collarless blue work shirt. He reached for Charlie’s hand.
“You have to be Charles Monel,” he said. “I’m Bud Fishkin.” Fishkin’s handshake was firm and dry. Fishkin slid into the booth and asked for a menu and a telephone. Now Charlie was surrounded by producers with telephones, murmuring into the instruments while Charlie tried not to be embarrassed. But of course no one was looking at them and no one was laughing. Without being obvious, Charlie started listening to the conversations. Ratto was talking to his secretary, going through the phone calls that had come in since he left his office. Fishkin was talking to his agent. Charlie felt like calling the waiter over and getting his own instrument, so he could call Jaime and tell her she was missing a pretty funny lunch.
“Bill tells me you were in Korea,” Bud Fishkin said in a warm voice after he hung up. “I must say, you look the part.”
Ratto said, “We have an idea for your picture, but first I’d like to explain a few things. Remember your book?”
Charlie smiled. “Yes.”
“Well, not exactly like that, but the spirit of that. Novels are thick. Movies are flat. We want to flatten your novel, but retain the same intensity, the same flavor. That’s why we’d like you to work with us on the script. If you’d like to. If it wouldn’t piss you off too much.”
“Novels get raped and murdered in Hollywood,” Fishkin said with a warm smile. “Lots of times the book writer is too protective. We felt you might not be this way since your book was never published. So you’ve got nothing to live down, nothing to defend.”
“I see,” said Charlie. “You want me to help with the raping and killing.”
Fishkin laug
hed. “You can be first.” Both Charlie and Ratto laughed.
“What’s in it for me?” Charlie asked, dabbing at his eyes with a big, red napkin.
“Wait a minute, wait a minute, I take that question seriously,” said Fishkin. “What’s in it for you is, first, your novel will now see the light of day, although in somewhat different form. This should be or could be of great creative satisfaction, and all that shit. Then there’s the money. There can be a hell of a lot of money in a movie, money you don’t even think about, residual rights, foreign sales, television series, electronic rights, it goes on and on. And if you make a name for yourself as a screenwriter, you can get pretty rich. And you can acquire greater control.”
“That’s important,” Ratto said. “Because with this first script you won’t have much control. That has to be earned.”
“You have to learn the ropes,” said Fishkin with a smile.
“What’s the plot of my movie?” Charlie asked. The waiter came up, and Charlie noticed that neither of the other men ordered anything to drink except coffee. Charlie did the same. He wasn’t going to get blasted and let them take advantage.
After the waiter left, Fishkin and Ratto exchanged a look, as if to say, You or me? Then Ratto said, “Let me. The movie’s about you, Charlie. A war hero who gets captured by the Chinese, then has to survive the prison camp, even though he has tuberculosis. It’s about survival.”
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