Fridays at Enrico's

by Don Carpenter

  She looked into her daughter’s bedroom, half-hoping to see her in her own bed. No. Jaime tried to identify which clothes were missing, but she didn’t recognize half the stuff she found in the closet or on chairs or on the bed. Kids traded clothes all the time. Some of this stuff was pretty weird, blue leather hotpants she was certain she’d never seen before, a leather jacket which must have cost a fortune. Jaime realized she knew almost nothing about Kira. After the breakup that had brought them into the same home, she’d learned less about her daughter, not more. Kira, blaming her mother, had closed herself off. Charlie, though not a bad man, had become sanctified in Kira’s mind. Writers should never marry anyway, Jaime told herself. We’re too selfish.

  With that thought she began to relax. Kira understood her pretty well. Her daughter would hurt her, surgically, using every weakness she sensed in her mother, then come home. There was no need to call the police or do anything else dramatic, just wait for her daughter to come home. Jaime started crying, but even that was just the fucking hangover. Kira was fine. It was Jaime who was suffering.

  80.

  It had seemed like such a good simple idea, an exercise almost, to write a short story about a girl Jaime had known only slightly, but whose tragedy had terribly upset her. In real life the girl’s name had been Mary Bergendaal. Jaime kept the Mary for the overtone of the virginal, and made her last name Rosendaal. Rose, doll, and Scandinavian. The real Mary had been a French horn player with the Portland Symphony, who’d killed herself at the age of twenty-four. Charlie, coming home one night, had told her about the suicide, because she and Charlie had met the girl one afternoon downtown, with Marty Greenberg. Jaime recalled a soft little blonde girl, hanging onto Marty’s arm and not saying anything, her eyes unfocused.

  “Is that Marty’s girlfriend?” she asked Charlie afterward. He just laughed. A month later she killed herself, blowing her brains out with a shotgun. Charlie had felt terrible, especially about laughing. “Oh, God, the things we all said about her.”

  Jaime had begun her story at second remove, with the main characters reacting to her suicide, then threw away what she’d written and started over with Mary at the center. If she could write about Mary from the inside, maybe Jaime could animate the enormous sympathy she felt for her, and find out by the end of the story why she’d killed herself. Of course the obvious was the obvious. She’d killed herself because she was angry. It was a revenge killing. She was the blow queen, she gave everybody head, now she would show them what it really meant.

  The story had grown as she’d submerged herself in Portland memories. She had enough material, really, for a good short novel. A story about Portland, centering on Mary but not restricted to her. Fifty-six pages in, she could imagine it would run to almost two hundred. Her instinct for the stories’ proportion was good by now. Today her head hurt and her stomach fluttered, but this wouldn’t stop her. Writing with a hangover, pecking out the words one painful letter at a time, pausing and staring without comprehension at the words, often produced her best material. She didn’t know why. Kira’s mysterious absence made her sweat with anxiety, but there was nothing to do but blot out everything and write. If you ever gave in, stayed in bed, let your anxiety win, you’d end up hugging your knees in terminal terror. “I can’t work! I’m going to die!” Instead she plugged away blindly, letting the words come without thought.

  At some point she sat, panting, wondering what the next sentence would be, then realized she was done for the day. A light sweat covered her body. She picked up the pages she’d written. Four of them, just enough. She stood, wobbling slightly, and went into the bathroom, and there stripped off her tee shirt and underpants and got into the hot shower. Her mind was almost empty. She was shampooing her hair when she thought of Kira. Oh, shit. All the good feeling from work ran down the drain. She stood helpless under the spray, the worst mother in America. No wonder her daughter ran off, no wonder she couldn’t attract a decent man. She was just an old whore without a brain.

  She was dressed in her favorite blue tee shirt and jeans, sitting at her desk correcting and editing the morning pages, when Kira came in through the back door. “Hi Mom,” she said, and opened the refrigerator door. Jaime’s face flushed. She sat with her arms at her sides, relief and anger flooding her. Kira had obviously only been upstairs. She hadn’t run away. She’d been visiting the neighbors, a couple of craftspeople, nice people, friends. If Jaime had been home, not drunk out in North Beach, she’d have known. As if to emphasize the point, her headache returned in full force. “Oh,” she groaned, as Kira came into her office wearing clothes Jaime had never seen before.

  “Where the hell have you been?” Jaime asked, in a gnawing, whiny voice.

  “Where the hell have you been?” Kira asked in an unkind imitation.

  “Where did you get those clothes?”

  Kira posed, her arms out like a model. “You like?” She wore pale pink crushed velvet bellbottoms and an emerald green silk blouse with long puffed sleeves. “Borrowed,” she said.

  “You weren’t here when I got home,” Jaime said, and immediately regretted it.

  Kira grinned at her. “When did you get home, Mom?” she asked.

  Jaime smiled, and the episode was over. She’d failed to bawl Kira out for cutting school. Kira changed clothes and headed out the back door.

  “Where are you going?” Jaime asked, though she knew.

  “Back upstairs.”

  “You aren’t bothering them, are you?” Jaime asked, as a formality. The couple upstairs liked having Kira visit.

  “I’m learning how to carve,” she said. Jaime listened as Kira went up the wooden staircase. What a fucking relief. Now if only the hangover would go away, her life would be back in the groove. The telephone rang. Charlie.

  “What’s going on?” he asked, sounding tired. Charlie was making a movie, at least he hoped he was. He’d started so many, but none had actually gotten made. “Where’s Kira?”

  Jaime had forgotten calling the hotel. “Oh, it’s nothing,” she said.

  There was a pause, some crackling on the line, then Charlie said, “The desk clerk told me you asked if she was here.”

  “I thought she’d run off.” It was hard to force words out of her mouth. Talking to Charlie put her on the defensive. She explained what she could, but Charlie hardly sounded satisfied.

  “There must be something going on, if you thought she’d come down here,” he said.

  “Why don’t you just take her?” Jaime said dryly. “How’s the movie coming?”

  “Fine,” Charlie said with some sarcasm in his voice. “How’s the book coming?”

  “Fine,” she said in imitation.

  Charlie chuckled. “Lemme talk to Kira.”

  “She upstairs learning to be a craftsperson.” Charlie knew and liked the second-floor neighbors.

  “How are you?” Charlie said after some silence.

  “Fine. Hung over.”

  “Did you write this morning?”

  “Yeah. Did you?”

  “Yeah. Well, Stan’s coming over, we’re gonna go out by the pool and pick up starlets.”

  “Give him my best.”

  “Tell Kira I love her.”

  “I will.”

  “G’bye.”

  “Bye, Charlie.” She hung up. Another shower would be necessary. She held her forehead. It seemed hot. She should have known, the leather jacket was a dead giveaway. Kira wouldn’t run away without taking it. Jaime decided she was losing her mind. Not dramatically, just dribbling it away.

  “Brain drain,” she said to no one.

  81.

  Kenny Goss knew Jaime’s upstairs neighbors too, and spent a lot of time around their back room, smoking dope and listening to rock ’n roll. They dealt some of the best marijuana in San Francisco. At the moment they were dispensing purple sensemilla from Santa Barbara, at twenty dollars an ounce, worth every cent so far as Kenny was concerned. He’d tried importing marijuana h
imself but the whole deal had gone terribly bad, and Kenny had found himself, at three in the morning, lying face up on the San Bernardino Freeway as traffic whizzed past. His car was somewhere nearby, upside down, after a brush with a truckful of people. Kenny lay waiting to be crushed. He was alert, and knew he’d die any second now. He’d given up on religion long ago, yet the Virgin Mary seemed to hang above him in midair, about ten feet above him if he was any judge. She just hung there, parallel to the ground, wearing a white robe, with a blue shawl edged in gold over her head and shoulders.

  “Get up,” she said to him. Cars whizzed past. “Get up and walk to the side of the road,” she said in a clear calm voice.

  “I don’t believe in you,” Kenny said.

  “Get up and walk to the side of the road,” she said, and vanished. Kenny stood up and walked to the side of the road. There was a lot of traffic for this time of the morning. Here was his car, upside down, steam rising from the engine. And here came red lights flashing. Kenny walked down off the roadway and hid in the bushes. He wasn’t hurt, just bruised and a little dazed. When the cops started looking for him with flashlights he moved off, and finally found his way to a truck stop. It took him most of the day to find the CHP garage, where his car had been towed. He identified himself to the guy on duty and said he wanted to get his stuff out of the car. This took a little nerve, and Kenny was jangly as he went to his car, which was a total wreck. But he’d stored under the fenders two socks full of marijuana, about a pound. If the cops had found the stuff, he was walking into a trap. But he had every dime he owned tied up in the goddamned stuff, and he meant to have it. By some miracle it was still where he’d hidden it. Without glancing around, he pulled out the two fat socks and put them into the paper bag with his dirty underwear. Carrying his stuff he nodded and said thanks to the guy who held the big cyclone fence open for him. After walking two blocks with his heart in his mouth, he relaxed. They weren’t coming after him. It was while sitting on the bus for San Francisco, possessions on his lap, that he remembered seeing the Virgin Mary. A visual hallucination?

  “Thanks anyway,” he said to no one in particular, and decided to get out of the dope business. Except, of course, as a consumer. Which led to the upstairs flat on Seventeenth Street. It was an amazing coincidence to find Jaime and Kira living downstairs, amazing and delightful. Their lives kept weaving together. Maybe it meant something.

  Kenny’s own marriage had not worked out. Not Brenda’s fault. She’d apparently been waiting all her life for some man to come along, marry her, impregnate her every year or so, and beat the hell out of her to keep her in line. Otherwise nothing worked. Brenda would be cool and calm, the perfect housewife, and then she’d go crazy. Kenny worked at home, both his writing and his small rare book business, so he was around all the time, except when scouting books. Their apartment had been on Pine Street, between Leavenworth and Jones. Not a great neighborhood, but the place was cozy, three floors up, and Kenny felt comfortable. He had four children’s books out and they all brought in nice regular money, not a lot, but enough for Kenny to able to relax and let his wife stay home. This was fine with Brenda, but after she’d done all the cleaning and washing and vacuuming she felt the time heavy on her hands, and so would start drinking beer. Ninety percent of the time even this was fine. Kenny would be in his little cubbyhole writing or dealing with his books and she’d be in the kitchen, sitting at the table with the radio on, drinking beer and reading the paper. But sometimes she got lonely or something, and would come and talk to him. Not just talk, but talk and talk and talk, the words tumbling out like a mountain stream over granite boulders, or so he ironically told himself as he endured the torrent. Not just words, hard words. Brenda Feeney Goss was a Catholic girl, and she wanted her babies. “Listen, if it’s not my fault it’s your fault, and if it’s not your fault I don’t know whose fault it is, but somebody’s got to be at fault,” and on and on until he wanted to slap her silly, no, what he really wanted was to ball his fist and smash her face, breaking teeth, hearing her nose snap, seeing the blood gush. Oh boy. What a horrible soul. If there was such a horrible thing. Immortal soul. Stuck with the same personality forever. Thanks a lot, God.

  Stupidly, Kenny had told Brenda all about his experience with the Virgin Mary. He was talking of the power of childhood, how the things we believe as children never really go away. She took it as a genuine miracle, and held his own faithlessness over his head. “Eternal hell, my friend,” she said to him. “And you’re taking me with you.”

  “Oh, batshit.” But he had an uncomfortable feeling she was right.

  “You notice the Virgin didn’t say anything about the grass,” she said another time, apropos of nothing. They’d both quit drinking and depended on their marijuana. But stoned she could be even worse, gliding into his cubbyhole like some gigantic cobra, hissing at him about anything she could think of. Never anything important. Kenny told her every which way he could that he was an easy-going guy, but you just had to leave him alone when he was trying to work.

  “Work? You call that work?” All real work was done with a pick and a shovel, as far as she was concerned. “You can call it work if you want, but it ain’t work.” Contemptuous laughter bubbled out of her.

  “Then how come they pay me for it?”

  “Because you’re a criminal!” she yelled. Marijuana was supposed to cool you out, but apparently it had the opposite effect on Brenda.

  He could have put up with the interruptions if she’d loved him. She didn’t. Once they were married she made it clear she found sex disgusting, except as a means of reproducing. They only real fun they had sexually had been while drunk or stoned. Then afterward she’d be relentlessly guilty. She wasn’t a good Catholic, either. She never went to Mass. Quite an irony for Kenny, because when Brenda finally did leave him, she ran away with a priest.

  For months Kenny was depressed, though not so depressed he couldn’t write. When he sold his fourth book he moved to a flat on Arguello, a nice big one with two bedrooms, just in case he found a woman he could really love. He decorated the place himself, spending careful weeks going through the stock over on Clement Street and down at Busvan on the Embarcadero, picking out old wooden pieces and some very nice Oriental rugs pretty cheap. He kept the new place immaculate, nothing like his bachelor pads in the past. With Brenda gone he felt like he could safely go back to drinking beer, and did.

  Upstairs over Jaime’s was a good place to meet women, but not the marrying kind, or even the dating kind. The unapproachable kind. The rich and beautiful kind. The Pogozis catered to the high rollers, rich young rock ’n rollers, rich young craftspeople, with nothing to do but try on jewelry and smoke dope. Karla Pogozi made jewelry out of 24-karat gold, heavy necklaces and earrings, while her husband, Vili, carved small animals and hash pipes out of ivory and rare woods. At any time of the day or night there were bound to be people up there, sitting around the back room. A great place to hang out, and Kenny did so a lot, even when he had dope at home. The company was always pleasant, the dope wonderful, the music hot. And the women who came through were delicious, in their leathers and silks. Too bad they were all taken. And too bad Kenny didn’t make enough money to afford them. But he had to be optimistic. He was a good-looking guy. Maybe one would adopt him.

  82.

  The trouble with writing about Portland was that Jaime had been happier then, as she remembered it. No matter that her life now was carefully arranged the way she wanted it. In Portland they’d been young and full of their own power, with their raffish old house in Lake Grove, their bright young friends, the painters and writers and dreamers of Portland. And Kira had been a baby. It had all seemed so easy.

  She found herself losing track of why she’d chosen to write about this time and these people. Not to show how wonderful everything had been, but to show how the wonderfulness must have looked to someone excluded from it. Someone who wasn’t invited to the hootenannies or dancing parties, but only to blowjo
b dates in cars or in the back stairwells of the Portland Auditorium. Someone who learns that talent, perseverance, and desire would not be enough. You had to be beautiful or charming as well, you had to be likable. Jaime had always been likable, and to get inside Mary’s character she had to shed her likable skin, her beauty and charm. After a while it was easy to do, and then of course the trick was to change back into herself at the end of the writing day. If she failed, she’d find herself going around all day as a mousy little girl with no confidence, waves of music passing through her mind, blocking out rational thought. The music was part of the process. Jaime always liked to have music playing softly in the background as she wrote, to block other sounds and sweeten her mood. Usually jazz, coming over the radio from KJAZ, but writing Mary’s story she played only classical music, Bach, Haydn, and Mozart. Mary was a little snob, Jaime decided affectionately. She had her integrity. She found Beethoven a little blowsy and romantic. Haydn was her ideal.