Fridays at Enrico's

  “What’s between us?” The conversation was getting too drunk for Charlie.

  “Godhood,” Marty said.

  “I’ll be right back.” Charlie drained his glass and stood. My goodness. Three Lemon Harts equaled at least six shots of whiskey. He walked carefully down the bar toward the entrance. The man who’d laughed at him was hunched over his drink and Charlie didn’t disturb him. Obviously a good man, a real human, the kind of salt-of-the-earth person Charlie had tried to avoid becoming all his life. Hard worker. Provider. Charlie had read that before the Battle of Somme in July 1915, whole villages of young men had signed up to go to war, and over they went in a body, up and out of the trenches side-by-side, all the boys from the village, and in five seconds all of them were dead, machine-gunned. Five seconds in combat. The hometown paper would print a list of the casualties, and the villagers would realize that every single one of their sons had died.

  Compared to that, what happened to Charlie had been a stroll down Park Avenue. The air outside the bar was cold, wind blowing down Columbus. It made him feel awake. He wanted to find Jaime. He was tired of philosophy. Tosca was right there, Jaime probably inside, sitting at a corner booth, holding court. They went there often. But it was still early. Charlie stood, letting the cold air sober him. Into Tosca, or up the hill to their apartment? Or both? What kept him from just pushing open the door to Tosca and going in? Was it the fear that she’d be there? Or that she’d not be? Anyway, fear. Fear was an old friend. Well, old friend, let’s go to Tosca.

  The bar was noisy, opera music playing on the juke box, both brass-eagle-topped espresso machines hissing steam into the air, the babble of conversation, the smell of cigarette and cigar smoke, a wonderful place. Before he went into the back, among the booths and tables where she’d most likely be, Charlie pushed up to the bar and ordered a cappuccino from Mario. He felt the need for some hot chocolate and coffee, to hold down all the liquor. The cappuccino tasted great. The woman sitting in front of Charlie smiled up at him. She was nice-looking, about thirty, well-dressed, obviously with the guy in tweed sitting next to her.

  “Hi, Charlie,” she said.

  He smiled politely. Or was it leered obscenely? He wasn’t sure. She talked as if they knew one another. They probably did, from one drunken evening or another. She’d just come from the symphony, that’s why they were dressed up. It had been wonderful, lots of nice Stravinsky. “Now we’re getting drunk,” she pointed out.

  “Me too.”

  “Where’s Jaime Froward tonight?” the woman asked.

  “Be back in a sec.” Charlie made his way through the people to the back, to survey the tables and booths. He didn’t see his wife and was intensely disappointed. He wanted to see her. He hadn’t in days. He wanted to hold her hand. He loved her little hands, so delicate. The sweetest pair of hands in the world. But she wasn’t here, and she wouldn’t be at Enrico’s, or the Jazz Workshop, or El Matador, or Frank’s, or even the Coffee Gallery, all places he’d intended looking, all places they both liked. He wondered who was playing at the Workshop. Last time had been the Jazz Crusaders, real hard-driving bop from four feet away. Great. Charlie himself had no particular musical tastes, but Jaime was a music fan, especially jazz, and had a great collection of records. If Charlie couldn’t find her, and he knew he couldn’t, he’d just run up to the Workshop and have a drink at the bar.

  Charlie drained his cappuccino and left Tosca’s for Twelve Adler. Kenny and Marty sat with two girls, and Marty saw him come in and waved for him to come over, but Charlie just backed out and left the dredgers to their pickups. He’d been wrong from the beginning, Jaime wasn’t out on the town. She was up in their apartment either writing or sleeping. She wasn’t in town to play around, he reminded himself as he trudged up Broadway, but to finish her book. Her second book. Charlie knew only that it was about a young woman.

  Jaime wrote what she wrote and kept it to herself, as did Charlie. That way they didn’t drive each other crazy. Charlie showed her his manuscript years ago, and her suggestions had been very good, but they argued hotly over every sentence, and Charlie finally had to take it back from her. He walked down Broadway to Enrico’s, past the all-night dirty bookstore and cigar stand. He thought about stopping in to pick up a mystery to take home and read himself to sleep, as he did on so many nights. A nice Perry Mason or something. But he didn’t, and he didn’t stop at Enrico’s, only looking past the outdoor tables as he went by, not seeing Jaime of course, since he was certain she was at their apartment. He trudged up the Kearny steps. The first night they’d gone out together she’d run up these steps like a monkey, and he’d followed with his worthless lungs, then as now making him pant like a fish. Sweat popped on his forehead. She’d better be home.

  She sat at her desk, the gooseneck lamp on, her manuscript in front of her, a red pencil in her hand. She looked up at him, her face breaking into a beautiful smile. She was so beautiful. And she was glad to see him.

  He went to her and pulled her to her feet, kissing her with all the feeling he could muster. He felt her fingers on his arms, her tongue in his mouth. His love for her was like a great white light. The long kiss ended.

  “I finished my book,” she said.

  45.

  She hadn’t meant to say it, but the words just tumbled right out. Charlie’s reaction last time she had finished a book was to take it well at first. The rest she didn’t want to think about. She’d expected that by now he’d have finished his own novel. She’d dreamed of them both riding high on the New York Times’ best-seller list, money pouring in, their pictures in the papers every day, articles in all the magazines about the fabulous literary couple. Invitations to Hollywood, what the heck, invitations to meet the Queen of England, who was, Jaime knew from listening to her mother, the queen of American high society as well. It was too late for an invitation to the White House, though. The only president she’d ever wanted to meet had been killed in Dallas. But Charlie couldn’t finish his novel.

  They made love in their little Telegraph Hill apartment and Charlie seemed fine, passionate as always, tender and kind. She herself was too exhausted to be much good, and had to pretend a little bit, so he wouldn’t feel let down. When they finished they lay side by side quietly for a long time. She knew he hadn’t fallen asleep because as soon as he did his mouth would come open and he’d begin to make a slight whistling sound. This lasted all night, unless he had his nightmares. Then he would begin to moan and sometimes even cry. But when he woke up he would tell her he didn’t remember. “As far as I know,” he told her once with his big bland smile, “I sleep like a log.”

  Now he’d be doing the same as she, lying there thinking about her book. How would he react? Her first book had been easy to write. She hadn’t known what she was doing, of course, which made it easier somehow, and she’d been writing about people she’d known all her life. The only really creative thing she’d done was make up new names. The stuff had just come out of her. All she had to do was polish it up. This new book was different. Maybe she’d bitten off too much. This time she’d made the whole thing up, instead of writing what everybody told her to write, e.g., the first book all over again only with all new people. She’d written a very internal story about a teenage girl raised in poverty in the thirties. She knew nothing about poverty except from her parents’ conversations at the dinner table. And she knew nothing about the Great Depression. She was half-sure that when she sent it in to Bob Mills he’d telephone and say, “Jaime, this just won’t do.” Deep in her heart she knew the book was good, for all the trouble it had caused her in coming out, the terrible hours of doubt, the passages that had to be rewritten dozens of times, while the cold sweat ran down her body telling her she was a fraud, this was shitty, she should quit, give up, go back and write another sweet little story about people with no problems. That was what one stupid reviewer had called her book, although most liked it.

  She felt a little gas, and was about to sneak it out when s
he remembered Charlie’s hilarious discussion of farting at the no name bar one night. He said that women sneaked their farts not to be polite, as everyone assumed, but to take people unawares. “A man lets a fart, wham, and you know to cover your nose, or light a match. An honest warning, like a rattlesnake’s rattle.” Charlie kept a straight face while everybody at several tables around were laughing and falling off their chairs. Of course everybody was drunk.

  “I’m about to fart,” she warned Charlie.

  He gave a little yell and jumped up and ran into the bathroom. Jaime laughed and farted simultaneously. “Is it over?” he called through the door. “Is it safe yet?” he asked her, looking frightened, like a little boy.

  “I’m afraid to light a match,” Jaime said between giggles.

  “The explosion that destroyed Telegraph Hill,” Charlie said in a normal voice, and sat on the bed next to her. They’d been lucky to get Charlie’s old apartment, but Jaime had furnished it herself. No more Zen literary purity, now the place had a real bed, a real easy chair, a rug, and, on the walls, a couple of the woodblock prints Charlie had brought back from Japan. On the desk next to Jaime’s typewriter, a single pale yellow rose in a blue glass vase.

  “What time is it?” Charlie asked. Jaime went in to the stove to look, drawing herself a little water in a cheese glass. It was almost one. “Early,” she said. She came back into the front room. Charlie stood looking at her completed manuscript. Charlie looked bigger naked than dressed.

  “Let’s go down to G and C’s,” he said. “My throat’s dry.”

  “I’ll get dressed,” she said. “You look fine as is.”

  “When do I get to read this?”

  His words put panic in her heart. If Charlie didn’t respond perfectly, she wasn’t sure she’d have the courage to send it in. He could say all the right things, but there might be the smallest amount of condescension or amusement or even nervousness, and she’d know the book was trash. Two years’ hard word destroyed in the lift of an eyebrow. Well, not two years’ hard work, more like six months’ hard work over a period of two years. Still. Could she say, No darling, I don’t want you reading it at all, not until it’s in print. Then you may, but only if you control your face and restrict your comments to extreme praise.

  “Can we go home instead?” Jaime said. “We can stop at the no name for a nightcap. I just don’t feel like facing all those drunks at Gino and Carlo’s.”

  “Leave the book here?” Charlie asked. “Let’s take it with us. I want to read it.”

  “Okay.”

  It was three days before he actually finished the book. Jaime was only a little surprised to feel the resentment building up. Why hadn’t he just sat down and gone at it? Only 226 pages, he could read it in a couple of hours. He didn’t. He told her he was “savoring” the book. She knew this meant he was having trouble plowing through it. On the third day he came out of his office carrying the manuscript, his face composed. He really looked very funny, his hair all up and sticking out. Obviously he’d been running his fingers through his hair as he read. He looked like a bomb-thrower, but sweet.

  “It’s a lot better than your first,” he said pedantically. “There were some passages of real emotion. A superior piece of work.”

  “Do you like it at all?” Tears welled up. He must have seen the effect his clowning was having, because he put the manuscript down on the dining room table and came to her and put his arms around her, consoling her for having written such a waste of time book.

  “I loved it,” he said into her hair. But it took about ten minutes of him describing in detail what he’d liked, and how much, how well it compared not only to her first book but to all books, before she believed him. “Shall I send it in?” she asked. He laughed.

  Before she actually did put a professionally typed copy of the manuscript in the mail to Mills, she wanted a woman’s view of it. She took the carbon over to her friend Tanya Devereaux. Tanya ran her call girl service from a flat on Alpine Terrace, a couple of blocks above Castro. It was owned by a couple of gay guys, who lived upstairs. Tanya read everything, and had strong opinions. Jaime parked her Porsche in front of the respectable-looking building and rang Tanya’s doorbell. Tanya answered naked.

  “Oh, I thought you were somebody else.”

  Jaime followed her down the carpeted corridor into her living room. Tanya had a long narrow Indian peasant face. If the Indians had peasants. Jaime knew Tanya was part Indian, but she didn’t know which tribe or anything. Tanya had taken on the whole police force and beaten them at their own game. Not that they didn’t arrest her every once in a while, but never on anything that would stick, and she’d walk out of the Hall of Justice thumbing her nose at them. “All it takes is an IQ over seventy,” she had said. “Don’t get me wrong. Most cops are good guys. But some are sadistic little bastards, and you can’t give ’em an inch.”

  “Am I going to be in the way?” Jaime asked her.

  “No. I have a fifty-dollar john coming in a few minutes, but you can wait here in the living room.” She arched her eyebrow in amusement at Jaime. “I fuck them downstairs. I only do my own tricks here. Special people.”

  “What do you have to do for fifty dollars?”

  A grin. “The same thing I’d do for twenty-five. Only the john offered fifty his first time, so he always pays fifty.”

  “I’ve heard of two-hundred-dollar girls, in places like Las Vegas, Hollywood, you know.”

  “A two-hundred-dollar hooker is a twenty-five-dollar hooker with a two-hundred-dollar john,” Tanya said, showing pink gums.

  “Ah.” The door chimed.

  “Relax,” said Tanya, and went to answer the door. She came back with a man in a dark blue suit. He had a round face and thinning hair. He looked very well cared for, his shoes shined to perfection, his suit obviously cut by a tailor, his pudgy fingers beautifully manicured, his jewelry gold. He looked surprised to see Jaime.

  “I didn’t ask for a three-way.”

  “She’s a friend.” Tanya led the man by the hand down the staircase. Twenty minutes later they returned. This time Tanya wore an old kimono open down the front. She escorted the customer out the door. Jaime could hear them whispering. When Tanya came back she said, “He couldn’t get it up.” She went into the kitchen for a Coke, and coming out, added, “He wanted you. He asked me how much.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I told him I’d ask you. You ever think about turning a trick? I could book you solid. Too bad you can write.” Tanya loved Washington Street.

  “Maybe I’ll end up turning tricks, I don’t know.” Jaime said it to be light, then worried she’d insulted Tanya.

  “I finished my book,” she blurted. “I’ve got a copy of the manuscript outside in my car.”

  Tanya’s face lit up. “Oh God, I’m so excited!” she said. “Can I read it? Please?”

  That was more like it.

  46.

  Why did she do these things to herself? When Jaime handed her the typing paper box with the carbon copy inside, Tanya had just put it aside on the kitchen counter and said, “I’ll read it right away.” Jaime had somehow expected to drive away from Alpine Terrace with Tanya’s opinion. Instead she drove away depressed. She’d forgotten how depressing the whole business was. She’d been living in her own secret world with people she’d made up herself, doing things she made up and turning out the way she intended. Now she was back in the real world, where everything was out of control. Charlie’s reaction had been horrible. He hated the book but didn’t want to give up his cushy life as her husband. It was certainly possible. It was possible he’d never loved her, but always seen her as a meal ticket. He was clever about it, too, always being so careful not to use her money.

  Driving down Divisadero she shook her head. Paranoid thoughts kept hounding her. That Charlie wasn’t what he obviously was. That she was unworthy of her success. It wasn’t really success, anyway, it was a lucky event, and she’d better be p
repared to have her second novel treated the way most people’s first novels were—no reviews, no money, no big paperback or movie sales, and so on. She’d be prepared for this book to fall through the cracks. The critics laid for you if your first book was, in their estimation, given too much attention.

  She drove north over the Golden Gate. Her movie deal had seemed so fabulous a couple of years ago. Joseph E. Levine, the big shot producer, famous for importing from Europe the shittiest movies he could find, had bought her novel sight unseen, based on something he’d heard at a cocktail party. Paramount Pictures. How flattering. He’d bought the book outright, the contract eighteen pages of dense boilerplate, which Mills blandly explained as “Pure slavery. He owns your book forever, in all media and all versions. He owns the characters, and if you wrote a sequel he’d have first right to buy it, and you couldn’t sell to anyone else with the same character names. Slavery, as I say.” Mills was for holding out. Jaime wanted that thirty grand. You could live three years high wide and handsome on that kind of money. But the thirty turned out to be twenty with ten to come when the picture was actually made. Which was apparently never. Joseph E. Levine finally read the book, and exploded. “These people are Communists!” he was reported to have said, and buried the project. No use explaining that they weren’t really communists, more like idealists. Try explaining that subtlety to the man who got rich importing “Hercules” starring Steve Reeves.

  In the process, Jaime had become fascinated. Movies were where the real money was, and Jaime wanted a lot of money. It was where the big audience was, too. She daydreamed about moving to Hollywood and breaking in as a writer, then moving on to director. Charlie was pretty cold about it. “There aren’t any women directors that I know of,” he said.

  “Ida Lupino,” she said, but Charlie went on about how terrible Hollywood was to writers. “Look what they did to The Naked and the Dead,” he said.