Fridays at Enrico's (5 page)

“Don't you want to go home?”

“I want to be with you,” she said. She'd come down here hoping to find him, but not to sleep with him, just to talk, tell him about her life falling apart, ask his advice. All that seemed unimportant now.

She stood in the middle of Charlie's living room–bedroom while he went into the kitchen and turned on a light. The place looked eerie in this light. It wasn't going to be a monk's cell tonight. She no longer felt like sleeping with him, of course, but here she was, she had asked for this, and so poor Charlie was going to have to go ahead and seduce her.

“Don't you use a typewriter?” she asked as he came back into the half-light.

“Sure I do,” he said, and pulled her to him. She let herself get pulled.

“Uh-oh,” Charlie said, and let her go.

He was too sensitive. She moved toward him and put her hands and cheek against his chest. “You have to do all the work,” she said. “I'm pretty scared.”

“You sure you want to do this?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “But I guess you don't. That's all right.”

“Do you want me to take you home?”

“No, damn it, I want you to take me to bed.”

“Then why'd you go cold?”

“I don't think you like me,” Jaime said. She was angry. All the liquor warmth was gone. She felt empty and stupid.

“Well, putting it that way, I better take you home,” he said, with bitterness in his voice.

“If I could just have a glass of water first,” she said in her smallest voice. She sat at his desk while he went into the kitchen and came back with a little cheese glass of water. He sat on the bed and watched her sip.

“You okay?” he asked.

“I'm fine,” she said. “I've had a bad time today. I'll be all right in a minute.”

“I really do like you,” he said. “Are you a virgin?”

“I don't see what that has to do with anything.”

“Thank you,” he said. “It explains everything . . . our
reluctance
. . .”

Jaime stood up, her heart pounding. “I'm not reluctant,” she said, and came over and took his head in her hands and tilted it up and kissed him, pushing her tongue into his mouth. In a moment they were both on the bed, holding each other tightly, kissing and moaning.

“Do it to me!” she cried out.

7.

Jaime's father had been keeping a mistress, and he died at her apartment, actually in her bed. But Jaime didn't discover any of this until the night before her father's funeral. All she knew was that he'd died out of the house somewhere, of a stroke.

It would have been exaggerating to say that Jaime and her father had been estranged at the time of his death, but they'd certainly been arguing. About Charlie, of course. After their first night together Charlie had brought her home around eight in the morning, a bright clear morning full of promise. She was already completely in love with him, but didn't realize it yet. In fact she thought everybody must have felt this way after making love all night. She looked forward to feeling like this on many mornings of her life. She couldn't understand why she'd waited this long.

“This is it, huh?” Charlie said, squinting up at the house. “Looks like a real mansion.” Jaime kissed him and got out of the car.

“See you in class,” she grinned at him.

“You sure will,” he grinned back at her.

She was surprised to see her father in the dining room in his bathrobe. She'd forgotten he had been fired, or hadn't realized that of course this meant he'd be home all the time now. Unless he got another job. He looked awful, sitting there in his blue satin bathrobe with its pale red satin lapels. He wasn't wearing his glasses and his eyes were red and somehow monkey-looking, like those of the primates in the zoo. Sad mad old eyes, she thought, and tried to bull her way through the situation.

“Morning, Dad,” she said, and sat at the table in her usual spot.

“What the hell do you mean coming in here at eight o'clock in the morning?”

“I'm hungry,” she said, just as her mother came in from the kitchen, hung over, in her pink wrapper and her old pink mobcap that made her look like Martha Washington. Mom carried the coffee pot, and as her father began his harangue Jaime held out her cup to be filled. Charlie was too old for her, of course. And he parked cars, never mind his ambitions to be a writer. Everybody wanted to be a writer. Meanwhile he was just a parker of cars and a rapist, or practically, since he must have seduced or somehow forced Jaime. She wondered what her father would have said if he'd known that Charlie had been the first. She didn't tell him. She took her lecture with her head erect, sipping coffee. She was damned if she'd look penitent. She didn't feel the least bit penitent. Her father insisted she not go out with Charlie anymore, but her mother saved her.

“Dear,” she said to him. “We can't ask her not to date.”

“We can ask her to stay away from men twice her age!” he said angrily, red face getting redder.

“No, we can't,” her mother said quietly. And it was over. But her father must have died feeling bad about his daughter.

Jaime's brother, Bill, flew in from Taipan, tanned and stricken. There was
a kind of wake at their house that afternoon before the funeral, with a bunch of newspaper reporters in their best blue suits, standing around the living room getting drunk and talking about the good old times. After the last drunken reporter had been poured down the front steps, Jaime and Bill sat cross-legged on her twin beds in what had been Bill's bedroom and talked. Jaime didn't quite know how she felt about Bill. He'd always hated their father, and now his guilt and sadness were hard to bear. He was her brother, of course, and that must have meant something, but she felt remarkably cool toward him, even after such a long absence. Bill had been overseas for two years, and he was six years older than she, a mature young man who'd chosen a life in civil service. Bill had a thin face, thin body, and was the tallest member of the family at five eight. His only attractive feature was a pair of blue eyes even harder and darker than hers.

“You know where Dad died, don't you?” he said to her finally. He told Jaime about the mistress, and explained that their entire life had been a sham, the happy family a lie. Her father had been screwing around for years. This one particular girlfriend he actually paid the rent for.

“Where did he get the money?” she heard herself asking, from the depths of her numbness.

Bill knew nothing about money. But he knew their father had died during intercourse and gone immediately into rigor, and that it had been difficult to get the body out of the apartment on Pine Street, the cops and ambulance attendants laughing and joking because they'd known old Farley Froward, everybody knew him, and everybody knew old Fairly Farley would have been just as callous and cracked just as many jokes.

“Where did you hear all this?” Jaime asked Bill. He grinned his mean little grin and said, “Weren't you listening downstairs?”

“I wasn't eavesdropping,” she said meanly. This all made her feel as if she was somebody else, hovering in a corner of the room, looking down at the foolish humans. Including her, who hadn't thought it was possible that her own father was unfaithful. Or that any woman would have him. Was her mother a fraud too?

“What about Mom?” she asked.

“Mom's been putting up with it for years,” he said. “Why do you think she drinks so goddamn much?”

“I never thought about it.” Their father was dead, his ashes to be scattered into the Pacific in two days. She'd apparently known nothing about him.

“Do you have any other family secrets to tell me, before you fly away?”

He looked at her oddly. “What do you mean?”

“Is Mom dating other men? Is the house really rented? Is our name really Froward? Anything else I ought to know about myself?”

Her brother stood, his face reddening. “You don't have to get shitty about it,” he said mysteriously, and left the room.

She had seen Charlie several times at school since their night of love and they'd even made love again, in the back of his De Soto, parked down by Lake Merced. This second episode had clarified things a bit, since she hadn't known whether she meant anything to Charlie or was just a nice pretty young piece of ass. After some comical maneuvers they had an extremely passionate coupling, and at the end of it Charlie told her he loved her.

“Oh, don't, Charlie,” she said, not really able to believe it. “You don't have to say that.”

“I know it,” he said. “But I do.”

“I like you, Charlie,” she heard herself saying, “but I'm not ready for love.” It was like dialogue from a bad movie. Charlie laughed and said, “You don't have to be ready for anything,” and drove her back to school.

Then her father died. She refused to withdraw from school. When she saw Charlie before their Clark class, he already knew about her father and held his hands out to her without saying anything. She put her head against his chest. One of the other boys in the class grinned at them and said, “It figures.”

“Never mind,” Charlie said to him, and put his arms around her. “Maybe you shouldn't be here,” he said.

“I need this,” she said, not knowing whether she meant the class or his arms. But she didn't see Charlie over the holidays. She managed to get through the break by throwing herself into her schoolwork and writing, and
she found herself spending a lot of time with her mother. She didn't go to North Beach, and quite frankly thought about never seeing any of those people again, just drifting away from San Francisco. She could work at little jobs, observe life, write short stories to teach herself, and then move on to the novel.

They'd have to sell the house. They had Farley's severance but they were deeply in debt. The good furnishings, the family car, a '57 Buick, would also have to go. They'd end up broke and stripped. Edna had worked at the
Chronicle
a long time ago, but now she hated the paper and blamed its editors for Farley's death. “They gave him high blood pressure and then they blew him out,” she said grimly to her daughter as they sat in what was still for the time being their living room. Both had glasses of wine. Edna didn't seem to mind Jaime's new habit of drinking. It made them closer.

“What are we going to do for money?” Jaime asked.

“I just don't know,” Edna said. “I'm forty-four years old. I don't think I can slim down and meet a breadwinner at this point in my life.” She chuckled and looked puckish. “I guess you'll have to do it.”

“Marry a breadwinner?”

“Breadwinners are great,” her mother said. “Ooh! Bread! Did we win?”

Jaime laughed and laughed. But their problem was real. Her mother had said that if they sold the house and moved to a less expensive neighborhood, there would be enough money for Jaime to finish college. Neither spoke of about Edna's lifelong desire to move the other way, into Pacific Heights proper. Her mother was never going to get what she wanted. Life was not going to give her anything more. For Edna, it was over.

“Oh, Mom,” she said sadly.

8.

Kenny Goss slept very little. His small wiry body didn't seem to need it and his brain was always seething with thoughts. He had tried living with a girl once, but they had lasted only a few days. “You're too intense,” she told him and left. Now he lived in a very small apartment on Jackson Street, near Larkin. It was on the second floor over a Chinese laundry, and all day when he was home he could hear the rumble of the machines and the voices of the family who ran the laundry, reassuring voices for Kenny. He had been raised to believe that the Chinese were filthy awful people, and every time a Chinese person proved his mother wrong he felt happy. He loved his mother, but he knew better now than to believe her. She didn't just have it in for the Chinese: she hated Jews, Germans, Japanese, etc. and etc., professing to love only those countries that were primarily Catholic. Kenny had been raised a Catholic. He had even spent a few days in a Catholic orphanage over in Berkeley while his mother found them a place to live. But the minute he was old enough to think, he freed his mind of the overwhelming smothering craziness that was to him Catholicism. Whenever he saw his mother these days she'd remind him that he was bound for hell, and he would remind her that all he had to do was repent, confess, commune, and that was that. All in his most sarcastic voice.

On this particular morning Kenny was sitting in his car at 6:00 a.m., outside a house on Washington Street, waiting for the right time to run up to the front door and see if the people were awake yet. As was his usual habit, the night before he had picked up a copy of the bulldog edition of the
Chronicle
and read the ads, looking for anything that might be fruitful. This ad said, “Household furnishings for sale. Many good things,” and the address close enough to the high rent district to make Kenny interested. Not that he cared about furniture. Kenny was a book scout. He spent most of his spare time running around the
Bay Area looking for underpriced used books. One of his tricks was to answer ads like this morning's, looking around at the furniture but actually keeping his eye out for books. Often the people holding home furniture sales were in bad shape and didn't know what they were doing. Sometimes the person who collected the books had died, and the widow wouldn't know their value. He'd picked up quite a few good bargains this way, including a copy of
Hike and the Aeroplane
, a children's book which had been Sinclair Lewis's first published work. Kenny sold the copy he found, not mint, not even excellent, but very good, for one hundred and fifty dollars. He had paid fifty cents for it.