Fridays at Enrico's (2 page)

They sat down on the bench and read each other's midterms. Charlie's was hard to read. His handwriting was messy, as if he had taught himself how to write. But once she caught on, she read his essay with fascination and some envy. Charlie's style was exuberant and his ideas sharp, she decided. Although he was pretty crude. She finished while Charlie was still concentrating on hers. He moved his lips as he read, something she had always made fun of, but now realized wasn't funny but touching, even charming. He stopped. “Yours is better,” he said. He smiled painfully.

She felt a stab of pleasure. “Then how come you got the A and I got the B plus?” she asked, wishing she hadn't.

“Beats the shit outta me,” he said with a shrug.

“Well, at least we didn't flunk,” she said.

“You wanna come over to my place?” he asked, looking right at her, for once not smiling. This was the moment she had been waiting for all semester. The pass, at last. She'd turn him down gently. After all, he had liked her midterm.

“Well okay, sure,” she heard herself saying. “Where do you live?”

2.

Charlie lived in North Beach, on Genoa Place, between Union and Green, halfway up Telegraph Hill. The apartment was small, two rooms separated by a half wall, two big windows looking out over the alley. Still, it was a nice view, with each of the apartments across the street a different pastel
color and plenty of bright blue sky when it wasn't foggy. In late 1958 when Charlie moved in, the place had been a terrible mess. The former tenant had been an amphetamine dealer. The place smelled of stale Chinese cabbage and leaky plumbing. The little toilet was filthy and nobody had cleaned the walls or under the fixtures in years. The apartment was covered with tattered layers of old wallpaper, paint splatters, dried-on food, and other things Charlie couldn't recognize. The story was that the amps dealer had committed suicide by taking barbiturates. He lay down on his smelly old mattress, expecting to die, but a couple of acquaintances from the Hot Dog Palace down on Columbus came knocking and, when he didn't answer, broke in with a screwdriver. They hoped to find amphetamines but found the dealer instead, barely breathing. According to the story, they ransacked the place anyway and found the stash, outfit and all. They shot up right there, and as a humanitarian gesture, shot speed into the dealer's arm. He woke up later to find his stash gone and a long explanatory note written on a paper bag.

After getting rid of the dealer's junk, Charlie washed the floor and walls, scraped and repainted the wooden floor, and removed the paint from the woodwork and the wallpaper from the plaster. He spent three days cleaning the stove and the little refrigerator. He stained the wood and whitewashed the plaster. The place began to look and smell wonderful. He bought a cot and mattress from the army surplus store on Stockton, kitchen things from Figone Hardware on Grant, unpacked his cardboard suitcase, unrolled his sleeping bag on the mattress, unpacked his books and put them up on orange crates, and was home. The amps dealer had finally succeeded in killing himself by going out to Land's End after filling up on barbiturates, and sitting watching the ocean until he went out. When they found the body he had the phone number of the city morgue in his pocket.

Charlie's car was a 1940 De Soto sedan, pale gray and rusty, but a good old reliable car. He and Jaime spent the twenty-minute drive from State to North Beach talking about school. All very noncommittal. He parked on Union just above Grant. He wondered if he should run around the car and
open the door for Jaime. She had been awfully quiet on the drive. Charlie didn't try to hustle her with a lot of bright stuff, and now that they were in North Beach he wondered why he had brought her with him at all. She was damned good-looking, that was why. He smiled as innocently as he could and said, “Well, here we are.”

“I think I better go home,” she said in a small voice.

Charlie felt relieved. He didn't want to seduce some poor damn nineteen-year-old girl if she didn't want to be seduced.

“Where do you live?” Charlie asked.

“On Washington, near Fillmore,” she said. “I can take the bus.”

“No,” he said. “We're here now, come on in, have a cup of tea, and I'll drive you on home.”

She said nothing so he got out and came around to open the door for her. Their eyes met as she got out. Hers were very large and blue, the color of the sky. They regarded him evenly, intelligently, even speculatively.

“Hi,” he said to the eyes.

“Hi,” she said back to him. He kissed her lightly.

“Come on, it's just up the alley.”

“I'll leave my stuff in your car.” They walked side-by-side up the narrow slanting alley.

She liked his apartment. She had expected—dreaded—a messy little place, but found herself in a monk's cell. There were no pictures on the wall, no brave posters or photographs, only a wall of books. There was the cot, with a brown army blanket under the neatly zipped sleeping bag, and a bare table and old wooden kitchen chair, obviously where he wrote, with a cardboard box underneath filled with manuscript. On the divider between the rooms, there was an old tin alarm clock ticking away and a water glass with some fresh nasturtium leaves and flowers.

“Oh, I love it,” she said. “How much?”

“Forty-five a month,” he said. He went through the arch into the kitchen. “Do you want tea? I have Lipton's or Japanese green tea.”

“Lipton's is fine.” There was no place to sit except at his little table. Or
she could just undress and lie on the bed. He could come out and find her naked. Surprise! Actually, she had no intention of sleeping with him, at least not today. He didn't seem like the kind of man who would just push her down and take her. She felt safe. She went over to the books.

“You have great books,” she called to him.

“Mostly junk from McDonald's,” he said. “You know the place I'm talkin' about? Down on Turk Street?”

“In the Tenderloin?”

He came out with the tea things, a brass teapot and two little Japanese terra cotta cups. “It's the best used bookstore in town. They got thousands of books, and nobody down there knows the value of anything. Hemingway, fifty cents, Melville, fifty cents, Norman Vincent Peale, fifty cents. It's all fifty cents to those guys.”

They drank their tea and talked about books. Charlie had a little radio in the kitchen, and he turned it on. Cool jazz quietly filled the air and Jaime relaxed. As they talked she waited for him to make a move. She wondered if he was good at seducing girls. She hoped so, because she was shy. At least she thought of herself as shy. She felt a little shy right now. Waiting. Her own boyfriend, whose name was Bill Savor, no longer appealed to her. He was a boyfriend out of default. There were no similarities between Bill Savor and Charlie Monel. Bill was a student, but not in the Language Arts program, even though he wanted to be a writer. Instead he majored in Education, so he'd have a junior college teaching certificate to fall back on. If you had something to fall back on, you certainly would fall back. To hell with that. All or nothing. More like Charlie—or was she romanticizing Charlie?

“Are you a romantic? Or a realist?” she asked him abruptly.

“About what?”

“My boyfriend's a realist.”

“If you have a boyfriend, maybe you better leave,” Charlie said, but he didn't look as if he wanted her to leave. He'd just called her bluff, is all.

“No, I mean, he's a writer, but, you know, he doesn't think there's any
money in it, so he's studying to be a teacher.” Blah blah blah. Her face was reddening, she was certain. When was he going to make a pass? Never?

“Why are you so worried about it?” he asked her. It was as if he had broken into her thoughts.

“What do you mean?”

“I ain't going to make a pass at you,” he said. “If you like me then we can just get undressed and go to bed. Nobody has to seduce anybody.”

He grinned and sipped his tea. She grinned back, pressing her fingers together in her lap. “That's how I feel too,” she said. “Well, I guess I better be getting home. I'll take the bus, you're all home and comfortable now.”

“Naw, I'll drive you.”

“You don't want to lose your parking space. I know how hard it is to park in North Beach. We come over here on weekends, you know. Driving around half the night looking for some place to park . . .”

Charlie listened to her blathering and wondered why he didn't just make a grab for her. But he didn't. He stood up, took her hands into his, looked down into those big blue eyes and told her he would now drive her home. Did he see disappointment? He wasn't sure.

3.

After North Beach, Jaime's family home out on the lower lip of Pacific Heights seemed tame and middle-class, stifling. The house itself was beautiful. She loved the house. It was one of those carpenter Victorians with an ornate false front, angular bay windows showing a lot of white lace curtain, false Doric columns on either side of the little front porch at the top of a flight of false wooden steps. The house was painted a pale yellow, and all the trim, columns, and trellises on either side of the steps were painted white. Red roses grew up over the trellises, and western calla lilies crowded the
border next to the house, behind a tiny ragged patch of lawn. The house was on a block of half-respectable two-story houses, some of them cut into small apartments, but all neatly kept-up behind a parking strip row of big leafy red flowering eucalyptus trees. Jaime had lived there all her life except the first year, when they lived out in the Sunset, which she didn't remember. And for most of her life she had treacherously wished the family fortunes would improve enough for them to move north, up over the ridge, into Pacific Heights proper, where the really rich lived.

But her father, her poor old drunken father, worked as a reporter for the
San Francisco Chronicle
, and as Jaime grew up and began to understand life, she also began to understand that her family was never going to join the rich, no matter how much she and her mother wanted them to. Her father, it turned out, was the wrong kind of writer.

Jaime dragged herself up the steps after Charlie let her off with a grin and a “See ya!” She did not get over to North Beach that often. She knew it was where most of the writers hung out, and for that reason she tried to avoid it. But there was a fascination, she had to admit. Charlie was attractive, too, but much too old for her, there were already wrinkles around the corners of his eyes. Pale eyes. Pale brown, almost green. Nice eyes. And he wrote well, though messily and with some of the worst spelling she'd ever seen. Somehow his terrible spelling made her feel good. She was one of those people who could spell.

She loved her front door. It was a thick heavy door, painted white, with a massive old brass decorated doorknob and a brass knocker just below the beveled glass windows. It was substantial, a door of respect. Jaime opened it with her Schlage key of respect. Inside, as usual, the house was cool and quiet, smelling of fresh flowers and floor wax. “Mom?” No answer. Her mother was out playing bridge. That was fine. Jaime loved having the place to herself. Her brother, now twenty-five, was living in Taipan, working for the government, and Jaime had taken his room, upstairs overlooking the backyard. She trudged up the stairs holding her books to her chest. The wallpaper showed country scenes, hunting scenes, from Victorian England, she supposed. The stairs were
carpeted with a Persian runner and the hand railing was polished dark wood. All so respectable. There was even a chandelier of real crystals in the front hall. Why did Charlie's monastic little apartment make her feel jealous?

Her room was bigger than Charlie's whole apartment, with neat twin beds side by side, a little desk with her Hermes portable typewriter, an overstuffed chair covered in a flowered print, and a bridge lamp behind it where she sat and read. She had her own bookshelves, which of course couldn't compete with her parents' grand library downstairs, with the Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck, and Fitzgerald first editions in their glass cabinet, and the big signed Picasso etching over the funny purple brick fireplace. Riches she found herself rejecting, in favor of Charlie's freedom.

What would she ever be able to write about? She took out her midterm blue books. B+. Maybe she wasn't as talented as she'd hoped. Walter Van Tilburg Clark ought to know. He was the most respected of the writer-teachers at State. He had written
The Ox-Bow Incident
, a classic western story Jaime didn't happen to like very much, even though it was beautifully written. She liked instead Clark's story about Hook the Hawk. She had heard around school that Clark had thrown the finished story into his wastebasket, and his wife had fished it out and sent it to the
Atlantic Monthly
, and that he had also thrown away the final draft of
Ox-Bow
, which his wife dutifully fished out of the wastebasket and sent to Random House. Clark apparently suffered from these bouts of depression, where he thought his work stank badly enough to throw away. Jaime knew the feeling. In fact, it was coming over her now.

She heard the thump of the front door and assumed her mother was home. She undressed and was walking naked down the hall to take her shower when she saw her father coming up the stairs. She shrieked and ran back into her bedroom. “Daddy!” she screamed. With the door safely shut she gathered her wits and laughed. I'm so cool, she thought. Properly dressed in her old pink chenille bathrobe she ventured out of her room again. Her father was in the master bedroom, lying on the bed, fully dressed except for his jacket. He lay on his back, looking at the ceiling. He was a short plump man with
round rimmed silver glasses, blue-and-white-striped shirt, a bright red knit tie, yellow-and-green-striped suspenders, oxford gray pants, and cordovan wingtip shoes buffed to a creamy shine. Jaime loved her father, but she knew he was drunk. Otherwise, why would he be home?