Fridays at Enrico's (44 page)

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 himself 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 blowjob 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.

The routine was simple. No matter what time she got home the night before, get up at six or six thirty. Slip into her gray sweatsuit and sneakers, awaken Kira, then walk across Park Presidio to the hidden entrance to Mountain Lake Park, through to its Fifth Avenue exit, then down Fifth to Clement, west on Clement to Seventeenth, and back to her flat. A two-mile walk, begun in sullen mindlessness and ending in cheerful anticipation of the workday. To avoid losing the cheer she'd take the paper inside unopened, leaving it for her post-work pleasure. If Kira wasn't up yet she'd rouse her and make tea. Other times Kira already had the water boiling. They spoke little at this hour, Kira groggy with sleep and Jaime already turning into Mary Rosendaal. Kira never asked what she was writing. So far as Jaime knew, her daughter had never read any of her work. Though it would have been in character for Kira to read the stuff secretly and say nothing. Normal enough, but Jaime wanted Kira to admire her. To tell Jaime she loved her writing, that she knew her work was important and understood why her mother was so strange. Apparently they weren't close enough for this kind of talk, and Jaime wouldn't force it on her. Bad enough that she'd wrecked their family life.

Kira at fifteen looked more like eighteen or nineteen, ripe and ready to plunder, one of the reasons Jaime didn't bring men home. Her daughter was beautiful, but not the kind of beauty that translates into modeling jobs or wealthy marriages, more the beauty of youth. The kind which as she grew older
would turn into handsomeness and character. Jaime hoped. She hardly wanted her daughter to be a model or actress. She most particularly didn't want her daughter to be casually seduced by one of her literary friends. Or God forbid marry one of the bastards. So she saw people not at home but at Enrico's or Tosca, though who even knew if Kira was still a virgin? Or had herpes. Or clap.