Fridays at Enrico's (13 page)

Stan himself wasn't in suspense. He'd been astonished that the agent had taken the story, although Dick pointed out that Stan was not yet a client. “He's just sending it around,” he told Stan. Stan was embarrassed, but there was nothing he could do about it. Linda had pushed him into this, sending a really bad piece of writing to a legitimate literary agent, ruining Stan's reputation in advance. He knew what he had to do if he was going to impress Linda. He had to learn how to write. He talked to Dick and his friends about taking night classes in writing, but they discouraged him. Portland State had a night class, but he couldn't get in without a high school diploma. Downtown there was Multnomah College, a kind of business school for working people, which advertised in the
Oregonian
and the
Yellow Pages
. He went down to an office building of SW Alder and found that they taught composition and had one section of Creative Writing, and, yes, they
admitted anybody who'd pay the fee. Stan signed up for Comp and Creative, and paid his fees.

To Dick's great relief the story was rejected by the first magazine Mills sent it to. Unfortunately it wasn't a cold rejection but a hot one. “Send us more!!!” some idiot had written on the slip, below which Mills added in pencil “???” Dick decided it was time to get Stan Winger off his back. He'd helped him to an agent, an editor (Linda) and entry into Portland literary society, such as it was. Let him get his own mail. Dick walked down Broadway to Jolly Joan's and left the rejection slip with Marty's girl Alexandra, who'd passed it along to Marty, who'd find Stan. Crooks were so devious. Stan obviously didn't even want his agent to know where he lived.

Stan shyly showed his very first rejection slip to his teacher, Mr. Monel. He liked Mr. Monel from the first. A big man, no more than about thirty, with a big happy face and a mop of hair. He stood in front of the creative writing class, six females and Stan, and announced that he didn't know a damned thing about creative writing, but when the boss learned he was writing “this big ol' novel” in his spare time he got the class. “You can't teach creative writing,” he said blandly, “and you can't even learn it. I guess you have to be born with it. What we can do here in this class is write a lot, read the stuff to each other, and try to help.” Exactly what Stan wanted, and this was the guy he wanted it from. Stan couldn't help going up to Mr. Monel after class and asking him out for a beer.

“Sure,” Charlie said with a big grin.

22.

Charlie loved Oregon. Just crossing the border had been great, California hot and dry, the sky blue, and right across the border big black and white clouds pouring rain down onto deeply green forested mountains. Mountains, but
not like the sawtooth ranges of his native Montana. Green, but not like the green of anyplace he'd ever seen, every tone and shade of green imaginable, hot greens and cold greens and deep dark greens and almost white greens. Charlie had never seen so much green in his life. And the rain, as if to tell Charlie what he and his family were in for, fell in great splattery drops all the way from the border to Portland. Charlie stayed behind the wheel of their brand new 1961 Volkswagen, which by an astonishing coincidence was also green, a gold green. He had meant to switch off driving chores with Jaime, but the rain poured down so continuously Charlie kept the wheel. Also, there were these huge logging trucks on the road, a whole lane wide and loaded with tree trunks fifty and sixty feet long, roaring down the Oregon roads as if they owned them. Charlie more than once had to hold the wheel hard to keep from being run off the road by the rush of wind and wet when one of these logging trucks blew past. It was like entering a whole new world, just exactly what Charlie and Jaime wanted. Crammed into the tiny backseat were Edna and the baby Kira. The Lyons Moving Van Company had their books and goods, and Charlie only hoped the movers wouldn't run into the loggers.

A couple of days later the rain lifted for an hour, just to show Charlie and Jaime the beauties of the country around their new city. They were in the Council Crest neighborhood, up in the west hills of SW Portland, being shown a house that was far too expensive at eighty dollars a month. It wasn't raining, although everything was wet, and they looked through the big picture windows regretfully, because they had to say no. The view was downtown Portland, charming through the mist. Then the clouds lifted, and they could see, for what must have been hundreds of miles, rolling forested hills surrounding the city, and in the distance no less than four snow-covered volcano mountains sticking up over everything. Mount Hood, Mount Adams, Mount Jefferson and Mount St. Helens, Charlie learned.

“Oh God, how beautiful,” Jaime murmured, and moved in close to Charlie. He put his arm around her.

“We're Oregonians now,” he said ponderously, and squeezed her shoulder. Kira and Edna were back at the Sunrise Motel, also Oregonians now. Thank
God for Edna, Charlie thought for the hundredth time. Not only their built-in babysitter, she'd helped Charlie convince Jaime that leaving San Francisco wasn't going to destroy their lives. Jaime had been adamant when Charlie's only job offer had been Multnomah College.

“I guess I'm not a first-round draft pick,” he said with a grin, but she chose not to understand him.

“It's not any kind of pick,” she said mysteriously.

“Better'n Iowa,” he said. What wasn't? Iowa had accepted Charlie, after he ate his pride and went in for his last final. Yet Charlie couldn't accept exile from his family. Jaime had convinced him that the Saxon money was needed for the baby, and so went the idea of them lying around for a year or two finishing novels. Charlie couldn't understand why Jaime wasn't writing. She was good, so much better than Charlie. Her immediate creative task, if you like, was the baby, whom she had insisted on naming after the sound bald eagles make. According to Jaime.
Kiiiir
, that was the sound of eagles Charlie recalled from Montana. Kira was a good name, though, and fitted the baby, who was already uniquely feminine and mysterious to Charlie. It was here, too, that Edna showed her true colors. As soon as she found out her daughter was pregnant she made a face and said, “I guess I'll have to stop drinking,” and she did. She had bad dreams for a few nights, but then was all right.

The first obvious effect to Charlie was that he discovered in his mother-in-law a gifted conversationalist and a friend. Edna was all right. At first they hesitated to drink even beer in front of her, but she laughed. “Oh, go ahead. I've had my share.” She lost weight right away and turned out to be an attractive woman, still round-cheeked and round-hipped, but looking a lot like her daughter.

Edna liked the idea of moving to Oregon, though it was a move to a low-paying job with no security, just a business college, not much better than a racket. “We all need to start over,” she said.

They found a perfect rental in Lake Grove, eight miles south of the city, near Lake Oswego. The house had been built right after World War II on an acre of woods, with a small clearing back of the house for growing vegetables.
There was a small mother-in-law apartment built onto the garage, tiny but perfect for Edna, a graveled circular drive up to the front, a low wooden fence, and greenery everywhere. Inside, the house was dark and cozy, with a big fireplace, a big kitchen, and three bedrooms. They spent a couple of weeks buying used furniture and considered themselves home when Edna put her signed Picasso print up over the fireplace.

Everything should have been perfect. He had a job, money in the bank, an office to work in. He was having trouble with his novel, a bit of trouble, not much, just that the fucking thing was no good. It was, he'd begun to realize, very difficult to say anything new about war. The ground had been thoroughly gone over, from Homer to James Jones. Even Charlie's POW experience had been touched on in a little book called
The Enormous Room
, by e.e. cummings. Charlie had been awfully depressed reading it. It described cummings's experiences in a World War I French hospital, and when he finished it, tears streaming down his face, Charlie knew that cummings had said everything about being a prisoner. cummings immediately became one of his favorite writers. Of course nobody, not even e.e. cummings had said
everything
about
anything
. So Charlie wasn't relieved of his obligation to finish his horribly long, terribly boring, totally unnecessary war novel. Which he was never going to show to anybody again unless it was at least halfway decent. This was part of the reason for coming to Portland. To get away from the intense literary competition. To a place where he could write in peace and begin to accept the realities of married life.

His teaching job was absurd but wonderful, and he decided he was glad no respectable school would hire him. Multnomah College was a practical, no-nonsense place for people who wanted to get ahead. Most of the students were young adults who'd presumably already been out into real life and didn't like it. They wanted to learn from Charlie how to write competently, and he was damned well going to teach them. It took only a couple of classes to realize that because the school had no admission standards, his job was really very important. Charlie could teach his students how to succeed in all their other classes. He could see right away that most of them
had never had any breaks. They were here to make their own, and Charlie meant to help.

So the job was great. The house was great. Everything was great except Jaime.

23.

She hated it all, from the rain at the border to their ranch style house buried in the woods. It was the first ranch style house she'd ever been inside. It seemed incredibly shabby and mean-spirited, with its boxlike rooms, low ceiling, tacky iron fixtures, and linoleum everywhere in the place of tile. Jaime was used to the California all-tile bathroom, and the hell with anything less. The only advantage to the house that she could see was that it was eight miles from Portland, a city almost as deliberately ugly as Oakland.

She was twenty years old with an infant daughter, living in the middle of nowhere with her crazy mother and a husband who taught at a third-rate business college. No wonder she was depressed. Just yesterday she'd been living in a dreamworld of wealth and social position, only she hadn't realized it. Life on Washington Street had been unbelievably refined and secure, and San Francisco unbelievably sophisticated and full of life and variety. All gone now. Jaime lived among people who did not seem to know they were in Rain Hell. She felt like an exile.

She was astonished nonetheless by her mother. Edna had gone from an incomprehensible drunk to a bright active person in less than a year. Jaime liked it that her mother wasn't stupid drunk all the time, but unsure how she liked having Edna live with them. She was meant to be there to care for Kira, but Jaime actually did that while Edna just criticized. Nice for Edna, living in her own apartment behind the garage, with its own tiny fireplace and upstairs sleeping loft, but she spent all day at Jaime's kitchen
table, drinking endless cups of tea and talking while Jaime took care of the house and the baby. Outside, rain. Charlie bought a cord of wood somewhere. He'd spent a whole afternoon outside with a couple of Oregonians in checked mackinaws and bill caps, stacking the wood in the covered area between the house and garage, and now just about the only time Jaime went outside was to retrieve wood from the stack. Every time she did she smelled winter Oregon, a heavy woody wet smell that she hated as badly as she hated the rain itself.

Then Edna shocked her by saying she felt useless and wanted a job.

“Good luck, Mom,” Jaime said.

Edna quickly bought herself a used Mercury out of her mystery horde of money, drove off to Portland and landed herself a job at the
Oregonian
, the state's biggest newspaper. She worked proofreading classified ads, as she'd done at the
Chronicle
years before. This gave Jaime some relief, but not enough. When Charlie was home, which was rarely, he was either asleep or in his office writing. Jaime didn't inquire how the writing was going, and he didn't ask her, either. She'd never read Charlie's entire manuscript. It filled two cardboard boxes and must have weighed forty pounds by now. She was frankly afraid of his novel-in-progress. She wasn't sure why. The thing would change their lives no matter how it came out. If it was what they hoped, Charlie would move up into the world of letters, and that could be destructive. But if the book was a failure it would kill him, eviscerate the Charlie she loved, turn him into one of those bitter old teachers with a failed novel in their desk drawer.

As for her, she'd given up. Kira took all her energy. Even when she had Kira asleep, her mother off at work and Charlie gone, she still had no mind to write. It was enough to sit quietly at her kitchen table with a cup of tea in front of her and the radio playing insipid pop music. She thought of the girls she'd known with ambitions to be artists, the trombone players, the poets, the painters and actresses, those who like Jaime had dreamed of novels. What happened to them all? Was it the same as for Jaime? Their ambitions buried under marriage?

Jaime's experience with snow was limited to trips to the mountains as a girl, and she'd never been in an actual blizzard. Her first was in many ways her best. It started on a Sunday morning, all of them at the kitchen table.

“It's snowing,” Charlie said, looking out the window. Jaime was feeding Kira and didn't turn to look.

“Great,” she said, but secretly she was a little excited. When she got the chance, after Kira was snoozing in her playpen, she went out on the back porch, where the overhang protected her from the snow, which came straight down. She watched it fall, wondering why it made her feel so good. The flakes were big ones, clumps really, and the ground covered fast. There was an incredible silence, too,
the silence of falling snow
, she tried in her mind. It hung on the trees and shrubs, altering the appearance of everything, and for the first time Jaime began to think she might enjoy Oregon. Then Charlie came out and like a little boy had to make snowballs and throw them at her.