Fridays at Enrico's (17 page)

“He showed you his manuscript?” Dick said, seething with envy.

“Oh no, I sneaked a peek. He keeps it in boxes, all this hand-written stuff and really badly typed stuff, tons of it. I just read a few typed pages. But this is the real thing.” Charlie's dialogue. Charlie's experience. Charlie's thundering prose. Charlie's awful handwriting, Charlie's terrible spelling,
Charlie's clumsiness. “It's raw,” she said, as if rawness was the highest quality in literature.

Dick's own military experiences were not the kind you put into a war novel. He'd been a reporter in the army, working on
Stars and Stripes
in Naples. While Charlie and a lot of other guys were in Korea, fighting, freezing, being captured and brainwashed, he weekended on Capri and sat around drinking with his
S and S
buddies talking about art. No fucking novel there. Dick's military experience had been a bust, so far as writing was concerned. And Charlie had the Bronze Star. Give me a fucking break. Dick wondered how he'd gotten it, envisioning Charlie rushing through the smoke with his rifle at port arms, mouth open in a defiant scream. All Charlie had said about it, when pressed, was that he had been the best-looking man in his platoon, and so they'd given the decoration to him. Dick knew enough about the military to suspect there was more than a little truth to what Charlie said. But brave
and
modest? Charlie was getting to be a real pain in the ass.

Even so, Dick liked him a lot. He didn't really believe Charlie and Linda would do anything behind his back. In fact, he trusted Charlie more than he did Linda. And he was sure in his heart that Charlie was going to be a famous writer. Dick's own work wasn't going that well. He and Charlie even talked about it. Charlie had been very respectful of the
Playboy
sale, saying, “Their money spends real good, don't it?”

But the only other money he'd seen from his pal Hefner was at Christmas, when he'd received a check for one hundred dollars, a gift from the magazine. His stories they rejected, and so did everybody else. He'd sold only two little pieces since then, and none of the stuff he'd written after
Playboy
. The pay was meager, eighty-nine dollars for one story and one hundred fifty for another. No way to get rich. Everybody was right, you had to publish a novel. Then editors would remember your name. Trouble was, Dick was afraid to write a novel. It chilled his heart to think about working on something for that long and then having it rejected. Maybe he didn't have a novel to write. No war or air strike, never killed anybody. Nothing to write about. His life? A laugh. Sure, most novelists just made up their plots. He could do that. He
did it with stories. It was too many eggs in one basket, and so while daydreaming of his novel to come, Dick did nothing about it and kept at stories with a
Playboy
slant. If he could just sell one more, even at fifteen hundred instead of the big three thousand, he'd feel ready to embark on larger work. He could see it in the front of
Playboy
, under his picture. “Dubonet is hard at work on his first novel.”

Meanwhile his friendship with Charlie needed attention. Dick tried to think of some adventure where he could show Charlie the beauties of living in Oregon. And show himself, too, because he was getting ready to move on. Could San Francisco be a destination? Linda was always full of San Francisco, North Beach, and all the rich cultural experiences of living in a truly creative environment. Likely Charlie and Jaime wouldn't be in Oregon long. Charlie already spoke of jumping back to San Francisco right after he finished his novel.

“Oregon's a great place to write,” he said with a beaming smile. “But I wouldn't want to die here.”

30.

Nothing is as pure as you thought it would be as a kid. Take writing. Take love. Take friendship. These had all been pure things to Dick Dubonet when he had been young and innocent. He still thought of himself as an idealist, but his ideals had come under a lot of attack recently and he was wondering. Just wonder, that's all. When he and Linda had fallen in love they'd been able to talk to each other, and Dick felt he could say anything to her and she wouldn't laugh or be offended. They'd lie in bed in the darkness and he would tell her his dreams of the future, of making good money as a writer, giving him in turn the freedom to expand himself into the world, to travel, to see the world as it is, and to write about what he saw. But first he'd have
to build up his reputation with the magazines, then write the novel he hoped would get him the money and attention to carry out his life plans. Which now included Linda, in fact were meaningless without Linda.

And suddenly he felt Linda slipping away. He wanted to bring it up but found he couldn't. What if he said something like, “You seem awfully interested in Charlie”? She might reply. He didn't know if he could handle any of the possible replies. “Yes, I am.” That would kill him. “No, I'm not.” He wouldn't believe it. “Mind your own business.” Meaning, if the end came, it would be his fault for hounding her about Charlie. “Oh, baby, I just love you too much to fool around, and I apologize.” Sure.

She wasn't really fooling around, she was just making it look to everybody as if she was. Dick had walked into the Caffe Espresso one night when he thought Linda was home to find her sitting with Charlie and Stan and some tall homely girl he didn't know. He joined them for an espresso and pretended he wasn't at all surprised to see Linda. She made no explanation. Dick had come in hoping to find Charlie, who'd made the habit of dropping in every once in a while after his night classes. Dick hoped to engage him in a game of chess. He hoped Charlie knew how to play. Dick considered himself half-good, which, he felt, made him one of the best coffeehouse players in Portland. It would be fun whipping Charlie Monel at something, even only chess. But when he brought it up (there was a chess game going on at the next table, two Reedies in glasses, bent over their board) Charlie just laughed and waved his hand in surrender.

“You'd whip my ass,” he said, and refused to be cajoled into a game.

So writing, friendship, and love were all tangled in his heart. He couldn't help thinking Linda had come to him because of his potential as a writer. It hadn't bothered him before, in fact he thought it part of his due. But then Charlie moved to town and everybody began talking about him as the hottest thing since Kerouac. So naturally Linda was attracted. Live by the sword, die cut to ribbons. Fair enough, except he was fond of Charlie himself, and could see what Linda saw in him. Here was a real writer, a big man, a strong man, a guy with combat experience, a killer and yet one of the slain, POW in
hell. How could Dick fight that? He wanted Charlie for his best friend. He wanted to help Charlie with his writing, which Dick had heard was pretty rough, and he wanted Charlie to help him with his, which lacked passion, or lacked something, a something Charlie might be able to help him with. So Dick buried his feelings, but that was okay, because maybe buried feelings came out in the writing. Maybe this was how Charlie was meant to help him!

The spring had been a hot wet one, and now the summer was promising to be a Portland Special, low clouds heavy over the city most of the time, rain falling, temp in the eighties, so that when the sun did break through the clouds the heat and humidity made you want to grab your throat and die. Dick and Linda often drove out to the Monels', and beyond, to a place on Lake Oswego called Latourette's where you could swim free. They all went down for long afternoons of swimming, drinking beer, and talking, and if it rained they didn't care. Latourette's was a big empty lot on the lake's south shore, a mile from Charlie's place, the lot steeply falling away from the road, with an old dock, and otherwise only wild greenery and some rocks along the shore. Usually Stan Winger would be with them. He'd been spending a lot of weekends at the Monels', and was apparently part of the family now, or at least acted it, making his way down the cliff holding Kira and her baby bag as easily as if she were his own kid. Dick had to admit he was a little jealous of Stan's closeness to Kira, when after all Dick had seen her take her first steps. He felt this made him part of the family too.

Dick didn't mind a bit when there were others at Latourette's. High school boys came by, and it gave Dick a secret pleasure to see the way these kids covertly stared at Linda and Jaime in their bathing suits, these beautiful women, the kind most men never get to talk to, much less touch. Dick was with them, talking to them, and as the boys would soon find out, touching them intimately. Although Linda hated it when he was too affectionate in public. “Stop kissing me,” she said to him crossly one afternoon when they sat in Charlie's kitchen listening to the rain. Thank God Charlie had been out of the room, but Stan, sitting right there, had a hard time keeping his face straight.

Then something extraordinary happened. Dick wonder if reality existed
at all, or if he was living in a dream. One night as they were eating dinner in their own home on Cable Linda said, as if asking him to pass the potatoes, “My son's going to be with me for six weeks. If you don't want him here, I'll get a place of my own.”

“What?” he said. “What?”

Her son was nine. Which mean that she must have been only about fifteen when he had been born.

“Of course he can live with us,” Dick said. “What's his name?”

Linda smiled. “His name is Louis. After his father.”

His father! Who turned out to be just exactly who Dick didn't want him to be, a big, muscular, tattooed man with a mop of dirty brown hair like Charlie's and wide intense psychopathic eyes. He brought the boy over one Sunday afternoon. Louis the father drove a really noisy old Ford that had been chopped and channeled, painted with red and gray primer, and looked like the dream car of a high school boy. He came up the steps carrying the boy on his shoulder, looking like Paul Bunyan, all he needed was an axe over the other shoulder, really. But he wasn't a logger. Dick got no satisfactory explanation of what he did or what had happened between him and Linda. All she'd say after her ex-husband left was that she'd met him sailing, and that they'd been divorced in Mexico.

Little Louis was a different matter. An ordinary-looking nine-year-old except for his eyes, which were hard. Dick saw instantly that here was a kid who trusted no one. A kid with a lot of bad experience under his belt already. Like Stan, raised in foster homes. Sometimes Stan got that same hard-eyed look. It wasn't going to be much fun, having this damaged kid for six weeks. But on the other hand, what better way to bind Linda to him, than to befriend her son?

The three sat very formally at dinner that night, the boy barely eating his food, Linda obviously nervous. Dick's heart went out to her. She was probably more scared of having a kid around than Dick was.

“Listen,” Dick said as brightly as he could. “I have a great idea. Let's get a cat!”

“Oh, that sounds wonderful,” Linda said, looking at her son. Louis's eyes didn't soften.

31.

Linda's job was too valuable for her to just quit, so it fell on Dick to oversee Louis. It wasn't easy. On their first morning alone together Dick explained that he had to sit quietly and write all morning, and Louis would have to entertain himself.

“Will you be okay?” he asked finally. He didn't know what else to say. Louis nodded without meeting his eyes, and Dick went into his office and shut the door. He sat at his typewriter and cracked his knuckles, took the little glass paperweight off the manuscript and inserted the top page in the machine. He sighed. He was in the middle of a story about two men who fight over a woman, and now, staring at the page, he wondered why he bothered. He worried about the boy in the next room, who made no noise at all. He was nine. He should have been a Cub Scout, with a lot of Cub Scout friends to play with, as Dick had been. Dick had had all the amenities of a middle-class neighborhood, Cub Scouts, Boy Scouts, neighborhood friends, a mother who didn't work. While the poor kid in the next room had nothing. He wondered what life must be like living with his father. Linda didn't seem to know what the man did or where he lived or anything about him. “How come he got custody?” was one of Dick's first questions, but Linda only said, “He wanted it.” Meaning, of course, that she hadn't. What kind of woman was she?

Poor Linda, her incompetence uncovered. A perfect woman except for this tragic flaw. She did not love her child. Dick thought maybe she was confusing the child with his father. Dick supposed he was a brute, a woman-beater, probably a child-beater as well, although Dick didn't see any bruising
on Louis. Or maybe Dick was just jealous, because big Louis was so big, with all the romantic energy of a motorcycle outlaw, although Linda insisted he wasn't one. She'd met him sailing. “He doesn't look like any of the yachtsmen I've ever met,” Dick said ironically.

Linda threw him a look. “He was crewing,” she said. “He never owned anything.” She, too, had been crew. In fact, Linda had been around boats a lot, had lived in Newport, on the Oregon coast, for a couple of years.

“Blowjobs for boat rides,” she said to him once, when they were drunk and talking about the past. He'd been shocked but laughed to show he wasn't. “I love to sail,” she said wistfully. “When we get rich let's get a boat of our own.” There were so many things they were going to get, when they were rich. A cabin in the mountains, where he'd teach her to ski. Trips to exotic places. Weekends in India. Life at the top. He looked at the page in his typewriter. No words had written themselves. He wondered what Louis was doing. He had to trust Louis. He couldn't keep checking up on him, or the boy would feel oppressed. He went to the door, opening it. Louis sat in the middle of the living-room, cross-legged, staring at nothing.