Fridays at Enrico's (21 page)

“I can stay if you want,” Edna said.

“No.”

Then the house was quiet, her mother gone to work, Kira asleep and the cat off in the trees.

37.

After three days, when Charlie hadn't come home crestfallen and sheepish, Jaime lost her temper. He'd left her without a car, not that she ever went anyplace. The thoughtlessness infuriated her. What if Kira got sick in the middle of the night and her mother wasn't there? Edna volunteered to leave her car at home for Jaime and take the bus to work, but Jaime wouldn't have it. She'd leave Oregon first. She called Southern Pacific and found out what time the Shasta Daylight left for California. She called their landlord, Mrs. Baker, and asked if they could get out of the lease and discovered Charlie had never signed the lease. Jaime gave thirty days notice and asked Mrs. Baker if she knew anybody who wanted a small chocolate-point Siamese with a crook in the tip of her tail. Mrs. Baker did not, so Jaime called Dick Dubonet, though she hated the idea of talking to him. What if he started crying?

Dick was fine. “I'll come right out,” he said cheerfully. She heard his little MG in the drive less than an hour later. They sat on kitchen chairs back in the shade of the porch while Kira ran around like an expert. The garden was gone except for a few dry cornstalks, and most of the greenery under the trees had died back. Dick spoke forgivingly of Linda, and obviously expected her back any day. They'd run off to have an affair, that was all. In the old days that would have meant the end of everything, but not anymore.

“What are you getting at?” Jaime sat tilted back in her chair, a cold bottle of Miller between her legs.

“Just that maybe you shouldn't be so drastic,” he said. “Why move? Are you really going to leave Charlie over this?”

“You make it sound like nothing. It's not nothing.”

He smiled appreciatively. He had beautiful teeth. He was in fact a very handsome man. It was a gorgeous fall day again. Oregon at its most beautiful, and Dick in the backyard in tee shirt and jeans. It would serve them
right, wouldn't it? Come back to find Dick and Jaime happily entwined? But Dick made no pass. In fact he was everything you could ask of a friend.

“You've never strayed, have you,” he said.

“I've never slept with anybody but Charlie,” she heard herself admitting. Dick's eyebrows went up, but he brought himself under control by taking a big slug of beer.

“That makes it different.”

“Yes,” she said. “Why does that make it different?”

“Well,” Dick started, then stopped.

“I want to move because it's time to move. It really doesn't have anything to do with Charlie.”

“You finished your book, now it's time to go. I'd love to read it sometime. But don't show it to me. Send me a copy, a free copy. Autographed.”

“Is everybody mad at me for finishing my book?” she asked him. He laughed instead of answering, and she said, “Anyway, you can have Isis. I can't take her on the train, and I won't put her in a box in a baggage car somewhere.”

Isis wandered in from the trees and Kira ran to her. “Key! Key!” she cried. Kira picked up the cat and walked around the yard holding her. The cat was limp, obviously enjoying herself. “Kira's gonna miss her,” Dick said. “Maybe after you get settled you can come up and visit us.”

“That would be nice.” Suddenly she knew she was really leaving Oregon. Charlie or no Charlie.

He came home the next day. Jaime happened to be sitting on the toilet when she heard the familiar rattle of the family VW. It was around three in the afternoon, Kira sleeping in her playpen on the porch. Another perfect day. Beautiful Oregon, she thought helplessly, as Charlie came into the house and called her name. Was Linda with him? Of course not.

Jaime came out of the bathroom numb and frightened. Charlie stood in the middle of the kitchen, staring at her. His hair was getting too long, she noticed, and he had a slight sunburn. Fucking out in the sun?

“School called,” she said to him coolly.

“I'm sorry.” For once, Charlie wasn't grinning. “I just went nuts.”

“All right,” she said. “Why are you back?”

Charlie got a beer out of the refrigerator. “You want one?” She nodded and they sat at the table, drinking beer like a couple of college chums. “You want to know what happened?” he asked her.

“Sure.” He wasn't acting guilty. Still, she couldn't let herself feel anything.

“Linda's gone,” he said. “She's not coming back. She's going sailing with some friends, down the coast to Mexico, then across to Hawaii.”

“Why didn't you go with them?”

“I damn near did,” Charlie said. “I told you, I went nuts. She told me she was leaving Dick, and I offered to drive her to Astoria. That's down the coast, beautiful little town. But we stayed in Seaside. It's a resort town, deserted now with the kids in school. Amazing place. Most of the businesses shut, big wide beach with nobody on it. We both wanted to get away, see? So I drove her to the coast. But I wasn't ready to come home. We talked day and night, I mean we really talked. Linda is terrific.”

“Is she a good fuck?”

Charlie looked her right in the eye and said, “We didn't. We slept in the same room, but different beds.”

“Are you asking me to believe that?”

“I'm telling you what happened. I love you. I'm not that crazy. We didn't sleep together. We talked about it, but we didn't do it. I think we were both too numb. We walked along the boardwalk, we played some pinball, and sat and got drunk in this little club that plays nothing but cool jazz, and we sat up at night and talked. I talked about you, she talked about her life, Dick, her kid, everything under the sun. You want to know something? She's a fine person. I wish her all the best.”

He said this last with such honesty, such conviction, that she began to believe him. Her stomach started to unknot. They drank more beer and smoked more cigarettes. Charlie kept talking, now about how her novel had temporarily deranged him because of its obvious excellence. “In Kim Song you had to be a psychopath just to survive,” he said. It was getting
dark out, and Jaime fed Kira. She'd been very happy to see her daddy, and now sat on his lap while Jaime spooned food at her. “After I read your book I think I just kinda fell back into that, you know, the old look-out-for-yourself mode. It's not much of an excuse for running out on you, but there it is.”

Jaime fed Kira her banana. They hadn't slept together. She believed him. She had to. She concentrated only on what would happen next. They'd go to bed, after dealing with Kira, and if they made love, it would finish the event. It would be all over, and all forgotten. She'd have to call Carol Baker and tell her they were going to stay after all. She'd have to get the kitty back. But no. Linda wasn't coming back. Dick would need the cat. Charlie stared at her.

“What?”

“You have a look in your eye,” he said. “All I can do is apologize. Do I live here or not?”

38.

Charlie wanted to be honest, but he couldn't. The practical truth was, he wanted to keep his marriage even though he didn't deserve to. He'd taken marriage lightly enough up to now. Easy to be married and play by the rules because he had no reason not to. He was in love with Jaime and didn't want or need other women. Everything on a high moral plane of love. He'd even wondered why other men strayed. He'd never been tempted. He hadn't even been tempted by Linda.

When he read Jaime's manuscript he knew at last why he could not finish his own book. He wasn't a writer. Jaime was. It wasn't the words, it was the organization. Jaime knew instinctively how to put things so they flowed from one scene to the next. Charlie's work was all over the place, great long sections of dialogue followed by great long sections of description or action, but
nothing flowed. It was maddening. Ten fucking years to learn the ropes. Like everything else he had tried. Automobile mechanics. He'd been all thumbs at first, but then he got it. Same with football, same with drill, same with shooting, hunting, fishing. Even academic stuff. Charlie could organize, research, outline and write a term paper with the best of them. But off on his own, trying to write honestly about his experiences, he couldn't. A built-in barrier. One he'd hoped, expected, would eventually fall away if he did everything right, followed the rules. But no. As he read Jaime's work he saw clearly that she had a natural gift he didn't have. Call it talent.

Charlie had no talent. He had the tools. He knew the rules. But he couldn't play. Sitting in his office sweating over Jaime's writing, he recalled the little guys who never got picked for football until last. Charlie had always been picked first. Or done the picking. He'd been bland enough about it, picking only the guys with talent. Leaving the little guys, the guys with no talent, standing there with their fingers up their asses. Now Charlie found himself one of that group. Talentless unpicked asshole. Embarrassingly eager, humiliatingly gung ho, and yet unavoidably and eternally untalented. He'd been given a Eugene F. Saxon Award, not because he was talented, which he wasn't, but for some other reason which he didn't even want to think about.

But had to think about, with Jaime's novel in front of him. The same fucking reason he'd been awarded the Bronze Star. Not that he didn't deserve it, every asshole who got off the boat in Korea deserved at least a Bronze Star, and if it had been up to Charlie, the Congressional Medal of Honor. But he'd gotten the medal because they didn't want the American People thinking all their POWs had been such cowards. They hadn't been cowards, of course, it just looked that way. And to the American military, appearances were everything. So the best-looking guys coming out in Operation Little Switch were given medals. There had been brave guys, of course. But the Chinese killed them right away. Charlie heard they made the condemned guys dig their own graves. He didn't particularly believe this because the ground was too hard for anybody to dig in, much less men condemned for their defiance.

Charlie defied nobody. All he did was lie there and cough up blood. When the guy next to him shit near his face it was three days before one of the Christers cleaned it up. Lots of school spirit in Kim Song. Everybody thought Charlie would die any day, so they pretty much left him alone. He saw things from where he lay. He saw a man getting raped while four other guys played pinochle a few feet away. He watched guys eat shit. Crazy guys, of course. Charlie never ate any shit. But he swallowed his own lung blood, to keep alive. For the nutritional value, don't you see? The Vampire of Kim Song.

He'd numbed over, to save his ass. It worked. He got out on Little Switch because he had TB. Nobody had said good-bye but Pippello, tall skinny fucker with gaunt hungry eyes, grinning and waving. Pippello had given him some free marijuana once. Usually they sold it, but Pippello had a little compassion in him somewhere, and came up to Charlie, squatted down and offered him the roach. “Fuck it,” was all he said when Charlie thanked him. The marijuana had been good. Two good hours in fourteen months.

It was lying there in Kim Song, later in Tokyo Army Hospital's TB ward, that Charlie had decided to become a writer. There seemed to be so much he wanted to say. Now he knew he would not say these things. Most had been said already. The rest didn't need saying. If he quit, the world would lose nothing. Jaime would lose nothing. He'd been valuable as a potential novelist, but now he had no value, not even the Saxon Award value. He'd have to save up and give that back, because of course it wasn't an award at all, but an advance on royalties disguised as an award. A returnable advance, he learned, reading the fine print. Which hadn't meant anything at the time, since he was going to finish his novel and MacMillan would be paid back a thousandfold. That's why he ran off with Linda, and that's why he couldn't possibly explain about the fucking. So he left it out. Confessing would only hurt Jaime anyhow, and he wanted his family. It was now all he had.

39.

Being rejected didn't bother Stan Winger anymore. He had four stories with Mills circulating around the magazines, and while none of them had been accepted he kept getting all kinds of encouragement. It made him feel good, but it didn't change anything. He still had to steal for a living. He wasn't boosting rags these days, because the guy he worked for left town. So he was back breaking into houses, but the thrill was gone. Every time he went into a place the fear would start mounting as soon as he turned off the sidewalk, and would not end sometimes for a couple of days. No more sexual pleasure. He knew that was what it had been. Going through a window gave him a hard-on. But it was over. Now only fear. The only redeeming factor he could see was that he didn't feel the urge to do terrible things, like crap on the dining room table or piss on the bed. He'd graduated from sexual punk amateur to professional thief. He was actually a jewel thief, though he'd take cash if he found it. His fences liked gold and stones, and even took Stan around to a couple of jewelry stores to explain to him the differences between costume jewelry and real jewelry. Stan learned how to judge the karat level of gold by heft. He learned how to tell the real stones from the fakes by looking at the edges of the facets for signs of wear.