Fridays at Enrico's (6 page)

He sat in his old maroon '49 Ford sipping coffee from his thermos cup and reading the morning
Examiner
by flashlight. This time of year the sun wouldn't be up for another hour. It was cold, but Kenny was comfortable. Last night had been good. He sat up writing for several hours, the laundry below closed, the apartment building almost silent except for the usual quiet domestic sounds, and he had been able to churn out three whole pages. He was writing an insane little story about an old Chinese man who worked in a laundry every day and then went home to work on his invention, which was made of a lot of tiny moving parts, gears, wheels, pins, shafts, etc. No one was sure what the old man was making, but everyone was very respectful. Kenny wasn't sure what the old man was making either, but he hoped his imagination would come to his rescue. He seemed to be coming near to the end of the story, and he still didn't have any idea what the story was about. He had to trust himself, he knew. Writing blindly, following only impulse, was the secret to finding out what lay in the deepest parts of his mind. What his mother would call his soul, but which he preferred to call his essence.

He looked at his watch. Five to seven. He knew from experience that a lot of people would answer this ad and it was best to be early. Oddly, none of the other book scouts he knew had caught on to his trick of answering furniture ads. Usually he was the only one even slightly interested in the books. He got out of the car and saw his breath. It was a nice cold morning. He went up the steps and rang the doorbell. He hoped they wouldn't be angry with him, but they usually weren't. They wanted that sale to begin.

After a while a plump little woman in a gray sweatshirt and green slacks opened the door and looked out at him without saying anything.

“I'm here for the sale?” he said.

“Oh,” she said. She seemed a little strange, but she widened the opening and let him in. He could see right away that the furnishings were good. Persian rugs everywhere, Tiffany lamps, at least three of them in the living room, good-looking and well-cared-for antique furniture. He walked around the living room pretending to look at the furniture.

“I'm Mrs. Froward,” the woman said and gave him a moist hand. He realized she was drunk. At least she had booze on her breath.

“This is all such nice stuff,” he said, walking around. He looked at the pieces in the dining room. Still no books. This was actually a good sign. If a household like this had only a few books, usually they would be displayed in the living room. Of course they might have no books at all.

“Do you have any bookshelves for sale?” he asked her. “That's what I'm looking for mostly.”

“This way.” She led him down the hall to their library. For Kenny, it was like walking into King Solomon's mine. Everywhere he looked he saw beautiful books in their original dust wrappers. Names leaped out: Joyce, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Hemingway . . . He reached for a copy of
The Sun Also Rises
, in its original dust wrapper. The book was in excellent condition. He opened it to the copyright page and saw the letter A where he hoped to find it. First edition. He checked a Fitzgerald. First edition. He hoped his hand wasn't trembling as he slid the Fitzgerald back into place. He turned and smiled at Mrs. Froward.

“Nice books,” he said. “Are you a collector?”

“My husband collected the books,” she said. “He's gone now.”

Just exactly what Kenny hoped to hear. But something was bothering him. “I could buy all these books,” he heard himself saying. “If it's cheap enough.”

“What do you think?” she asked. She sat down in a nice-looking leather chair, well-worn, probably where the dead guy sat and read over his collection. He looked around. Approximately two hundred books.

“I could give you fifty cents apiece,” he said. “A hundred dollars for the whole bunch. I could haul 'em out of here this morning.”

She looked up at him, and this time he saw the pain in her eyes, for only a second, but it was there. “I don't know,” she said. “You'd be getting a lot of valuable books. I wasn't actually thinking of selling the books, but we need the money.”

“Look,” he heard himself saying, “you're gonna have a lot of furniture dealers here pretty soon. They'll be trying to screw you, excuse me, but they'll want to get all this really valuable stuff cheap. You have to be ready to bargain . . .” His heart sank as he listened to himself. But he couldn't steal from an old drunk woman. It just wasn't in him.

“You don't know the value of any of this stuff, do you?” he asked her. He sat down on the little love seat, and noticed for the first time with a shock that the small painting on the wall in front of him was a Matisse. Or it looked like a Matisse. “Matisse?” he asked her and she nodded absently. She must have been up all night drinking. Her husband dies and she's helpless. And then the scavengers arrive. Kenny sighed. If he had been a real businessman he would have made her an offer for everything in the house, screwed her blind and made a fortune. Instead, because he was a writer, because he needed to be a man of honor more than he needed the money, Kenny told Mrs. Froward the facts of life.

“Lady, you're not in shape to sell your stuff, pardon me.”

“That's true,” she said. “But sell it I must.”

He sighed again. Last chance to be a vulture. “Let me call you a reputable dealer,” he said. “Somebody who can take over and auction off your things for the right prices. It will take a while, but otherwise they'd take you to the cleaners.”

He telephoned Butterfield's and told them what was going on. They were sending a man over, and meanwhile, Kenny would stop people at the door and tell them the sale was over.

“Why are you doing this?” she asked him.

“I don't know, lady,” he said. He couldn't tell her he was a man of honor, could he?

9.

Jaime thought her period had stopped because of the death of her father. But no, she was pregnant, and had obviously gotten pregnant on her first night of love. And to top that off, when she told her mother, Edna snapped, “Fine. Then you're his responsibility. You can go live with him.”

“Oh, fine,” Jaime snapped back, thinking about Charlie's luxurious apartment. On that first night Charlie had unzipped his sleeping bag and laid it on the floor next to the cot, and they made love on that. Later when she felt sleepy she just pulled some clothes over her and slept. But she could not imagine living like that. She was a middle-class girl. She was not used to poverty. And anyway she didn't think Charlie was going to be happy about being a father. There was really no other choice. Abortions cost money.

She and her mother were living in the house while the realtors tried to sell it, and there were strangers in the house all the time. Most of the good stuff was gone, sold at auction, and the house was strange, full of odd echoes. It seemed as if her father were merely on vacation, and had gone off without them. She missed him, but she also felt a little resentful about his absence. Why didn't he take us with him? She expected to see him coming in the front door, black topcoat collar up, wet gray felt hat pulled down to his eyes, specks of rain on his glasses and moustache. Her mother was busy selling things and looking for an apartment they could afford that wasn't in a slum, and Jaime tried to do her schoolwork, pay attention in classes, and write. She'd been working on a short story about a girl much like herself. It wasn't going very well and now seemed to have no point. Too much had happened to her since beginning the story. She threw the pages into her wastebasket. None of her personal furniture had been sold. Her room was intact, the only intact room in the house. The only one with a rug, though not a Persian. She hadn't told Charlie she was pregnant yet. He'd pulled back after her father's death, out of common decency, or
because he found her too easy. When they ran into each other he always seemed friendly and concerned, but she made herself aloof, as if the death of her father had affected her deeply, as deeply as it might have affected a character in a Russian novel, although Jaime had read only one,
Anna Karenina
.

Then finally one day in class when Professor Clark was looking something up in a book, Charlie tapped her on the shoulder and she turned. His eyes seemed gold that day. “Hi,” he said to her.

“I'm pregnant,” she said, and turned back. Numbly she listened to Professor Clark reading from the Upanishads (they were reading
A Passage to India
) and waited for Charlie's reaction, although he could hardly interrupt the lecture. Then he touched her on the shoulder, and she knew, just from that single touch, that everything was going to be all right. She started to cry. At that moment Clark looked at her and must have seen the shine of the tears. His blue eyes widened, and he went back to reading. It's not the lecture, Walt, she wanted to tell him. She got a Kleenex from her bag and blew her nose noisily.

“Gesundheit!” Charlie whispered and she felt his hand at the back of her neck. Clark grinned and kept on reading. When the bell rang Jaime stood up and turned to face Charlie. She knew her eyes looked terrible, but Charlie just pulled her in to him and she cried against his field jacket.

Of course his place would be no good for them. The family house had been snapped up, probably at bargain prices, and Jaime and her mother had to move out within a month. Edna seemed distracted and was drinking too much. Jaime couldn't talk to her. She did not know whether this was the happiest time of her life, or the worst. Only when she was with Charlie did she feel good. Only with Charlie did she feel safe. And this was insane. What did she know about him? He was from a small town in Montana, Wain, Montana. His mother was dead and his father worked in a lumber yard. He'd been a soldier and had won a medal her father envied. She knew he was an enthusiastic writer with few literary skills, and finally, she knew everybody around State thought he was their most promising student. Probably because he was big and strong and had a nice smile.

They went outside to smoke a cigarette under the trees in the courtyard between HSS and the administration building. It was raining a little.

“I thought you might be,” he said.

“Be what?”

“Pregnant.”

“What made you think so?”

He smiled. “Because I wanted you to be,” he said. He put his hand against her cheek, his cigarette dangling romantically from his lips. “You know how I feel about you,” he said.

“How?” She had gone over the line. She should never have asked him that.

“I love you,” he said.

“Oho,” said another student in passing. Charlie threw him an ironic smile and turned back to Jaime. “I'm nuts about you. I want to marry you. I want you to have our babies. Et cetera.”

“I don't want that,” she heard herself saying. “I have to finish college.”

“I can wait,” Charlie said. Suddenly his face contorted with doubt. She wanted to laugh at his comical expression, as he realized she might turn him down. “Wait a sec.”

“I do love you,” she said.

“You're not planning on an abortion or anything like that, are you?” There was anxiety in his voice. His hands were on her arms, his cigarette in his mouth.

“I don't know,” she said, feeling the power. “I don't know what I'm going to do.”

“Please don't.” He spat away his cigarette and kissed her urgently. “Don't you get it? We're perfect for each other.”

Now she was in control. “Let's walk down and have a nice cup of poisonous coffee,” she said. Quietly talking, they walked arm-in-arm across the gently sloping lawns to the cafeteria, where they found a group of young writers sitting around having coffee. Jaime and Charlie joined their colleagues, their secret warm between them. They'd live together and have their child. Charlie, after he got his degree, would look for a teaching job. Jaime
would have the baby and then come back to school. They'd share everything. If they still loved each other a few years down the line, they could marry. She'd be twenty-one by then, and able to decide.

She looked at her fellow students. There was nothing but men at the table. Of the handful of women in the program, none were considered potentially great writers. Really, most of the creative writing students were headed for teaching careers. Few would become writers. Right now they were talking about money. Some had applied for the Eugene F. Saxon Award, ten grand from the MacMillan Company for the most promising partial manuscript. Jaime would have applied herself, except she had no novel.

10.

When Charlie got the Saxon he was more surprised than anybody. He hadn't even wanted to apply. His thesis advisor had cheerfully told him that Part One could not only get him a Saxon, but if submitted with the proper recommendations, could get him a scholarship to Iowa's writing program, the most prestigious in the country. “Paul Engel will love it,” Dr. Wilner said. Charlie knew that Part One wasn't ready. It had all the people and all the stuff, but it was crude as hell and irritated Charlie every time he read it over. Part One had taken him years to get on paper, even in its roughest form, and now, after all his teachers and friends had worked it over, it still irritated him. It was
not good
.