Fridays at Enrico's (14 page)

“Come on!” he yelled. “This is your first snowstorm!”

She played along, getting wet and cold, running around in the snow. They watched it pile up all day, making comments like, “Boy, it's really getting deep!” Charlie explained to Jaime and Edna that this wasn't a real blizzard, you had to go to Montana to experience that. “I've seen the temperature drop from seventy to ten below in about forty minutes,” he told them as the snow blew silently against the windows.

“Oh, put it in your book,” Jaime said. There was something bizarre in her reaction to the snowfall. She wanted it to go on, to cover everything up to fifty feet, and then see what would happen. It was an anarchistic feeling, a don't-give-a-damn feeling. Let the traffic go to hell, let the snow fall, let business and schools close, let everything stop while the snow covers everything.

“Remember ‘The Dead'?” Charlie said, interrupting her thoughts.

“Yes,” she said. The Joyce story, where the snow fell all over Ireland.

He grinned. “You want me to go out and stand in the snow, to prove I love you?”

“No, but thanks.”

The next day when they got up the snow was still there, and had developed
a nasty icy crust. Charlie had to shovel out their circular drive and wait for the snowplow to find their road.

“What makes you think there's a snowplow?” she asked him. She was standing on the front porch watching him shovel.

Charlie blew happy clouds of steam. “Of course there's a snowplow.” An hour later the snowplow did pass, and Charlie and her mother went to work. It was eerie the way the cars sounded, just the engine thrumming as the wheels moved over the silent snow. After they were gone she sat at her kitchen table. Kira slept in the corner. Snowflakes started coming down outside. Jaime thought about killing herself.

She considered keeping this random existential temblor to herself, but that night in bed she told Charlie. He lay on his back, and touched his leg without looking at her. “You got to get used to these winters.”

“You think that's what it is?”

He turned to her and after a moment smiled. “It's just the winters,” he said. “Let's face it. Snow country is suicide country.”

“Have you ever thought about it?”

“Sure. Everybody in Montana all winter long thinks about nothing else. If the guns didn't freeze up they'd all be dead.” He chuckled. “Joke.”

She'd touched something in him, she knew. His experiences as a prisoner of war, maybe? He never talked about those. “It's all for the book,” he told her. “I don't even think about it unless I'm working.” Had he considered suicide in the prison camp? Had it been horrible? Probably very cold. She wondered if the snow reminded Charlie of being a prisoner.

“Let's make love,” he said, and put his warm hand on her belly.

“No,” she said.

24.

It wasn't long before Charlie knew Stan was a thief. They'd drink beer at one of the downtown taverns and talk about writing, but after a while Stan was telling Charlie about his adventures in county jail. “You ought to write about it,” Charlie said. Stan was an enthusiastic writer of pulp stories, but Charlie thought he could do better. He didn't criticize the pulp, he just kept urging Stan to write more about internal stuff.

“You don't always have to have a surprise at the end,” he told Stan one night as they sat drinking beer at the Broadway Inn.

“That's what they buy,” Stan said.

“You ought to read more classical stories,” Charlie said. He mentioned Maupassant, Chekhov, Hemingway, Steinbeck, and John O'Hara. Stan got out his little steno notepad and dutifully wrote down the names. A week later he came up to Charlie after composition class and said he was deep into Maupassant. “Boy, this guy can write,” he said with a big grin, and Charlie felt a burst of pleasure.

“You fuckin' ay,” he said in a low voice so the other students wouldn't hear. Stan winked, as if they had a conspiracy going. Sure enough, Stan's writing improved at once. He wasn't writing great stuff, but his dialogue was getting real.

One night Stan had news. A story he'd written, one he'd not shown to Charlie, had actually been bought, by
Raymond Chandler's Mystery Magazine
. For fifty dollars.

“You just passed me by, son,” Charlie said ruefully. “I've never sold a thing.” Stan admitted he had a lot of help on the story, and asked Charlie to a party, to celebrate the sale.

“Bring your wife,” Stan said.

“I'll try,” Charlie said.

The winter had been a long one, with snowstorm after snowstorm, melting and freezing, raining for long dull weeks on end, then snowing again. Charlie didn't mind. His new Volkswagen loved the snow, and he could drive around in it when people with big cars and power steering were sliding off into snowbanks. He taught Jaime how to drive in snow but she was always tense behind the wheel and he ended up doing most of the shopping, and anything else that required leaving the house. He worried about Jaime. She stayed in all day, not writing, and while she usually seemed in good spirits, Charlie sensed a time bomb ticking away somewhere. He'd been invited to parties and evenings of beer-drinking by his students and even the college administrator, but Jaime always had some reason not to go. “You go ahead,” she said. “I'll be fine.”

“I hate to leave you alone.”

“I've been alone all my life.”

Of course she had the baby twenty-four hours a day, and her mother at night, but Charlie knew what she meant. He tried to come home right after night classes, but the trouble was that after two hours of teaching he was always so jacked up. If he did come home Jaime would either be asleep or he would bore her to death talking about what happened in class. If he didn't come home he'd go out beer drinking with Stan Winger, then come home drunk.

“Come this time,” he said. “Stan's an interesting guy.” He paused. “He's a thief.”

She didn't get it right away. “He steals other people's stories?”

“He breaks into houses.”

The party was on SW Cable, in the hills just west of downtown. The roads were clear of snow but it rained a very cold rain, and Jaime didn't speak the whole eight miles into town. She'd been reluctant to spend an evening among Oregon hicks, especially a bunch of literary hicks. Charlie wasn't worried, though. Jaime was so pretty she could act any way she wanted and people wouldn't mind. He hoped she wouldn't call anybody a hick, though. Californians were resented in Oregon as it was.

“They aren't hicks,” he said over the sound of the windshield wipers. She made a little noise.

Walking up the slippery steps to the house, Jaime took Charlie's hand and said, “I'm pregnant again.”

“That's great,” Charlie said after too many steps. “Watch your feet.” They were at the front door, which opened wide, and Charlie felt the heat from the house against his frozen face. There was a bright-eyed little guy in front of him.

“I'm Dick Dubonet, welcome to my chalet,” the guy said.

Jaime smiled and held out her hand. “Hi, I'm Jaime Monel.” She walked into the party as if she owned the place.

“Ooh, what a beautiful wife!” Dick Dubonet said, and Charlie liked him at once. Not for calling Jaime beautiful, but for being such an enthusiastic asshole. Charlie had been prepared to dislike Dick Dubonet ever since he heard Stan's hero-worshipful description of the guy. And he was everything Charlie expected, too loud, too literary, too short. What Charlie hadn't expected was this openness, this lack of sophistication, even though the guy was obviously trying to act sophisticated.

“And this is my wife, Linda,” Dick said.

“I'm not your wife,” Linda said, smiling up at Charlie.

“I don't see why we need the state to approve our relationship,” Dick said.

There were about twenty people at the party, and over by the couch several musicians with guitars and banjos. The music was loud and energetic, but nobody was dancing. On the dining room table, food and drink, mostly quarts of Blitz-Weinhard beer, and Charlie went to the food, trying to get his mind to work again. Another child, right now. Was that what he wanted? Was that why Jaime had been acting so strangely? He put potato salad and salami and olives on a paper plate and poured himself a glass of beer. Behind him people were starting to dance. Stan was beside him, filling a plate.

“The literary crowd,” Stan said. Proudly, Charlie thought. Well, why not? He turned around, prepared to enjoy himself, prepared for another child.
What he was not prepared for was Linda McNeill, into whose eyes he found himself looking, as the five-string banjos hit their stride.

25.

Stan saw the look that passed between Charlie Monel and Linda, and it spoiled his evening. He knew what it meant, and being the all-observant one, he also saw that Dick Dubonet also saw the look, brief as it was, and if Stan was any judge, Dick didn't like it any more than he did. The look was simple. The best-looking female in the room signaled to the best looking-man, “I'm yours.” And the banjos played on.

“
Wake up, wake up, darlin' Corey!
” everybody yelled over the banjos, while Stan as usual sat in a corner not even tapping his foot. He'd been building up this gigantic fantasy of himself and Linda. All based on a look she'd given him, not that long ago, and based on her giving so much time to him, helping with his story. He'd made himself believe that getting the story published would change his life, and now he saw that what he'd meant was getting together with Linda. He had automatically assumed. He had forgotten himself. He had forgotten reality. Women like that were not for men like him. They were for men like Charles W. Monel.

But the kitty came back, the very next day,

The kitty came back, 'cause she couldn't stay away . . .”

Of course Charlie's wife had to be young and beautiful herself, with flaming red hair cut like a boy's and her thin boyish body. She was dancing now with Jeffrey Lyman, a happy-go-lucky kid Stan figured was a homosexual, but a nice guy. Charlie would collect his due from Linda, Stan was sure. Why wouldn't he? These people were artists, they probably swapped wives and girlfriends all the time. The couple kissing on the couch hadn't come in together. Stan thought about getting laid, but Vancouver was a
long way off through cold rain, and Stan didn't feel like sitting on a bus. One of the things that made him stew in corners at parties was his own sexual inadequacy. Probably why he broke into houses, too. It explained his whole life. Including why, at this party in his honor, he felt so shitty. Get published had only highlighted his inadequacy as a human being. Take the matter of Linda.

She'd been the one to tell him his story had been bought. She did it by inviting him to lunch at the Buttermilk Corner. Then, when his mouth was full of roast beef, she said, “Bob Mills called. Guess what?”

“What?” he asked, after grinding up his food and swallowing. His heart was in his mouth anyway. He had hoped she invited him to lunch because she was falling in love with him. Now, his mouth hanging open, he listened to her tell him the good news. It was quite a letdown.

She reached out and touched his hand. “You don't look happy. Cheer up, you're a published author.”

“I'm not an author,” he said through a red flush of embarrassment.

“Yes you are.” Linda gave him that beautiful smile. “Not only that, you're one of the best writers in Portland. With just one story.”

She probably knew he had an inferiority complex.

Now at the party she came over and sat beside him on the floor. The musicians had put away their instruments and the phonograph was playing loud jazz. Stan was a little drunk, and when she put an arm around his shoulders he turned his face away to keep her from smelling his breath. But it didn't work. She took him by the chin and turned his face toward hers. She was about an inch from him.

“I want a kiss from the guest of honor,” she said, and kissed him. For the second time. It emptied his mind. When he came back to reality she was smiling at him, her eyes filled with the affection he'd never experienced in his life. Why shouldn't he fall in love?

But it was a love he'd keep to himself. For all the depressing reasons you can think of. She was Dick Dubonet's girl. She'd helped him, out of the goodness of her heart. And she was going to sleep with Charles Monel.
Whom (possibly who) he had brought to the party. Proudly. His teacher. Oddly, he didn't hate Charlie for this. It wasn't his fault.

Five weeks later they got the news that
Raymond Chandler's Mystery Magazine
had folded. So Stan wasn't paid and wasn't published. Stan talked to his new agent on the phone and Mills told him in his deep dry voice that the story was a good one, and he would very likely place it soon. And keep writing. Stan hung up to see a grinning Dick and a sad-looking Linda.

“Good thing you didn't spend the money,” Dick said.

“I knew something would happen,” Stan said. Not bitterly.

“Let's all go down to Jerry's for a burger,” Dick said. “My treat.”