Fridays at Enrico's (36 page)

“I'll call the bastard tomorrow.” Charlie waved at Ward. “Bring me a Wild Turkey, Ward, please?”

Jaime was deep in a long story she thought might actually turn out to be a novel, or a novelette, or novella, whatever the hell you call them. Short novel. She'd been writing short stories lately, a string of them, and getting them mostly printed in the
New Yorker
. She talked of her work for a while, while Charlie had his Wild Turkey.

Then he said to his wife of twelve years, “Okay, what do you want to do?” They both looked through the glass at the people sitting outside at the marble tables. High grade drunks, the cream of San Francisco bar society.

“I want to fuck that girl over there,” Jaime said, pointing to a beautiful woman in a red evening dress, who sat at a table full of dressed-up people. The men looked like lawyers. Charlie, too, would have liked to screw the woman in the red dress, but he only smiled at Jaime.

“I mean us,” he said. “Shall we hit another bar, or do you want to cross the river? We could stop at the no name for a night. Or not. Or I could take you up to the apartment. Entirely up to you.”

“I'm sick of the apartment,” she said, putting hope in his heart. She put her hand on his cheek, her eyes almost wet with tears. “But I gotta stay. The old bitch won't let me.” Charlie knew she meant that the story was keeping her. She wouldn't come until it was done. Again he realized why she was a writer and he wasn't. She was mystical about the work. The work really did come first. For Charlie the work had come first only until he'd met her. Then her, and Kira. Something had somehow put Jaime out of reach of these feelings. He'd read her first novel, about her wonderful family life, and couldn't see anything there to make her this way. The only way she could love her family was to write about them.

Charlie smiled at her sadly. “Let's have one more,” he said. “And I'll walk you home.”

She smiled glassily. “I love you,” she said, and giggled.

66.

Charlie was met at LAX by a driver holding up a sign with his name on it. Actually the best part of the trip was getting into the limousine, Charlie's first. He hoped his fellow passengers on the commuter flight could see him now. Him in his Levi's, boots, garbage shirt, and black leather jacket. Them in their commuter suits. He knew he looked like a dope dealer or a rock musician, and they'd put him through the mill at SFO, making him put his hands against the wall while the little airport cops searched his bags and patted him down. They missed the baggie of marijuana he carried in his hip pocket under his dirty handkerchief.

“I'm Charles Monel,” he said to the driver, who was a young guy, thin, with very dark glasses and pale skin. The driver pulled open the back door and Charlie grinned at him. “Thanks,” he said, and bumped his head getting in. Bill Ratto's sweet-voiced secretary had sent Charlie tickets and asked which hotel he'd prefer. Charlie didn't know anything about L.A. hotels, so the secretary put him into the Beverly Wilshire. All the way there, driving mostly on backstreets and avoiding freeways, the driver talked about his own Hollywood ambitions.

“I'm not like most of the drivers,” he said. “They're all writers or actors. I'm gonna produce.” He explained that in Hollywood only the man who controlled the purse strings had any creative power. “Everybody else has to suck his ass,” the driver said. His eyes met Charlie's in the mirror. “Can I give you some advice?” he asked Charlie.

“Sure.”

“Don't rub your eyes. It just makes it worse.”

Charlie stopped. “What the hell is it?”

“Particulate matter,” the driver said.

Charlie's room at the Wilshire was nice, nothing special. He'd somehow
been expecting luxury. There was a little red blinking light on his telephone. The message was from Bill, asking him to call at once.

“Charlie! How do you like Southern California?” Charlie couldn't think of an answer and Bill didn't wait for one. “I need to do a couple of things around here, then we can have lunch right downstairs in your hotel.”

Charlie found the restaurant, El Padilla, in the back of the hotel. He gave his name to the uniformed waiter, who took him to a banquette. The room was about three-quarters full, and buzzing. Charlie felt a kind of nervous excitement that had nothing to do with his meeting. What if a star walked in? Instead Bill Ratto slid in next to him and told the hovering waiter to bring them menus and a telephone. So every cliché was to be played out. Bill was wearing a suit and tie and had tucked his sunglasses into his lapel pocket, one temple bar hanging out raffishly. His shirt was white, his tie was silk, but still he looked Hollywood. The tan, maybe. Bill's plump face had thinned, and his hair receded. He no longer looked like an owl, more like a hawk. A cartoon hawk.

He turned to Charlie and stuck out his hand. “We're meeting my partner,” he said. “Meanwhile, how are you? You look great, a little heavy, but good. How's your wife?”

“Jaime is fine,” Charlie said. She hadn't come because her story had turned into something longer. “Don't let them fix you up with any actresses,” she said, and kissed him wetly. Kira wanted a tee shirt from Hollywood.

The waiter plugged in the telephone, and with an apologetic smile Bill picked up the instrument and talked quietly into it. Charlie picked up the menu, trying not to listen. When he put down the menu another man was coming toward them, smiling brilliantly. He was very good-looking in a Hollywood way, with dark hair, and dressed in jeans and a collarless blue work shirt. He reached for Charlie's hand.

“You have to be Charles Monel,” he said. “I'm Bud Fishkin.” Fishkin's handshake was firm and dry. Fishkin slid into the booth and asked for a menu and a telephone. Now Charlie was surrounded by producers with telephones, murmuring into the instruments while Charlie tried not to be embarrassed. But of course no one was looking at them and no one was
laughing. Without being obvious, Charlie started listening to the conversations. Ratto was talking to his secretary, going through the phone calls that had come in since he left his office. Fishkin was talking to his agent. Charlie felt like calling the waiter over and getting his own instrument, so he could call Jaime and tell her she was missing a pretty funny lunch.

“Bill tells me you were in Korea,” Bud Fishkin said in a warm voice after he hung up. “I must say, you look the part.”

Ratto said, “We have an idea for your picture, but first I'd like to explain a few things. Remember your book?”

Charlie smiled. “Yes.”

“Well, not exactly like that, but the spirit of that. Novels are thick. Movies are flat. We want to flatten your novel, but retain the same intensity, the same flavor. That's why we'd like you to work with us on the script. If you'd like to. If it wouldn't piss you off too much.”

“Novels get raped and murdered in Hollywood,” Fishkin said with a warm smile. “Lots of times the book writer is too protective. We felt you might not be this way since your book was never published. So you've got nothing to live down, nothing to defend.”

“I see,” said Charlie. “You want me to help with the raping and killing.”

Fishkin laughed. “You can be first.” Both Charlie and Ratto laughed.

“What's in it for me?” Charlie asked, dabbing at his eyes with a big, red napkin.

“Wait a minute, wait a minute, I take that question seriously,” said Fishkin. “What's in it for you is, first, your novel will now see the light of day, although in somewhat different form. This should be or could be of great creative satisfaction, and all that shit. Then there's the money. There can be a hell of a lot of money in a movie, money you don't even think about, residual rights, foreign sales, television series, electronic rights, it goes on and on. And if you make a name for yourself as a screenwriter, you can get pretty rich. And you can acquire greater control.”

“That's important,” Ratto said. “Because with this first script you won't have much control. That has to be earned.”

“You have to learn the ropes,” said Fishkin with a smile.

“What's the plot of my movie?” Charlie asked. The waiter came up, and Charlie noticed that neither of the other men ordered anything to drink except coffee. Charlie did the same. He wasn't going to get blasted and let them take advantage.

After the waiter left, Fishkin and Ratto exchanged a look, as if to say, You or me? Then Ratto said, “Let me. The movie's about you, Charlie. A war hero who gets captured by the Chinese, then has to survive the prison camp, even though he has tuberculosis. It's about survival.”

“It's about winning over evil,” said Fishkin.

“I doesn't sound much like my book,” Charlie said. Fishkin raised an eyebrow.

“Really? Describe your novel in one sentence. The sentence you'd see later in
TV Guide
.”

Charlie thought a moment, then said thoughtfully, “A bunch of assholes get caught in a war.”

“I love it!” said Fishkin.

67.

Jaime loved North Beach in the mornings. It was like a Mediterranean village on a hill, bright clean blue sky, empty streets and narrow alleyways. Jaime liked to get up with the sun, shower, dress, and walk down the hill to the Caffe Trieste for an espresso with chocolate sprinkled on it, perhaps a brioche if she didn't have too bad a hangover. The place at that hour was always busy, people standing at the little counter arguing in Sicilian or Italian with the people behind the counter, scavengers out on the street in front, having their espressos after a hard morning picking up San Francisco's garbage. Jaime loved these people. They knew her, at least by sight, and nearly every
morning the young men out front would say things about her in Italian and laugh. It had taken years for her to be served promptly inside. She was never sure whether this was because she wasn't Italian or wasn't male. But now they'd start her espresso right away, singing out, “Jaime! Brioche today?” while others waited impatiently. Then she'd sit with her back to the window and read whatever paper was lying around, smelling the hot chocolate, the Italian cigar smoke, hearing the hissing of the espresso machines and the loud conversations all around her. It was her daily moment of humanity before returning to isolation and work.

With Charlie in Hollywood Jaime had to interrupt her routine and go home to Mill Valley to be with her daughter. Jaime couldn't write at home with Charlie there, which broke her heart. Charlie would be so considerate of her privacy and her need for a smooth quiet routine, always offering his own office, but all that self-sacrifice on his part made her too sad to work. How could she explain this to Charlie without hurting him? “I can't work here because you're a failure.” She assumed Charlie understood, but it was a little catch between them, one more thing they couldn't be open about. They mounted up, these silent catches.

When Charlie flew to L.A. Jaime had two choices, go home to work, or bring Kira to the city. She feared leaving Kira to wander around North Beach while she wrote. Kira was not only too tall for her age, she was too smart, too curious, to self-reliant. So Jaime went home. It was supposed to be for the one night, but Charlie called up and said he'd been invited out to Malibu for the weekend. “To talk shop,” he said, without a trace of humor, so she was stuck for three days. She brought her manuscript and her Hermes portable, but Kira seemed to have decided that she wouldn't let her mother work. On Friday they drove to Stinson Beach and walked along the wet sand looking for sea shells. Kira seemed to know the names of all the shells, green rock oysters, purple-hinged scallops, sand dollars, turban snails, etc. and etc., always running ahead of her mother and picking up whatever glittered, discarding the imperfect shells and putting the others into her pants pockets. There were dogs on the beach, and Kira ran and played with the
dogs, although she claimed she didn't want a dog of her own. She'd been told she'd have to take care of any pets, so she'd said, typical Kira, “Then I don't want any.” Yet her room was full of dead butterflies, dragonflies, dried mushrooms, pictures of wolves and hawks, as well as the usual stuffed animals and children's books.

Jaime had never been happy with Charlie's quitting writing. She understood his terrible pain when he had to reject publication of a butchered version, Bill Ratto's vain attempt to play Maxwell Perkins, but she expected after a year or so of working as a bartender Charlie would come to his senses and get back to his desk. But no. After all these years he seemed perfectly content to tend bar and support her writing, as if he were secondary in their marriage. She knew better. This Hollywood thing really worried her, Ratto again, not letting Charlie get on with his life. Another battering for Charlie, coming up.

But when she met him at the airport Charlie was explosively cheerful. “Jesus H. Christ, it's good to be back in San Francisco!” he said. “You can't imagine what that fucking place is like. You can't even rub your eyes.” But the energy bubbling up out of him had a different source, she was certain. That night, lying in the darkness after making love, he talked quietly about his visit, about what these producers had in mind and how he felt about it.

“I think I can beat these guys. They're not dumb or anything, but it's so obvious what they want.”