Fridays at Enrico's (43 page)

PART SIX

The Literary Life

79.

Consider the unborn Buddha spirit. Unborn, because when your Buddha spirit is born, you become enlightened. Jaime was at the moment unmistakably
pre
-enlightened, a perfect open loving creature, sensitive to everything and naïve about everything, the dupe of the senses. Right now Jaime was so sensitive she couldn't open her eyes, for fear of what she'd see. Easier to lie there with her eyes shut, the unfamiliar pillow under her head, the unfamiliar covers over her body. A hotel room? She hoped she was alone. Her unborn Buddha spirit always did better alone. Jaime had become a Buddhist in self-defense. Nothing else seemed to work, and if Buddhism itself seemed to have no working parts, that was fine with her. After life, nothing. Fine. Maybe by telling herself she was a Buddhist she was really saying, I am not a Christian, I am not a Jew, I am certainly not a Muslim, yet I believe in something. The universe? No. Bigger. More loving. Something. The Buddha looks like a nice guy. Blame it on him.

She stirred. There was too much light in the room, wherever it was. She tightened her lids and tried to reconstruct the night before. It wasn't a shock anymore to awaken to a blank memory, but it did stir up old sensations of dread, the Monday morning school feeling. Let's see. Go back as far as lunch yesterday. Lunch at Enrico's. Was that yesterday, or the day before? She had lunch at Enrico's every Friday, or nearly every Friday. So, today would be Saturday. Kira wouldn't be in school. And then, remembering, her skin
went cold. She felt sweat prickling on her body. Kira was missing. Jaime opened her eyes. Big windows behind dark green silk-looking drapes. A man's bedroom, and from the look of things, the man had money. She turned and saw Brighton Forester smiling at her from the doorway, his white hair tousled, his handsome red face tilted in sympathy.

“You're awake,” he said. My God, she must have slept with him. Brighton Forester, someone she'd known or known about for years. Not one of her heroes. A member of the San Francisco establishment, a rich man, a novelist with one good book out. And, as she well knew, a married person.

“Where's your wife?” Jaime asked. Humorously, she hoped. That son of a bitch. He'd been after her for years, and now she was in his bed. They probably fucked in the night, and she couldn't even remember. She blinked painfully, her fingers clutching the edge of the quilt.

“She's in the mountains,” Brighton said. He wore a terrycloth bathrobe. “Why do you ask?” Apparently these society people went around fucking whomever they pleased. Of course they'd be hypocrites about it. Mum's the word and all that. Jaime's eyes hurt. She remembered Kira. Kira was missing.

“What happened last night?” she asked. Brighton came into the room, his eyes warm and sympathetic, and sat on the edge of the bed. Jaime sat up and pinched her nose to make the pain stop. It didn't.

He explained that they'd run into each other at a party, gone off with a handful of people, and ended up here in bed. He smiled fondly. He obviously liked her, aside from anything else. She liked him, for what it was worth. A nice man, tall, well-built, civilized, Princeton educated, and so on. But she needed to think about Kira. She needed to remember yesterday, in detail. How did Jaime know Kira was missing? Had the school called?

“I have to get up,” she said to Brighton. “My daughter is missing.”

Downstairs in the breakfast room Brighton told Jaime over coffee that she'd already solved the problem. “That's all you would talk about last night,” he said. “How your daughter had run off to Los Angeles.”

“Los Angeles?” She wanted to bite her tongue. She was horribly ashamed of her loss of memory. But Brighton was calm, encouraging. Kira had taken
a bus to Los Angeles, he explained. To be with her father. The bus was likely pulling in about now.

Jaime sipped her coffee, trying to absorb the information. Reassuring, at first, to know Kira had made good on her threats. Then the dreadful feeling came back. “How do you know this?” she asked Brighton.

He smiled. “You told me. Remember? You stopped on Van Ness to telephone.”

“Who did I telephone?”

“I don't know.”

He was no fucking help at all. Jaime got out of there as quickly as she could, turning down Brighton's offer to drive her home. “I can take the bus,” she said, gave him a kiss meant to indicate only friendship, and went out his big front door to find herself on Cherry Street, in Pacific Heights. She walked down to California Street. It was a sweet blue morning, but she couldn't enjoy it. She took the bus out to Eighteenth Avenue and walked north to Lake Street. Her flat was Seventeenth at Lake, one door in from the dead end. The
Chronicle
lay on the reddish brown doormat, just as if everything were normal. She picked up the paper, keyed open the front door and went up the short flight of stairs to her flat. “Kira,” she said without hope. No one answered. Tuffy the cat was curled up on Jaime's bed. He looked up at her, then went back to sleep. Jaime undressed and took a shower, still waiting for her mind to clear. It didn't, not much. She checked her answering machine. Several messages, but none from Kira or Charlie. She wondered if they were together, and if so, how Charlie was dealing with it. Being responsible for a fifteen-year-old girl in Hollywood. Kira in particular, with a mind of her own, to put it mildly, and taller than her mother by six inches already, and still growing. The body of a woman, also mildly put, thank you, and the mind to match. Jaime had initiated a talk about sex once, but all Kira said was, “Oh, shit, Mother,” and walked out. To big, too smart, too pretty. Now, well, Jaime didn't want to use the word runaway, but she couldn't think of another. Like half the children in America, Jaime thought, then felt contempt for herself. Sure, that's the excuse. Everybody's doing it. Jaime didn't want her daughter to be the last hippie runaway.

She dialed Charlie's hotel. Charlie wasn't in or wasn't answering. When the desk clerk came back on the line, Jaime asked, “Have you seen my daughter? His daughter? Is she registered?”

“No, she's not,” the clerk answered in a distant polite voice, and she hung up, her face flushing with guilt. Where the fuck is Kira? She thought to call the school, but it was Saturday. Wasn't it? She looked at the newspaper. Yes, Saturday, April 12, 1975. Then she remembered. Friday, yesterday, she'd finished writing, had showered and was headed down to Enrico's for lunch with friends, her regular lunch crowd. The school called. Kira had left at midday without permission. Would she look into it? They loved Jaime at Drew, and would do anything for one of their most famous graduates. But they couldn't help with this. Now she remembered vowing, in a heat of anger at Kira, not to wait for her daughter to come home. She'd instead gone ahead to Enrico's. Later she could bawl Kira out for cutting school. But Jaime had never gone home. Instead she and Kenny Goss and Richard Brautigan sat around getting drunk, Jaime jumping up every few drinks to call home. Kira never answered. Jaime must have decided, in some cleverly drunken way, that Kira had run off to Los Angeles. When in fact she could be anywhere, including some pretty bad places. Jaime blocked herself from further speculations.

She looked into her daughter's bedroom, half-hoping to see her in her own bed. No. Jaime tried to identify which clothes were missing, but she didn't recognize half the stuff she found in the closet or on chairs or on the bed. Kids traded clothes all the time. Some of this stuff was pretty weird, blue leather hotpants she was certain she'd never seen before, a leather jacket which must have cost a fortune. Jaime realized she knew almost nothing about Kira. After the breakup that had brought them into the same home, she'd learned less about her daughter, not more. Kira, blaming her mother, had closed herself off. Charlie, though not a bad man, had become sanctified in Kira's mind. Writers should never marry anyway, Jaime told herself. We're too selfish.

With that thought she began to relax. Kira understood her pretty well. Her daughter would hurt her, surgically, using every weakness she sensed
in her mother, then come home. There was no need to call the police or do anything else dramatic, just wait for her daughter to come home. Jaime started crying, but even that was just the fucking hangover. Kira was fine. It was Jaime who was suffering.

80.

It had seemed like such a good simple idea, an exercise almost, to write a short story about a girl Jaime had known only slightly, but whose tragedy had terribly upset her. In real life the girl's name had been Mary Bergendaal. Jaime kept the Mary for the overtone of the virginal, and made her last name Rosendaal. Rose, doll, and Scandinavian. The real Mary had been a French horn player with the Portland Symphony, who'd killed herself at the age of twenty-four. Charlie, coming home one night, had told her about the suicide, because she and Charlie had met the girl one afternoon downtown, with Marty Greenberg. Jaime recalled a soft little blonde girl, hanging onto Marty's arm and not saying anything, her eyes unfocused.

“Is that Marty's girlfriend?” she asked Charlie afterward. He just laughed. A month later she killed herself, blowing her brains out with a shotgun. Charlie had felt terrible, especially about laughing. “Oh, God, the things we all said about her.”

Jaime had begun her story at second remove, with the main characters reacting to her suicide, then threw away what she'd written and started over with Mary at the center. If she could write about Mary from the inside, maybe Jaime could animate the enormous sympathy she felt for her, and find out by the end of the story why she'd killed herself. Of course the obvious was the obvious. She'd killed herself because she was angry. It was a revenge killing. She was the
blow
queen, she gave everybody
head
, now she would show them what it really meant.

The story had grown as she'd submerged herself in Portland memories. She had enough material, really, for a good short novel. A story about Portland, centering on Mary but not restricted to her. Fifty-six pages in, she could imagine it would run to almost two hundred. Her instinct for the stories' proportion was good by now. Today her head hurt and her stomach fluttered, but this wouldn't stop her. Writing with a hangover, pecking out the words one painful letter at a time, pausing and staring without comprehension at the words, often produced her best material. She didn't know why. Kira's mysterious absence made her sweat with anxiety, but there was nothing to do but blot out everything and write. If you ever gave in, stayed in bed, let your anxiety win, you'd end up hugging your knees in terminal terror. “I can't work! I'm going to die!” Instead she plugged away blindly, letting the words come without thought.

At some point she sat, panting, wondering what the next sentence would be, then realized she was done for the day. A light sweat covered her body. She picked up the pages she'd written. Four of them, just enough. She stood, wobbling slightly, and went into the bathroom, and there stripped off her tee shirt and underpants and got into the hot shower. Her mind was almost empty. She was shampooing her hair when she thought of Kira. Oh, shit. All the good feeling from work ran down the drain. She stood helpless under the spray, the worst mother in America. No wonder her daughter ran off, no wonder she couldn't attract a decent man. She was just an old whore without a brain.

She was dressed in her favorite blue tee shirt and jeans, sitting at her desk correcting and editing the morning pages, when Kira came in through the back door. “Hi Mom,” she said, and opened the refrigerator door. Jaime's face flushed. She sat with her arms at her sides, relief and anger flooding her. Kira had obviously only been upstairs. She hadn't run away. She'd been visiting the neighbors, a couple of craftspeople, nice people, friends. If Jaime had been home, not drunk out in North Beach, she'd have known. As if to emphasize the point, her headache returned in full force. “Oh,” she groaned, as Kira came into her office wearing clothes Jaime had never seen before.

“Where the hell have you been?” Jaime asked, in a gnawing, whiny voice.

“Where the hell have
you
been?” Kira asked in an unkind imitation.

“Where did you get those clothes?”

Kira posed, her arms out like a model. “You like?” She wore pale pink crushed velvet bellbottoms and an emerald green silk blouse with long puffed sleeves. “Borrowed,” she said.

“You weren't here when I got home,” Jaime said, and immediately regretted it.