Fridays at Enrico's (46 page)

Society wasn't getting her anyplace. She wrote nothing that lasted more than a page and a half, then to be torn up in anger or slipped into the wastebasket with a sigh. Torry's work, if you could call it that, consisted these days of getting up in the morning, drinking cup after cup of coffee, then falling into a gloom. He brightened only when he saw Jaime, who was beginning to feel like the Salvation Army. Then one day he didn't show up.

Jaime wasn't permitted to call, in case you-know-who was there. She had always to wait for him to call and apologize, beg her to see him. Not this time. Jaime finally learned from the
Chronicle
that Torvald Hetter was in Cannes for the film festival. In the same day's society column she read that Mr. and Mrs. E. Stanton Plinckerd were in Cannes for the film festival. Little surprise there. But she hadn't expected to feel so bad. She spent about three days in a deep depression until, standing at the refrigerator opening a container of kefir, her story about Mary Bergendaal flooded back into her, and the pain slowly went away. Mary was a lot more interesting than Torry anyway. At least Mary didn't whine.

Jaime half-expected to see Torry at Enrico's this particular Friday. The Cannes festival was over. Torry didn't hang out at Enrico's but he knew Jaime made a religion of Fridays, and would calculate this as a good public place to run into her. Jaime dreaded it, but she'd hardly forego her lunch with friends just because that weakling coward sniveling hungry-looking wretch might appear to beg her forgiveness. She was right, intuition had served her well. Torry sat at the bar, over by the cigarette machine, looking through the glass at the people seated outside. The place was crowded, the day sunny, and Jaime almost walked right past Charlie, who sat at an outside table grinning and squinting up at her.

“Hi, baby,” he said.

85.

“Just a sec,” Jaime said, her mind suddenly empty. “I'll get a drink at the bar and be right back.” Charlie was sitting with people she didn't even look at. She walked into the bar and faced Torry. She meant to say hello and sit down, but instead said, “Where the hell have you been?” and all but put her hands on her hips like an angry housewife. Torry looked mildly shocked. People sat near, obviously listening. Bob the bartender leaned over the bar, listening. “I'll have a kir,” she said to Bob.

“I had a sudden emergency,” Torry said with his crooked smile. He'd try to use irony to get out of it. The truth was, his pretense of being in love with her, being obsessed with her, was in ruins over a free trip to Cannes. “You little whore,” she couldn't keep from saying. Maybe Charlie gave her the courage, who knew? Torry's face went out of control for a moment, but only a moment. Then he managed a smile.

“Okay,” he said. “Say what you want.”

“I have to go sit with my husband,” she said, and went outside. She felt in a fury of clarity. There were no chairs. The sidewalk was full of well-dressed people yapping and eating. Jaime signaled to Kenny the waiter, who rushed inside and rushed back out with a chair for her. She sat beside Charlie, her back to the bar. “Thank you, Kenny,” she said. She smiled at Charlie and the three men sitting with him. One of them was Kenny Goss, she realized with a little shock. “Oh, hi, Kenny,” she said, and laughed. “Too many Kennys around here.” She smiled at the other two men, waiting for Charlie to introduce her. They were both smiling, but one of them was smiling more than politely. “Good God,” she said.

“Hi, Jaime,” Stan Winger said. His eyes were shining. He reached across the table for her hand. They'd said hello a couple of times on the telephone, but this was the first she'd laid eyes on him since Oregon. He looked
remarkably different, tanned, gray hair at his temples, a massive gold watch on his wrist. His hand was warm and dry. His eyes strong. All traces of the sad unformed kid she'd known were gone.

“Prison seems to have done you good,” she said with a small smile. Stan laughed, and after a second, so did the others.

“Yes, prison makes a man of you,” Stan said. “If it doesn't make a woman of you first.” Everybody laughed, including people at nearby tables. Or maybe they were laughing at jokes of their own. She casually turned her head, still laughing, and saw Torry glaring out through the glass.

“Jaime, this is Bud Fishkin,” Charlie said, and she turned to face the man sitting on her left. He was darkly handsome, with big dark eyes and an easy smile.

“I love your work.” He took her hand and gave a gentle but firm squeeze.

She knew from her agent that Fishkin-Ratto had turned down everything of hers they'd seen. She smiled at Fishkin without sincerity. But there was Stan grinning at her, and she had to grin back. “You look great,” she said.

“You too.”

“We're up here pitching our movie,” Charlie said proudly. He put his big hand on her shoulder familiarly, and she felt the old Charlie electricity pass through her. He still had his touch, she thought, and suddenly felt very good. This was not only the best possible revenge on Torry, here was Stan Winger, somebody she really did like.

They chatted and opened their menus. “On Fishkin-Ratto, eat expensive,” said Fishkin. As they sat discussing what to order, Torry came out and walked past Jaime, touching her on the shoulder as he moved out onto the sidewalk and out of sight.

“Who was that?” Charlie asked. Jaime had a sudden image of Charlie knocking the shit out of Torry. “Torvald Hetter,” she said. “He wrote
Lost in Heaven
?”

“Jesus Christ,” Stan said. “My favorite book.” He looked at Jaime and laughed. “By a man.”

“That book's been turned around three times,” Fishkin said. “Every time there's a new head of Universal. Five or six screenplays, including two by Torry. Nobody can solve the damn thing.”

“It's too simple,” Stan said.

Jaime knew Torry had been driven crazy by Hollywood. They romanced him, flew him places to talk to famous directors or stars who wanted to play his macho men, and of course there'd been plenty of option money. But never a movie, never Big Casino.

“What's the big problem?” Kenny asked, as usual the quietest at the table. He'd addressed Stan, but Bud Fishkin answered.

“No girls in the picture,” he said.

“And no guns,” Stan said.

“And nobody dies,” Bud said.

“Yet the book keeps on selling, all over the world,” Fishkin said. “I was in Paris the other day, in a bookstore, and there it was, a big stack of 'em.”

“It must break Hollywood's heart, not being able to cash in on it,” Charlie said seriously, but there was a twinkle in his eye.

“It breaks
my
heart,” Fishkin said honestly, and Jaime decided she liked him. She'd been hearing about this slick bastard for years, but now found him charming. Maybe that was how he did it. Now that Torry had stamped out in a rage, this was going to be a nice Friday.

The movie they were trying to get financed hadn't actually been written yet. Just a twenty-nine-page treatment, written by Stan and Charlie one marathon weekend. Stan had a house in the Hollywood Hills with a swimming pool, and the two of them sat around the pool drinking Dos Equis, eating McDonald's double cheeseburgers, and throwing ideas around. They thought they had a hot story, about a couple of Toledo, Ohio, working-class brothers who get drunk, rob a bank, and run for Las Vegas, where they win big only to have the hookers strip them of all the money in a single night. Then they go back to Toledo and their old lives. The working title was
The Big Runaround
, but nobody liked it. All the majors had passed, so they were up here talking to upstart producers like Fantasy and Zoetrope. They'd had their morning meeting with Fred Roos of Zoetrope, and were headed to Fantasy that afternoon, and would be on the plane back to Hollywood that night.

“I hoped you'd be here,” Charlie said to Jaime.

“Why didn't you call me?” she asked. He just grinned and shrugged.

“When are you gonna come to Los Angeles?” Stan asked her.

“It would take a million dollars,” she said, and smiled at Fishkin.

He laughed and said, “If I have anything to do with it,” and let it go at that. Lunch broke up at two thirty. They had to be over in Berkeley at Fantasy at four. As they stood and said confused good-byes, Charlie looked down at her and said, “Can I see you tonight?”

Seeing Charlie upset her, though it shouldn't have. “I thought you were flying back,” she said.

“I'd rather stay.” He took her hands. Stan and Fishkin stood nearby. Was he doing this for show?

“No,” she said, and immediately felt bad. His face creased and aged as she watched. Charlie was losing some hair, but it made him handsomer, she thought. His beard was shot with gray and suddenly she noticed the shine of contact lenses on his eyes. Charlie was getting old.

“Okay,” he said quietly, and let go of her hands.

Stan was less gentle. He grabbed her in a big hug and said into her ear, “You saved my life. Up in Oregon. I'll never forget that.” He pulled back and looked at her, his face suffused with love. “Thank you,” he said.

“Stan,” she said, and tears came to her eyes.

“I'm really glad to have met you,” Bud Fishkin said with a warm grasp of her hand. “I'm gonna look into a few things. Who's your agent?”

“Ziegler-Ross,” she said. She wanted to add, “Don't forget,” but didn't. Not a bad guy. And then they were gone. She went into the bar and sat next to the cigarette machine. The place was almost empty, just a couple of drunks at the other end of the bar and some other drunks at tables, too drunk to go back to work, she supposed. She very badly wanted a Lemon Hart and orange, but ordered a kir instead. One Lemon Hart would be the equivalent of five kirs. So she had a lot of drinking to do.

The End

Finishing Carpenter: An Afterword

Part of my job as a clerk at Berkeley's great used bookstore Moe's, in the early 1990s, was to scour the massive wall of fiction and confront the books that weren't selling. Out of all the staff I claimed this task because it interested me the most, and because it suited my vanity to be able to claim that “I run the lit section.” Codes, written in pencil and discretely tucked into the corner opposite the asking price, revealed when a given title had hit the shelf. After six or eight months you reduced the price. Once it had been knocked down a couple of times, two options remained: chuck the book into the pile of discards under the staircase or take it home and read it.
A Couple of Comedians
, with its great title and Norman Mailer blurb, got me to flip it open. When right there in the stacks I was met with Don Carpenter's punchy prose, and with his grabby, wry, and humane outlook, I took the book home. I read it. I loved it. I looked downstairs, in our pocket-size paperback stacks, and found a copy of
Hard Rain Falling
, Carpenter's first novel, repackaged with a Tom of Finland–style painting and corresponding jacket copy to sell as “gay lit” (“The hard-hitting novel of a young street tough and his inevitable journey toward prison—and self-knowledge . . .”). I read
Hard Rain Falling
and thought it made two masterpieces in a row. The suggestion given by the dust jackets of the two books—and the move from the Northern California bildungsroman of
Hard Rain Falling
to the entertainment industry hijinks of comedians, was of a writer who, failing
to sustain a literary career, had migrated to Hollywood and was, all too typically, never heard from again.

My next move—a compulsive one, for me, when I discovered an out-of-print writer—was to go to Peter Howard's Serendipity Books, a legendary Borges-like physical compendium of seemingly every book ever published, which happened to be just down the street from my house. You could call my visit the equivalent, nowadays, of “googling.” At Serendipity, sure enough, I found a run of all of Carpenter's early books, including an autographed copy of
Blade of Light
I purchased and still own. I also found the three late-1980s books published by Jack Shoemaker's North Point Press. Carpenter, from the evidence, had not only survived Hollywood, but was alive and writing and living nearby. After I'd read a few more of the books, I flirted with the idea of finding my way up to Marin and presenting myself to Carpenter as his “biggest fan” (“and I run the lit section!”). It appeared that finding him might not require more than puttering around Mill Valley's central square for a few hours and poking my head into a coffee shop or two. I didn't manage this, whether for the better or worse I'm spared knowing. In 1995 came word that the sixty-four-year-old Carpenter, who'd been suffering a host of illnesses that severely restricted his ability to work, had killed himself.

Though I wasn't actually alone in my admiration, it took a while for Carpenter's scattered constituency to discover one another. For years he was “in print” only in as the protagonist of a few anecdotes in—and as the dedicatee of—Annie Lamott's talismanic writer's handbook,
Bird by Bird
. George Pelecanos and I each advocated for
Hard Rain Falling
to Edwin Frank at the
New York Review of Books
, and when it was published in their reprint series, with a Pelecanos introduction, it gave occasion for tributes from fans like Ken Tucker and Charles Taylor and Sarah Weinman, readers familiar with Carpenter's other books, and with his great screenplay,
Payday
. For all of us, Carpenter, though difficult to categorize and never famous in his own day, was a writer who mattered, one who not only wouldn't go away, but grew more significant in memory. This in turn encouraged those who were caretakers of a substantial unpublished manuscript—Shoemaker, and Carpenter's daughter
Bonnie—to reexamine the case for publication, after a nearly forty-year timeout. That's where this more specific story of
Fridays at Enrico's
begins.