“See?” Marty said to Stan. “I told you he’d be helpful.”
“I really appreciate it,” Stan said to Dick. “Your time and everything.”
“Think nothing of it,” Dick said expansively. “Some day we’ll be colleagues. You’ll be helping me.” He hoped he wasn’t piling it too deep. But people never seemed to tire of flattery.
“One little thing,” Dick said. “I’d work on the character of the burglar a little bit. Doesn’t quite ring true.”
Marty snorted and gave Stan a look.
“What’s funny?” Dick asked.
“Nothing,” Marty said. He looked at Stan. “Can I tell him? He’s very cool.”
Stan smiled shyly. “I used to be a burglar,” he said. “You know, little stuff. I based the story sort of on that.”
“You’re a criminal?” Dick said.
“A professional criminal,” Marty said smoothly.
“Used to be,” Stan said. There was a light in his eye Dick had not seen before. “Need anything?” he asked Dick, wickedly.
20.
“You liked the story so much,” Dick said to Linda, “why don’t you type it up for him?” They were at Buttermilk Corner, the upstairs cafeteria where Linda liked to have her lunch. She was buying. Dick had the cheeseburger and a baked apple, while Linda ate two chicken pot pies. She worked in a law office and sometimes had empty hours to fill. She’d offered to type Dick’s clean copies for him, but he saw a trap in it. He felt more comfortable typing his own stuff, thank you, especially because it gave him another run at the material.
“I wouldn’t mind,” she said. “He’s fascinating anyway.”
“You mean because he’s a second-story man?” Dick had been unable to keep the secret.
Linda smiled. She had a peasant face, he decided. As she got older her features would thicken, likely her body would thicken, and she’d become one of those solid women in cloth coats and babushkas you used to see in Life magazine. “Why don’t we have a party?” she said. “You could bring your criminal friends and I could decide if I liked him enough to do his typing.”
It was another guitar and banjo party, with a lot of dancing. Brownie McGee and Sonny Terry had been in Portland the week before and played in a garage over on the East side. The place had been packed, a memorable night, and everybody was still running around singing the blues. Dick invited Stan Winger, but Stan just sat in a corner nursing a beer and listening. He didn’t even tap his foot while everybody else was stomping and screaming. It was a great party, lasting until five in the morning, and Stan was one of the last to leave. He seemed drunk but able to hold it.
He’d liked the party. It was the first he’d been to, or just about, and it made his stomach tense at first, but the people seemed so open-hearted and willing to accept him among them that he relaxed and spent the evening sneaking looks at the pretty girls. The beautiful girls. He couldn’t get over how good-looking the girls were at this level of society. And Marty Greenberg’s girl, more beautiful than anybody, wasn’t here. Marty was with a tall redhead he introduced as Cybella. Whoever she was, a great dancer, with wonderful long legs that she kicked up into the air not caring what she showed, panties and all. All the women were like that, openly getting drunk and kissing guys and showing their bodies. Half had on low-cut dresses or blouses and there were tits everywhere.
As he was leaving, Dick and Linda, arm-in-arm, thanked him for coming and then Linda, with a sparkle in her eyes, took him aside on the front porch. The clouds to the east were getting light underneath. She put her hands on his arms and looked him in the eyes very seriously. Of course they were both drunk, and Dick was only a few feet away, talking to others who were going down the stairs, falling down, whooping, etc.
“I love your story,” she said. “Here’s your reward,” and kissed him gently on the mouth. After the kiss was over he just stared at her, feeling her fingers on his arms. “I’ll type it for you, if you like,” she said. “So Dick can send it to his agent.”
“Gee,” Stan said like an idiot.
Linda laughed and pulled him to her. “Such a fine writer,” she said into his ear.
He walked home filled with Linda, and hating himself for it. Not love, but certainly passion. She was Dick’s girl and just being kind to Stan, but he couldn’t help wanting her. This was how he repaid Dick for going out of his way to help. It was evil of him to think about Linda’s kiss and how her breasts felt against him, how warmly he felt them now, remembering. But before he completely vanished into a daydream about Linda, he told himself severely that even if the opportunity arose, he wouldn’t make a pass at Linda. He’d never made a pass at anybody anyway. Though maybe Linda would be different. She’d kissed him, hadn’t she? And said that nice thing about his story. Maybe she’d make all the moves. The thought warmed him.
But the business of getting the story typed and sent to Robert P. Mills was not the pleasure Stan had hoped. He finally met Linda late on a Tuesday night at Jolly Joan’s with his latest revision, now fourteen pages long. They sat in a booth and Stan sipped coffee while Linda read over the new pages. His buttocks sweated while he waited for her verdict. Not that it was going to be a verdict, but that was how he felt. Finally she looked up, her eyes soft. “You’re a good writer.”
“Sorry about the bad typing,” he said. “And the grammar and spelling and all that stuff.”
“I can help you with that if you want. I can clean it up.”
They spent an hour drinking cup after cup of coffee and going over the story. By the end of it, Stan wondered what she’d meant by “good writer.” She’d sweetly and quietly taken apart just about every sentence in the thing. She didn’t like his choice of words and she didn’t like the way he used exclamation points and she didn’t like the characters, or at least she wanted to change them into entirely different people. By now Stan wasn’t sure he even recognized the story. He didn’t feel like a writer anymore. She was the writer. All he’d done was put down some crude stuff that she turned into a real story. She stacked the pages, squared the edges, and put them back into the envelope.
“What a night, huh?” she said with a grin. He didn’t have the strength to speak, so just sat with his mouth open, gasping like a fish out of water. “I’d better drive you home,” she said. “Dick will think we’ve run off.”
“I can walk,” he said. He’d been daydreaming that after they cleaned up the story she’d make a pass at him and he’d easily take her into his arms. But now he felt empty and sexless. “Give it back to me,” he said. “It’s not ready to type.” He held out his hand for the envelope, but Linda put it in her lap with her purse.
“No. Let me type it and we’ll see. If you don’t like it, then we’ll change it.” She smiled as if everything was fine.
When they got to his part of town he suddenly panicked at the thought that she might, just might, ask to come up. He couldn’t let her do that. He lived in a hole in the wall. “Let me out anywhere,” he said.
At the corner of Jefferson and Second she stopped the car. There was no traffic. It was nearly three. Was he supposed to lean over and kiss her? He remembered from the party that these people kissed at the drop of a hat. She wouldn’t be upset if he gave her a little kiss. He tried to smile, but grimaced instead. They were side by side in Dick’s little yellow MG and he could smell her.
“I’ll have this typed in a day or two,” she said. “It depends on the workload.”
“I appreciate this,” he said. She leaned over and kissed him. When they broke she looked at him inquiringly. He could think of nothing to say except, finally, “G’bye!” and he was out of the car. He watched it drive away. Exactly the kind of car he wanted for himself some day. But he couldn’t keep his mind on the car. He knew he’d failed. She’d given him the go-ahead to make a pass, and he’d been tongue-tied.
As he undressed in his tacky little room where they never could have come, he realized she hadn’t been inviting him at all. The inquiring
look had to do with something entirely different, like maybe he had bad breath and didn’t know it. As he walked down the empty hall naked carrying his white towel, he decided to get a bottle of Listerine. You never knew.
21.
After Dick read the rewritten, edited, and cleanly typed version of Stan Winger’s story he had to admit it was pretty good. His agent might not reject it. Maybe Dick had discovered an important new talent. Maybe he’d given a helping hand to somebody who was now going to kick him in the face. Could he turn his back on Stan? Just tell him coldly that the story wasn’t good enough? No. He sent it to Bob Mills and sat back waiting, hoping, to hear bad news. He might be ashamed of himself, but he wasn’t a perfect human being or anything close to it. He felt jealous. Being a thief gave Stan an unholy fascination, especially to Linda, who spoke of him constantly and enthusiastically. She’d say, “This guy would get along so well with Corso,” or “Jack would love Stan.” She’d never offered to introduce Dick to any of her Beat friends. In fact, every time he suggested they might take a trip down to San Francisco she put him off. “I’m not ready to go back,” was all she would tell him.
Linda was getting letters from her Beat friend John Montgomery, full of gossip about Jack and Gary, Phil and Michael, etc., driving Dick crazy. Montgomery was in The Dharma Bums, and Linda would tell people she’d gotten a letter from her dharma bum. Then she’d call Dick her ski bum. “From dharma bums to ski bums,” she joked once. “What a schuss!”
Dick’s agent seldom wrote to him. Mills was content to scrawl a penciled note across the bottom of letters of rejection or acceptance, and he did so on the matter of Stan Winger. “Winger story like O. Henry,” he scrawled across the bottom of a rejection slip, “but I’ll send it around.” The slip was from the New Yorker, cold flat rejection. Mills had been sending Dick’s stuff to better and better magazines since the Playboy publication, but getting nowhere. Yet Dick’s stories were getting too good for the regular girlie magazines, and Playboy was curiously reluctant to repeat.
Dick thought about writing a story about Stan Winger. Good revenge, if Stan’s very first submission got accepted somewhere. A story about a thief who steals his mentor’s girlfriend. Of course that hadn’t happened, but the elements were there. The fiction would exaggerate reality into something entertaining. What kept him from writing the story was that Linda would read it. Not that it would give her ideas, but one never knew. It might even make her mad. “Don’t you trust me?” in that indignant righteous voice. So a good story didn’t get written, and everybody in West Portland sat around waiting for Stan Winger’s story to be accepted or rejected.
Stan himself wasn’t in suspense. He’d been astonished that the agent had taken the story, although Dick pointed out that Stan was not yet a client. “He’s just sending it around,” he told Stan. Stan was embarrassed, but there was nothing he could do about it. Linda had pushed him into this, sending a really bad piece of writing to a legitimate literary agent, ruining Stan’s reputation in advance. He knew what he had to do if he was going to impress Linda. He had to learn how to write. He talked to Dick and his friends about taking night classes in writing, but they discouraged him. Portland State had a night class, but he couldn’t get in without a high school diploma. Downtown there was Multnomah College, a kind of business school for working people, which advertised in the Oregonian and the Yellow Pages. He went down to an office building of SW Alder and found that they taught composition and had one section of Creative Writing, and, yes, they admitted anybody who’d pay the fee. Stan signed up for Comp and Creative, and paid his fees.
To Dick’s great relief the story was rejected by the first magazine Mills sent it to. Unfortunately it wasn’t a cold rejection but a hot one. “Send us more!!!” some idiot had written on the slip, below which Mills added in pencil “???” Dick decided it was time to get Stan Winger off his back. He’d helped him to an agent, an editor (Linda) and entry into Portland literary society, such as it was. Let him get his own mail. Dick walked down Broadway to Jolly Joan’s and left the rejection slip with Marty’s girl Alexandra, who’d passed it along to Marty, who’d find Stan. Crooks were so devious. Stan obviously didn’t even want his agent to know where he lived.
Stan shyly showed his very first rejection slip to his teacher, Mr. Monel. He liked Mr. Monel from the first. A big man, no more than about thirty, with a big happy face and a mop of hair. He stood in front of the creative writing class, six females and Stan, and announced that he didn’t know a damned thing about creative writing, but when the boss learned he was writing “this big ol’ novel” in his spare time he got the class. “You can’t teach creative writing,” he said blandly, “and you can’t even learn it. I guess you have to be born with it. What we can do here in this class is write a lot, read the stuff to each other, and try to help.” Exactly what Stan wanted, and this was the guy he wanted it from. Stan couldn’t help going up to Mr. Monel after class and asking him out for a beer.
“Sure,” Charlie said with a big grin.
22.
Charlie loved Oregon. Just crossing the border had been great, California hot and dry, the sky blue, and right across the border big black and white clouds pouring rain down onto deeply green forested mountains. Mountains, but not like the sawtooth ranges of his native Montana. Green, but not like the green of anyplace he’d ever seen, every tone and shade of green imaginable, hot greens and cold greens and deep dark greens and almost white greens. Charlie had never seen so much green in his life. And the rain, as if to tell Charlie what he and his family were in for, fell in great splattery drops all the way from the border to Portland. Charlie stayed behind the wheel of their brand new 1961 Volkswagen, which by an astonishing coincidence was also green, a gold green. He had meant to switch off driving chores with Jaime, but the rain poured down so continuously Charlie kept the wheel. Also, there were these huge logging trucks on the road, a whole lane wide and loaded with tree trunks fifty and sixty feet long, roaring down the Oregon roads as if they owned them. Charlie more than once had to hold the wheel hard to keep from being run off the road by the rush of wind and wet when one of these logging trucks blew past. It was like entering a whole new world, just exactly what Charlie and Jaime wanted. Crammed into the tiny backseat were Edna and the baby Kira. The Lyons Moving Van Company had their books and goods, and Charlie only hoped the movers wouldn’t run into the loggers.
A couple of days later the rain lifted for an hour, just to show Charlie and Jaime the beauties of the country around their new city. They were in the Council Crest neighborhood, up in the west hills of SW Portland, being shown a house that was far too expensive at eighty dollars a month. It wasn’t raining, although everything was wet, and they looked through the big picture windows regretfully, because they had to say no. The view was downtown Portland, charming through the mist. Then the clouds lifted, and they could see, for what must have been hundreds of miles, rolling forested hills surrounding the city, and in the distance no less than four snow-covered volcano mountains sticking up over everything. Mount Hood, Mount Adams, Mount Jefferson and Mount St. Helens, Charlie learned.
“Oh God, how beautiful,” Jaime murmured, and moved in close to Charlie. He put his arm around her.
“We’re Oregonians now,” he said ponderously, and squeezed her shoulder. Kira and Edna were back at the Sunrise Motel, also Oregonians now. Thank God for Edna, Charlie thought for the hundredth time. Not only their built-in babysitter, she’d helped Charlie convince Jaime that leaving San Francisco wasn’t going to destroy their lives. Jaime had been adamant when Charlie’s only job offer had been Multnomah College.
“I guess I’m not a first-round draft pick,” he said with a grin, but she chose not to understand him.
“It’s not any kind of pick,” she said mysteriously.
“Better’n Iowa,” he said. What wasn’t? Iowa had accepted Charlie, after he ate his pride and went in for his last final. Yet Charlie couldn’t accept exile from his family. Ja
ime had convinced him that the Saxon money was needed for the baby, and so went the idea of them lying around for a year or two finishing novels. Charlie couldn’t understand why Jaime wasn’t writing. She was good, so much better than Charlie. Her immediate creative task, if you like, was the baby, whom she had insisted on naming after the sound bald eagles make. According to Jaime. Kiiiir, that was the sound of eagles Charlie recalled from Montana. Kira was a good name, though, and fitted the baby, who was already uniquely feminine and mysterious to Charlie. It was here, too, that Edna showed her true colors. As soon as she found out her daughter was pregnant she made a face and said, “I guess I’ll have to stop drinking,” and she did. She had bad dreams for a few nights, but then was all right.
The first obvious effect to Charlie was that he discovered in his mother-in-law a gifted conversationalist and a friend. Edna was all right. At first they hesitated to drink even beer in front of her, but she laughed. “Oh, go ahead. I’ve had my share.” She lost weight right away and turned out to be an attractive woman, still round-cheeked and round-hipped, but looking a lot like her daughter.
Edna liked the idea of moving to Oregon, though it was a move to a low-paying job with no security, just a business college, not much better than a racket. “We all need to start over,” she said.
They found a perfect rental in Lake Grove, eight miles south of the city, near Lake Oswego. The house had been built right after World War II on an acre of woods, with a small clearing back of the house for growing vegetables. There was a small mother-in-law apartment built onto the garage, tiny but perfect for Edna, a graveled circular drive up to the front, a low wooden fence, and greenery everywhere. Inside, the house was dark and cozy, with a big fireplace, a big kitchen, and three bedrooms. They spent a couple of weeks buying used furniture and considered themselves home when Edna put her signed Picasso print up over the fireplace.
Fridays at Enrico's Page 9
