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.”
“Well in that case,” Linda said, with a rueful smile at Stan. It was quite a ride, with Linda on his lap in the little MG. Jerry’s was only half full. Marty Greenberg was there with his French horn player, and they sat together. Marty had too many women, Stan thought. This one wasn’t even pretty, in any regular sense, her chin small, her cheeks round, her eyes downcast most of the time. She had beautiful hair, though. And beautiful skin. Before their food came, the two women went to the toilet together, and the three men relaxed.
“She’s going through some problems,” Marty said of Mary Bergendaal.
“I’ll bet she really blows that horn,” said Dick Dubonet. They all laughed.
Stan remembered the conversation only because a few weeks later he came into Jolly Joan’s at around three in the morning, after a couple of hours writing, and found Marty sitting alone at the counter over a cup of coffee. Stan sat next to him, glad to see a friendly face. But Marty was glum.
“How’s the coffee this morning?” Stan said.
“Do you remember Mary Bergendaal?” Marty’s eyes looked haunted and Stan knew in a flash what he was going to say. My God, it had been written on her face.
“She’s dead, isn’t she?” He felt a chill enter his stomach.
Marty frowned. “Yes. How did you know?” He didn’t wait for an answer, but started talking about Mary Bergendaal. She’d been so self-contained, just a quiet little girl, spending most of her day practicing or playing. Marty was her only friend outside the Portland Symphony, and he had not been much of a friend. “I let her do it,” he said, his usual amused expression replaced with, well, anguish. She was twenty-four years old and had killed herself with a shotgun. Marty had spotted the gun under her bed several times.
For some reason Mary Bergendaal’s death affected Stan more strongly than it should have. He didn’t really know her. They sat across from each other once, at Jerry’s. What could he have said. “Don’t kill yourself.” Sure. Maybe the reason he felt such compassion for this girl was that she represented himself. A loner, dedicated to her art. Finally the moment comes when you realize. It’s all so fucking useless. Without love.
Stan’s next story was about Mary. He didn’t have the time or the inventiveness to fake it up, he just wrote about a lonely girl who got tired of jokes about blowing her French horn. He called it “The Last Straw,” and sent it to Mills without showing it to anybody, not even Charlie. Mills sent it right back. “Nice story, but not comm.” Stan agreed. He didn’t even know why he had sent the damn thing in. He just wrote it because he wanted to. Reading it over, he decided that it was badly written, but his best story. He put it away, with his experimental stuff.
26.
Her first Oregon winter ended in miscarriage. The pain was awful. She sat on the toilet holding her stomach for hours, not really thinking, hearing the endless rain pelt the roof. Charlie hadn’t come home from class yet. Her mother was in her own apartment, Kira asleep in her room. One of the beauties of Kira was that she slept well. The pain came and went like a finger probing her belly, then in a black flush of pain her unborn child fell from her. Her name would have been Isis.
Jaime blamed herself. She hadn’t wanted to be pregnant, and when she told Charlie it was obvious he didn’t want another child so soon either. To be a wife and the mother of two at her age seemed like burial. But when the child died inside her she went into a blackness that made earlier depressions seem shallow. This was so black it didn’t even seem black. She was perfectly rational, she just didn’t feel anything. She was below feeling, below suicide. Sitting at the kitchen table, bleeding into a Kotex and waiting for Charlie, she thought about a simple ordinary death for herself. They had no pills in the house, nor any guns. She’d have to cut herself to death. She remembered the Jack London story about the man who hadn’t done it right. She thought of her girlfriend in San Francisco who’d nicked her arms with a razor blade, sixty-four shallow little cuts, because she’d gotten only one birthday card. Hesitation marks, they were called. Jaime didn’t want Charlie to come in and find her sitting there with a razor blade in her hand, blood everywhere, tiny cuts up and down her inner arm. “I couldn’t do it . . .” No. Her mother’s car was out in the garage. She could take the vacuum cleaner hose, attach it to the exhaust pipe, run it into the car through the window, stuff the window with newspaper to make it airtight, and turn on the gas. Thum thum thum death.
Her depression dropped below suicide quickly as she thought about the effects on her daughter, her living daughter, Kira. Asleep now in the next room. What would she learn from her mother’s death? To kill herself. Down Jaime dropped, a speck in the cosmos, ha ha ha, below that to the atomic level of organization, and then down, down, below the atomic, past the subatomic, into the nothing of reality. Emptiness. Not even a reason to die.
Charlie came in drunk. “Oh, you’re up,” he said. “You okay?”
“I’m fine.”
He leered at her glassily. “Then let’s do it,” he said in a deep purr, and bent down, kissing her on the back of her neck. She could smell beer and potato chips on his breath.
“I can’t,” she said. “I just had a miscarriage.”
“Huh?” Charlie let her go and she could not see him. The rain hit the roof.
“It’s all right,” she said.
“Oh, Jesus.” Charlie put his hands on her shoulders, and she could feel his energy pouring into her, filling her with a terrible sweet sad love. “You must feel so bad,” he said.
“I love you,” she said dryly. After they went to bed he held her until she finally fell asleep. The rain had gone all night, of course, and the next day, but then it stopped, and the Oregon sky turned bright blue. As if to say, a child lost, a world gained. No, thought Jaime. I will not love the spring. But the air was dry and sweet, the sky blue, everything in sight green and growing. She found herself wandering through the woods in back of their house, looking at the little trilliums that came up and put out their white three-petaled flowers. The ferns were rising out of the almost black ground, and birds sang in the trees. Jaime couldn’t help feeling alive. Then she heard a baby cry.
She was a hundred yards from any house, in the middle of the trees, and the sound was close. Who could leave a baby out in the woods, even on a warm spring day? She heard no other voices as she moved toward the crying, her heart beating rapidly. It wasn’t a baby, but a Siamese kitten. Who, when it saw Jaime, let out a very loud meow that
sounded just like a baby’s cry.
Jaime laughed and picked up the kitten, who had bright blue eyes. It couldn’t have been more than six weeks old. What was it doing in the woods? Jaime never found out. They asked their neighbors, but the answer they got was, “People throw cats away sometimes.”
“I’ll call you Isis,” she told it, and held the kitten to her cheek. Yet the cat did not replace the child. Jaime’s depression didn’t lift, in spite of spring. Instead it got so bad she turned to writing. She didn’t know exactly what. The miscarriage had reminded her that she’d lost her father unacceptably early, and had never gotten used to the loss. Just to invoke him, just to try to understand him, she started writing about her father, and their life on Washington Street. After a few days of writing while the baby slept, she hungered for the times when by writing she’d take herself from this cabin in the woods, back to a civilized place and time. It was heaven walking the streets of San Francisco again, even if only in her mind.
“What are you writing about?” Charlie asked, once he found out.
“Just some notes. About my dad.”
“That’s great,” he said warmly. “You ought to write a book about him.”
“Maybe,” she said.
27.
Charlie felt sorry for his best student and invited him out to Lake Grove for a backyard picnic. It was May, the whole Willamette Valley buzzing with life, hot blue skies, thick humid air rising off the river filled with insects and birds, and of course loving couples everywhere. Stan Winger didn’t seem to have any luck with girls. He wasn’t bad looking, in Charlie’s view, just sort of indistinct, too shy, the kind of guy whose appearance you can’t quite remember. A highly forgettable guy, Charlie thought with irony. Raised in foster homes, juvenile hall, jail, raised with the ethics of the street, which were surely better than no ethics at all. Charlie remembered the four New York street guys who were in Kim Song. They held together. Them and the Christians. They had been a pain in the ass, but they hadn’t fallen apart. The way Charlie and near everyone else had. Well, he’d have to fix Stan up with a girl.
“How come you don’t have a car?” Charlie asked Stan. They drove south out of Portland, along the banks of the river.
“I don’t drive,” Stan said. He had on black pants and an old white dress shirt. His picnic clothes, Charlie thought.
“I’ll teach you how, if you want.” He tried to imagine an American kid growing up without being taught to drive.
“That would be great,” Stan said, without enthusiasm. He was a little tense. This was not his first picnic, he’d been on a couple of hell-raising parties outdoors with kids from the Broadway Gang, once up at Rooster Rock State Park on the Columbia River, screaming drunken runaround sunburn antics, and once here on the banks of the Willamette, beer and girls and nude swimming in the night, only Stan didn’t have one of the girls, didn’t go nude swimming, only got drunk and arrested with the others at the end. Some of them had been middle-class kids, and the cops let them go home. Stan and a couple of the others were sent to Woodburn. Six months on that beef, and he hadn’t even gotten laid. Maybe that was why he was anxious, or maybe he was just a hopeless asshole, and would never have a good time, no matter what. Or it could be that Dick and Linda would be there.
They drove up the circular gravel drive in front of the house and parked. There were no other cars in the drive. The patch of front lawn was ragged and overgrown, and the front door stood open, with a little cat sitting in the doorway in the sunlight washing itself. The cat looked up at Stan but didn’t move, so Stan had to step over it, into his teacher’s house. It was better than he’d hoped, warm and inviting. Jaime came out of the kitchen smiling, holding out her hand.
“Stan, it’s so good to see you.” She wore a man’s tee shirt and Stan could see the outlines of her nipples, which made his face heat up. She obviously wore no brassiere, and her hands were wet. “I’m glad you’re early,” she said, leading him into the kitchen by hand. “I need you to help me cut up potatoes.”
Charlie drove off to buy beer and Stan was left alone with Jaime and the child, in her playpen in the corner of the kitchen. Jaime’s red hair was growing out, the blonde roots showing. After he finished cutting up potatoes Stan sat with a cup of coffee and listened to Jaime talk about everything under the sun, charming witty conversation that he could only grunt at from time to time, as if he was following. He realized after a while that she was “entertaining” him. No wonder Charlie loved her. Bright, funny, beautiful, graceful, a good hostess, and Charlie said she was one of the best young writers he had ever read. Of course he was talking about his own wife, but even so. Charlie always tried to be nice, but he didn’t lie. And Stan now realized, he wouldn’t commit adultery, either, not with Linda or anybody else. It was dishonorable.
“Would you like to hold Kira?” Jaime asked. She handed the little girl to Stan. Kira didn’t seem to notice him at first, but then looked up into his eyes and smiled. He’d never been so flattered in his life. He didn’t dare examine the feeling he discovered, holding this priceless object. This human child. This vulnerability. Then, still looking into his eyes, Kira opened her mouth and began to yell, not a loud yell, just a child’s.
“Lunch coming up,” Jaime said, and took the child.
“How old is she?” Stan asked.
“Sixteen months,” Jaime said. She sat Kira in her high chair and started feeding her. Stan sat sipping his coffee, feeling as comfortable as he had ever felt inside a home. Jaime’s mother came in from the back somewhere and sat down with her cup of coffee. Jaime introduced them and said, “Stan’s one of Charlie’s best students.”
Edna winked at him and grinned. “You don’t look like a student to me.”
“I’m really a burglar,” Stan said, and grinned at her.
Edna laughed. “You ever go to the dog track?” It turned out they had something in common. Edna and her friends at work bet on the dogs. In fact, all day long while they were proofreading ad copy they were also discussing which dogs to bet on that night. Stan had been out to the dogs a few times. It seemed stupid to bet on these animals, when at the first turn they nearly always ended up in a pile and nobody on God’s earth could predict which would win.
Dick and Linda showed up in the little yellow MG, followed by a couple of other cars full of friends, including Marty Greenberg and his waitress girl, Alexandra. The kitchen crowded with people talking and drinking beer, and Stan was one of them, relaxed, comfortable, knowing nearly everybody, not the stranger in the group for once. Marty came up and bummed a cigarette. “Let’s go out into the jungle,” he said, and Stan followed Marty into the sunlight. Charlie had an old picnic table and a couple of benches, and they sat down. The babble from the kitchen was loud through the open windows, and smoke poured out into the air. Everything smelled of wet wood out here.
“I was raised in Brownsville, Brooklyn,” Marty said. “This is heaven.”
“What brought you out here?” Stan asked.
“Reed College.”
Charlie came out, carrying a can of beer. “Come on, you guys,” he said, and led them down a trail between the trees. In a couple of minutes they were out of range of the house, and all Stan could hear were the birds in the trees and the sounds of their feet on the soggy ground.
“Watch out for large furry animals,” Marty said.
It was hot and muggy in the forest, the green undergrowth up to their knees and the ground mushy underfoot. Charlie led them to a clearing. In it stood a few scraggly rows of small yellow-green plants. Charlie pointed proudly. “Marijuana,” he said. “The crop of the future.”
“My goodness,” Marty said, grinning. “Isn’t it illegal to grow this stuff?”
“It’s not mine,” Charlie said blandly. “Although I plan to smoke it.”
“Whose is it?” Marty said stupidly.
“Hey,” Stan said to him. “Cool it.”
“Should be ready for plucking in about a month,” Charl
ie said.
“Keep me informed,” Stan said with a sly smile. He had smoked a little reefer. He loved it.
“If they catch you smoking this stuff,” Marty said, “they make you go to Lexington, Kentucky, to be cured.”
“Don’t be afraid,” Stan said. He winked at Charlie, who winked back. “Don’t be afraid” was one of their favorite lines from The Enormous Room, which Charlie had loaned Stan a month ago. The walked back to the house and Stan was emboldened to say to Marty, “You know not to say anything, don’t you?”
Marty looked at him. “I keep forgetting you’re a criminal.” But he smiled as he said it.
28.
“You have no character,” Linda told Stan. They squatted down next to Charlie’s marijuana plants. She reached out to touch his cheek. “No lines of character. Nobody ever told you how to be. You’re fresh clay, Stan. All you need is molding.”
He blushed angrily, caught out. Of course he didn’t have any character. But why bring it up now? Because he’d shown her Charlie’s marijuana? He hadn’t meant to.
“Where did you boys go?” she had asked. She took his hand and they walked off into the trees. She seemed to be leading, but they ended up at the clearing. “God, how great,” she said, squatting down.
“I didn’t mean to bring you out here.” Her touch burned his cheek.
“You need a mentor,” she said. “Somebody to guide you. And Charlie’s the one.”
“He’s my teacher,” he said stupidly.
“Charlie’s a great man,” she said, and took back her hand, sitting on the ground. Stan sat and immediately felt the wet seeping through his pants. She was beautiful. She had on a light blue men’s workshirt tied at the waist, and cutoff jeans, showing a lot of white skin. She kept on about Charlie, what a great writer he was going to be, and what a good man he already was. She was making Charlie sound like Jesus Christ.
“Did you know he was a war hero?” she asked.
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