Fridays at Enrico's Read Free

loved the house. It was one of those carpenter Victorians with an ornate false front, angular bay windows showing a lot of white lace curtain, false Doric columns on either side of the little front porch at the top of a flight of false wooden steps. The house was painted a pale yellow, and all the trim, columns, and trellises on either side of the steps were painted white. Red roses grew up over the trellises, and western calla lilies crowded theborder next to the house, behind a tiny ragged patch of lawn. The house was on a block of half-respectable two-story houses, some of them cut into small apartments, but all neatly kept-up behind a parking strip row of big leafy red flowering eucalyptus trees. Jaime had lived there all her life except the first year, when they lived out in the Sunset, which she didn’t remember. And for most of her life she had treacherously wished the family fortunes would improve enough for them to move north, up over the ridge, into Pacific Heights proper, where the really rich lived.
    But her father, her poor old drunken father, worked as a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle , and as Jaime grew up and began to understand life, she also began to understand that her family was never going to join the rich, no matter how much she and her mother wanted them to. Her father, it turned out, was the wrong kind of writer.
    Jaime dragged herself up the steps after Charlie let her off with a grin and a “See ya!” She did not get over to North Beach that often. She knew it was where most of the writers hung out, and for that reason she tried to avoid it. But there was a fascination, she had to admit. Charlie was attractive, too, but much too old for her, there were already wrinkles around the corners of his eyes. Pale eyes. Pale brown, almost green. Nice eyes. And he wrote well, though messily and with some of the worst spelling she’d ever seen. Somehow his terrible spelling made her feel good. She was one of those people who could spell.
    She loved her front door. It was a thick heavy door, painted white, with a massive old brass decorated doorknob and a brass knocker just below the beveled glass windows. It was substantial, a door of respect. Jaime opened it with her Schlage key of respect. Inside, as usual, the house was cool and quiet, smelling of fresh flowers and floor wax. “Mom?” No answer. Her mother was out playing bridge. That was fine. Jaime loved having the place to herself. Her brother, now twenty-five, was living in Taipan, working for the government, and Jaime had taken his room, upstairs overlooking the backyard. She trudged up the stairs holding her books to her chest. The wallpaper showed country scenes, hunting scenes, from Victorian England, she supposed. The stairs werecarpeted with a Persian runner and the hand railing was polished dark wood. All so respectable. There was even a chandelier of real crystals in the front hall. Why did Charlie’s monastic little apartment make her feel jealous?
    Her room was bigger than Charlie’s whole apartment, with neat twin beds side by side, a little desk with her Hermes portable typewriter, an overstuffed chair covered in a flowered print, and a bridge lamp behind it where she sat and read. She had her own bookshelves, which of course couldn’t compete with her parents’ grand library downstairs, with the Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck, and Fitzgerald first editions in their glass cabinet, and the big signed Picasso etching over the funny purple brick fireplace. Riches she found herself rejecting, in favor of Charlie’s freedom.
    What would she ever be able to write about? She took out her midterm blue books. B+. Maybe she wasn’t as talented as she’d hoped. Walter Van Tilburg Clark ought to know. He was the most respected of the writer-teachers at State. He had written The Ox-Bow Incident , a classic western story Jaime didn’t happen to like very much, even though it was beautifully