Fridays at Enrico's Read Free Page B

manuscript. Perhaps he kept it in his desk at the Chronicle . Perhaps he hid it in a tree trunk in the backyard. Perhaps it didn’t exist.
    â€œExcuse me from the table, please,” she said, and went upstairs and threw herself on her bed. She could hear her mother and father bellowing at each other. She wondered what their net worth was. Did they have enough to survive, or was her father lying again? She heard them coming up the stairs, still arguing, and then in their bedroom changing and arguing. Her parents argued a lot, usually about unimportant things, things outside their lives, politics mostly. They were left-wing Marxists, Trotskyites, believers in World Revolution Now. Although, as Jaime had noticed and commented on, they were perfectly willing to live off the blood of the peasants a little while longer, perhaps just until the revolution was complete, when they would all presumably go off and live in a commune somewhere.
    Her mother, in her dark blue wool coat, stuck her head in the door and said, “We’re off to the Knickerbockers’ for bridge, good night, dear . . .” In a few minutes the house was quiet.

4.
    She couldn’t sleep. Her mind raced with thoughts, not of the future but of Charlie Monel. It was a bad sign that she couldn’t completely remember whathe looked like. But she could remember the purring tone of his voice, and that spare tiny clean apartment where he lived and worked. It was odd that she hadn’t seen a typewriter. Maybe he wrote by hand. Even more literary. Charlie would probably write his novel about the Korean War and be a famous writer, admired, another Norman Mailer or James Jones. She had no war to write about. She thought about Stephen Crane, who had written his great war novel without ever having to go to war. He just made it up. She wondered if she could make up a war novel. Sure she could. She could be one of those upon whom nothing is lost, like Henry James’s woman who walked past a barracks and wrote about army life. Or maybe he made that up. She thought about submitting her war novel to Random House, her favorite publisher. She saw the manuscript as being about three feet thick, in several ream boxes. They would open it and pass sections around the office to read excitedly, quoting passages to each other. She could see Bennett Cerf’s pipe drop out of his mouth at the stunning, tear-jerking, epiphany ending. Tears stream down his face as he murmurs in that growling Harvard voice, “We want this book!”
    Imagine their surprise when they discover it was written by a little girl, barely out of college, who never heard a shot fired in anger. National Book Award. Pulitzer Prize. Uh, Nobel Prize. Pearl S. Buck won it, didn’t she?
    But even in her fevered imaginings, she knew they wouldn’t publish a war novel by an inexperienced girl, no matter how good it was. They just wouldn’t. Her heart sank back down into reality. Her father had been fired. She might not even be able to finish college. She might have to go to work, although not as a prostitute.
    Jaime got up to go to the bathroom. She missed her cat. Eliot had gone out the window one night and never returned. He was an unfixed cat, only because Jaime never got around to taking him in, and so was pretty scarred up. A big wide-faced orange-striped tabby, king of the neighborhood. As Jaime sat on the toilet she realized she was wide awake, too awake to go back to bed. She had two choices. She could get into her pajamas, get in between the covers and lie there all night worrying, or she could get dressed and go to North Beach. She went into her room and checked her wallet. Twelve dollars. Plenty of money.
    She caught the 55 Sacramento bus. It wasn’t quite eleven thirty. There were only a couple of other people on the bus, sitting alone. Jaime, dressed in her jeans, an old yellow flannel shirt and her favorite brown sweater, sat behind the driver as the bus rolled