3.

After North Beach, Jaime’s family home out on the lower lip of Pacific Heights seemed tame and middle-class, stifling. The house itself was beautiful. She 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 the border 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 were carpeted 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 written. She liked instead Clark’s story about Hook the Hawk. She had heard around school that Clark had thrown the finished story into his wastebasket, and his wife had fished it out and sent it to the Atlantic Monthly, and that he had also thrown away the final draft of Ox-Bow, which his wife dutifully fished out of the wastebasket and sent to Random House. Clark apparently suffered from these bouts of depression, where he thought his work stank badly enough to throw away. Jaime knew the feeling. In fact, it was coming over her now.

She heard the thump of the front door and assumed her mother was home. She undressed and was walking naked down the hall to take her shower when she saw her father coming up the stairs. She shrieked and ran back into her bedroom. “Daddy!” she screamed. With the door safely shut she gathered her wits and laughed. I’m so cool, she thought. Properly dressed in her old pink chenille bathrobe she ventured out of her room again. Her father was in the master bedroom, lying on the bed, fully dressed except for his jacket. He lay on his back, looking at the ceiling. He was a short plump man with round rimmed silver glasses, blue-and-white-striped shirt, a bright red knit tie, yellow-and-green-striped suspenders, oxford gray pants, and cordovan wingtip shoes buffed to a creamy shine. Jaime loved her father, but she knew he was drunk. Otherwise, why would he be home?

“I’m sorry I screamed at you,” she said.

He did not look at her. Instead he pursed his lips tightly and breathed heavily through his nose. The heavy smell of liquor floated through the room.

“Day off?” she asked brightly.

“I got fired,” her father said grimly. Jaime laughed and went into the bathroom to take her shower. She had the water running and was just stepping in when she realized he was not being sarcastic. He really had been fired. In an instant she saw it all going up in smoke, the house, the family, college, her career. Her father had been fired. Probably for being a drunk, although up to now she had assumed that most reporters were drunk most of the time. But maybe her father was an especially drunken reporter. She’d never gone down to see for herself, but she had heard about the long afternoons and evenings at Hanno’s, the bar in the alley behind the paper. Drunken reporters sitting around talking about sports and Hemingway. Her father right in the middle. Until now.

The fear lived in her stomach. She let the hot water hit her neck. She was nineteen. Could she get a job? Would she have to, to help support her old parents? Maybe her mother could get a job. Her mother had worked. She could work again. Jaime soaped her breasts and wondered if she could get a job as a call girl. She imagined herself walking down a hotel corridor, dressed in slut clothes, knocking at a numbered door. And having the door open to reveal a grinning Charlie Monel. No. She knew she could not work as a prostitute, not even for the experience. Not even for the money.

At dinner her father explained. He had napped, gotten up, drunk a couple of cups of coffee and then a Martini before dinner, and now he was charming and relaxed. Apparently he’d been fired in some sort of mix-up.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I have a grievance I can bring up before the Guild, I have my severance, we won’t be out on the street, and besides, I can always get a job at the Examiner. The Examiner’s been after me for years. Nothing to worry about. I’m sick of Abe and his goddamn nonsense anyway. It’s time I moved on.”

By the end of dinner he was talking about finishing his novel. This was very upsetting for Jaime, who remembered all her father’s stories about the great novel he would write, which would move them over the hill and into the real Pacific Heights. As a child she had ransacked his desk and everywhere else in the house, and she never saw any novel 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.

“Excuse 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.