67.

Jaime loved North Beach in the mornings. It was like a Mediterranean village on a hill, bright clean blue sky, empty streets and narrow alleyways. Jaime liked to get up with the sun, shower, dress, and walk down the hill to the Caffe Trieste for an espresso with chocolate sprinkled on it, perhaps a brioche if she didn’t have too bad a hangover. The place at that hour was always busy, people standing at the little counter arguing in Sicilian or Italian with the people behind the counter, scavengers out on the street in front, having their espressos after a hard morning picking up San Francisco’s garbage. Jaime loved these people. They knew her, at least by sight, and nearly every morning the young men out front would say things about her in Italian and laugh. It had taken years for her to be served promptly inside. She was never sure whether this was because she wasn’t Italian or wasn’t male. But now they’d start her espresso right away, singing out, “Jaime! Brioche today?” while others waited impatiently. Then she’d sit with her back to the window and read whatever paper was lying around, smelling the hot chocolate, the Italian cigar smoke, hearing the hissing of the espresso machines and the loud conversations all around her. It was her daily moment of humanity before returning to isolation and work.

With Charlie in Hollywood Jaime had to interrupt her routine and go home to Mill Valley to be with her daughter. Jaime couldn’t write at home with Charlie there, which broke her heart. Charlie would be so considerate of her privacy and her need for a smooth quiet routine, always offering his own office, but all that self-sacrifice on his part made her too sad to work. How could she explain this to Charlie without hurting him? “I can’t work here because you’re a failure.” She assumed Charlie understood, but it was a little catch between them, one more thing they couldn’t be open about. They mounted up, these silent catches.

When Charlie flew to L.A. Jaime had two choices, go home to work, or bring Kira to the city. She feared leaving Kira to wander around North Beach while she wrote. Kira was not only too tall for her age, she was too smart, too curious, to self-reliant. So Jaime went home. It was supposed to be for the one night, but Charlie called up and said he’d been invited out to Malibu for the weekend. “To talk shop,” he said, without a trace of humor, so she was stuck for three days. She brought her manuscript and her Hermes portable, but Kira seemed to have decided that she wouldn’t let her mother work. On Friday they drove to Stinson Beach and walked along the wet sand looking for sea shells. Kira seemed to know the names of all the shells, green rock oysters, purple-hinged scallops, sand dollars, turban snails, etc. and etc., always running ahead of her mother and picking up whatever glittered, discarding the imperfect shells and putting the others into her pants pockets. There were dogs on the beach, and Kira ran and played with the dogs, although she claimed she didn’t want a dog of her own. She’d been told she’d have to take care of any pets, so she’d said, typical Kira, “Then I don’t want any.” Yet her room was full of dead butterflies, dragonflies, dried mushrooms, pictures of wolves and hawks, as well as the usual stuffed animals and children’s books.

Jaime had never been happy with Charlie’s quitting writing. She understood his terrible pain when he had to reject publication of a butchered version, Bill Ratto’s vain attempt to play Maxwell Perkins, but she expected after a year or so of working as a bartender Charlie would come to his senses and get back to his desk. But no. After all these years he seemed perfectly content to tend bar and support her writing, as if he were secondary in their marriage. She knew better. This Hollywood thing really worried her, Ratto again, not letting Charlie get on with his life. Another battering for Charlie, coming up.

But when she met him at the airport Charlie was explosively cheerful. “Jesus H. Christ, it’s good to be back in San Francisco!” he said. “You can’t imagine what that fucking place is like. You can’t even rub your eyes.” But the energy bubbling up out of him had a different source, she was certain. That night, lying in the darkness after making love, he talked quietly about his visit, about what these producers had in mind and how he felt about it.

“I think I can beat these guys. They’re not dumb or anything, but it’s so obvious what they want.”

“What?” she asked.

“They want to win.” He put his hand on her stomach and rubbed her gently. “I love your stomach,” he said.

“And I love yours,” she said. “How do you beat them? If they’re so set on winning?”

“By helping them win,” Charlie said. He chuckled as if he had discovered a great secret.

He really wanted to try Hollywood. Her own bad experiences made her hate the business, though she’d made money. Never again would she sell a book outright. Her first and possibly her best, certainly the most widely read of her books, was now buried under the corpse of Joseph E. Levine, late of Embassy Pictures, then Avco-Embassy, and now God knows what corporate monstrosity. And she’d been so thoroughly rolled by the television people who’d optioned Judy Bell that she automatically wanted to vomit when she heard the words, “I have great news!”

When they met, Charlie had seem relaxed about political ideas. “I got my Marxism from a different nipple,” he said, laughing at those who hoped to save the world. Then Vietnam came rudely in everyone’s lives, and she and Charlie stood outdoors with ten thousand people at a Berkeley soccer field listening to Dick Gregory and Norman Mailer exhorting them all to defiance. They’d cheered that day with the rest, but after a while Charlie got disenchanted with the anti-war movement. “They’re attacking troop trains,” he told her. “Fuck ’em.”

“But those soldiers—” she started.

“Those soldiers have no choice,” he said.

They were in the Coffee Gallery, drinking ale. “They could choose civil disobedience,” Jaime insisted. She’d read Thoreau, knew what she was talking about.

“Civil disobedience is something you do alone,” he said mysteriously.

He was against the war and against the war-resisters. No man’s land for Charlie. He’d never killed anybody, but he’d tried. She feared what might be going on under the surface, though he was nearly always his old cheery helpful self. You can’t spend ten years of your life writing a novel without leaving a lot of yourself in it. Each book is like a child, not just in a metaphor but in your heart, and a bad fate for your child hurts terribly. Charlie was very badly wounded, and Jaime wasn’t at all sure what effect Hollywood might have on her damaged hero.