Mendocino and Other Stories (3 page)

She unwraps the soap and washes her face; it makes her skin feel clean and tight. Then she brushes her teeth, turns off the bathroom light, and gets into bed. Tomorrow she will give them the cookies. If Gerald's pleased by them, Marisa will be, too.

Lying in bed, still wide awake, she finds herself thinking of the last time she and Gerald had dinner alone together in San Francisco. He took her to a little Burmese place out by the park, and they pored over the menu, dismayed to find that everything sounded exactly like the Chinese food they'd had the night before. Then Bliss found a section of salads and they thought, Aha! something new! They agreed on a dish called Lap Dap Dok; it was described as a spicy salad made of tea leaves. It arrived at their table on a wide, shallow plate, and the waitress held it up for them to see. It was like a pinwheel: six different ingredients barely touching each other. Bliss had identified sliced chili peppers and peanuts and something that looked vaguely like chopped parsley when the waitress took a pair of spoons and mixed the whole thing together into a dark paste. Bliss helped herself to a large spoonful, then took a little bit between her chopsticks and put it in her mouth. Immediately she was horrified: it was bitter and sour and rotten-tasting all at the same time—easily the worst thing she'd ever eaten. She started to giggle, waiting for Gerald to
taste it, and when he did his expression made her laugh even harder. “I wonder if this is what dung tastes like,” he said, then he turned red and started to laugh, too. Soon they were both laughing so hard that people began to look at them. She remembers now how familiar that laughter felt to her—the sick, giggly, helpless laughter of two children in a world of their own.

HOW COULD A
grown man with any self-respect sit in the Ghirardelli Chocolate Factory at eleven o'clock in the morning and eat a hot fudge sundae with mint chip ice cream, hold the nuts? It was Charlie's own question; his answer was that he wasn't a grown man, he was a grown boy, or maybe an ungrown man, pre-grown, never-to-be grown. He was in the process of honing his self-pity into a kind of artifact, an arrowhead he could keep in his pocket, its point ever ready. He spooned pure hot fudge into his mouth and told himself it was Linda's fault he was doing this—if he'd had someone to account to he'd never have indulged himself in this way—but it gave him no satisfaction to blame her. Linda was his wife, and fifteen days earlier she'd taken a suitcase full of clothes and gone to stay with her friend Cynthia “for a little while,” leaving Charlie lower than a dead man, as she would say. Maybe
that
was what had gone wrong: she no longer said things like “lower than a dead man” or “Nice play, Shakespeare.”
Where was that girl? Not, Charlie felt sure, in San Francisco, this meanly cold, this coldly mean city to which they'd moved five months before, from his beloved New York, at her request. Whereupon she'd left him.

Charlie looked at his watch. It was now twelve minutes past eleven, and although that left him thirty-three minutes to walk the ten blocks to his doctor's appointment, he was stricken by a fear of being late—a lifelong fear, one of his many crippling lifelong fears. He forced down the last of his sundae as quickly as he could and stood up. He put on his jacket, but as he was wrapping his scarf around his neck he felt a sharp pain scorch the surface of his upper arm, and he groaned and sat down again. He rubbed at the sore spot with his other hand, a futile gesture, he knew: the pain was too fast for him, disappearing so quickly he sometimes wondered whether it existed at all. It was the other pain, the one in his elbow, that he could count on. More of a dull ache, he would say to the doctor, a consistent dull ache. He stood up again, and as he headed out of the Chocolate Factory he patted his back pocket to make sure his notebook was still there—it contained a list of all the symptoms he'd had, back to the first radiating heat from his armpit to his fingers in June of 1988. A few months ago Linda had joked that he had a sore arm the way other people had a hobby. Sore? he'd wanted to say. I'm in pain. He knew it was a bad sign that he no longer saw any humor in his situation.

Walking along Beach Street toward the Cannery he saw a cable car filling with tourists. Last to board was an elderly couple, and Charlie watched as the conductor gently helped them up. The conductor wore a dark uniform and a peaked cap, and for a moment Charlie thought, What a great job! Then he thought, a conductor? He was regressing—first the sundae and now this. And what do you want to be when you grow up, little boy? Charlie
worked thirty hours a week at a frame shop on Chestnut, a few blocks from the apartment, and he liked it—he got a discount on framing materials. Linda said she knew it was a good
job;
she wanted him to have a career, but Charlie put careers in a group with pets and lawns—people were always talking about them and tending to them, but they just weren't that interesting.

IN HIS SEARCH
to discover what, after all, was wrong with his arm, Charlie had been in many New York waiting rooms during the past couple of years, but this was the first in California and he didn't know what to make of it: it was empty. He was accustomed to a two-hour waiting room wait followed by a forty-five minute examining room wait, sitting there in a paper nightgown. And the New York doctors, who'd never think to apologize for keeping you—Charlie had liked them: their clean, meaty hands, their arrogance.

A tall, red-haired woman in a white coat opened a door and said Charlie's name. He followed her into the doctor's office, and when she circled the desk, sat down, and said, “So, your arm hurts,” he blushed and buried his face in his hands. Dr.
Lee
Price. He'd gotten the name from Linda, who'd gotten it from someone in her office, and he hadn't thought—he just hadn't thought.

“Let me guess,” she said. “You thought I was the nurse. You assumed Lee Price would be a man. You feel like an idiot—you're really not like this.” She smiled at him. “Does that sum it up?”

“You forgot the part about how I'm much more of a feminist than a lot of women I know.”

“So I did,” she said. “So I did.” She unfolded a pair of glasses and slid them on, and her eyes seemed to open up, a delicate pale green. “It's really Leonora,” she said. “Big secret. Now tell me about your arm.”

She didn't comment as he talked, but every few minutes she held up a finger for him to pause and scribbled something on an unlined sheet of paper. With her head angled toward the page he was free to stare at her, and he took in her softly curling auburn hair, her clear, creamy skin, her narrow body. Lovely, he thought, and then,
lovely
? It wasn't in his working vocabulary.

“Any headaches?” she asked, still bent over her notes.

“No more than two or three a day.”

She looked up and narrowed her eyes. “And Tylenol does the trick, or no?”

“Tylenol or a nap. I've always had a lot of headaches.”

She nodded and wrote something. “Do you sleep well?”

“I was all-state in high school. I only wish it were an Olympic event.”

“A wise guy,” she said, laughing. “Are you married?”

“I—” he said. “My—” There was an answer to this question—it began “Yes, but.…”

“I ask because sometimes people can have small seizures in their sleep without knowing it. If you were married your wife might have noticed if your sleep were disturbed at all.”

“I'm married,” he said. “But I'm pretty sure nothing like that's been going on.”

“OK,” she said. “Through that door and I'll take a look.”

It was the usual neurological thing: she asked him to turn his neck in every conceivable way; she produced a small hammer and tested his reflexes; she took a set of keys from her pocket and ran them along the soles of his feet. Holding his eyelids open with her fingers, she looked into his eyes with a tiny light. Listen, Charlie wanted to say, I've been through all of this.

“Any weakness?” she asked, pocketing the little flashlight.

“I have a little trouble doing this.” Charlie held up his forefinger
and with his other hand bent the tip forward. “Bending it at the first joint—not exactly life-threatening.”

She held her finger up against his. “Push,” she said.

He tried to bend his fingertip onto hers, but nothing happened. “I noticed it on my camera, about six weeks ago. I had to use my middle finger to hit the shutter.”

“It's odd, but I don't find anything unusual otherwise. When was your last neck x-ray?”

“About eight months ago.” They had found something called “change” in his neck, but evidently it had been a red herring.

“EMG?”

“Excuse me?”

“You've never had an EMG?”

“Not to my knowledge,” Charlie said.

“You'd know it. Let's see if we can get you in later this week. You have insurance, right?”

“I'm covered by my wife's group policy at work.” In his jacket pocket was a claim form that Linda had messengered to him from the office—better than actually having to see him!

Dr. Price nodded and set down her clipboard. “What does she do, your wife?”

“She's an architect.”

“And you stay home with the kids?”

Charlie put a finger to his chest. “The kid,” he said.

CHARLIE HAD MET
Linda on the first day of their first year of college. They were at freshman orientation week: their college rented a camp an hour's drive from campus, and you stayed in cabins with triple level bunk beds and met during the day with upperclassmen to discuss College Life. This was in the seventies,
and everyone wanted to
talk.
On the first night each freshman was given a partner to interview for ten minutes and then introduce to a group of twenty. Charlie and his partner sat at a picnic table and she launched into her background with such zeal that Charlie didn't have to ask any questions. He sat there staring at her—this blond-haired, blue-eyed girl from Minnesota, who seemed to have had the kind of childhood his parents referred to as “TV mythology”—and he hoped this initial pairing wasn't going to last the whole week. His older brother had told him that the people you hung around with during your first few weeks at college ended up being your friends whether you liked them or not. Charlie had visions of himself saddled with this girl for the next four years, and he wanted to lean across the table and say, “Neat is the opposite of messy, damn it!”

The girl was Linda. Later that night, after the awkward introductions (she told the group, “This is Charlie from outside of Boston—he likes to read”), Charlie overheard her telling another girl that he had eyes you could drown in. He liked that, and for months, long after the word “saddled” was the last he'd have chosen to describe his feelings about her, he tried to get her to say it to him—eyes you could drown in. Then he woke up in the middle of the night one night late in the spring of their freshman year, and looked at her, and he realized it was he who had fallen into her, so deeply into her that he couldn't feel any boundaries. He was the doubter—he hated himself for it, but he tested her in mean, small ways, flirting with other girls, disappearing into silence for days at a time—but he never found the edge of what he was to her; he was contained by her in a way that frightened and exalted him.

Now, fourteen years later, she was gone, and it wasn't so much that he was angry or depressed or even scared: he was adrift.

DURING HARD TIMES
Charlie found it helpful to formulate a philosophy of life, and the past fifteen days had yielded him a particularly effective one: Bob Dylan. What he perhaps liked best about it was that Dylan had so little appeal to women, meaning Linda. He was an anti sex symbol, or maybe an anti-sex symbol. That beard, she would say, shuddering.
That thumbnail.

When he got home from Dr. Price's, Charlie put “Tangled Up in Blue” on the stereo, turned the volume high, and lay down on the living room rug. Dr. Price had prescribed yet another antiinflammatory drug, and Charlie had taken his dose, along with some codeine, and now waited for the customary queasy grogginess to overcome him. He knew that the new drug would help for a while, but that a few weeks after he stopped it the pain would balloon into his elbow again. The reason he had waited so long to find a doctor in San Francisco was that he was terrified of becoming addicted. Addicted to Dolobid—not a very hip way to go.

The phone rang, and he turned off the stereo and answered it. It was Linda, her voice, and it made him ache.

“How'd it go?” she said. “What'd he say?”

She, Charlie thought. “I have to go back on Friday morning,” he said. “For an EMG.”

“A what?”

“Electro-something.” He paused; this was sure to displease her. “I'm not exactly sure what it is. I forgot to ask.”

“You're so funny,” she said stiffly.

“A real laughingstock.”

“I'm sorry—I just don't see how you could forget to ask something like that.”

“My arm hurt.”

Linda was silent, and he tried to think of a way to save the conversation. “Sorry,” he said finally. “I'm all drugged up.”

“Well, guess what? Kiro asked me to work on the clinic in Walnut Creek.”

“Lin,” Charlie said, “that's great. We should celebrate. Or you should. Congratulations.”

She was silent again, and then she said, in a bright, public voice, “I should get going but I'll talk to you soon, OK?”

“OK,” Charlie said. “Okey dokey. Till then.”

He said good-bye, hung up the phone, and turned the stereo back on. “Oh, shut up,” he said to Dylan, and he switched the receiver to the radio. He lay back on the rug. Something baroque was playing, and as the violins climbed higher and higher, winding around each other in ever tighter circles, Charlie thought of a string pulled taut, a single translucent nerve stretched end to end, fingertip to brain.

AN EMG, IT
turned out, was really two tests. Charlie lay on a padded table, his arm on a pillow at his side, and looked at the pair of imposing machines that would measure the velocity of his nerves and the electric activity in his muscles. He felt queasy.

Dr. Price smiled at him. “We'll do the nerve velocity test first,” she said. “It may be a little uncomfortable.”

“I've heard that line before.”

Again she smiled at him. She adjusted the position of his forearm, then carefully taped a wire to it. “Ready?”

“Wait,” Charlie said. “Is it a high voltage?” He tried to look as if he were kidding. “Could you accidentally give me too much?” Yuk, yuk.

“Don't be scared,” she said. She was so close he could feel her breath on the bare skin of his upper arm. “The strongest shock
you could get from this thing wouldn't feel much worse than a sharp kick.” She held a two-pronged fork to his neck. “We'll start with the worst so you'll know there's nothing to worry about.”

The current slammed into his neck, and then it was over. “That wasn't so bad,” Charlie said, laughing a little. “That was nothing.”