Mendocino and Other Stories Read online

  “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.”

  She made a note, then continued down his arm, shocking him here, then there. The worst of it was how she pulled the hairs on his arm when she lifted the tape off.

  “What a guy,” she said. “Next time I give a demonstration can I call you?”

  She set the wires and the fork on the table behind her. She held up a thin cord, on the end of which was a sliver of a needle, an inch and a half long. “Some people think this is worse,” she said, “but it shouldn't give you any trouble. Ready?”

  She slid the needle into a muscle in his forearm, and Charlie felt tears pricking at his eyes. “Ah,” he said, and then, because it had sounded embarrassingly sexual, “Ow.”

  “OK,” she said, “now make a fist.”

  Such a small, thin needle for such a great, big pain. Charlie's entire arm hurt, not just where the needle jutted out, but in his hand and wrist, too. She moved the needle around and he thought he might actual
ly cry. He was aware of a strange crackling sound, like a staticky TV, and he realized it was coming from the monitor.

  “There,” Dr. Price said, “that wasn't so bad, was it?” She pulled the needle out of his arm, leaving him feeling bruised and exhausted. “Just a few more of these.”

  Half an hour later, the test over, they sat in her office. Charlie rubbed his hand up and down his arm. He was giddy with relief, eager to be terribly funny or audacious.

  He looked at Dr. Price—Lee, Leonora, not such a bad name, really—and he willed himself into a crush on her. That red hair, those green eyes, the fetching white coat: he wanted her, or perhaps he only wanted to want her. Did the fact that it was only eleven o'clock in the morning mean he couldn't suggest they go for a drink? He longed to say “Let's ditch this hot dog stand”—it was a Linda line, but he felt he could use it with aplomb, without the least pang of sentimentality. They could have a drink and then a quick wedding, two or three red-haired kids, and a ranch-style house in the suburbs to which he would repair each evening, loosening the knot in his tie, eager for the martini she would have waiting for him. He only had joke ties now—a tie that looked like fish scales, a vintage tie a full five inches wide, even a tie made of wood—but he could buy one with little white dots, and he would, he would.

  “… very useful,” she was saying. “At least we've ruled out any denervation.”

  “What?” Charlie said.

  “You passed the test, Mr. Goldman.”

  “I did?”

  “Don't look so morose. Go, take pictures with your middle finger, be happy.”

  “But my arm,” Charlie said. “My arm hurts.”

  “Take the Dolobid,” she said, standing up. “You said you'd worn a cervical collar for a while—do you still have it?” He nodded. “Wear it for a month or two. Sleep in it.” She smiled. “You can call me if the pain gets worse.”

  BACK IN HIS own neighborhood Charlie wandered toward the frame shop, his arm twinging occasionally in memory of the assault it had suffered, and he decided to ask for the afternoon off. He passed in front of a men's clothing store, and after a moment backtracked and stood looking in its window. Men at Work, the store was called—the other kind of work. It was a store Linda liked; when they'd first arrived in San Francisco they'd gone out walking almost every evening, and she'd steered them into this shop several times: she'd held up combinations of shirts and ties for his appraisal, saying he'd look great in this blue or that brown. Charlie was a jeans man, but he hadn't minded—he'd even tried on the odd suit to please her. He understood: he liked watching her try on clothes, too. It was a way of interpolating his love for her: Linda in the silk dress, Linda in the leather jacket, Linda in the slender grey suit—he loved them all. He thought of going in and buying a tie to wear as a surprise for her the next time he saw her—not one with little white dots, but one he actually liked—but then he thought that it would be much better to ask her to come with him, to help him choose one. It was really a pretty good idea—maybe he'd even let her talk him into a suit. Was it so hard, after all, to imagine himself dressed in a suit and tie, taking the bus downtown every morning? He could see himself carrying a briefcase, could even picture himself passing through a revolving door and standing at a bank of elevators avoiding eye contact with the other people who were standing there. He could see himself stepping into the elevator, facing the doors, could picture the elevator rising smoothly and speedily to, say, the twenty-third floor—but then what? What did people do in those towers all day long? What was in the briefcase—a tuna sandwich and an apple? Charlie couldn't get himself out of the elevator.

  At the frame shop he found Kendra, the nicer of the two owners, in the back room, cutting some mats. Cutting mats—now there was work that made sense. He was almost tempted to work his shift, but not quite.

  “Poor you,” Kendra said when he'd explained about the EMG. “I don't trust doctors at all anymore. Do you know, my gynecologist told me I should have a hysterectomy just because I'm forty-five and I have a little trouble now and then? ‘We'll just take it out,’ he said. Can you believe it?”

  Charlie shook his head.

  “If I were you I would go next door and have a nice cup of herbal tea, and then go for a good long walk. You probably just pulled a muscle! An EKG, for goodness sakes. You can't trust them.”

  He thanked her and left the shop. EMG, he thought. He raised his arm quickly and the pain drilled at him: still there. It was comforting, in a way.

  At home Charlie sat down next to the phone. He missed New York, missed his friends—they'd never think to mention herbal tea without irony. And as for a good long walk, if he'd been in New York he'd have been instructed to get into a cab and go straight home to bed—much sounder advice. He longed to call one of his friends in New York, but whom could he call without having to tell about Linda? Instead he called his brother's office in Boston.

  “Chuck!” Richard's voice boomed through the phone. “What's the good word?”

  Was there one? Richard seemed to be in one of his increasingly frequent Hail-Fellow-Well-Met moods. “Nothing,” Charlie said. “I was at this doctor's—she gave me this test.”

  “She?”

  “Yeah—red hair, green eyes, white coat.”

  “Uh oh,” Richard said. “Lust alert.”

  Who was this person? This was not the kind of thing Charlie needed to hear.

  “I take it,” Richard said, “that Linda is still among the missing?”

  “You take it right.”

  “She'll be back, kid. She will.”

  “Yeah,” Charlie said. “She just needed some space.” She'd actually used that word, which had made the whole thing all the worse. “Space.” It wasn't how she talked—wasn't, Charlie told himself, how they talked.

  “What'd you go to a doctor for, anyway?” Richard said. Charlie could hear him moving papers around. “Your arm?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Hmm. You know, I have a theory about your arm. Would you like to hear it?”

  “Not really.”

  “It's nerves, your arm. Ever think of that? Nerves, pure and simple.”

  Charlie waited in vain for Richard's dumb pun laugh. “It might be a nerve,” he said finally. “Like I was trying to tell you, I had this test.”

  “And it was negative, right? Or positive, or whatever, but it didn't show anything, tell me I'm wrong. Have you never wondered why none of these tests shows anything?”

  It was true: he'd had x-rays and blood tests and even a CAT scan. Would Richard have been happier if there were something terrible wrong? And there was something wrong. “I'm glad we had this chance to talk,” Charlie said. “Give my love to Kathy and the kids.”

  “Charlie, Charlie, I'm sorry. I know it's a drag having your arm hurt, I do. But at least you have your legs, young friend!”

  Charlie laughed: it was something their mother had said to Richard once.

  “Charlie?” Richard said. “She will be back. You two are perfect together. You know what Kathy said a couple months ago? I shouldn't tell you this. She said she wished you and Linda were around more so the kids could see what a good marriage was all about. So there.”

  “Well,” Charlie said. “I guess we showed her.” He attempted a laugh. “Is everything OK?”

  “Yeah, yeah. You know how it is. It's one day, then it's the next day. What can you do? You just go on.”

  This struck Charlie as immeasurably sad, and as soon as he could he made an excuse and got off the phone. You just go on and on and on.

  He went into the bedroom and pulled open the bottom drawer of his dresser. There, wrapped in a dingy old plastic bag, was his cervical collar. He put it on and looked in the mirror: the man in the big white doughnut. To hell with neckties—he was taking the idea of the turtleneck to new limits. He felt like calling Dr. Price, but what could he say? Excuse me, but are there any tests to determine whether someone's really in pain? Excuse me, but are you busy tonight? He t
ook a Dolobid and two codeine tablets and got into bed.

  PEELING SHRIMP, LINDA had said once, was like giving birth—no one ever told you how horrifying it was, you had to see for yourself. Charlie was peeling a pound of jumbo and not minding it at all: she had invited herself for dinner. As he worked he sang along to “Just Like a Woman” and allowed himself to hope that she, that tonight.… But she'd taken her diaphragm with her, he'd checked—she'd probably taken it because she'd known he would check—and while Charlie felt in his heart of hearts that a baby was just what they needed, Linda was unlikely to see it that way.

  For that matter, sex wasn't really the issue.

  What was the issue?

  By seven o'clock everything was set. The shrimp were ready for sautéing, the snow peas and carrots were ready for boiling, the shockingly expensive raspberry tart was hidden in a cabinet, and the wine, on which Charlie had spent most of an afternoon's pay, was icy cold.

  By 7:30, everything looked a little wilted.

  At eight Charlie put on his cervical collar and sat on the edge of the bed. He thought of Dr. Price saying, Go, take pictures with your middle finger, be happy, and he hoped that she would remember what she'd said to him and be stricken by remorse—prefer-ably tonight. And she'd call him and say, Charlie, I didn't mean it, I want to help you. When the phone rang at 8:30, though, it was Linda.

  “Charlie?” she said.

  He held the receiver away from his ear while she recited her apologies—something about work, something about Kiro. After a while he broke in. “Let me guess: you'll call me soon. Good-bye.” He hung up, and when she didn't call back he returned to the kitchen and threw away the shrimp and the snow peas and the carrots, forced them into the disposal with a wooden spoon. He took the tart from its hiding place and carefully lifted it out of its box. Holding it with both hands, he leaned over the sink and quickly ate half of it. He was about to have another bite but instead said, “That's disgusting,” and let what was left fall from his hands. He could feel the glaze on his cheeks. He started out of the kitchen but immediately turned back and shook pepper over the remains, just in case he changed his mind.