Mendocino and Other Stories Read online

  IN HIS DREAM Linda was about twenty-three, in blue jeans but neat in blue jeans—blue jeans that she'd ironed. They were new in New York, living in an apartment that was like one they'd lived in but smaller and darker and dirtier, and she was stacking things: stacks of dishes, stacks of books arranged by subject, stacks of his socks and underwear. He was lying on the naked mattress watching her, and she was babbling, threatening to alphabetize the spices while at the same time relating to him a story about her aunt Marge, the “funny” one—and they were happy, happy.

  And when he woke she was there, but not in blue jeans. She was sitting upright on a chair by the door, her purse in her lap, wearing a pair of what she called “slacks” and a blouse and blazer—looking, Charlie thought, like a woman waiting to be interviewed for a job. He propped himself up on his elbows to get a better look, then sank back onto the bed. “Thanks for knocking,” he said.

  “I did,” she said eagerly, seeing that he was awake. “Several times. And I rang the doorbell. I guess you're still a heavy sleeper.”

  “You were expecting major changes? It's only been three weeks.”

  She came over and sat on the edge of the bed. “I'm really sorry,” she said. “Really, really sorry.” She touched the cervical collar. “Poor thing.”

  He ripped open the Velcro fastening and tossed the collar to the floor.

  “Please,” she said. “Please forgive me.”

  “OK,” Charlie said. “I forgive you.”

  She bent down and kissed him quickly, awkwardly, on the jaw. “I'll make us some breakfast, OK?”

  When he had dressed he found her stretched out on the living room rug, balancing in her lap an old accordion file she kept in a small wooden trunk they used as an end table. She was sipping from a cup of coffee, and it was such a familiar sight that Charlie was moderately cheered: perhaps this was simply another phase of their life together. He got coffee for himself and stretched out next to her.

  “Actually, you do look awfully thin,” she said. “Have you been eating?”

  “Mostly sugar in various forms. It gives me a certain clearheadedness.”

  “And so good for you.” She sipped her coffee. “Did you pour pepper on a tart?”

  They laughed, and she leaned over and kissed him again, easily; then she began looking through the file.

  “What are you after in there, anyway?” Charlie said.

  “My old address book—Kiro wants me to get in touch with Mackenzie about something.”

  “Oh.” Mackenzie was an old professor of hers—it seemed to Charlie that he wasn't supposed to ask about what.

  “Oh, look.” Linda pulled a postcard from the file. “I can't believe it—remember this?” She held the card up for him to see: it showed a row of tiny cabins and a big sign that grandly proclaimed, KENABSCONSETT INN—LODGE, CABINETTES. “Remember our cabinette?”

  “You mean cabinet?” Charlie said. He remembered: a dank little bathroom, fringed chenille curtains, a bed like a topographical map. Somewhere in Maine. It had poured rain the entire time they were there, and they'd gone to the “lodge”—a little matchbox of an office with an easy chair crammed next to a fireplace—and bought fifty-two copies of this postcard so he could make them a deck of cards.

  Linda turned the card over. “King of clubs,” she said. “Remember?”

  Charlie took the card. The king of clubs had been the best one: he'd drawn a cave man wearing an animal skin, a long-armed club over his shoulder. He hadn't known she'd saved it. He looked at her, and it seemed to him that she wasn't remembering as much as he was. It hadn't been just any weekend away but one organized around a particular date, September 25, 1981, and a particular purpose: the celebration? commemoration? of the fifth anniversary of the first time they'd slept together, their annual marker back in the days before they had a wedding anniversary to observe.

  “Remember the lobster rolls?” she said.

  He handed her the card and took his coffee cup into the kitchen. He saw the raspberry tart still lying in the sink, and he folded it into the drain. When he looked up Linda was standing in the doorway, watching him. “Are you OK?” she said.

  “I'm great. I'd have to say I'm really just thriving.”

  “Charlie.”

  He shrugged and turned back to the sink to wash his coffee cup. There was a rule he seemed to be living by: do everything you can to make her want to stay away for good.

  “Listen,” she said. “Do you want to drive over to Walnut Creek with me today? I was going to go look at the site, maybe do some sketches. Kiro was there yesterday afternoon and I think he wanted me to go this weekend.”

  “I guess,” Charlie said. Kiro, Kiro, Kiro. “What do you mean you think he wanted you to go? Did he ask you?”

  “Kiro is amazing,” she said, shaking her head slowly. “He doesn't have to ask for things. People just know what he needs, and they want to give it to him, whatever it is.”

  “Great management technique,” Charlie said.

  THE FOG WAS lifting in the East Bay; by the time they got to Walnut Creek the sky was clear, the air warm. In New York it would have been a treasure of a day, a tantalizing hint of spring, an occasion for buying bunches of tulips for your wife—but at least he was with his wife. “God,” he said, “You forget you live in a state where it can be seventy degrees in November. It's always so damp and cold in the city.”

  “It's bracing,” Linda said. “I like it.”

  She led him up a small rise, to a clearing backed by grey-brown hills. “Brilliant,” she breathed. She turned to Charlie. “He thinks we should design a kind of medical village, which I think is genius now that I've seen this place, don't you? A sort of main house for the information desk and all the administrative offices, and then behind it, conforming to the line of the hills, an S of cottages attached by covered walkways. And everything connected underground, where the labs would be.” She touched his arm. “What do you think?”

  Charlie shrugged. “Kiro knows best.”

  Linda took a sketch pad from her shoulder bag, and he crossed the clearing and began to climb the hill behind it, through low scrub and rocks. When he got to the top he was winded and sweating lightly; his elbow ached. He sat on a boulder and looked down at the clearing. Linda looked tiny and serious—she looked as if she had nothing to do with him. Look up, he commanded her. But she was absorbed in her sketching.

  Charlie lowered himself from the boulder onto the ground and lay back. The thing was, he didn't know how to think of their marriage as troubled; it had always seemed to him that they got along very well—no fights. He wondered if he could possibly unravel their lives back to the beginning of the trouble, and as he was wondering this another date from their shared past came to him: Halloween, 1983.

  They were living uptown then, on 113th Street, in one of the nicest apartments they ever had; Linda was getting her master's in architecture at Columbia. Charlie worked at a camera store on 96th Street, and on his way home each evening he'd go up to Avery Hall to see if she was ready for a dinner break.

  Remembering a jack-o'-lantern they'd carved one Halloween in college, Charlie picked up a pumpkin on his way to look for her that afternoon. She wasn't in any of her usual places, though, and none of her friends had seen her all day. He walked back down Broadway under a heavy grey sky and decided that he wouldn't start to worry until he got home and she wasn't there. But she was: the apartment had an unusually large kitchen with a view south, and Linda was standing at the sink washing dishes. She barely looked at him when he said hello. He put the pumpkin on a chair and took off his coat, and when he turned around he realized why it all seemed so strange. The table and the counters were covered with dishes; every dish they owned seemed to be out. He couldn't tell whether she had already washed them or was about to. “What are you doing?” he said.

  She turned from the sink, her hands gloved with suds, and began to sob. “You don't care if things are clean,” she cried. “It's totally up to me
. Do you realize we've never washed our wedding china?” She waved at a stack of the formal, flowery plates; he didn't point out that they'd also never used them. “I don't mind,” she said. “I like things to be clean. But you just ought to realize…” Her voice trailed off and she turned back to the sink, plunged her hands into the water, and began to sob harder.

  And here was his mistake. He'd said, “Realize what?” He'd stood behind her without touching her and said, “Realize what?” And that evening he asked her again and again, until she finally told him to stop asking, she was fine. That was where they'd taken their wrong turn: into a place where you couldn't tell the difference between polite and happy, to this point, this dry hillside, this separation. When it was so simple, what he should have done: taken her in his arms and said, Darling, darling, please don't, please forgive me for whatever it is I've done to upset you, please, you're my beautiful girl—my dahling, lovely gehl, like a character in an old movie—and they'd be wonderful now; they'd be fine.

  HE FOUND HER back at the car, looking over her exquisite sketches—he loved her sketches, had always loved them. “You're very good at what you do,” he said.

  Once she would have said, happily, “Really?” Now she laughed a little dismissively and said, “So are you”—and he wondered what it was she thought he was good at.

  “Charlie?” she said. “It's getting a little crowded at Cynthia's.”

  Cautiously, hopefully, he nodded.

  “She hasn't said so, but I think she'd like her privacy back.”

  “It's a small apartment.”

  “Here's the thing—Kiro's offered me his carriage house for a few months.” She looked at him, then quickly looked away.

  “Kiro?” Charlie said. “This is all about Kiro? Jesus, Linda—too bad I'm not some fastidious little Japanese architect, is that it? He probably doesn't even have any hair on his chest.” He slammed his fist against the car. “I can't believe you.”

  Charlie had met Kiro once; he remembered him as a small man in a double-breasted suit—a tiny man, really, who smoked tiny black cigarettes and drank a vile drink called a negroni: gin and sweet vermouth and Campari or something. Kiro's philosophy of life was probably cryptic and pretentious, his carriage house full of smooth black stones and thousand-dollar orchids, no furniture. She could sleep on the stones and eat the orchids, and then they'd see.

  “Charlie, listen,” Linda said. “This isn't about sex, I promise. Kiro is just my friend, my very—my very kind friend. He's not the issue.”

  “What's the issue, Linda?”

  “I just”—she hesitated—“need some space right now.”

  That word again. He turned away from her, and because there was nothing else to do he got in the car. He watched her standing there, pretending to be looking at her sketches, her beautiful sketches. His wife.

  She gathered her things together and got in next to him.

  “Would it help,” he said. “Would it help if I got an office job? You know, where I had to wear a suit and tie every day?”

  “Charlie, God. Dress up and play a part? That's not how it works.” She sighed and leaned against the door. “You're wasting yourself.”

  He started the car. She had never actually said it before, and while a sour little voice in him was saying, “No, I'm not; I'm saving myself,” the rest of him had risen to a strange plateau where he felt oddly empowered—he was back on the hill, watching her from a great height.

  HOW COULD A grown man with any self-respect sit in the emergency room waiting area of a major city hospital and cry? If he hadn't been in so much pain Charlie might have asked himself any number of questions, but as it was he was concentrating on staying as still as possible. He wasn't actually crying so much as tearing up at each involuntary movement of his neck and shoulders, which caused him more anguish than he'd ever known. At least you have your legs, young friend. It was true: if it hadn't been for them, he'd probably still be at home in bed, destined to a slow and painful death.

  He'd woken up in agony that morning—the day after helping Linda move her stuff to Kiro's, so at first he'd been a bit skeptical: nerves, pure and simple. But he couldn't turn his head, couldn't move his arms without unbearable pain; the only way he'd finally been able to get out of bed was to swing his legs up and then use them as a lever to bring his body upright. Picking up the receiver and dialing were excruciating, but he'd finally reached Dr. Price at the hospital, and she'd agreed to see him there, and now it turned out that he had something new wrong: a winging scapula. It sounded like a kind of sailboat, but it was his shoulder blade, unleashed from its mooring.

  “That would definitely be uncomfortable,” Dr. Price had said.

  A winging scapula was also unusual, and while it was probably a fluke (a coincidence that half his upper body was malfunctioning!), some possibilities had to be ruled out. In a little while he was going to go to Radiology for an MRI, and then later he was going to go somewhere else for an EEG. He was making his way through the alphabet.

  Dr. Price reappeared and sat on the chair next to his. “Radiology is going to squeeze you in in just a few more minutes,” she said.

  “That sounds painful.”

  She laughed. “After that I've arranged to have you admitted—just for one night. When you're done there just come back down to Admitting and they'll have a bed for you, OK?”

  “I guess so,” Charlie said. At least maybe they would give him some morphine; he'd taken some codeine about an hour before, but it didn't seem to be helping much.

  “We'll wait and do the EEG tomorrow,” she said. “You'll be feeling a lot better by then.”

  “What exactly are we looking for?” The word in Charlie's mind was “tumor.”

  Dr. Price was silent for a moment. “Nothing we're going to find,” she said, “how's that? I really think it was just moving that new dresser in.”

  “Right,” Charlie said. “The dresser.” He hadn't wanted to tell her what he'd really been doing yesterday: carrying twelve boxes of art books down three flights of stairs. He'd strapped together two at a time and carried them over his shoulder, the way the movers had done in New York. “Still,” he said, “it's hard to believe this has nothing to do with my arm. What's really wrong with my arm?”

  “It hurts,” she said.

  Thanks a lot, he thought, but then he turned, painfully, to look at her—pretty Dr. Price, whose job it was to know when to say “Don't worry”—and he thought: Well, yes.

  She glanced at her watch and stood up. “Listen,” she said. “You know who get winging scapulae? Soldiers, from carrying their guns. So you're in good company, huh?” Charlie watched her hurry away, toward people with problems way beyond unusual. Good company? he thought. He'd rather be alone.

  Slowly, carefully, he got to his feet. He had a quarter in his pocket—he'd had the foresight to make sure of this before he left home—and now, walking gingerly to minimize the pain of each step, he started toward a cluster of pay phones. He told himself that what he was about to do wasn't so much calling for help as giving information: she would want to know, she had a right to know—she was his wife. And this time, Charlie had some hard information: he'd already known what an EEG was, and he'd asked and discovered exactly what an MRI was. It was Magnetic Resonance Imaging—formerly, Dr. Price had confided, Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, NMR, but they'd changed the name because people hadn't liked the word “nuclear.” It was like a CAT scan, that big washing machine, except they could look at any part of you, and it wasn't invasive. Charlie was all for noninvasive.

  He reached the phones. She would say: “Charlie, oh my God, no.” Or maybe: “Oh, Charlie, no.” She would be there waiting for him after the MRI, with flowers and magazines because she was a great believer in brightening a sick room. A “sick room”—that was another of those phrases of hers. It used to be that if he had so much as a cold she'd turn into Cherry Ames, girl nurse—bringing him milk shakes and toast, because that's what her mother had brought h
er when she was sick. Chocolate milk shakes, so thick you had to eat them with a spoon.

  Charlie inched his hand into his pocket, and a shiver of pain raced through his neck and shoulder. He knew that lifting his arm to dial would be even worse. And for what? An hour or two. Maybe a day or two. He pulled his empty hand from his pocket. What was that old joke? “Doctor, doctor, it hurts to dial the phone.” “So don't dial it!”

  IF A CAT scanner was like a washing machine, an MRI machine was more like a delivery truck. Charlie had taken off “everything,” including his wedding ring, and was standing in a paper gown watching the technician prepare the little stretcher he would lie on. And then the stretcher would slide into the machine.…

  “Got all your jewelry off?” the technician said.

  “Yeah,” Charlie said, “I left my diamonds in my jeans pocket.”

  The technician was about Charlie's age, friendly. He laughed. “Metal's the problem,” he said. “You know those covered elastic bands women wear in their hair? With a little piece of metal at the joint? I had a woman wearing one of those and when she came out her ponytail was on the other side of her head.”

  “I guess it's a good thing I don't have any metal staples in my body,” Charlie said.

  “Good in any case,” said the technician. “Ready?”

  It hurt to lie down, but once he was in position he actually felt better. The technician put a wedge under Charlie's knees and then enclosed his head in what Charlie could only think of as a cage.

  “The idea,” the technician said, “is not to move. It'll take about half an hour. I can take you out at any time, but then we'll have to start over. It'll sound like this.” He moved out of Charlie's line of vision and knocked on the side of the machine.

  “But what will I feel?” Charlie said.