Mendocino and Other Stories Read online

“Nothing,” the technician said. “You'll feel nothing.”

  He slid Charlie in, and Charlie thought it was a good thing he wasn't claustrophobic: he was lying in a dark tube just wide enough to contain him, his head in a cage, forbidden to move.

  “Everything OK?” the technician asked. There was a little light down past Charlie's feet, and the technician was in that light.

  “Yes,” Charlie said. “I guess.”

  “I'll be going into the control room now,” the technician said, “but I'll be able to hear you in there, OK?”

  Charlie swallowed. Maybe he was claustrophobic. There was no reason for this to be any different from lying in bed, but it was. He tried closing his eyes, but he started to spin and had to open them again. Relax, he told himself. If only he had a mantra. He could choose one right now—“field,” maybe, or “stream,” those were peaceful words—but how relaxing could it be to say “field” over and over again, field, field, he feeled really silly with a mantra!

  It was cold in the machine, but he could feel sweat trickling down his sides, collecting on his forehead, his upper lip. If he had a tumor it would appear as a blotch on the technician's monitor—a purple blotch, probably. If he had a tumor…

  But he knew he didn't. If he did he'd be having dizzy spells, vomiting: he'd be sick. He would have to put his affairs in order and he didn't have affairs, he had—a sore arm. The way other people had a hobby. Or a career. Or a marriage.

  The noise started. From inside the machine it sounded sort of like the clanking of a radiator, but more, Charlie decided, like someone hitting the lid of a garbage can with a hammer, over and over again, arrhythmically. It was actually kind of soothing, in the way bad avant-garde music could sometimes be soothing, and it made Charlie think of his and Linda's last night in New York. They'd been taken out for drinks by their friends Ira and Jeannine, music-lovers who chose a little place in TriBeCa where a group called Eponymous was playing: three white guys with dreadlocks and sunglasses, one with a synthesizer, one with drums, and one with a whole battery of weapons including a hammer and a washboard. Linda was so tense that night—she kept looking at her watch, and kicking Charlie under the table every time Ira ordered another round of drinks—but Charlie had liked it, all of it, even the terrible band. Eponymous—where but in New York could you find a band like Eponymous, a band called Eponymous? He wondered what had become of them. He thought that as soon as he got out of here—this tube, this hospital—he would call Ira; Ira would know. He hadn't talked to Ira in almost two months, probably the longest they'd ever gone without talking since they first met. And Charlie liked Ira—loved him. And Jeannine, too, and their apartment with all of that overstuffed plush furniture from Ira's grandmother's place. Maybe he wouldn't call, he'd just show up at their door with a six of beer and some weird record he'd buy at Tower on his way down Broadway, and they wouldn't ask him any questions, they weren't like that, but they'd know, just as Charlie did, what the issue was: it was I-don't-love-you-anymore, and Charlie knew he'd known that for a long time.

  Saving himself? Why talk of saving himself when he could spend himself? All in one place.

  SEVERAL WOMEN IN my office are pregnant. Jennifer, my creative director, a contradiction in terms if ever there was one, is pregnant. So is Samantha, another copywriter and my one real friend here. And the receptionist, Karen, is pregnant, too. Saman-tha's is due first: March 25th. Then Jennifer's on April 2nd, then Karen's on May 6th. There has been talk of a betting pool. Which of them will deliver closest to her due date? My money will be on Karen: she is just twenty-two, too young to realize the possibilities for drama inherent in being early or late.

  They are flushed and slightly awkward, these women, and I wish them all good fortune. To each of them I wish a big bouncing baby with a fine set of lungs, to each of them the kind of birth that makes the doctor and nurses beam with goodwill and self-congratulation. Now there is a profession that must give incredible pleasure. Who else gets to witness the most private joys of life?

  I AM A copywriter at Fitch Brown Llewellen, an advertising agency. Ours is the Sears, Roebuck of advertising agencies. Not that we are so large; not at all. But we are definitely derivative. Remember those big shirts everyone was wearing a couple of years ago? With long, wrinkled shirttails hanging out and small awkward collars? They were worn over tight black pants or narrow mid-calf skirts. Well, look around and then go to Sears, and you'll find that that's where those shirts are now. You won't have to look hard; they'll be hanging under a huge sign that says BIGSHIRTS.

  Sears, Roebuck gets its ideas about style from the greater fashion world and then appropriates not only the idea but also, as in that huge sign, the credit for the idea. So it goes with Fitch Brown Llewellen. The big one right now is our religious adherence to a type of ad first used, brilliantly I might add, for Molson beer and the American Express card, not a few years ago. Upstairs, in the executive offices of FBL, this adherence is referred to as “buying into a principle.” Down here, where the rest of us sit under buzzing fluorescent lights, we call it imitation.

  I worry sometimes about those fluorescent lights. What is the effect on an unborn baby? Does an expectant mother have the right to ask such questions of 1) her doctor? 2) her boss? 3) her mother?

  IT IS 9:30 in the morning, and Samantha is late for work. The apartment she shares with her husband, Josh, is only twenty blocks away, but she rarely arrives on time. She has taken to walking very slowly. She wears heavy, rubber-soled boots, rain or shine. She is thirty-eight, and has had two miscarriages.

  My phone buzzes and I put down the newspaper and pick up the receiver.

  “You'll never believe what I ate for dinner last night.” It's Sam. Her office is two down from mine, but we do most of our talking on the phone.

  “A hot fudge sundae with dill pickles,” I say.

  “What a cliché,” she says. “I'm disappointed in you, Virginia.”

  “What did you have?” I picture her transformed, a wonderful mommy cook making herself hot cereal while Josh looks on, askance, from behind his reheated pizza.

  “It's disgusting,” she says.

  “Well?”

  “Saltines spread with mayonnaise, and I mean numerous saltines, twenty or more.”

  “That is disgusting, Sam,” I say, but I feel a rush of warmth for her. I want to tell her that I read somewhere that you can't do better for your baby than to eat as many saltines as possible, every day.

  “I know,” she says, laughing. “Oy gevalt.”

  Since they got pregnant, Josh has been teaching her bits of his grandparents' Yiddish, a word or two a day, so the baby can start to feel a little Jewish.

  I AM WORKING on a dog food campaign. Getting this assignment was the realization of my worst nightmare about advertising. My brother, the perennial student, warned me. He said, “You think it will be handsome couples drinking champagne or giving each other important diamonds. But Virginia, it may well be dog food.”

  The joke was on me. Kanine Krunch, it's called. At least it's the dry kind of dog food, the kind that comes in gigantic paper bags. At least it's not the wet, canned kind. That is some consolation.

  ON MY LUNCH hour I have begun to look for baby presents. It's too early to buy, but I want to know what's out there. There's a wonderful mobile at Babes in Arms, a little store around the corner. It's got little pastel animals hanging off curved strips of wood. Pink kittens. Blue puppies. Purple giraffes. I don't know if Sam and Josh are going to go for the bright, primary color decorating schemes plugged by the baby magazines these days, or whether they'll choose soft and cuddly instead. But I'd like to think of them standing at the edge of the crib and touching the little animals so that they sway, gently, over the baby's head. I've got a few more weeks to decide.

  For Karen, it will have to be something more practical. She and her husband, Donald, got married just a month ago, and on his postal clerk's salary they'll be struggling once she stops working. A little terry c
loth sleeper, maybe. A soft little sweater with a matching cap. A year's supply of Pampers.

  I don't know what I'll get Jennifer.

  KANINE KRUNCH HAS one distinction: only one. It is very cheap. It is the dog food you would buy if your boyfriend arrived at your house with two large black labradors and asked you to “watch” them for a week or two while he went to Florida to see about buying a boat.

  My assignment is to think of—no, to make up—another distinction. And then to “pop it” into an ad in which two extraordinarily attractive yet wonderfully mellow people have a desultory, nonaggressive (this is not a hard-sell) conversation about their pooches. The idea, of course, is that if you, the consumer, would only switch to Kanine Krunch, you would become extraordinarily attractive yet wonderfully mellow, too. What you're not supposed to notice is that this image of the good life comes straight from those Molson beer and American Express card ads. Therefore, in an attempt to claim originality, I will be asked to attach to this ad a line similar to “For the easy times in your life.” Similar to, but different. That's the line Samantha used for the flip-top canned puddings.

  THREE MONTHS AGO Jennifer called me into her office, all seriousness, to announce her pregnancy. She told me first, alone, because I was the one who would be handling her work while she was gone. She trusted me, she said, to keep the place calm while she was off having the baby.

  “Six weeks, Virginia,” she said. “Two before and four after. That means you'll have to go to Indiana.”

  “Right,” I said. Indiana is where the client's main offices are. I've met the client once, here in town, but Jennifer was talking about the big meeting where we would show storyboards and chew our fingernails. The client, of course, isn't a single person at all, but a group of nearly indistinguishable men of about forty who wear suits of a slightly too-light shade of grey.

  “Actually,” said Jennifer, “it'll be a great opportunity for you.”

  Up the ladder.

  “It'll give upper management a chance to see how dedicated you are.” She stood up, a signal that our talk was over. “In fact,” she said, “you should thank me for getting pregnant.”

  I smiled but resisted her suggestion; it didn't seem like a requirement of office protocol. I stood up and headed for the door.

  “Virginia,” she said.

  I turned.

  “Aren't you going to congratulate me?”

  Her real face came through and for a moment she looked softer, almost vulnerable. I felt like going around to where she was standing behind her big teak desk and hugging her, but I didn't know how she'd take it. “Congratulations,” I said. “It's wonderful.”

  “I'm really happy,” said Jennifer. And then, as if she'd just remembered that business, after all, was business, she laughed and added, “John and I decided it was time to test-market a new aspect of our relationship.”

  I PASS BY Karen's desk countless times a day—on my way to the bathroom, the supply closet, the elevators. Her job as receptionist allows her quite a bit of free time, and she has taken to knitting. She holds the baby-soft yarn low in her lap, ready to drop it into the open shopping bag between her feet. The executives wouldn't like it, if they knew. They would say it was unprofessional, and of course it is. It is an entirely domestic act, a miraculous thing, really. A pair of smooth sticks, mysterious turns of the wrist, and a little garment begins to appear.

  She is making a christening gown.

  “SAM,” I MOAN into the phone, “I want to be pregnant.” I am kidding, half. I am thirty-four and I am not married, nor, I suspect, was meant to be. Could I ever have a baby alone? Would I?

  “No, you don't,” says Sam. “Your face would turn fat and your ankles would swell and you'd have heartburn on a daily basis. Believe me.”

  “But I want a baby,” I say. “A little bundle of joy.”

  “Virginia, you live in one room.”

  “I could partition.”

  She laughs. “Oh, Virginia,” she says.

  “Do you feel like a different person now?”

  She's silent for a moment. “It's not really like that,” she says. “I feel like something new is starting, like I'm going to be different, but I'm not yet.”

  “It's so incredible, when you think about it.”

  “I know,” she says. “At the beginning, when all I felt was nauseated, it hardly seemed like what I was going through had anything to do with having an actual baby.”

  “But now it does?”

  “Now it does.”

  A kind of hollow feeling comes over me. “Oh, God,” I say.

  Sam doesn't speak, but I can hear her breathing, slow and soft. “Listen,” she says finally, “think of your freedom. What about men, what about relationships?”

  “What about them?”

  “Virginia,” she says, teasing, “you're the queen of relationships. You couldn't stand not having at least five intrigues a year.”

  I am not the queen of relationships. I am more like the court jester. I'm the one who can comment, wittily, on them all. On the guys who, sliding a hand up your sweater, insist that they just want to be friends. On the men, the young and serious ones, who ask if it will make you feel claustrophobic if they leave a toothbrush in your bathroom (it will). On the fellows who sweep you off your feet for three weeks, then inform you sheepishly that the wife and kids will return from the Caribbean on Sunday afternoon. On the one-night-standers whose failure to call leaves you slightly insulted and vastly relieved. On the lovers from your past who telephone in the middle of the night and, after forty minutes of idle conversation, ask if they can come over.

  I want to have a baby, but I can't think of having a husband.

  JENNIFER IS STANDING in my doorway. She wants to see what I've done so far on Kanine Krunch. The problem is, my notes would make no sense to her. I've figured out the people but not the setting. There will be a semiglamorous young woman with a little terrier on a leash, and a regular guy with a golden retriever running around in the background. And the guy will have an angelic little toddler sitting on his shoulders. I'm not sure what they'll say, though.

  “Can you show me an outline?” Jennifer asks.

  “I would,” I say, “but I don't really work in outlines.”

  “There isn't much time left, Virginia.”

  In fact, there are five weeks. But Jennifer's leave starts soon and she's getting nervous. “I'll have something to show you next Monday,” I say. “First thing in the morning.”

  She groans, and just as I am about to say, OK, Friday, she comes over to my desk, leans against it, takes my hand, and puts it on her stomach. “It's kicking,” she says.

  This is awkward, looking up at her huge round belly, so I stand up, leaving my hand where she's placed it.

  “Wait,” she whispers.

  At first there is nothing, then I feel her take a quick, deep breath. “See?” she says.

  “That was it?” I was expecting a real kick, aimed outward, fierce, sudden.

  “That was it.”

  It was like a wave rolling across her stomach. It had a wonderful, mysterious feel, as if it were a tiny manifestation of some grand, universal movement. Her face is flushed, and I realize that this is due only partly to exertion. The rest is pride.

  I smile at her. “I'll have the outline for you on Friday,” I say.

  I HAVE A blind date tonight. My brother called me from Charlottesville, the location of his current school, and told me that a friend of his from the microbiology lab was coming to New York for a conference. He said the guy, whose name was Hank, didn't know a soul here, that it would be great if I could take him out, show him the town. That's how my brother talks: “Show him the town.” It's as if he only arrived in this country a few years ago, and his studies have prevented him from learning the language.

  Dating, I often think, is like applying for a job. You go all out in the interview, proving your intelligence, your reliability, your suitability for this particular pos
ition, and then when—if—you are offered the job, you realize that the actual work would be tedious beyond measure.

  Promptly at eight, the buzzer rings. The intercom is broken, but I go ahead and hit the button that releases the door downstairs. Up here on the fifth floor, I figure no one will bother with the climb unless his purpose is legitimate.

  I wait a minute or two, then start listening for his footsteps. Nothing. I unlock my locks, poke my head out the door, and listen. No one is on the stairs; I can tell. The buzzer rings again, and again I push the button for the downstairs door. I stick my head out my open door and listen. Nothing.

  After a few minutes the buzzer rings again, and now I realize that what I've always feared has happened. The wiring that enables me to open the downstairs door from inside my apartment has worn out, or whatever happens to wiring.

  I fly down the stairs, composing apologies in my head. When I reach the door, there is Hank; it can only be Hank. He has a distinctly microbiology look about him: tall and thin, with overly large hands and a quizzical expression on his face.

  “I'm sorry,” I say, out of breath. “The thing must be broken, you know, the door-opening thing. What happened, there was no little sound, or did the door just not open when you pushed it?”

  “Virginia?” he says.

  I am standing here, holding the door open with my foot, panting. Who does he think I am?

  “Yes,” I say. “I'm Virginia, and you're Hank, right?”

  He offers me a large hand, which I shake. “Nice to meet you,” he says.

  “You, too,” I say. “Sorry about the door.”

  “Huh?”

  “The door,” I say. “When you buzzed, and the door didn't work. Was there a little sound at all? Or did it just not open when you pushed it?”

  He looks confused for a moment. Then he says, “I heard a noise, but I wasn't sure what it was, so I just waited for you.”

  Oh.

  “Did I do something wrong?” he says.

  “No,” I say, “not at all.” I take a step backward. “Come on in.”