Mendocino and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF Page B

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-fiveand 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. E
M
G, 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 theworse. “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