Mendocino and Other Stories Read Online Free

for living is, but it could never have been him. He was never her reason for anything except wearing more makeup than she felt comfortable in and pretending, for a few months, that she was part of something serious.
    She changes into her nightgown and goes into the bathroom tobrush her teeth. Lying on the counter, still in its wrapper, is a brand-new bar of scented soap. She's sure it wasn't there before. She picks it up and brings it to her face; through the blue paper she can smell the rich aroma of sandalwood. Marisa must have brought it in while she and Gerald were outside. It's an expensive soap, and she has a hard time imagining Marisa in one of those drugstores that call themselves pharmacies and sell imported brushes and combs one aisle over from the Maalox. She can't help feeling flattered—did Marisa buy this soap expressly for her?
    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 totaste 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