Referred Pain: Stories Read online

  “I think I’ll move my things out in the next few days. I can stay with Laurie till I find a place. Or with Cara and Jeff. We got really close.”

  “Just like that. Three years, and it’s over in three minutes?”

  “I’ve been thinking about it for a while.”

  “How long? Since I broke my tooth?”

  “Richie! Will you stop with the fucking tooth?”

  “But that’s how it all started, isn’t it?”

  “No. I mean, it looks that way, but no. That just brought things to the surface, like profound differences.”

  “Oh, don’t give me that crap. Profound differences! We managed fine before, with profound differences.”

  “They would have come out sooner or later.”

  When Lisa left he had fantasies of Jody, fruitless and unsatisfying. He had no desire to see her again. She was simply the most tangible woman his fantasies could cling to. And she was so appreciative. An even more voluptuous indulgence was the thought of his upcoming surgery, an elective procedure that would cost him several thousand dollars. He was deep in the labyrinth again and must journey still deeper to see where it led, how it felt. His parents, the women in Bosnia, the true sufferers all over the world, were the aristocrats of pain. He was a mere peasant. But this pittance had been given to him and he must embrace it. If not for the initial accident, he would have remained an innocent. Anyway, he would have Valium.

  As he waited in the surgeon’s office, perusing a Time magazine article with heart-stopping photos of still more corpses discovered in a ditch near Sarajevo, a lean, middle-aged man with a small goatee stumbled from the warren of inner rooms. Koslowski recognized him as an actor who occasionally appeared in minor television roles, once as an expert witness on Law and Order, once as a social worker on ER. Actors needed those unnaturally even, generic teeth—God knows what tortures he had submitted to. Obviously drugged, the actor weaved his way toward a chair, using his outstretched hands to guide him. A nurse raced out. “Mr. Becker, wait, you have to lie down in the recovery room.” She steadied him as he was about to trip over the magazine rack.

  “I’m okay, I’m going home.” His speech was slurred.

  “You can’t go home yet. Please come with me.”

  The actor dug in his back pocket and with fumbling fingers extracted a credit card from his wallet. “Here. I’m going home.”

  The receptionist behind the desk smiled, as did Koslowski. Even in his stupor, the man knew enough to find his credit card.

  “You can pay later,” the nurse pleaded. “Come on now. You’re not ready to leave.”

  Koslowski rose to assist her, and together they managed to steer the wayward actor to a room no larger than a closet, where they settled him on a cot. An hour from now, that would be his state, Koslowski thought. He would be docile.

  “I forgot to mention,” Dr. Ferrucci said as he prepared the needle. “I’m doing a bone graft. I hope it takes, because that’s what’ll hold the implants in place. We won’t know till nine months from now.”

  “Whatever,” and Koslowski rolled up his sleeve. As the Valium waltzed through him, he sank into that drowsy, delectable state in which every problem melts away and all is benign, an undulating world of silk and cream.

  There seemed to be several nurses or hygienists in attendance, all of them blonde, all resembling Jody, all swimming in a milky haze. Before he could figure out whether there were truly three or whether his blurred vision was multiplying them, Dr. Ferrucci’s voice boomed, “That’s it. Everything went fine.”

  Koslowski allowed himself to be led into the recovery room. Was the actor who had lain there before him home yet or staggering through traffic? Would his smile be different the next time he glimpsed him on television?

  After a while, one of the nurses—there were indeed three—handed him the familiar post-op instructions along with prescriptions for a painkiller and an antibiotic. Though he assured her he was fine, she accompanied him out and saw him into a taxi. “Remember the stitches come out next week—here’s your appointment card. And you can’t wear your bridge for six weeks, till the area heals.”

  Without the support of the bridge, his jaw and cheek sagged into a state of collapse that made eating and talking too great a strain. So he ate and talked as little as possible. The area had sustained so much injury, Dr. Ferrucci explained as he removed the stitches, that the muscles were exhausted and frayed.

  Koslowski could barely ask, “When will they recover?”

  “In time. Try Motrin. But the procedure went very well. A textbook case, as we say.”

  Koslowski did not mind so much not talking; he had very little to say.

  “What’s the matter, Richie? You’re so quiet,” his mother asked on one of his visits to the hospice—one of the easier visits. His father slept the whole time. It was only when he slept that Koslowski recognized the father he knew and loved. Awake, his face was vacant, except when masks of fury or fear clamped over his features, then, as abruptly and mysteriously, vanished.

  “I’m fine. Just a little tired.”

  “I never thought she was right for you anyway. She was a nice girl, but she didn’t appreciate you. You’ll find someone else. You’re a good-looking boy. Go out, meet new people.”

  He glanced over at his dying father. “Okay, tell Dad I was here. Give him my love.”

  Not eating bothered him more than not talking. He lost weight. Skating wore him out. Even his hours at the keyboard were more burden than pleasure. A diet of scrambled eggs, yogurt, and ice cream didn’t begin to approach true deprivation—the TV news showed starving children in Somalia and he sent a check to Doctors Without Borders—but it was a hardship nonetheless. Everyone was entitled to eat.

  Once the six weeks were up, the bridge no longer fit. “Impossible. It can’t not fit,” said Dr. Ferrucci. Koslowski didn’t argue—his jaw muscles wouldn’t permit it. Nor did he obey his first frantic impulse, to return to Rome and Dr. Habemeyer, with his little saw. Instead he called twenty dentists listed in the Yellow Pages until he lit on one who would make a removable bridge. If indeed no reputable dentist in the United States would provide such an object, did that make genial, rotund Dr. Mbuto, recently arrived from South Africa, disreputable? Not at all. His framed diplomas lined the walls. He must know plenty about suffering, too, probably enough to rival Koslowski’s parents. And maybe for that reason he was willing to relieve the paltry sufferings that came his way. Not a moment too soon, either. In the bracing autumn air, with the new little bridge securely glued in his mouth, Koslowski wolfed down two empanadas from the Jamaican grocery on Dr. Mbuto’s corner.

  The next two years were eventful for Koslowski, and not only dentally. He heard from friends that Jeff and Cara, the attorney who had witnessed, and possibly caused, his accident, had divorced. Good. Let her suffer too. His satisfaction soured when he learned a month later that Lisa, once his very own, had moved in with Jeff. Did she by any chance know that Jeff had a bridge? At the fateful party, he recalled, Jeff claimed to have heard the collision of olive pit and tooth and feared for his own bridgework. But however their romance fared, it would not, Koslowski was certain, be undone by teeth.

  His father crept slowly and agonizingly toward death. At last he arrived. And in the finality of mourning, as if released or reprieved, Koslowski felt ready to abandon his quest.

  But his quest was not ready to abandon him: he had gone so far into the labyrinth that retreat was impossible. The only way out was to trudge onward, through the second implant surgery the following summer, the removal of the infected stitches, the device installed to support his weakened cheek muscles—All the while, his tongue was repeatedly mangled, since the long-awaited crowns were skewed at a clumsy angle.

  Apparently he was among the unlucky seven percent. “You said they’d feel like my own teeth. They don’t. They feel like a boulder sitting on my tongue.”

  Dr. Ferrucci shrugged regretfully. “I had to put them wher
e the bone could support them, Richard. We do the best we can.”

  Enough. He gave up. He would live with the discomfort, which would earn him a minuscule place in the annals of world pain.

  Not long after, he married.

  He met Maxine at dusk on a warm fall day, almost a year after his father’s death. With his mouth still sore from surgery, he was skating on the boardwalk near his mother’s apartment when he noticed a pair of metal crutches propped against a bench. He looked about for their owner but saw no one likely among the sparse strollers. The crutches might get lost or stolen; their owner might be in trouble. He scanned the ocean. Had someone lost hope and walked, or limped, into the sea? Only a handful of people were swimming—it was past the season—and none appeared in distress. A woman with dark flowing hair emerged and headed for shore with a side-to-side hobble. Though she tottered once or twice, she didn’t lose her balance, even when she bent to pick up a towel from the sand. She dried her hair and shook it out, fitted a long, sarong-like garment over her black bathing suit, shouldered her tote bag and proceeded up the beach. She was tanned and very pretty, glistening in the amber light, in her exotic costume. Koslowski waited as she made her way up the stairs.

  “Are these yours?”

  “Yes. Why?” She took them a bit ungraciously, but he understood.

  “I’m sorry. I thought someone might need help. Or they might be lost.”

  “Kind of hard to lose them, wouldn’t you think?” She gave him a second glance and softened. “Actually someone stole a pair once while I was swimming. They disappeared, at any rate.”

  “Really? What kind of weirdo would do that?” He shook his head and offered his crooked smile.

  Maxine lived nearby with her widowed father. She did freelance editing at home and wrote children’s books that she hoped to publish some day. Her congenital spine ailment might worsen over time. She might end up in a wheelchair. She explained all this once their affair began, but Koslowski was undeterred. On the contrary, he relished the idea of caring for her. She was so beautiful, so valiant.

  “A cripple?” his mother exclaimed when he told her.

  “She’s disabled.”

  “What’s the difference what you call it? Can she have children, at least?” She could and did. Three. She persisted with her children’s books and in time was quite successful.

  Koslowski gave up dancing. At large parties, Maxine urged him to go on and dance with others—his mother boasted of what a terrific dancer he was, and she wanted to see. But he never did. He gave up the band and his ambitions, though he still played at home and occasionally filled in at the piano bar as a favor to his old boss. He left the music company and took a job supervising computer systems in a brokerage firm that paid well and provided excellent health coverage, so that Maxine had every aid and comfort. When the wheelchair came, he mastered all the necessary routines.

  He never mentioned teeth to her or to anyone else as long as he lived: that was part of his discipline. He learned forbearance. He learned to live with the metal posts—titanium, the metal of the future—nestling just below his sinuses, the teeth they supported sitting thick and burdensome on his tongue, a constant reminder of his mishap and his prolonged madness. Now and then, during trying times, his jaw would go into spasm and the teeth would grow by day and shrink overnight—irksome but no longer alarming. He kept Dr. Mbuto’s little bridge in a sealed jar of water in the back of a drawer and changed the water from time to time. No rational explanation for this quite sufficed: that it had been so hard to obtain, that it had seen him through, that he might need it again someday. He only knew it felt risky to throw it away; it was part of him.

  The madness left its somber residue. He was quieter, as if subdued. He was often plagued by transient but irritating ailments: conjunctivitis, allergies, rashes. He was accident-prone, would bump into chairs and break a toe, hit his head on a protruding shelf, pull a muscle while lifting weights in the gym. He grasped that something coiled in his heart was generating these minor nuisances, but he couldn’t make it stop. At least it never generated anything very serious. It was merely trying to teach him something, and would not try him beyond his endurance. Indeed the petty trials it sent mocked his endurance. And maybe, by some superstitious form of bookkeeping, they also kept him safe from the unendurable ones. His mind balked and fogged over when he tried to think through this tangle. Meanwhile he lived as best he could. His growing family absorbed him, and his friends, seeing his patient devotion to Maxine, thought him heroic.

  He knew he was no hero. He wouldn’t have survived what his parents had endured. He had been given a test—even if it was a mockery—and he had failed. His parents were made of stronger stuff. But he didn’t despise himself. There were some things he could do. He wouldn’t have been one of the skeletal but resilient bodies that greeted the liberating forces, but he could readily see himself among the stalwart, well-fed soldiers confronting a scene they could never, in their innocence, have imagined. He saw it as clearly as if he had been there to rescue his father and the others. It was spring and the ground was muddy from recent rain. The rancid, smoky smell was choking, like nothing he had ever smelled in his life. The stick figures standing behind the barbed wire might have risen from a tomb. But there was no time to indulge in shock. Things must be done. He must approach them courteously, assure them that their nightmare, or this part of it, was over, see that they were fed and transported to places where they could be cared for. The job might take weeks, months, but he had the stamina. There was no hesitation. He would do what was required, and not only because it was his duty. He would save them, out of decency and out of relief that he did not have to be them. And in this way he would earn his right to live.

  The Stone Master

  A FEW OF US WERE exchanging road stories. The conversation inevitably takes this turn when we meet, given that frequent travel, for so many in our profession, has become a way of life. There were the usual tales of effortless seduction and flighty escapades, as well as of the dull dinners in anonymous company, the long, lonely stretches, and the naïveté, if not outright ignorance, to be endured in the provinces. This kind of talk had begun to weary me of late, and if only to allay the tedium by the sound of my own voice, I was about to give an account of my recent visit to the town of M——, which, uncharacteristically, I had never spoken of to anyone.

  But I found myself reluctant, and when my guests had left, their mood somewhat dampened by my diffidence, I wondered why. It wouldn’t make a good story, for one thing: a mere encounter, it had little drama, certainly nothing in the way of erotic or scenic dazzle. It would do nothing to enhance my reputation; my friends might even judge me to have been hallucinating. For that matter, how could I be sure that my host on that night in M——, the Stone Master, was not delusional, or perhaps having his bit of fun at my expense? I thought not, and yet I had talked to no one else in M——; he had been unwilling, in the nature of things, to let me see any of the gems, which might have served as evidence; and the whole episode so challenged credibility that I too might have dismissed it as my own imagining, except that I have little imagination to speak of.

  But beyond all that, to tell of my night in M—— seemed a species of betrayal, and not simply of the Stone Master, who had been extremely kind, and of what he had revealed. This sense of possible betrayal was as unfamiliar as it was compelling. For the first time in a long while, I felt that to broadcast an event that had so shaken the armature of my inner life would be a betrayal of myself.

  But habit is compelling too. I find that tell it I must, so I set it down here in private.

  It was dark and wet on the drive to M——. My driver, a sullen young man with an opaque stare and a faded rhinestone stud beneath one eyebrow, had rebuffed my attempts at conversation but instead hummed maddeningly to himself. He would switch the radio on and off at intervals to listen to snatches of an interview with a fairly well-known personage, not unlike the interviews I myself w
ould soon be giving in M——, I thought wryly. He drove slowly, because of the rain no doubt, but out of insolence as well, I suspected, as I fidgeted in the back seat; my contacts were awaiting me in the town square, no doubt irked at my lateness.

  For about half an hour we had seen no other cars and no signs, indeed nothing at all except an abandoned truck stop. Then there loomed over the highway one of those reassuring large green rectangles. The driver slowed down still more. It wasn’t easy to make out the words with the windshield blurred by rain, but sure enough, M—— was listed—ten miles off, it said. A new directional arrow must have been recently painted on the sign without covering up the old one, making it impossible to tell whether we were being pointed right or left. At the fork in the road, the driver veered right. I myself thought the left arrow was the newer, but I was not native to these parts, and besides, I was too disheartened and tired to argue the point. Soon there began to appear along the road the usual diners, motels, and shopping strips that announce the entrance to most cities nowadays.

  M——, for I had to assume this was in fact M——, seemed closed up for the night; not a soul was out. I had been led to expect a small sleepy city, but not a comatose one. My driver found his way through the streets with ease and presently pulled to a halt in an old-style square with the requisite church, city hall, post office, and assortment of staid buildings that might have been appealing in bright daylight but offered no cheer on this dank fall night. At least the rain had stopped.

  I had been told a car would be waiting at the city hall. Though there was no such car, I had no choice but to alight with my briefcase and traveling bag. The driver accepted his pay in silence, never ceasing his humming. Normally I would have arranged to be picked up after my brief stay, but I found myself unwilling to spend any more time in the company of this person, from whom emanated what I first took as a vast hostility but later revised to a vast indifference, or more precisely, the most disconcerting sense of personal dispersion, a kind of amorphous spill that had left a gaping negativity within. So I said nothing about the return trip. I would make other arrangements.