Referred Pain: Stories Read online

  I thanked him for his hospitality and for the ride. There was more I wanted to say, but I hadn’t had time to sift through all I was thinking and feeling. For a wild moment, as I got out of the car, I thought of asking him to take me back with him to Old M——. But it was far too late for me to be given a stone like the others. In any case, it would have faded considerably. I would have to make do with what light I had.

  He wished me success with my ventures in New M—— and then spun the car around. The sky had grown darker as we said our good-byes and darkened still more as I began my walk into the city. I felt a slight drizzle; the pavement was shining, as if after a heavy rain.

  In about fifteen minutes I found myself in the town square, its church, city hall, and post office squat and stolid in the damp darkness. People hurried by, carrying rolled-up umbrellas. Most of the shops were closed for the night, but a few restaurants and a large drugstore were open. At the city hall, two men stood beside a car, gazing around anxiously. As I approached they rushed up to me.

  “Mr. B——? We’re so glad you’ve arrived safely. We were getting worried. Did you have trouble along the way? I hope you didn’t get caught in the rain?”

  I shook hands and apologized for my lateness. “No trouble at all,” I said. “The driver was a bit confused, so I walked the last few blocks.”

  “We’ll take you right along to the guest house,” the other one said. “I’m sure you’re tired out from your trip. Unless you’d like to stop for a bite to eat?” He gestured at the two coffee shops, the old-fashioned one with the plastic booths and the more stylish one with the gleaming espresso machine, both open and lively with customers.

  My contacts appeared somewhat tense. Behind their genuine eagerness to please, I could see they had been worried lest I not show up (this has been known to happen with similar guests, though I myself have rarely defected), irritated at having had to wait, and were now anxiously scrutinizing me in the hope that I would live up to my reputation and thus reflect well on them for having invited me—all natural enough in the circumstances, all very familiar. It made me long for the calm impromptu reception of the Stone Master of Old M——.

  I declined the offer of refreshment and climbed into the back seat of the car, where we exchanged remarks I had exchanged with dozens of strangers, dozens of times, in this situation—a combination of weather, flattery, name-dropping, and briefings on my scheduled appearances. Besides the allegedly eager audiences awaiting my presence, there would be several media interviews. I took careful note of all they said, as I had done many times on similar trips.

  On a street that resembled the Stone Master’s, we pulled up at the guest house, a squarish brick building with no special charm, but I knew from experience that it would be comfortable enough. I declined their offer of help with my bags; I carried no heavy suitcase full of samples, only a razor and a change of clothes. I was the product of my own labor, and I was here for the sale.

  The Trip to Halawa Valley

  THE WEDDING WAS OVER, and its residue showed the pleasing signs of success. The guests had been bedecked with leis—now the orchard of mango and lemon trees was strewn with white ginger petals. Coconut shells and half-eaten papayas, wet and succulent, dotted the grass. The table held the leavings of a feast; the air kept the echo of strumming music and afterimages of hula dancing. Tomorrow the bride and groom would be off for an unknown destination.

  “Where do you take a brief honeymoon if you already live in Hawaii?” Jim asked Lois. “Besides which, it’s twenty-five hundred miles from anywhere.” They sat on lawn chairs, exhausted, watching their oldest son, Paul, and his new wife and her cousins cleaning up. At twenty-four, to his parents’ amazement, Paul had made an enormous sum of money after just two years in a Wall Street brokerage firm and rewarded himself with a surfing vacation. On impulse, he bought a lush orchard on the island of Molokai, an instructional manual to go with it, and he remained. Paradise, he scrawled on his postcards.

  “I imagine they’re going to one of the other islands. To be alone for a while.”

  “Alone?” He gave an amused frown. “They’ve been living together for eight months.”

  Lois answered in kind, a wry glance from their old elaborate language of glances, recalled now like a mother tongue. They had married even younger than Paul and Kalani, with a vision of the road broadening before them, unfurling its adventures.

  “Well, if it’s privacy they want,” Jim said, “then they shouldn’t have me on the couch in the next room tonight. I ought to sleep in the cottage with you.”

  “Sleep with me?” She turned to him lazily. “Shouldn’t that be illegal or something?”

  “For convenience,” he said. “A small courtesy.”

  “To them, you mean? Or to you?”

  He laughed out loud, a man with flashes of charm all the more effective because of his usual somberness. Beneath that he was warm-hearted, aggrieved, delicate. The wedding had made him sentimental, thought Lois. He wanted to hold someone, or something, in his arms. A stuffed toy might do as well.

  “Ask me later, okay?”

  The wedding had softened her too, but differently. She missed having more family present. Above all, she missed their son Eric, who called two days ago to say he couldn’t attend. A close friend had died of AIDS. He had to speak at the funeral. When Paul, disappointed, announced the news to the family gathered in the living room, a cousin of Kalani’s said, “Too bad. Molokai’s a hangout for drag queens. A lot of them work as waiters. In the inn in town, you’ll find them.”

  “Eric is not a drag queen,” Jim had said loudly, half rising from his chair, while Lois put a hand on his arm. The cousin’s remark barely touched her. How close, she was wondering. How close a friend?

  She missed Suzanne, who would have been seventeen. But that feeling was nothing new. She missed Anthony, Eric’s twin; that missing was spiked with anger.

  At night she relented—sharing the cottage was a small enough courtesy. They sat side by side in its one bed like married people, though they had been divorced for four years. “So, how about reading to me? Is that the guidebook you’re holding? Read about that place Paul said we should go to tomorrow. What is it, Halawa Valley?”

  “The w is a v,” he said, and repeated it correctly.

  “You’ve been studying up.” She felt a stab of remembered admiration. An eager traveler, he always arrived ready, knowledgeable, his mind attuned.

  “Sure.” He riffled through the pages. “The hike is rated Hardy Family.”

  “As in Hardy Boys?”

  “No. Hardy Family as opposed to Experienced Adults or Easy Family.” There was a heavy pause. “Okay, first the road. ‘It’s a good paved road. The only problem is there’s not enough of it. In places, including some cliff-hugging curves, it’s really only wide enough for one car and you’ll need to do some serious horn tooting.’ But it’s supposed to be an incredibly beautiful drive.”

  Lois slid lower on the pillows and yawned. This was one of the games they used to play. When she couldn’t fall asleep, Jim would read to her from the newspaper, a sure soporific. Next morning he would quiz her, affecting sternness, to see at what point she’d dropped off. “Fill in the blanks, Lo. ‘The mayor lashed out at the members of the blank committee. He proposed a blank percent increase in the number of police.’” Or they’d make up excursions for vacations never taken. “Those fjords, weren’t they fantastic? The rushing water, the cliffs …,” Jim murmured for weeks after their trip to Scandinavia had to be canceled because he was fired. He did sound effects for films. Nowadays, with horror and violence in fashion, he was in no danger, was even overworked. Back then, the two-year layoff had been harrowing. Plus, the twins were sickly, and Lois’s assistant in the dress shop robbed her blind and then disappeared. All very unnerving. Lois acquired the habit of seeing every mishap as part of a series. Could they be jinxed?

  “So much for the road. The hike itself is Molokai’s most popular trail, t
hey say, though it’s a bit difficult to follow. You’ll need sturdy walking shoes—did you bring some? ‘The one-hour walk up is neither steep nor particularly strenuous, but it is often muddy and slippery.’”

  “Oh, muddy and slippery? Sounds great.”

  “Lush vegetation, fruit for the picking, mangoes, papayas, blah, blah. Keep an eye on the disappearing water pipe. Voracious mosquitoes. Come on,” he said as she groaned. “It’s an adventure. Let’s think positive.”

  The very words he had used when Suzanne first got the frightening symptoms. A rare degenerative disease, they were soon told. She was eleven. It had taken six months, and toward the end there was no question of thinking positive. Better not to think at all, just do what the nurses taught them to do. Not long after her death, Anthony joined the Hare Krishnas at eighteen, recruited at the airport on his way to college. Seen in the right light, Jim remarked acidly, that might make a great farce. Their living room was not the right light. When Anthony visited with shaved head, peach-colored robe, and dirty laundry, asking for a contribution, Lois became ill and Jim went out to run, tripped, and gashed his knee, requiring nine stitches.

  “Go on, read some more.” He had new reading glasses with steel rims, more stylish than the old. He still slept naked. His chest hair was grayer.

  “You have to ford a stream by stepping across the stones. They can be ‘deceptively slippery.’ Or you can wade. But if you wade, it says, ‘choose your footing carefully. Water depth can go from ankle-deep to knee-high in one step.’ After a heavy rain it’s almost impossible to cross safely.”

  Physical challenges held no intrigue for Lois. Jim was the hiker, skier, swimmer. He favored sports where you covered ground. Took flight. Sometimes he’d go out to run in the middle of the night after hours spent sitting up in bed side by side with her, talking until the words became a dull catechism. Maybe if we hadn’t moved …? The power lines? The food? The strain on Anthony …

  How have we sinned? In no way commensurate with the results. How to continue? Acceptance, humility, move forward. But they balked at that next step. They were too alike, they agreed, something stubborn and immutable in their natures. They should have taken turns mourning and soothing, but like cranky children, each one wanted to be It: grief’s target.

  The litany was enervating; energy seeped away with each predictable word. Sooner or later bile would come up. “It’s a good thing we had a lot of children,” Lois had said near the end. “Like peasants. So no matter what happens there are some left to work the land and take care of the parents.” Jim glanced over, pained at her levity. “On the contrary, maybe we should’ve stopped while we were ahead.” His form of humor was worse. “Why?” she shot back. “Eric? He’s okay. I can live with that.”

  “Sure, I can live with it all right too,” Jim said. “But can he? He could get sick any minute. He could be HIV-positive right now. Don’t tell me you don’t think about it all the time.” When Eric had called from college to announce that he was gay, they took it well. After all. And gay couldn’t hold a candle to the Hare Krishnas—there was no talking to Anthony since his mind had been colonized. Eric was more than eager to talk about his life. Share, as he put it. In return for their civilized acceptance, he gave affection and details. “Be careful,” Lois said each time he phoned, and when she hung up, moaned into the pillow, “This is not turning out as I pictured it.”

  “Once you cross over,” Jim went on, “the trail parallels the stream, but you can’t always see it. There’s that water pipe to follow, but it comes and goes.”

  “We’ll probably get lost and starve in the woods. Remember on the news the other night, they found a hiker in the woods after a week? He looked half-dead. Paul and Kalani won’t be back for days, and no one will think of looking for us.”

  He still found her amusing, apparently. “It takes longer than that to starve, Lois. Besides, there’s all that fruit to pick—mangoes, guavas, whatever.”

  “We could be washed away in a tsunami. Didn’t Kalani say it was a tsunami area?”

  “Yes, there was a huge one in 1946, it says here, which took all the taro farms and most of the people. Then another in 1957. There are only seven families left in the valley.”

  “We could visit the leper colony instead. It’s not catching. Nobody shuns the lepers anymore.”

  He didn’t laugh this time. Intent, hard-muscled, dark, he was absorbed in the guidebook propped on his raised knees. Friends had found his somberness intimidating, but not Lois. She saw it as a form of concentration, of rootedness in his life. No wonder he needed the running, skiing, swimming. When they finally parted, it was not in anger or antipathy but rather in exhaustion and defeat. If it had not turned out as they pictured it, at least they had completed jointly, as best they could, an assigned task, arduous, demanding. With Eric and Paul grown and in college, they could rest. Being together was not a rest. A reminder.

  He was inches away. She focused on her body like a scanner but could find no urge to touch him. Right after Suzanne’s death she couldn’t bear to touch and suspected he felt the same. The touch and the desire it called forth felt toxic. No more, was all she could think. No more. Of course that madness had soon passed. She wouldn’t mind, now, when he wrapped his arms around her to cling in the dark, as he surely would. A reflex.

  He looked up, smiling belatedly. “Don’t worry. We’ll have a fine time. When you get to the falls there’s a large pool—that must be the swimming Kalani mentioned. ‘Partly because the pool is so deep in the center, the water is shockingly cold.’”

  “I can hardly wait.”

  “You’ll like it. You’ll be hot from the climb.” He seemed to grow more eager as he read. In another age he might have rushed off to join the French Foreign Legion. “The water is red. ‘Moaula’—that’s the falls—‘translates as “red chicken,” and fittingly, the water appears red.’ Probably iron in the rocks.”

  “Or the blood of previous tourists.”

  “Listen to this. ‘If you plan on taking a dip here, it’s best to first place a ti leaf in the water. Legend has it that a mo’o, a giant lizard-like creature, resides in the pool. If the ti leaf floats, she welcomes company and it’s okay to swim. If it sinks, it’s a warning she wants no visitors.’” Abruptly, he shut the book and curled onto his side, staring at her. He turned to pluck a petal from the vase on the night table and rested it carefully on the sheet covering her. “What about you, Lois?”

  “I want no visitors.”

  She inched around yet another hairpin turn, peering sideways through the windshield for a broader view, then slowed almost to a halt as a battered pickup clattered by from the opposite direction. She was the steadier driver. Jim was given to fits of rashness or caution that made her close her eyes. Once, driving to the hospital to see Suzanne, he hit a truck. No one was hurt; the police took them the rest of the way.

  “Look out there on the right,” she said. A sweep of blue sea and surf came into view below the sheer drop of rock, and in the distance, the islands of Maui and Lanai rose green and hazy, low tufty clouds dappling them with shadow. She glanced up to see more clouds amassing in a pale gray sky. It was risky to take her eyes off the road even for an instant, though. She tooted around another absurdly narrow curve. Jim seemed far away, gazing up at outcroppings of jagged black rock like half-finished sculptures.

  Pain brought some couples closer and divided others. This was the sort of wisdom purveyed on the back pages of the daily paper, deduced from academic studies. Lois read the articles the way a mutilated veteran might read a textbook account of his battle—sure, tell me about it. A friend who had found Buddhism lectured her on freeing herself of expectations. But how could you live without them? Unless you were a monk or a saint. The world ran on effort and reward, action and results, investment and return. Was it unreasonable to expect your daughter to grow up?

  Soon the road headed downhill, ending in a valley walled by bulbous mountains that embraced a jigsaw-puz
zle shoreline. Lois parked near the beach and rubbed her tense neck. “Okay. Muddy and slippery rocks, disappearing path, shockingly cold water—here we come.”

  “You forgot the voracious mosquitoes.” He led the way to the tiny green church where the road began. According to the book, they were to proceed for half a mile past several houses, and at the last house to find a footpath.

  They found a chain stretched across the road and a misspelled hand-lettered sign nailed to a post. “Road Closed. Keep Out. No Access to Falls.” They were slanting block letters crudely drawn, crammed close together as they neared the right-hand edge.

  “What’s this all about?” He stiffened, as though he might stamp his foot in anger. “That can’t be an official sign. If they were serious, they’d block the road.” He stepped over the chain. “Come on.”

  “It says it’s closed. Maybe there’s flooding. It could be dangerous. Anyway …” She looked up at the graying sky.

  “We can always turn back. How bad can it be? It’s a major tourist spot.”

  “But there are no other tourists.”

  A Jeep appeared in the clearing in front of the church, and Jim charged over. The driver, a middle-aged Hawaiian man wearing an aloha shirt and a baseball cap, answered his questions in a lilting pidgin accent. No, there was nothing wrong with the trail and no flooding. But the road was on private property—those seven families awaiting the next tsunami, Lois thought—and the local people weren’t happy about visitors going up and back. Specifically, they didn’t want to be held liable for injuries that might occur on the trail. They couldn’t afford liability insurance.

  “But the path and the falls—that’s not private property, is it?”