Referred Pain: Stories Read online

  It stops short of what’s behind the fear. It stops short of the excitement of it, the lure of disaster, the subterranean enticement to let disaster have you, so that after the boy leaves, besides the obvious relief, there’s the merest trace of letdown. He came in, he scared you half to death, then he left? That’s all? Well, what more do you want? To be raped or killed? No, no. What, then? To know what it’s like without having to feel it. To know but not to suffer. (Which is the experience that stories offer us, come to think of it.)

  For all those reasons, what I set down isn’t enough. It would be enough only if I were to transform all the details—the pineapple chunks, the mini dress, the neighbors, the family from Cleveland—disguise them like guests at a masked ball, making them as unrecognizable and even farfetched in design as flowers are from their roots, so that only the fear kept its true face, standing out in the masked crowd, its face alone stark and bare, grimacing, potent, leering, and spreading like a stain, consuming everything in its orbit like a hoop of fire. And I’m captivated by it, by the threat of my own destruction.

  I would begin with notes, with whatever random images offer themselves, and see where they lead, whether they coalesce into anything resembling or remotely equivalent to my fear.

  Okay. Someone not me, but scared like me. She’s young, let’s say twenty-five. She comes to New York right after college, from the boondocks, not too far away, though. She wants excitement. She wants glamour, the kind of life she’s read about in slick magazines, where long-haired girls in spaghetti-strap dresses dance all night in discos on a perpetual high from something or other (but let’s not get into any drug scene here, not relevant). Or stroll into foreign-sounding restaurants on the arms of rich bronzed men. Yachts. Caribbean vacations. Celebrity parties. All an absurd fantasy, that’s clear, concocted to sell magazines to girls exactly like her, from small towns, bored girls with no money who feel they’re destined for something better than what they’ve seen so far. She thinks she’s beautiful enough, bold enough for all that. She’ll get a job, something in the music business, PR or advertising. Buy the right clothes. Hunt out the right places. No plan, no thought, just fantasy. An incredible naïveté. Sleepwalking through her life. (Thirty years ago, maybe. But can anyone be so naïve today? I think so. Wait and see.)

  This is all background. This is not the story proper. Keep going and the story will turn up.

  Well, she couldn’t swing it. No surprise there. She didn’t know where to begin, knew no one, and worst of all she had no money. In desperation she gets a job as a receptionist in a law firm, not what she had in mind. She has to buy suits and silk shirts and pumps instead of slim spaghetti-strap dresses and high-heeled sandals—all on a credit card, naturally. They hire her because she’s decorative and has a faintly Latin look—her mother was born in Puerto Rico. She doesn’t know that’s why they hire her, or if the thought crosses her mind she dismisses it. Not interested. She’s never thought much about it, the whole ethnic issue hasn’t been part of her suburban life (suburban? Or small-town? Work that out later). She can barely speak Spanish. Her mother came here at the age of two. She likes salsa, but so does everyone else. Whatever. They hire her, that’s all she cares about. They say they’ll train her to do paralegal work eventually, but meanwhile they need a receptionist. And she needs money, fast. She can’t ask her parents. Her father’s been sick, out of work, and they’re probably hoping she can help them out one of these days. She lives in a tiny, dilapidated but costly apartment on the edge of a newly chic downtown neighborhood. Chic but squalid. A firetrap. The banisters of the hall stairs give her splinters, the bathtub has claws, the sink has orange and green stains, the windows have to be tugged open, the screens are torn, the wood floors are furry with wear, the ceiling fixtures are bare bulbs, and worst of all, there are mice. She’s afraid of mice, of small swift creatures in general. (There, that’s the ticket! But not mice. A bird? Yes, maybe a bird.)

  Still, she tries not to let this, or the drug dealers on the corner, get her down. She’ll find the right life, only it might take longer than she expected. If she were an artist, an actor or a dancer, she could hook up with the right people. But she has no special talents. She’s not stupid, she knows there are things she can do, she just doesn’t know yet what they are and she has no one to help her find out. (How do you find out when you’re that kind of girl—sheltered, uninformed, unformed? When what you thought was your boldness shrinks and shrivels in the gust of the city like a cheap shirt in the wash?) She has a couple of friends from school but they can’t help; they’re pretty much in the same boat. They go to discos together but can’t seem to connect with the right people. The guys they meet are creeps from New Jersey.

  That’s roughly who she is, then, an eager girl who doesn’t know yet who she is. Enough for a start. Now for a trial run.

  Barely awake in the gray dawn, she heard a hazy fluttering noise, like rustling paper or wind beating on leaves. She concentrated. It might not even be real, might be the last shreds of a dream unraveling. Or the embryo of a new dream.

  It persisted. It was real, perhaps from the bird’s nest in the maple tree right outside the open bedroom window. There might be a nest of wasps, out here in the country. Sometimes squirrels climbed the branches in the first light and pattered across the roof over her head. Their pattering reminded her of mice, but she knew they couldn’t get in.

  The clock said ten after six. The mist could lift; the days often started out this way near the sea, then modulated into brilliance. The sound, too, would go away if she ignored it. She pulled the sheet around her, curled her knees to her chest to still any possible rustling from within—yes, there was that, but she wouldn’t think about it yet—and sank back to sleep.

  When she woke again at nine she had forgotten the sound. She pulled on shorts and a striped shirt and went downstairs. She saw the thing at once and gasped: it lay in the windowed alcove of the dining room, right near a leg of the oak table. Lucky she’d slipped into sandals. She hoped with all her might that it was only a clump of dust, although the house was kept ferociously neat. A wood chip from the fireplace? But it was no use hoping—it stirred. Please, not a mouse—she thought she’d escaped mice forever. Whatever it was, the blob was barely alive, an offensive contrast to the gleaming milky wood floor. She inched closer and tapped her foot gingerly and the blob moved in reply, a slight heave, an intake of breath. She couldn’t go any nearer; her heart was pounding.

  So she’s pregnant, it appears. Yes, and almost five months gone. Too late for an abortion, almost beginning to show, and yesterday she felt it kick for the first time. It was horrible. It frightened her, like having a stranger, an intruder inside her, trapped and knocking to get out. She’d let it out if she could, but she can’t, not now. It’s going to be kicking and moving around more and more; she knows that and dreads it. It’s like harboring an alien, she’s been invaded, no longer owns her body, there’s this furtive thing with restless paws, this small creature, trapped inside her. Growing all the time. She knows this isn’t how you’re supposed to feel. She’s read those articles too—she has plenty of time to read magazines at her desk. You’re supposed to feel joyous, expectant. But she doesn’t, can’t even pretend she does. She’s terrified.

  How did this happen? Let’s see. One of the lawyers at work, one of the older ones, say—forty-eight? no, forty-six—takes an interest in her, starts taking her to lunch, then to dinner. Expensive restaurants. She buys the right clothes—she’s good at clothes, thinks belatedly she should have tried for a job in fashion, maybe working for a designer—so that strolling in at his side, she can almost imagine she’s in the magazine life for a few hours, only he’s twenty years older than the companion she pictured. And he’s not in music or movies or even real estate, just a lawyer who specializes in contracts. Plus he’s married. Technically: his wife’s been in the hospital for several years, wasting away, some rare disease she’s never heard of.

  He’s good-
looking, he’s kind, he’s generous, and he likes her. It puzzles her. Call him Roger. She can’t bring him to her apartment—she imagines, wrongly, that he’s never seen anything remotely like her apartment—and he can’t bring her home because of his children—Brian, sixteen, and Nancy, nine, who miss their mother—so they go to hotels. He makes love in a slow, intense, and deliberate way, with a ravenous but controlled hunger, like a gourmet sitting down to a superb dinner, intent on savoring every morsel and making it last as long as possible. This, to her, is an education. Certainly better than the two guys she’d half-heartedly let into her apartment, who fell on her with a stagy, unconvincing, and ineffectual ardor. It has the density of the real. At last.

  So, move it along.

  She’d have to deal with the thing, whatever it was, alone. Roger was gone, called back to the city yesterday—a sudden crisis at work—only an hour after they arrived. He promised he’d be back in time for dinner tonight. He’d invited some friends over, an archeologist couple just home from a dig in Mexico, and a lawyer with an actor husband. (Grown-ups, she thought.) He wanted to introduce her to his friends. Not to worry if she couldn’t manage dinner, he said. Call the store in town—they’d send over everything she needed, soup to nuts. All he asked was that she keep an eye on Nancy. Brian had stayed in the city. Incredibly, his rock band, a cacophony of raging hormones, had an actual gig in a tiny bar near her old apartment. His absence was a relief. Brian made her edgy: a skinny, surly, slovenly adolescent in baggy pants and a baseball cap apparently glued to his head, who regarded her menacingly and played the drums—he had a set in the beach house as well as in the city. The members of his band, three boys cut from the same sullen pattern, would come over and make ghastly music for hours on end. Roger indulged them. The girl, Nancy, she liked better. She was thin and aloof, such an unchildlike air of gravity about her, but at least she spoke; she told Rosa she wanted to be a veterinarian when she grew up.

  She stepped backward toward the stairs, keeping her eye on the thing on the floor. “Nancy,” she called. “Are you awake? Could you come down, please?”

  She heard bare feet on the stairs. Nancy was ready for the day, washed, combed, her sandy hair tied back severely in a pony tail. She was dressed, uncannily, like a miniature, paler Rosa, in tan shorts and a striped shirt. Like a kid sister. “What?” she asked.

  “Hi,” Rosa said. “There’s, uh, something in the house.” She mustn’t sound alarmed. “A little animal, I think. Remember you told me you want to be a vet, you love animals? Well, maybe you can help get it out.”

  “Where?” Her face was alert but impenetrable, and her tone, as always with Rosa, one of well-mannered resistance.

  “Over there. See? Near the table.”

  “Oh.” Nancy approached it, and Rosa, emboldened, followed.

  “Do you think it’s a mouse?”

  “How could it be a mouse? It has feathers. It’s a bird.”

  As if to confirm Nancy’s pronouncement, the bird fluttered its wings and flew several inches off the floor. They both jumped back. The bird came to rest a few feet from where it had started, further in the alcove. An ordinary brown sparrow. Outdoors, where it belonged, it could never cause alarm. Indoors it somehow turned eerie, its movements unpredictable. It’s been here for hours, Rosa thought. While she lay carelessly in bed it had been flying around, taking its measure of the house with the beat of its wings, taking possession and injuring itself on the hard surfaces.

  Roger’s gratitude makes her uneasy: she’s restoring him to life, she gives him a reason to get up in the morning. She doesn’t know what to say to this, can’t say the truth, that for her he’s only the beginning. She drifts along because it’s so nice, more than nice, such a relief to have someone who cares for her. Only now can she feel what a strain it was, struggling on her own and getting nowhere. He knows the city, knows how to do everything, pays for everything; he even takes her out on a fishing boat one weekend. Since they have nowhere to cook the fish, she finally brings him to her apartment, and when he sees it he looks somber and says this won’t do, he must arrange something better right away. She looks at the apartment through his eyes, then looks at him, good-tempered, sexy, generous. What she feels is a generic affection mingled with a temperate desire. More curiosity than desire, actually. That part is an adventure, having her body catered to with such attention, seeing what it’s capable of. She looks at the apartment again, and yes, she’ll let him help her out. Make things a bit easier. It’s too soon to give in, she knows that, she even has twinges of guilt over the sick wife, but it won’t be forever. She’ll be his distraction for a few months, as long as it lasts, and enjoy some relief herself. That’s not giving in, is it? It’s a step toward a life. Or is it a step away? She’s not sure. But it’s something happening, anyway, and she lets the happening pull her in.

  Very soon she has a new apartment with all the grace and appurtenances the old one lacked. And no mice.

  “I wonder how it got in. The doors and windows were all closed.”

  “The fireplace,” said Nancy. “They come down the flue.” They both glanced over to the living-room fireplace. There was still a faint smell of smoke in the air; the nights were chilly, and Rosa had lit a fire after dinner, then suggested they play a game. What did Nancy like? Scrabble? Monopoly? But Nancy said she’d rather watch TV in bed. Rosa had sat alone for hours, staring at the flames, willing the thing inside her to be still. Forever. At last she’d gone upstairs, first checking to make sure the fire was out.

  “Oh, has this happened before?”

  “No, but that’s how they get in. Poor thing. It’s hurt.”

  Rosa was losing patience but dared not rush the child. “Do you think you could just, you know, pick it up and take it out?”

  “I really don’t know how to handle birds. I know about mammals. A bird is not a mammal,” said Nancy evenly. “Why don’t you do it? You’re supposed to be the grown-up.”

  “You’re right. But the thing is … I don’t like to hold birds. I don’t like the fluttering. I could use some help, is what I’m trying to say.” She had a wild vision of the two of them locked in paralyzed intransigence all day, standing in these very positions when the guests arrived for dinner. Roger would be appalled and embarrassed. His wife, when she was well, would probably have swept the thing briskly out the door. Rosa didn’t even know where the broom was.

  Nancy cast her a look of mild contempt and bent over the bird. She took it in her hands. Her cheeks grew flushed.

  “That’s it. Good girl,” Rosa crooned.

  Suddenly Nancy’s hands flung open, and the bird fluttered about the dining room in weak, downward spiraling circles. Rosa leaped back and covered her face with her hands. Peering out, she saw the bird plummet to the floor, where it quivered. She despised her fear, yet she couldn’t bring herself to touch it.

  “Why’d you let go?”

  “I don’t know. It kept fluttering. I just couldn’t hold it anymore. Can’t we do it later?”

  “I have an idea.” Rosa got a small towel from the kitchen. “Here. Pick it up in this, wrap it around, and hand it to me, then open the kitchen door and I’ll put it out.”

  When she tells him she’s pregnant he begs her not to have the abortion. Implores. The easygoing manner vanishes; he’s a man obsessed. They’ll be a family together. She’ll meet his children. His wife would never leave the hospital. He stops short of saying she’ll soon be dead—that is understood. Rosa would give him a new life, and he would give her everything she wants. (Never mind that she doesn’t know yet what she wants. Or that the whole thing doesn’t sound right: waiting for his wife to die? What does that say about him? About her? Yet is it so selfish of him to want a life, same as she does? What would she say if one of her friends told her this story? Get out, she’d say. Or maybe not. Go for it, maybe.)

  He keeps her busy, as if by occupying all her free time he could prevent her from seeing a doctor. Of course he’s busy too�
��lawyers always are—but he manages. On weekends he takes her to his beach house, a big glass house. Or mostly glass, it seems. A spacious, sleek, airy house, like the kind featured in the magazines she reads. His wife had good taste. She meets the children; they’re cold to her. Naturally—they’re old enough to get the picture. Dad’s girlfriend. She tries to imagine herself as their mother and fails. She’s not ready for that. Her own life has barely begun. What had been a relief, a sexual adventure, becomes tangled, strained, fraught. Worse, a cliché. Even she can see that. She owes him. He’s bought her, and he’s bought the baby that’s invading her too. Once she gets rid of it he’ll get rid of her. Back to the walk-up with the orange and green sink and the mice: what’s known as freedom.

  Days pass. Weeks. She can’t get herself to the doctor because she dreads confronting Roger afterward with the news. She’s never had to face anything so serious. She tries to put it out of her mind. Maybe it’ll go away by itself. Some do. With a numb fascination, she watches herself moving into risky territory, like someone who opens a door marked Danger. Except she doesn’t have to open any door—the door has been open all along. She has only to stand still and do nothing.

  Nancy wrapped the bird in the towel and thrust it disdainfully at Rosa, who accepted the slight package. But instead of moving to the door she stood stiffly, waiting for the light fluttering, as if she wanted to feel what she most dreaded, make the horror tangible. Then she would know it. Along with the desire to flee was the perverse desire to know. It kept her rooted to the spot, clutching the towel.

  The bird burst from the folds and zoomed up to Rosa’s face. She screeched, staggered back and dropped the towel. “Shit,” she moaned, brushing the ghost of wings from her cheek. The bird circled again, flew into the living room and came to rest near the fireplace, as if seeking to leave the way it had come.