Referred Pain: Stories Read online

  “You’re a reporter? Well, we might need some good coverage.” Only half-joking, Jim was very self-possessed. Older than he looked, probably. His obvious possession of Loretta gave Bennett the same uneasy feeling he had had at the prom, although this time he could find no fault with her. She was splendid, grandly confident without the arrogance he disliked in other would-be activists. His mother, maybe even his sister Helen, would have approved of her manners. Except of course for the arm linked through a black man’s.

  “I wish I could, but I’m just on the city desk. Local stuff.”

  “Local stuff’s been interesting these days,” Jim said.

  “It has,” Bennett agreed. “I wanted to get the Board of Ed. story, but my most exciting piece lately was the subway strike.” In their first year of high school, he remembered, still the placid decade though there must have been underground rumblings too faint for common ears, Loretta was the only girl in the class who said yes to the English essay assignment: Would you marry a person outside your race or religion? The teacher had her stand up and read her essay aloud, and afterward she faced a barrage of challenges, some of them insulting. Bennett felt for her, even tried to support her by a few placating comments. At first her voice had the familiar tinge of defiance that always hid her fears, but she quickly mastered herself. In the end, the incident won her friends and a reputation for boldness. He wondered if she and Jim were married.

  She started to pull both men off into a corner. “We must have a real talk!” But others kept crowding around—she knew everyone, it seemed, black and white. Bennett was captured too, first by Susan’s friends, then by a voluble girl who wanted to know how to get a start in journalism. Loretta caught his eye and gave a hopeless, amused shrug. Toasts, speeches, and the party broke up.

  “Good luck,” he managed to say. “Let me know how things go.” He scrawled his address on a cocktail napkin.

  “If I can. Happy new baby.” She was off with a flourish, Jim’s large hand planted on her shoulder, leaving Bennett unsatisfied. He wanted more. Not to take her in his arms; there were other women at the party he’d prefer for that—paler, less intense, self-contained women like Susan, though he hadn’t reached the point in his marriage when he would do more than notice them. He wanted only to be in Loretta’s presence. He felt renewed, restored to possibility, energy, adventure. But what was he thinking: he was twenty-nine years old, on the brink of fatherhood.

  Two months later, her voice on the phone was raked with anguish.

  “I need to see you, Ben. Right away. Please.”

  “Sure. What is it? Do you want to come over now?” Susan was out, he almost added. But why should it matter?

  “I don’t think so. Can you meet me someplace?”

  “I can’t get out. I’m sorry. The baby’s sleeping.” It was a Saturday afternoon, his turn to care for Richard. Susan was struggling to work part-time, and he had pledged to do his fair share. She was in a consciousness-raising group and gave cogent arguments for why he should. Bennett agreed in principle. Beyond principle, he dreaded his failings being aired before a roomful of women.

  “Oh, right, your wife was about to have a baby. Congratulations. What kind?”

  “A boy. He was born the day after that party.” In the flash flood of changes that swept him along, he’d almost forgotten meeting Loretta. “How about tomorrow morning? Coffee? Are you okay?”

  “I’ll tell you tomorrow.”

  He expected that she would be late, but she was there waiting for him. It was Helen who called her flighty, he reminded himself, but in fact she had always been prompt and prepared at school. An orderly child. He could still see her homework marching forthrightly across the notebook pages in that firm up-and-down writing. She sat at a table far from the door, drab and wretched in old jeans and a faded tie-dyed shirt. Thinner, sallow, her eyes stained a darker gray.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Jim’s dead.”

  They’d been seen around town together, she told him, and the locals didn’t like it. Jim was driving a pickup truck with three of the other men, late at night, in the rain, and they had an accident. The others, who had minor injuries, swore that a car forced them off the road, but they had no proof, no witnesses, no license plate. There was nothing to be done. She cried as she told the story.

  Bennett was horrified. He knew such things happened—his colleagues came home with stories that never made the papers—but they had not touched his life. He leaned across the table to stroke her cheek. That’s what happens, he could hear Helen say, when you start putting your nose in other people’s business. “I’m so sorry,” he said, too loud, to drown Helen out. “But there must be something you can do …”

  “They told me I’d better leave or I might get hurt too. It was two days ago. I just … I had to leave him there.”

  “It’s awful. Were you married, Loretta?”

  She looked startled. “Married? No. What difference does that make?”

  “None. None at all. I just wondered …”

  “Bennett.” She stared at him as she had as a child, the gaze that had made him feel singled out, transcendent. It was both claim and offer. A promise to transport him to vaster places where unpredictable things happened. But something was expected of him in turn. “I need money for an abortion. Can you lend me some?”

  “Oh … Are you sure … ?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Well, of course. Do you have someone … reliable to do it?”

  “Yes, yes, it’s all set. I just need the money.”

  “What about your family? I mean, I’m glad to help you out, but don’t you want anyone to …”

  “I came to you because I thought you wouldn’t ask so many questions. You’d understand. Look, I’m sorry to lay this on you, Ben. But you’re the only one.”

  How could he be the only one, after so long? And what was he supposed to understand?

  “So. You’re a daddy.” She managed a smile. “What’s it like?”

  “Quite a change,” he said, embarrassed by his luck.

  She didn’t want him to meet her at the doctor’s—only give her the cash, which he did the next day on a street corner near his office.

  “Will you let me know if everything’s okay? Call me at work. Here’s the number.”

  He was out on assignment the next two days—a midtown water main break paralyzed traffic and sent hundreds of people to temporary shelters. When he returned, a message on his desk said, Loretta called, everything’s okay. No phone number.

  “Guess what your old friend’s up to now?”

  He moved the phone an inch away from his ear. “Why do you always use that tone for her, Helen? You don’t even know her anymore.”

  “I know what she is. You should too. She started early. She practiced on you.”

  “That’s absurd. We were infants.”

  “Bennett,” Helen said with a sigh. “You’re such an innocent, still. You used to let her lead you anywhere.”

  Wrong, all wrong, he thought, but how foolish even to discuss it at this point.

  “Her mother tells me she’s going to law school.” Helen offered her nugget with sneering relish.

  Bennett was relieved to imagine her sitting still, bent over her books. Was she still grieving over Jim’s death? Upset by the abortion? He longed to know. Then one autumn day, in brilliant light, he glimpsed her, or someone who looked just like her, from a Fifth Avenue bus window. Her hair flying free, she strode aggressively down the street with four or five people—fellow students?—laughing and gesturing, absorbed in talk. She wore leather boots and a black leather jacket and hauled a large tote bag. He wanted to call to her, but couldn’t get the bus window open. He rose to get off, but the bus was crowded; by the time he reached the door she’d vanished around a corner.

  Everything was changing so fast. Half the couples Bennett and Susan knew were getting divorced—a rite of passage, it seemed—and it was the wives who led the ex
odus. Sometimes he feared Susan might join them. Or was she just too busy? He didn’t dare ask. She didn’t always laugh at his quips lately. She could be acerbic when she was pressured by too many demands. A few times she remarked that he never asked any questions. “I’m glad to hear whatever you want to tell me,” he said. “Yes, but you don’t ask.” He tried to remember to ask more questions but found it a curious effort, not tangible and specific like remembering to stop for groceries or pick up the children’s toys.

  On a typical Saturday afternoon—Susan spooning puréed carrots into the new baby, Bennett scooting toy trucks along the floor with Richard—the phone rang. Not Helen, he prayed.

  “Bennett? Me again. Always calling you to bail me out.” He sensed fear behind the throaty, combative tone. Shouting and clattering sputtered through the wires. “As a matter of fact, I am calling you to bail me out. I was arrested.”

  She’d been in an anti-war demonstration, and the cops had dragged her limp body to the van. “You’re my one phone call. Can you do something? Like come down and bring a lawyer? I’ve got to get out of here. It’s a madhouse.”

  With all her new friends, why me? But he didn’t dream of refusing. His job had occasionally brought him inside a police station, but never to post bail. Would he need to sign forms asking for personal data? It might not go over well at the paper.

  “I’ve got to go out,” he told Susan, grabbing his jacket. “An old friend’s in some trouble.”

  “Who? Anyone I know?”

  “No. I’ll tell you later.”

  Helen’s husband was a lawyer, but that was out of the question. Anyway, his specialty was insurance fraud. From a street phone, he called a Legal Aid lawyer he knew through the paper, who owed him a favor and would know how to handle this discreetly.

  An hour and a half later, he sat opposite Loretta in a coffee shop, still edgy from the raucous scene at the station. He sympathized with the demonstrators—he sent checks to their cause—but did they have to go to such lengths? They were a rowdy, unkempt bunch, quite different from the earnest group at the party years ago. What had become of her zeal to transform Mississippi? Did she lose heart after Jim’s death? Or was it all the same zeal, free-floating, seeking a cause? Still finding herself?

  Her patched denim jacket with the peace symbols crookedly sewn on was torn at the sleeve; her skirt trailed on the floor. She was missing an earring, her hair was straggly, her face shiny with sweat and triumph. “Thanks so much,” she said. “You’re a real friend.”

  “And you’re a mess.” Clean up your act, he wanted to say. What do you think you’re doing? You used to say we had to figure out how to live right—awareness, choice, responsibility. But the hectoring words stuck on his tongue.

  As if she could read his mind, she reached out to put her hand on his. “Listen, I know what I’m doing, Ben. It’s important.”

  “It is important. But there are other ways—”

  “They don’t work as well. This’ll be in the papers, you’ll see. You of all people must know that. The bigger the stink, the better the coverage. From now on, that’s the way to go.”

  She was right. The placid time was long over. It had been an anomalous blip in history, a slack loop on the time line; even those who lived through it could hardly believe it had been real. The time of his childhood was discredited, and Bennett was willing to relinquish it. But he felt bereft and unprepared. His adult life was a crash course in reality, and he’d always hated cramming.

  “I heard you were in law school.”

  She jerked her head back in surprise. “I was thinking of applying but I changed my mind. How’d you hear that?”

  “Helen.”

  “Probably my mother told her. Wishful thinking. No, I wouldn’t have the patience. Right now we need quicker measures.”

  “Are you working? Do you need money?”

  “Thanks, no. I work on and off. Anyhow, I still owe you. I haven’t forgotten. You’ll get it back.”

  He waved that off. “Where are you living?”

  “I share a place downtown with a bunch of people. Hey, you’re not a spy for my mother, are you?” She tilted her head and smiled, and again the lush eagerness enveloped him like a perfumed mist, restoring him to himself. So what if she wasn’t the same girl he had loved? He was the same. It was as if he’d entrusted his soul to her long ago for safekeeping, and repossessed it only when she appeared. Yes, this was what he loved: not the person but the feeling she gave him. But how could they be separated? He turned to see them both in the mirror beside the table. In the glare of artificial light, the outlines of his face looked dim, blurred by confusion.

  “Of course not. I’m just concerned. You need to think of the future—”

  “I am thinking of the future. That’s what I was doing out there. What about your future?”

  “I’m so busy with the present, I can’t even see it.”

  “I’d love to meet your family some time. Can I come over?”

  “Sure. Today’s not a good day, though. Another time.”

  “Fine, I’ll give you a call.”

  In time an envelope with no return address arrived at his office, containing hundred-dollar bills folded into a sheet of paper: “Thanks again for being such a good friend. Love, L.” That lucid, good-natured, upright handwriting: here I am, nothing to hide. Didn’t she know how risky it was to mail cash? What kind of people send so much cash through the mail? People without a checking account. People who don’t want to put a return address on a money order. And where did she get it? He didn’t want to speculate. He’d never expected it back, and was more irked at her carelessness than grateful. The money hardly mattered now. With the boys in school and Susan working full-time, they could afford to hire help. The simmering tension over household tasks had subsided. They’d never really worked it out, they agreed in a melancholy mood. “The problem went away,” Bennett said.

  “No,” said Susan, “we evaded it.”

  “Okay, whatever.”

  “I hate that word, you know?”

  “But you do support freedom of speech?” Bennett joked.

  “All right, you get the last word, Ben.”

  “I didn’t know we were quarreling.”

  Their rare skirmishes were like that, so attenuated, so offhand, that he hardly recognized them until they were over. All in all, he felt fortunate. They’d managed better than many others. They were getting through, as if these frantic years were an obstacle course on the way to an earned serenity.

  “Do you ever dream of the foreign desk?” Susan once asked.

  “Not especially. Anyhow, how could I disrupt the kids and all? And your work.” She accepted in silence this tribute to the seriousness of her work. He would be faulted for a tactical error, Bennett thought, but he got no credit for right thinking. “Why? You think I need a change?”

  “Well, not if you’re happy with what you’re doing. I just wondered. You never talk about it.”

  “I’m fine as I am.”

  “It might be nice to see the world,” she said tentatively.

  “We could take a trip this summer. The kids are old enough.”

  “I guess. I meant like try living someplace really different. I don’t know, India? Morocco?”

  He had no longing for India or Morocco, but now and then he too was puzzled at how he had reached this stasis. Then he would think over his luck: early on, he’d landed a job that was still the envy of his friends from journalism school. It was more than luck by now; he’d kept the job and done it well. By starting high, more or less, he was spared the hassle of rising.

  Still, it pleased him that his next assignment was a change from his usual beat of natural or technological disasters that brought predictable, remediable chaos. With local elections coming up, the mayor was paying a visit to a notorious downtown park; no doubt he would vow to clean it up and reclaim it for innocent pleasures. Bennett was among the crowd of reporters trailing after him. The park was a
mess, a littered shantytown of refrigerator cartons and corrugated metal held together by duct tape. Marijuana scented the air. Half-naked children played in the stubble or wailed for attention. Men and women in tie-dyed rags or long velveteen dresses sauntered about, some cooking over open fires. At least they weren’t handing out flowers, Bennett thought. It was a bit late in the day for flowers. Friendly at first, even hospitable, as if entertaining in their living rooms, the squatters began heckling the mayor as soon as he opened his mouth. Someone lit a joint and offered it teasingly to the reporters. Bennett jotted down notes in haste, excited and repelled by the scene. The police, on good behavior in front of the TV cameras, prodded a few nodding figures draped over benches, lumpy shapes wrapped in shawls though the day was warm. As one of them raised her head, a scarf fell to her shoulders. Her hair hung in clumps, her face was puffy and smudged with dirt. The mayor wagged his finger. “We want to get help for people like this. No way is this liberation. This is a public health hazard.” Bennett wrote down the words, planning how he might frame the quote. The woman slumped back down and the cop pulled her up again. She shook him off and opened her eyes wide.

  Bennett’s every muscle clenched in denial. Transformed, yes, but not beyond recognition.

  He should do something, but what? Go over and speak to her? Take her home? Give her a new life? How could he explain her to Susan?

  The police began leading the more vocal squatters into a waiting paddy wagon. They tried to drag Loretta off, but the others formed a barricade in front of her. An ugly scene might have erupted—the bigger the stink, the more coverage, as she had said. But one of the mayor’s aides gestured at the cops and they retreated. Bennett had almost made up his mind to go to her, but the mayor was rushing off to the next stop on the expedition, mouthing words the other reporters were writing down. He had no choice but to follow.