Referred Pain: Stories Read online

  It gnawed at him that she might have seen him. That he had denied her and she knew it. His dearest friend. No, he protested, she’s not your dearest friend anymore. She hasn’t been your dearest friend since you were six. Or twelve. Eighteen at the most. The cells had replaced themselves several times over by now; that grotesque crone was no one he knew. Enough rescue work—let someone else take over. One of her hippie friends.

  But he couldn’t wholly believe this. He didn’t know what to believe. He only knew he couldn’t crawl out from under the weight of guilt. Had he needed help, she would have rushed to his side. He would stake his life on it. Sure she would, he thought bitterly; it would be a new adventure for her. At least he didn’t mention her in his article, which by rights he should have done.

  He’d have to go back and do something for her. But the next day Richard fell off his bike and sprained an ankle, and Mark came down with the flu. Schedules had to be rearranged. Even without accidents or illness, there was never enough time. He was forever behind, a lagging, panting runner in a race headed nowhere. Nights, he and Susan fell into bed late and exhausted. His parents and their neighbors had never been so overtaxed. They had time to sit on the porch and read the papers and play cards, swatting lazily at mosquitoes. Yes, it was that placid, dead time when no one did anything. Dead inside, Loretta used to say. Nowadays everyone said it, so it must be true. Such placidity wasn’t meant to last. It was insidious. It lulled the privileged, at the expense of others they never saw, or if they saw them, they didn’t notice them, which was worse. Bennett knew the ideology inside out. But he was so weary.

  By the time he returned to the park she was gone. The squatters were still there, despite the mayor’s speech. Moving through the clumps of people playing guitars or stretched on the ground and smoking, Bennett asked for her by name but no one knew any Loretta. He described her as best he could—as she’d looked on that awful day. “Oh, you mean Lulu,” said a tattooed man with a harmonica. “Gone, man. Who knows where? She comes and goes.”

  He should have pressed further, but he was too angry. All right, so now everyone was alive, in perpetual motion. And her perpetual motion had brought her to this—a drugged, collapsed lump on a park bench. Was that better? he wanted to shout at her. Dead inside. He didn’t want to find her. Lulu!

  He continued at the newspaper, valued for his competence, even if it was somehow understood he wouldn’t be given the major stories. They moved to a larger apartment where Susan used a spare room as a studio—she had more designing work than she could handle. She took to working late in the evenings after the boys had gone to bed. Bennett ambled in.

  “How’s the new computer working out?”

  “It’s amazing.” She seemed pleased that he asked, and began demonstrating its wonders. It could juggle images and typefaces in a flash, could isolate elements of one image and transfer them to another. Even the human face was fair game. Playing around with magazine photos, she put Gorbachev’s bald head above Ronald Reagan’s wrinkled brow, then by a series of deft clicks, transformed Woody Allen into Clint Eastwood. “There! A total makeover. It’s like dressing up paper dolls. Everything’s fluid. You can doctor old photos so in a way you’re changing reality. That could be dangerous, you know, politically. But it makes things so much easier. Stuff that used to take me hours, I can do in a minute. Watch what I can do with these headlines.” With her fingers dancing avidly over the keys, she was remaking history. The administration was toppled over the Iran Contra scandal. Peace came to Northern Ireland. Famine in Africa was averted by swift UN measures. Bennett stood bemused. Perhaps life was really like that. Written not in stone but in flickering images never meant to be grasped and held firm, relied on, or even remembered.

  Watching her, he felt a surge of love. He touched her hair, which showed faint streaks of gray. Her bare arms were taut, the skin smooth; she found time to lift weights and take long runs in the park. “It’s fantastic. But maybe you’ve worked enough for one night.”

  “Are you listening, Ben, or just lusting?”

  “A little of both. I’m not like Gerald Ford. I can do two things at once.”

  Months, even years, could go by without any thought of Loretta. And then there she’d be: holding up a sign in dripping blood-red letters, “Hands Off Our Bodies,” when the abortion clinic two blocks from his apartment was destroyed by arson. He thought he’d tumbled into a time warp: traffic diverted, pedestrians funneled to a narrow path, demonstrators shouting slogans behind police barricades while counter-demonstrators shouted back. He was transfixed by the sign and hadn’t even noticed the person carrying it, when she said, “Hey, Ben. Don’t tell me you don’t remember me!”

  He had to stare for a good few seconds, she was so changed: lean and angular in a man’s sports jacket and white shirt, her cheekbones jutting, the once-lavish hair lopped off in a severe cut. Then he was levitated by joy. “Hey, Loretta!”

  “What’re you doing here? Covering the story?”

  “No, just passing by.” A moment ago, as he glimpsed one of his colleagues, a newly hired young woman, flashing her press pass and elbowing through the crowd, his face had darkened. But on second thought, of course it made better sense to have a woman cover this story.

  “Can you believe those lunatics?” Loretta said.

  “At least no one was hurt.”

  “Not this time. Ben, this is Faith.” She turned to the woman beside her, similarly dressed, her hair cropped the same way. Chunky and graying, Faith eyed Bennett warily.

  “Pleased to meet you.” He held out his hand.

  “Faith is my partner.” A challenge.

  “I’m still pleased to meet you,” said Bennett, and both women smiled, Faith grudgingly, Loretta with a trace of the old glow. In truth he was not pleased; he was only pleased with himself at having brought off the moment well enough. His Loretta? She should know by now who she was.

  “Can you take a few minutes for a cup of coffee?” No, she didn’t want to miss the action. “Then let’s just get out of the crowd for a second, okay? I need to find out … I’m so glad to see you looking well. I heard you were in bad shape.”

  “Strung out. It was so awful, I can’t tell you. I met Faith at the rehab center, and she saved my life.”

  Aha. It wouldn’t last long, he thought. He even felt a stab of sympathy for Faith, soon to be jettisoned. “I must tell you something. I’ve had you on my conscience. I saw you once, when you were …”

  “I know.”

  “You do?”

  “I wasn’t totally out of it. I did open my eyes.”

  “I’m so sorry. I’ve felt rotten about it ever since.”

  “It’s okay. What could you have done? With the mayor there and all.” She gave a mischievous smile. “Anyhow, it wouldn’t have helped. No one could’ve helped me then.”

  “I should’ve tried. I don’t know why I didn’t. I guess I’m—”

  “It’s over. Let it go, okay? How’re you doing? More kids?”

  “No, just the two. How about you, I mean when you’re not standing here with your sign?”

  “Working at a shelter for abused women. Going to business school at night.”

  “Business school?”

  “Why not? I was always good at math, remember?”

  That was true. Without her patient coaching, he would have flunked trigonometry.

  “I’d better get back,” she said.

  “Why don’t you come over some time? We haven’t had a real talk in, I don’t know, years?”

  “Sure. I’ll give you a call.”

  And last sighted in the lobby of a midtown hotel at a conference for journalists. A total makeover, as Susan might say. Now she was the business manager for a slick fashion magazine and was dressed accordingly. Rosa Luxembourg was long forgotten. Faith, ancient history for sure. Bennett could tell by the way she moved—he’d looked at women long enough to know.

  Impaled by her gaze, he felt an odd rush of pl
easure at having kept his good looks. “So what does it all mean?” he teased. “Have you finally found yourself?”

  “I was never lost. Well, except that one awful time. Look, it’s a new era, we’ve got to keep up. But seriously, there is a reason.” She dug a snapshot from her wallet: a Chinese girl about three years old, holding a stuffed green elephant and beaming at the camera. “My daughter. Tina.”

  “Congratulations. How did this come about?”

  “I adopted her when she was six months old.”

  “Does she have a father?”

  “Not at this point. Maybe she will someday. Why should she have to wait for some notion of the ideal family? I heard about all the babies in orphanages and decided to do something about it.”

  This is the last straw, came a voice in his head. Helen’s or his own? Bennett couldn’t tell.

  “I see what you’re thinking, Ben. But this is different. I’ve been doing it for three years. Besides the months of arrangements. I can hold a job if I make up my mind to.”

  “Where is she while you’re at work?”

  “Day care, where do you think? What is it? You think I’m too old, is that it? I’m not too old. I could even get pregnant if I chose to.”

  “I know how old you are, Loretta.”

  “Never mind. Let’s get the packets and see what’s in store.”

  She slipped away in the crowd, and he was left stinging with remorse. Two years later, when Helen called about the accident, he stung all over again.

  “If you’re so upset, then phone the hospital,” Susan said, when she and the boys returned from the college tours and found him still lying on the motel bed. But he wouldn’t. Not till they got back home. As long as he heard no news, she was not dead yet. Miracles happened. She’d pulled through before. Besides, what right had he to this crushing sense of loss? He’d barely spoken to her in years. Not for the first time, he wondered why he had never desired her, or at least pursued her and waited for desire to catch up. He had an eye for women. He’d been drawn into two brief and secret affairs over the years, attended by such ravaging guilt that they were hardly worth it. Or maybe they just seemed so in retrospect. But Loretta had always felt out of bounds. Now he thought: she would have. I bet she would have. His life might have been vastly different; he had a glimpse of such breadth and iridescence that his eyes teared. Then he shuddered. To live daily in that glow, with that gaze on him? No, he couldn’t have stood it. It had been enough as it was. He had even enjoyed missing her between sightings.

  Now all her guises were erased, and what he saw with perfect clarity was the real Loretta, his: the small child. The two small children, holding hands; murmuring in the twilight. If she died, they would be dead inside him. Her old phrase, dead inside.

  Susan tried to distract him. “Do you think you’ll mind the boys leaving? The so-called empty nest?”

  “I don’t know. It’s not for a while yet. Mark’ll be around for two more years.”

  “There might be more time for us,” she said.

  The motel air between them seemed to stiffen. Time for us? What would they do with the extra time?

  The intensive care nurse said he could see her for a moment. She lay swathed in bandages and hooked to paraphernalia. How cruel that all her efforts should come to this, he thought. But he knew those trite words were mired in the grooves of a time dead and gone. Loretta wouldn’t think that way—if she were able to think. She hadn’t seen her life as a series of guises, nor would she think a life need add up to anything, like compound interest on mouldering capital. A life is whatever it is all along, she would say. He could hear her. He imagined he knew what she would say about everything. He understood—had always understood—that she was responding to what called her moment by moment. That was a way of making a life, a self, as good a way as any other. It was the life she had found, at any rate, and it was distinct from his. Only some fixed perversity in him had pretended not to understand. Some hanging back. Or envy. The Helen part of him.

  Her eyes opened, clear and knowing. The steady gaze.

  “You!” she whispered.

  “Me.”

  “Talk to me, Ben.”

  He opened his mouth to speak. He didn’t know what he would say, but trusted that words would come. Now, finally, he could be a true friend to her. Now he could do everything he wished he had done. Brought her to meet his family. Gone to see her child. Written something about Jim’s death, pressed for an inquiry. Stood beside her at the clinic demonstration. Gone to her side that day in the park. Now he could do it all. And if he could live it again, he would not betray her as he had when they were six. Seeing her powerless under the white sheet, he remembered how their childhood idyll had ended. They had gone too far, far out of the neighborhood, and eaten crushed ice with fruity syrup. They were out on the street on a sweltering August day and Loretta wanted to walk. They ventured around the corner and down a block of row houses identical to their own. They’d done that before, but this time she wanted to go further. They weren’t supposed to cross the street, he reminded her, but she didn’t care. “Come on,” and she tugged at his hand. They were careful to wait for the traffic lights. On and on they walked, while Bennett grew ever more anxious. How would they find their way back? But Loretta said it was easy, she knew the way, and he followed. Soon they were in a neighborhood of shabby apartment buildings with rows of garbage cans at cellar doors set in the pavement. Lots of people were outside. Dark men sat at a table playing a game with tiles. Dominos, Loretta said knowingly—her grandparents played it. Women on plastic chairs fanned themselves with folded newspapers, and children like themselves, but darker, played dodge ball in the street. When a car appeared, the women called out strange words and the children dashed for the curb. Spanish, Loretta said. People smiled at them as they passed. It got so hot that they sat down on a curb, and a fat old woman tried to talk to them in a friendly way, but they couldn’t understand her. Loretta talked anyway. She counted up to five in Spanish—the weekly cleaning woman had taught her—and the fat woman and her friends clapped. After a while they got up and walked some more, to a stand where a thin young woman in shorts and a red halter was selling ices. “Let’s get some,” Loretta said.

  “We have no money.”

  “Maybe she’ll give us some anyway.” They watched as the woman scooped crushed ice into white paper cones, then squirted colored syrup on top from an array of huge upside-down jars. The colors were dazzling—red, green, purple, yellow, and blue. They stood staring until at last the woman did offer them some. Loretta nodded eagerly. The woman pointed to the jars of syrup to ask which color they wanted. Loretta chose blue, Bennett red. Thank you, they said, and everyone standing around laughed. Gracias, the woman said, and they repeated it after her. The ices were delicious, cold and sweet, the syrup thick and gooey. They sat on the curb sucking at the cones until there was nothing left, then they turned and headed for home. But they couldn’t find the way. Soon they were crossing streets at random. The streets were broad, with hurtling trucks and buses. Nothing looked familiar. Loretta tripped and cut her knee, and they wiped her blood with their shirts. She didn’t cry but Bennett was nearly in tears—he thought they’d never find their way home. At last he spied something he recognized, the huge plate-glass windows with bright new cars inside, and then he was able to guide them back. A block from home they met his mother, leading Helen by the hand. “Where’ve you been?” she shouted. “We’ve been looking everywhere for you.” Bennett thought she’d slap him, but she didn’t. “What’s that stuff all over your faces?” They told her about the free ices, and she said, “You ate that garbage! You’ll be sick from it, wait and see!” Loretta’s mother was hunting in the other direction, she told them. They were very bad to make everyone worry. “Whose idea was this?” She glared at Loretta as if she knew already. Bennett pointed. “She wanted to go for a walk.” His mother shook her head at Loretta, but all she said was, “Look at you, you cut your knee.”


  “It doesn’t hurt,” Loretta said.

  Loretta was kept in the house for three days as punishment. Bennett’s mother told him not to play with her. “She’s too wild. There’re plenty of other children. And you don’t have to go wherever people tell you. You could’ve gotten into trouble. You could’ve gotten really lost.” But we were really lost, he thought. Of course he still played with her—he knew his mother said things in anger that she didn’t really mean. But it was never the same. “Were you punished?” Loretta asked when she was back on the street. “No, she just yelled.”

  “You’re lucky. But it was fun getting lost.”

  “It wasn’t. I didn’t like it.”

  “You liked the ices. And we got them for free.”

  He wished he had been a bolder boy. He wished he could have told his mother that he wanted to go too, that he loved Loretta because she urged him on. That without her he would lack the courage or the will to move out into the world. But the past was irreparable. Now he could do it all. At least he could talk, if that was what she wanted. Just at that moment, though, a heavy-set man with a bald spot walked up to the bed. Loretta strained to smile, and gazed at him the way she used to gaze at Bennett. The man shoved aside the tubes and bent down to kiss her. The husband. He had forgotten about him.

  “The doctor says you’re going to be all right,” he said, stroking her hand. “You’ll walk, you’ll talk, everything. It’ll just take some time.”

  Bennett stepped back to leave them alone. “Tina?” he heard her breathe. “She’s okay,” the husband whispered back.

  At dinner that evening, Susan asked how his friend was. “Who is this anyway? Some great love of yours I don’t know about?”

  “When I was six, I was in love with her. I’ve hardly seen her since high school.”

  “Six? I wouldn’t have thought you were such a romantic boy.”

  Had she questioned him further, now he might have told her. But Susan didn’t ask anything more. Way back, she’d complained that he didn’t ask many questions, was not curious, and in time she had become that way herself. He’d heard that long-married couples often take on each other’s traits.