Referred Pain: Stories Read online

  One day he heard a word that wasn’t his. “Deny.” Brenner, the gullible attorney in the novel, “couldn’t deny” the facts of the case, which involved dubious statements on grant applications for organ transplant research.

  Not “deny,” he told Tad. Anyone could write “deny”; it had none of the punch and ambiguity that was needed. “It should be ‘defy.’ Maybe I mumbled.” He never mumbled. But it was almost a relief to find the boy was fallible.

  “I’m awfully sorry. I’ll fix it right away.”

  A few days later he thought he saw the gold flash again as Tad looked up and said, “Hey, here’s something nice. A fan letter.”

  “No kidding. Who from?”

  Eric had told him to watch for clippings about the reprint of his first novel, a Korean war story that was a near best-seller thirty years earlier. One reviewer had even alluded to The Charterhouse of Parma. “Combines the drama and action of the battlefield with the psychological subtlety of the great masters” was the quote Eric had wanted on the new edition, but the sales force didn’t think psychological subtlety would fly nowadays. They opted for “A dynamic tale of men at war and political intrigue.” The reprint was an oasis—if not a mirage—in the desert of recent years; it might even revive interest in a movie, twice optioned but never made. He hadn’t expected fan letters.

  “His name’s Jim Ward, from Little Falls, Nebraska. Listen to this. ‘Dear Mr. Malverson, I just came across your terrific book, The Way to Dusty Death, and wanted to let you know how much it meant to me. My father was a pilot shot down in Korea—I was a kid so I barely remember him—so while I enjoyed the story there was a certain amount of pain in reading it. Nothing ever showed me so vividly what it must have been like for him, so I want to thank you.” He was a high-school shop teacher and would recommend the novel to his students. “Aside from the personal angle, it was a real page-turner.”

  Eric’s face flushed. The first such letter in months. He silently cursed his blindness, which stole the delight of studying the handwriting, picturing the address and the writer, maybe a loner in a shabby apartment heaped with yellowing magazines, but more likely a family man in a tract house, aluminum siding, pale curtains, skateboard on the lawn … Reading fan mail was an intensely private pleasure, a kind of unwilled, effortless masturbation, and it embarrassed him to hear the words aloud in Tad’s presence, in Tad’s voice. He wouldn’t let the boy see how much he relished them. “Okay, let’s get on with it.” Yet afterward they seemed to share an intimate complicity, as if Tad had seen him admiring himself in the mirror or making love to a woman. Almost as if Tad had procured the woman for him and insisted on watching, as payment.

  There was also a letter from a woman in Beverly Hills who described herself as head of a small production company, asking whether the movie rights to The Way to Dusty Death were available. Tad was excited but Eric blew it off; there’d been too many dead-end inquiries in the past. “Send it along to Bill Benson and forget it,” he muttered.

  He wasn’t sure when the suspicions began. Maybe the week in late February, during another snowstorm, when Tad reported several online reviews of The Way to Dusty Death. “Really? How’d you find them?”

  “Just checking Web sites here and there.”

  “So what do they say?” he asked casually. “I’ll have to find them again and print. Is it okay if I do it tomorrow? It’s almost two and I’ve got a class.” The next morning Eric heard the printer chugging while he shaved; when he entered the study Tad waved some pages, then read aloud three short favorable notices. Eric was ready to dismiss them—who were these self-styled critics, anyhow?—but Tad said they were widely read. “If you want reader response I could set up a Web site. You’d have stuff pouring in.”

  “How about getting through the novel first,” he answered dryly. Then, and he didn’t know where the impulse came from, he added, “Jot down the Web sites and pop them in an envelope so Bill can have a look.”

  “I can e-mail them. It’s quicker.”

  “No,” he said, suddenly alarmed by the sleight-of-hand possibilities of cyberspace. He blinked and squinted to bring Tad into focus, to study his face, but to no avail. It seemed the boy was deliberately eluding him. And from that moment his faith was shaken. “Do it by mail. I’ll speak to him once he gets it.”

  When the snow stopped he tried going uptown to the galleries. He could navigate on the street if he kept alert; the traffic lights’ green and red were distant jagged blotches, so the best strategy was to move when others moved. There was some satisfaction in arriving safely, but what had once been a joy turned into a penance. Filtered through his haze, blotches of color shivered over the canvases, lines blurred, brush strokes vanished, patterns bent. The representational paintings turned abstract, and the abstract ones morphed into crazy quilts. It was worse than not seeing them at all, a kind of sacrilege, as bad as someone jumbling the sentences in one of his books. He felt he ought to beg the artists’ pardon. On the way home he paused before the windows of a huge new bookstore but couldn’t make out the tides on display. Each week Tad would read Eric the first two paragraphs, and the last, of the reviews in the Sunday Times, and had suggested that he go to bookstore readings to meet the new authors. Tad didn’t know bookstores were an unspeakable torture, with Eric’s own books mostly out of print and the gleaming jackets as meaningless as the splotches on the museum walls. He kept walking. Better to let it all go. Stay home and stick to the tapes. They were the only reliable thing left.

  The stories ripening in his ear each night gave him an idea. Why not have Tad tape the revised passages in the new book? He could do it first thing in the morning, while Eric dressed and fumbled in the kitchen, then they could spend their time moving ahead with the new sections. At night he could listen and make notes as best he could. The work would go so much faster. Now that he was well into the books, Eric practically lusted to reach the end. Its shape was clear in his mind, clearer than anything the material world could offer. It would be short, swift, and emotionally violent, the kind of book that left the reader stunned by inexorability, all soothing distinctions between good and evil blurred. He could already see the ending, with poor Brenner, his hero, plunged into bitter and lasting disillusion. It was just a matter of finding the routes to get there, a kind of Harrison Ford-ish hacking through the underbrush.

  So after Tad left each day, his voice lingered in the study, measured and confident, the distilled essence without the physical presence. His reading, under Eric’s guidance, was neither dramatic nor monotonous but colloquial, disinterested. He inflected the sentences according to their syntax, not their emotional valence. The book was good; Eric could feel it. It seethed with energy and conviction. It had the penumbra of thought. It alluded to more than itself. And it was just the right temperature. He imagined the sections as moving back and forth from cold to hot, calibrated to precise degrees like seasons in an ideal climate, storms and frosts and heat waves distributed in perfect rhythm, divided by temperate spells that never lasted long enough to grow dull. His words, Tad’s voice. He played the tapes over and over, murmuring along with Tad to feel the shapes of the sentences in his mouth, the words skittering on his tongue.

  Two more letters arrived, one from an English professor who praised his novel in an arcane language which Tad, fresh from his seminars, had to translate, and another from an ex-corporal who’d served in Korea and had a few small corrections, one geographical, the other about the kinds of food served in Seoul bars.

  Eric shrugged. “Better than nothing, but basically second-rate.”

  That made Tad laugh. “What kind do you like?”

  “Earnest. Heartfelt. Like that shop teacher. Or else cranks, for the entertainment value.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” said Tad, “if I ever write to an author.”

  “Everyone has different tastes, though. Keep that in mind too.” He told Tad to answer them in two polite sentences and put them in the folder called Reader Ma
il. When he began that file years ago, Eric was tempted to call it Fans but was restrained by a kind of modesty that seemed prescient now, with his intimacies on exhibit.

  Bill Benson’s assistant called, the girl who used to come to sort his mail. “Mr. Malverson?” Everyone else had dispensed with last names, but Grace was meticulous. Maybe that was why Bill kept her on. It surely wasn’t for her looks or her brains, Eric thought. “Mr. Benson asked me to tell you he checked the Web sites you wrote him about, I mean Tad wrote about, and actually it was me who checked them, but I didn’t find any reviews.”

  “But Tad showed me … He read them to me.”

  “Well, sure, they were there, but these online sites only keep the stuff up a few days. Next time if you e-mail we can do it the same day.”

  “And where do the reviews go after they, uh, take them down?”

  She hesitated. “Nowhere, I guess. They’re just sort of … over.”

  “I see. Why didn’t Bill call me himself?” Because you’re old and blind and obsolete and from now on you’re relegated to the underlings, a voice in his head supplied.

  “He’s out of town. The booksellers’ convention in Phoenix.”

  “Lucky Bill. Oh, another thing, Grace. Ever hear from, what was it, Garden of Eden Productions, something like that? The movie interest?”

  “Children of Paradise,” she corrected. “Not yet. But it’s only a couple of weeks. You know those movie people, they can take forever.”

  A woman from Texas wrote saying her book group had had a stimulating discussion of his novel. They didn’t usually go in for war books, but the husband of one member reported that it wasn’t primarily about war but about fear and mortality and the illusions people construct to ward them off.

  Tad looked up after reading it aloud, as if for approval. “So, you like this one better?”

  “Nice,” he granted. “Very nice. I told you I have a weakness for corny and explicit. Go figure.”

  And a few days later came a classic nut case, full of rage about geopolitical ethics beginning with the Opium Wars. Tad held the letter up close so that, with the aid of the magnifying glass, Eric could make out the italic typeface with every tenth word in boldface capitals. They both chuckled. “Excellent crank,” said Eric, and Tad seemed very pleased.

  After Tad left that day, Eric called Lucinda into the study. “Lucinda, my love, light of my life, could I possibly trouble you for something not in your job description?”

  “I told you before, I don’t do ironing and I don’t do sex and I don’t move furniture. Want me to look up a number for you?”

  “No thanks. And I never asked for sex, Lucinda. If it didn’t work out I’d lose you. Take a look in the first folder, bottom drawer on the right. Reader Mail. Got it? Read me what’s on top.”

  She sat down opposite him and put on the large glasses she wore on a chain around her neck, which gave her a studious air. She was wearing an orange sweatshirt, tight black jeans, and huge gold hoops in her ears. Like everything else in the room, Lucinda shimmered in a halo of dots lit by a bright March sun streaming in the west window. The air was warmer than usual, a premature touch of spring. Eric blinked. He couldn’t seem to stop blinking, as if that could dissipate the haze. Lucinda cleared her throat and adjusted the glasses. She would have made a good schoolteacher, he thought. She could have been many things. She didn’t have the fighting spirit. He, on the contrary, saw life as an armed struggle where strategy was decisive; it was why he wrote so often about war, the best ready-made metaphor. Lucinda had had a brief career singing in cabarets, then came the children—she never mentioned any father—then she worked for two years as a dental hygienist. But she preferred cleaning apartments to cleaning teeth. “I don’t like standing in one place all day,” she told Ada when she first came. “I’d rather move around.” Too easygoing, his Lucinda. She liked to count her blessings and had on several occasions suggested that Eric do the same. If she were a character, he’d toughen her up and write her a grander destiny. Shrewd campaign manager for a politician. Or why not the candidate herself? A crusader. Battered women, human rights abuse, something that took guts and endurance.

  “Okay. ‘Dear Mr. Malverson, Your novel, The Way to Dusty Death, reminded me yet again, not that it’s ever far from my mind, of the American, or I should say WESTERN, or let’s just be frank about it and say CAUCASIAN’—I’m saying it that way,” Lucinda put in, “because that’s how he writes, in big letters, ‘CAUCASIAN intervention in places we have no BUSINESS—’”

  “Fine, enough,” he interrupted. “What’s the one before that?”

  “‘Dear Mr. Malverson—this one has a nice handwriting—‘Our book group in Dallas had a truly enlightening discussion of—’”

  “What else?”

  “Let’s see. Someone who served in Korea. Then we’re back to last year.” She started to get up. “Is that it?”

  “No. What about the envelopes?”

  “There’s no envelopes. That Tad, he is one neat boy. I’m making a lentil soup you can heat up for dinner, so if that’s all, I better—”

  “Wait a second. When did you last take down the trash?”

  “From this room? A couple of days ago, I guess. I’ll do it on my way down. Sorry about that.”

  “It’s all right, I’m glad you didn’t. Lucinda, please, would you mind … ?” He pointed at the wastebasket under the desk.

  “Go through the trash? Oh, come on now, Eric.”

  “It’s just papers, dear, not fish bones or apple cores. Help a blind old man. Make believe I’m trying to cross the street. See if you can match up the envelopes with the letters.”

  She shuffled for a moment. “Bingo. Joseph Borowski, the one about the CAUCASIAN intervention. The guy’s got a point, if you ask me.”

  “Sure, put him in charge and he’d be worse, I guarantee. The same address on the letter and the envelope?”

  “Yeah. Two-seventeen Salmon Run Road, Hoboken. That’s where Gerard’s from, Hoboken.” Gerard was her boyfriend, who drove a bakery truck and was in town only intermittently.

  “Postmark?”

  She held the envelope up to the light. “Hoboken. Just like I said.” She shuffled through more papers. “That’s all. The others must have gone down last week.” She stood and faced him, hands on her hips. “What’s with you? Don’t you trust that boy?”

  “I’m not sure. Do you?”

  “Can’t you tell a good thing when you see it? It’s possible you lucked out, you know. It does happen.”

  “Anything’s possible. Is that a stud in his right ear?”

  “It’s real tiny. If you saw that, maybe you’re taking a turn for the better.”

  “No, I just saw the light flashing from it. What does it mean? Anything? Does it mean he’s gay?”

  “I don’t think so. It used to mean something, but now they’ve all got them. Anyway, he told me he has a girlfriend. Angela. A law student.”

  “Oh, he tells you things?”

  “He liked my scarf and wanted to know where he could find one for her.”

  “Very chummy, aren’t we? You wouldn’t happen to know anything about Web sites, Lucinda?”

  “Are you kidding? I told you before I don’t like those machines. I don’t even like dusting yours. My kids got them, but I think they’re the devil’s work.” She turned and ambled toward the door, then stopped. “And you did ask for sex.”

  “I did? I swear I don’t remember.”

  She nodded, one hand propped on the door jamb, the other fiddling with an earring. A fine pose. The hush of Vermeer, but not delicate enough. Manet, maybe. Waiting, unreadable. It was like one of those critical moments in a story, when a word or gesture sends things irrevocably down one path and all other paths close over. But he couldn’t tell if her face was teasing or disgruntled. That was the worst of being near-blind. How could you know how to proceed if you couldn’t read the signals?

  “I would remember if you’d said yes.�
�� He paused, but no clues came. She didn’t stir toward him or away. I can tell a good thing when I see it, he wanted to say but didn’t dare. “When? Before Ada left or after?”

  “Right after.”

  “Well, then. I wasn’t myself.”

  “Really. Who were you, then?” She turned to walk out.

  “Lucinda? I hope I wasn’t, you know, rude. I wouldn’t like to think I was rude to you.”

  “Well, I’m still here, right? You know what, Eric? You need to get out more. You’re not a cripple. You’re not even all that blind. Hop in a taxi and go someplace. Meet people.”

  Women, she meant. Someone whose face he’d never really know. Some soft, amorphous body to sink darkly into. But seeing them was what stirred him most. Keep the lights on, was the only detail he’d ever insisted on in bed. Someday, maybe. Not yet.

  “Should I count my blessings too?” But he said it with a smile.

  “Took the words right out of my mouth.”

  When he settled in with the tapes that evening he caught another wrong word. “Dissect.” This was no case of mumbling.

  “My word was ‘analyze’” he said offhandedly the next morning. “How’d you ever come up with ‘dissect’?”

  “Oh, I remember that line. It was a great moment.” Tad was grinning so broadly that even Eric could see it. “When the woman, Laura, is trying to figure out what her husband’s weird behavior meant, the day before he vanished. She goes over it step by step.”

  “I’m glad the story interests you, but I’m sure I didn’t say ‘dissect’. What’s going on, Tad? Want to be an editor?”

  “I’m sorry if I made a mistake. I wouldn’t dream of editing you. I’ll fix it.”

  “Do you see any difference between ‘analyze’ and ‘dissect’?”

  “Well, sure. ‘Analyze,’ used in this context, is more abstract. I mean, you can analyze anything, but in novels mostly it’s ideas, or maybe behavior or motivation. ‘Dissect’ has a more physical feel. Like dissecting frogs in high school. Sort of an autopsy.” He paused then grinned again, a kid hitting on the right answer in a test. “Like, anatomize.”