Referred Pain: Stories Read online

  But for the most part people welcomed the succulent fruit and felt lucky to be alive in the dawn of the tomato-eating age. Think of the numberless maligned tomatoes left to rot on the vine, they marveled. And innocent all the while. What pleasures untasted, what hungers unappeased. People were grateful, and for a time the woman was known and revered far and wide for her brave deed. But since the drama of her deed was so quickly over and its results so benign, unlike the drama of the invention of gunpowder or the colonizing of a new land, her fame soon declined. Tomatoes were sliced, chopped, crushed, stewed, fried, turned into sauce, and in no time at all incredulous children would laugh to hear that the versatile, ubiquitous tomato had once inspired dread, and that the ordinary woman whom they saw every day had shown unprecedented courage in eating one. Thus her name and origins and circumstances are lost to us. We can only imagine them.

  What was it like for her, this Prometheus of the vegetable world? At first the excitement attending her act distracted her from her misery, if it was misery. No doubt she was courted by many. Even the one who had caused her misery was all too willing now to have her, heroine that she was. But she no longer needed him. The first bloom of excitement bedazed all other feelings, and when that passed, she found her despair had passed as well, the not caring what became of herself that had driven her to begin with. Had she been shrewd she might have used her fame, at the most propitious moment of its brief arc, to attract a wealthy and powerful husband. But she was not shrewd, only daring and passionate. She remained in the village where she was born, and the only significant change was her knowledge that life could come up with something new even when it seems most depleted.

  And yet she suffered ever after from a vague disappointment. It had nothing to do with her faded renown nor with tomatoes themselves ceasing to tantalize her. She had known all along it was the act, not the fruit or the fame, that mattered. She had known, even as she sank her teeth into it, that no tomato would ever again taste as good as the one she ate in the village square, in front of all the people, after her night alone in the woods. The disappointment rose from something less tangible. Life could bring the vastly unexpected, and yet it did not. Nothing she did in later years came close to the elation of that single act of abandon. She was a daring woman who found no more opportunities for daring, or for the kind of daring peculiar to her, which was biting into the perilous unknown and letting it travel through her. She wished there were other fruits to be braved, but there were none.

  It was a different sort of person who ate the first artichoke, a spirit not so much daring and impulsive as patient and ingenious. But that is another story.

  Francesca

  I THOUGHT I KNEW what my life was. Through most of it I have been sober and single-minded, for the last twenty-odd years studying the curious eruptions of wayward cells, cancer cells. Most of them cause turbulence and ruin, while a few, especially in older bodies, nestle harmlessly in a corner where they can be virtually ignored, though we forget them at our peril. But then something happened. It seems my passage through the world has been generating trails I could never have imagined, and which might be better ignored as well. After all, so much of human history, private history, goes unacknowledged. Yet I find myself unwilling to let this particle rest. It refuses to, in any case. It has reappeared through a turn of fate and in a troubling, even terrifying, form.

  I should note, by way of preface, that I have never been a man who had difficulties with women or who had hurting ways. Now two women are hurt on my account and they will never know why.

  Twenty-four years ago I spent a semester of my senior year of college in Rome, on one of those programs abroad that have become so common. At the time, it was, if not a rarity, at least more of a special privilege than it is today. And so the dozen of us who were chosen set foot in Italy with a giddiness, an almost unreal elation, sharpened and sustained by our knowing—the men, that is—we might well be drafted and sent to Vietnam soon after graduation. Now or never: we had to cram all our youth into those five months. And what better place? Our group made some side trips, to Florence, Siena, Ravenna, a few other cities. But mostly we stayed in Rome, which even without any threat of imminent danger provides giddiness and elation enough. With all that, I have to say I was on the stodgy side for a young man in those unstodgy years. Not by choice but through shyness and inhibition.

  The program was in art history. I was doing a double major—art history and biochemistry. I had trouble making up my mind, though I was leaning toward biochemistry. It was more practical, and I thought my bent for the meticulous and measurable would serve me better there. Still, I kept up the art history major, partly because I wanted the trip. I wanted something to shake me out of my stodginess—I knew it would take shaking from outside. And since my family was poor and I spent my summers working, there was little chance I would get abroad any other way.

  An Italian professor of art history at the University of Rome was attached to our group. He had a long, difficult name we had trouble pronouncing; it sounded to me more Greek or Romanian than Italian. He would walk around the city with us, expounding on its architecture, its churches, its history, as well as amble through the museums, murmuring with nonchalant erudition about the paintings, and finally, he conducted a weekly seminar in his large, ornately cluttered apartment on a small street just off the Piazza Navona, where, he explained, gladiatorial contests, chariot races, and all sorts of rowdy festivities were held in ancient days.

  This Roman professor, tall, stout, and rather imposing, with thick strong features, an unruly black mustache, thinning hair, and a genial bemused manner—as if he found us lovable, benign aliens—must have been forty or so, though we naturally saw him as advanced in age. He had an American wife eight or ten years younger than himself, a rangy, firm-boned woman with hair the color of honey and an imperturbably ironic manner, and on seminar nights she would serve us elaborate, rum-drenched pastries with wonderfully muddy coffee in thimble-like cups—translucent white with a rim of gold at the top—and later, dense, sweet, tart anisette liqueur. She had two small daughters, fair-haired like herself, maybe three and five, who would cavort among us babbling in incomprehensible Italian, so that very soon we realized the seminars would not be excessively scholarly or purposeful: we should regard them instead as a way to get an inside look at a real Roman family. Though as one of the girls in our group pointed out, it was hardly a typical Roman family since the wife and mother was American, like us.

  She—Janet was the wife’s name—did not seem American. So far as I could tell, her clothes, her mannerisms, and gestures were all Roman: decisive, dramatic, mellow. She appeared to have taken on the coloration of her chosen environment, and when she spoke Italian to the children, which at first we understood only in bits and pieces, she sounded to us like a native, but of course we were not the best judges.

  She was only ten or so years older than we were, yet it was enough of a gap to make us treat her deferentially, as the professor’s wife, the role in which she was presented. One evening one of the more outspoken girls asked how she and the professor had happened to meet and marry.

  “I was a student here in a program like yours,” she said. Her English had a very faint tinge of otherness, not an accent exactly, for she was a native speaker, but a hint that the words and inflections were seldom used, taken out on special occasions like fine linen—crisp and slightly self-conscious. “The professor was doing the seminars, the tours, the whole bit. At the end I … just stayed. We got married. That’s the story.” She smiled ironically and shrugged, the way the girls in our group sometimes smiled and shrugged, as if to imply they possessed more information and wisdom than we men could dream of, and withheld it out of a teasing, challenging perversity. At that instant I saw her as having been one of us, the young and unsettled, rather than as a grown-up, established, foreign sophisticate. She became a person who had taken a risky turn, surprised and perhaps even dismayed her family. Tricked fate, as it wer
e. A palpable illustration that we might do the same.

  Often at the end of the seminar the professor would disappear for lengthy telephone calls, or to say goodnight to the children, or on unknown errands, and Janet would sit with us. I thought she was simply fulfilling her duty, till after a while I saw she was genuinely interested. More than interested—on the lookout for something. I don’t know how I sensed it: she didn’t seem bored with her own life—there was a shimmering animation about her, a sense of being richly present—but she was restless too; she enjoyed stirring things up and inducing revelation. She would ask questions that coaxed our awkward self-doubts to the surface, and she managed to do this without being rude or overbearing but by being charming. Once she had made us speak of our uncertainties they no longer felt awkward but brimming with possibility.

  Gradually I became the one she spoke to most often. Looking back, I think perhaps I seemed most in need of being shaken loose, released from the clutches of naïveté. We would sit in the glow of the dim lights as she interrogated me like a curious, unconventional aunt from far away. What did I think about my past, did I like my parents, what were my ambitions, what did I want to find out about the world?

  “How things work,” I said hesitantly.

  “What things, for instance?”

  “Well, cells.”

  “Cells,” she repeated. She got me to talk about a fairly commonplace project I had undertaken in the lab, involving crossbreeding in fruit flies, and though she was attentive there was a playful note to her attention, as if, while these were important matters, we must not take them too seriously. I found her easy to talk to, but confusing.

  One late afternoon I came upon her in the Borghese Gardens, where I often wandered on my own, semi-intoxicated by the mere idea of being where I was. After chatting for a moment I was about to continue on my way, but she suggested a coffee. I was impressed with the way she ordered the waiter about in typically imperious Roman fashion and tossed back the dark brew in one gulp. I expected we would talk in our usual manner; I was still acting the boy prepared to be questioned, to indulge my fantasies in her adult attentiveness. But after a few moments of this she said, “Don’t you have any curiosity about what’s around you? Do you ever feel the need to ask questions?” I was puzzled. Mired in deference, I had little experience in talking to adults on equal terms.

  “Well, sure. How come you went so far from home?” I asked.

  She laughed. “I came here to get away from people like you.” She spoke in a friendly way, a way that invited further questions, but in my puzzlement I said nothing. “From innocence,” she added, as if I had urged her on. “American innocence.”

  I had an inkling, then, of what she had in mind, for even the most untried young man can sense a sexual challenge. But I simply couldn’t believe it. She went on to tell me she had grown up on a farm in Nebraska—not all that far from my own small Minnesota town, yet I doubted that I could ever grow so comfortably urbane. Even after three years I was not quite at ease in my Ivy League college, which I attended thanks to a scholarship. As a matter of fact I am not quite at ease even now.

  As she talked that afternoon, she would occasionally touch my arm or wrist. Just before we got up to leave, she let her fingers rest on my arm for an unsettling time. I knew, but was still afraid to trust my instinct. Or my luck, as a college boy would doubtless have put it then.

  “Why don’t we walk for a while?” she said. “Or are you dashing off to pursue your studies?”

  Of course I agreed to walk. By now I was desperate to touch her, my hands were drawing into fists, the blood was rushing through me—all of which she surely knew. But I was afraid. Italians were famously demonstrative, affectionate; if she were simply doing as the Romans do I might be making a shameful mistake. I could end up in trouble, be sent home in disgrace. What would my parents say? It sounds absurd now, I know. Young Americans are no longer so ignorant or inept.

  “Do you have a girlfriend here yet?” she asked. “An Italian? Or is that all happening within the group?”

  “No,” I said. “There’s very little of that going on, unfortunately. We haven’t had a chance to meet too many Italians so far. And we’re mostly just friends.”

  “Just friends,” she mocked. “What wholesome young people.”

  We were walking up toward the Pincio—for the view, she suggested. It was about five o’clock on a March afternoon, still fairly cold. At the top of the hill we stopped to look down at the traffic and hubbub circling the great column in the Piazza del Popolo, and in the distance, in the fading light, the ruins. Hugging her shoulders against the wind, she turned to me in such a teasing way that even a dolt such as I knew I was supposed to kiss her. If before I had feared it might be a disgrace to kiss her, now I knew I would be disgraced if I didn’t. And I wanted to very badly anyway.

  What followed is easily imagined—how I was initiated into the intrigue of secret meetings and deceptions, how I felt this to be the great adventure of my life (as indeed it was). She was not only a restless woman, I discovered, but a beautiful and rare one. I had hardly noticed her beauty and rarity—I was so predisposed to see her as the professor’s wife. Naturally I felt guilty throughout, above all when the professor spent time helping me with a term paper, or when, after the seminars, he said, “Janet, would you bring us the coffee, please?” I would watch her, deft and gracious, the very picture of an elegant faculty wife, serving the coffee without taking any particular notice of me.

  Guilty, but also boundlessly thrilled and excited: it was at those moments, in the presence of the group, in the presence of her husband, that I craved her the most. One night I couldn’t bear it, and followed her into the kitchen on the pretext of carrying some cups and saucers, to run my hand along her back and hips. She looked over her shoulder as if I were a mad vulgarian, as if our intimate hours were a boy’s dream.

  “What on earth do you think you’re doing?” Like a boy, I quickly drew my hand back. I almost apologized, but I was not that much of a boy anymore. The next day, when we were alone, she said, “That simply isn’t how you go about things. You’re ruined if you start taking those chances.”

  “Oh, do you do this often? You sound like you have the routine down pat,” I said, seized with jealousy.

  “No,” she said. “Just once, a few years ago.”

  “Also a student? Do you specialize?”

  “Not a student,” she said, and wouldn’t say more except, “Don’t be nasty, don’t spoil everything.”

  “And will you do it again?”

  She laughed. “How can I tell?”

  “Why with me?”

  “Do you really need to ask?”

  “I guess I do.”

  “I liked you. You seemed the right sort.”

  “What sort is that?”

  “Oh,” and she pretended to think it over, or perhaps really did think it over. “Decent. Clever.” I was flattered then, but later dismayed. Decent and clever? Not exactly stirring declarations to an ardent lover.

  I assumed she must be miserable with the professor: why else would she have sought me out? But she laughed this off as another sign of my conventional ignorance. She said nothing disparaging about him, never talked of him at all, except to answer, when I inevitably asked, that they made love infrequently. I realize by this time how many women say that to their lovers, yet I believe it was true. I believed everything she said—there was such an air of conviction about her—though while she told the truth, it could not have been the whole truth. Possibly she thought I was not ready to hear the whole truth, or possibly as in my own research, truth can never be told in its entirety.

  I asked if she minded being called on to serve coffee to students week after week and she said not at all, there was no indignity in serving coffee. Besides, it was part of the bargain. What bargain, I wanted to ask, but was too uneasy, and I suspected she wouldn’t answer anyway. Explanation was hardly her style. She liked talking to the students,
was all she volunteered; it gave her a chance to speak English.

  “But this person who made the bargain, the person you are with him—is that really you?”

  “It’s no more false than this. I can be any number of people. Don’t you find that?” Not a new notion by any means, but the first time I had seen it enacted. “Do you think,” she said tauntingly, “that the person you see is the only ‘real’ me? Do you think there are real and unreal selves?” I had in fact thought so, but from her ironic tone it would have been mortifying to confess it.

  I found her a riddle. Later, of course, I would see her as a complex, self-willed woman, and such types tend to be inscrutable to men. But back then she was older than anyone I had ever known, far older than her age—a thirty-one-year-old woman with the mind of an eighty-year-old. It was she who described herself that way, and I came to feel she was right. She lived as though she had seen and assessed everything and had had the time to put it into perspective, and now had very little time left and need answer only to herself.