Referred Pain: Stories Read online

  When the semester ended I scrambled to find a way to stay for the summer. For her. She urged me to stay, but I didn’t need much urging. The professor was going to Holland and Germany for several months to do research. I managed to get a job as a waiter in a café. I knew enough Italian, by then, to take the imperiously snapped orders. We made love whenever we could, when the children were napping, or late at night, or on weekends when Janet could leave them with her in-laws. However unique and indescribable it felt to me, our love clearly belonged to a well-documented genre: brief, heedless, intense, and transforming. But my story is not about the loss of innocence or the discovery—it felt like the invention—of passion, or about loving in an unidealistic, futureless, encapsulated, carnal way, which may be what loss of innocence is. The real story takes place two decades later.

  After I returned home and finished college I was drafted, as expected. I spent two months in Vietnam surviving in a way I could not in a million years recount. In truth I have done all I can to forget it. I was wounded early on, in the shoulder, and luckily spent the rest of my time at a desk. I seldom watched the news reports or read the papers about it afterward. I was no soldier and no activist. I am not interested in politics but in science. I know how irresponsible that sounds—I have often been lectured about it. And when I am, I say nothing, simply remind myself that I work, however marginally, on a cure for cancer. That should be enough.

  Graduate studies in science are among the most laborious and demanding: you can get to be thirty or more before you assume a real position, draw a respectable paycheck, and feel like an adult. Most of the students came from more comfortable backgrounds than mine. My family had a hard time figuring out why, in my late twenties and after so many years in school, I was still writing a dissertation and earning a workman’s wage. They said that with the same efforts I might have gone to medical school and become a prosperous doctor. It wasn’t their fault that they couldn’t see how specific my interests were. When I was finally done I wanted some ease. I wanted not to have to account for myself all the time. I married a woman with whom that would be possible. A nurse—I met her in the emergency room when my bicycle swerved in a pothole and sent me flying. She was, and is, a stocky, pretty, able woman with pale brown boyishly cut hair. I loved her and still do, even if it is not the kind of love pictured in books or films, or that I knew with Janet. It is love all the same, and arguably stronger than what I knew with Janet, possessing a structure and endurance. This sounds unfair to my wife, perhaps, now that I see it set down so baldly, and yet she enjoys a good life. We have our children and our house and our work and our friends, and we sleep close together at night still.

  Several months ago, in an Italian scientific journal, I came across a series of articles on migratory cells. With my dregs of Italian I could see they might be crucial to my research, but returning to a long-lost language is not, alas, like riding a bicycle, where no matter how long ago, they say, you remember how. A colleague suggested I call the Romance languages department; they could send over a graduate student to translate, who would be glad to earn some extra money. The secretary called back promptly to say she had just the person, a very bright Italian student who was bilingual—her mother was British or American or something—besides being punctual, reliable, and so forth. I was rushing to class and didn’t ask her name, just said to send her over the next morning during my office hours. I didn’t really think of her as a person at all, then. I was excited about what I might learn and couldn’t wait to see the translation. The student was merely a step on the way to satisfying my curiosity.

  She arrived promptly at ten: tall, slim, pale, and auburn-haired, wearing a soft gray wool skirt, a green sweater and leather boots, not the usual jeans and sweatshirt uniform. She wanted to appear professional, I thought. Her manner was un-student-like as well. Students are usually shy and fumbling or else excessively candid and enthusiastic, which comes to the same thing. This one seemed reserved, not shy. She presented herself in an economical way, just as much as necessary for the purpose. All in all, she was extremely self-possessed.

  “I’ve come about the translation work,” she said, and announced her name. Francesca. The last name—well of course that is obvious by this time. Life, like science, is full of the coincidences that unleash discovery.

  I was glad to be seated, because I might have toppled over. I had the oddest sense that my face was escaping me, I was losing control over it. I felt a jumble of wonderment, panic, curiosity—I had no idea what might be happening on the surface. I tried to smile and be polite, but for all I knew I looked stunned.

  How could I be sure so quickly? The name, as I’ve said, was unusual even for Mediterranean names with their syllabic frills and furbelows. There couldn’t be many with that name. Still, I needed to be absolutely certain.

  “I spent some time in Rome when I was a student.” I tried to seem casual though my mind teemed with memories and frantic calculations. I hoped my worst suspicion wasn’t so, and yet I hoped it was. “On an art history program.”

  “Really,” she said mildly.

  What did I expect? Thousands must have done the same. I made myself stumble on. “One of my professors had your name. His first name was Federico.”

  She showed no great surprise. “That’s my father. He’s a professor of art history.”

  “Is that so?” Now it was legitimate to sound a bit excited, so my feelings had some release. “Isn’t that a coincidence! I knew both your parents. They used to have the students over all the time. That little street near the Piazza Navona. Did you grow up there?”

  “Yes, I remember the students. They were coming over until quite recently.” She smiled indulgently, as if hosting American students was a lovable eccentricity of her quaint parents.

  “What a coincidence!” I said again.

  “Well, really not that strange. They must have entertained hundreds of American students. What did you think of them, my parents, that is?”

  That sort of abrupt slashing through pleasantries was exactly her mother’s style and unsettled me for an instant, like hearing the rustlings of a ghost. But I was not a boy now; I had had the beneficent experience of her mother. “I found them wonderful people. They made us feel so at home, especially your mother. How is your mother?”

  “Mother died last fall.” She looked down, to get away from my gaze. This was private, delicate territory. She was still grieving. And I, I could not even tell what I was feeling, apart from grim surprise and a pressing warmth behind my eyes. I fended it off, for I needed all my forces just to speak casually to the girl. I was not permitted to express anything out of the ordinary. I would take the news home with me, for later. “I’m so sorry. She must have been still relatively young, as I remember. What—what was it?”

  “It’s all right, you can ask. She had cancer. Lymphoma.”

  “Ah.”

  “It was pretty quick. She wasn’t sick very long.”

  “And you—” I felt slightly dizzy and gripped the edge of the desk to anchor myself. “I wonder if you were one of the little girls I used to see playing? I don’t think there was a Francesca, though. One was Elsa, I remember. Rosa?”

  “Very good.” She smiled as though I were a clever child. “There’s Elsa and Rosalia, then me, then Pietro—he’s two years younger.”

  “I see. Well, I was there in sixty-six …”

  “A year too soon for me. I was twenty-three just last week, in fact.”

  “April.”

  “April, yes.” She frowned ironically, then laughed. The eyes, green and witty, were her mother’s. “Why, do you follow astrology, like your former president? Americans are so amusing sometimes. The crudest month, as one of your poets says.”

  If they know nothing else, I have found, the students all know that line; in that respect, she was generic. Then I realized her knowledge would be more than superficial: my daughter was a student of literature. For as I feared and hoped, I was looking at my ow
n daughter. I wanted to leap up and embrace her. I wanted to do all sorts of things at once, laugh, weep, mourn her mother, find out about the family, even reveal myself. For a moment I thought I might do this—not right away, but some day in the future. But only for a moment.

  How could I know for sure? one may ask. Oh, I was sure. Even if the dates hadn’t worked out, even if it weren’t true that Janet rarely made love with the professor, this girl was mine. I could see it. She had my coloring. My hair, before it faded and started going gray. My family’s body, tall and narrow and energetic, though her movements had an un-American mellowness. She reminded me of my mother and my older sister. I wondered if they would notice, were they to see her. Could I ever manage to introduce her? How could I explain her? Yet all the while I knew this would never come to pass. I wouldn’t mind shocking my family at this point, but I could not shock her, Francesca. She had her father—she didn’t need another.

  “No,” I laughed. “I don’t follow astrology. In your mother’s case, April was a lucky month, I’d say. And how is your father?”

  She passed over my compliment. “He’s fine. He just retired from the university, but he still writes papers. Of course it was terrible for him, my mother … They were so devoted. So close. You must have noticed. But he has lots of friends. And my sisters live nearby and keep an eye on him. My brother is in school at Berkeley. We both flew back when Mother was sick. Well, you don’t need to hear all this. Would you like to tell me about the translation?”

  “No, no, I really do want to hear. I remember them so vividly.”

  She smiled. “There’s nothing more to tell.”

  “When you write will you give him my regards?”

  “Sure. But there were so many … The house was like a—a port of call. My mother was constantly serving them coffee and listening to their problems. I guess you know.”

  “Yes.” I couldn’t stop staring at her, trying to find traces of my children, my other children. She was beautiful in a way it took a while to appreciate, even more so than her mother, whom she did not resemble except for the eyes and the cool, self-possessed manner. Like Janet’s, her statements were assertions, with a tinge of irony.

  She was also, like Janet, decisively, provocatively polite. “About the translation …,” she prompted.

  “It’s only natural,” I mused, “that this should be an amazing coincidence for me, while for you … I mean, to come upon an old acquaintance of your parents, all the way across the ocean—no big deal, right?”

  “On the contrary, it’s a pleasure to meet you.”

  What I felt at that moment was pride, I must admit. Paternal pride. Few Americans of twenty-three would speak with such aplomb. And her speech was not diluted with the nervous, meaningless tics, the “like’s” or “you know’s” that disjointed the talk of even the brightest students. Well, God knows I had nothing to do with it. Credit her mother. “But it can’t be quite the same pleasure.”

  “Nothing is quite the same as anything else, is it?”

  “How true.” I laughed faintly. “Well, let me tell you what I need to have done.” I showed her the articles. “Do you think you’ll have trouble with the technical terms?”

  She didn’t answer right away but leafed through the pages. “I don’t think so. It’s the technical terms that are similar in both languages. Besides, that’s what dictionaries are for, aren’t they?” She gave me a rather impish grin, and suddenly I felt something new stirring in the room. I was grown now—it no longer took me weeks to identify it. The girl, I was almost sure, was flirting with me. She had sensed my interest and was responding. I would have to be more careful.

  “It’s about cancer cells.”

  “So I see.”

  “I hope that’s not—I mean, will it upset you?”

  She gazed at me as her mother used to, as if I were ludicrously inept. “I’ve already had the reality. There’s not much the words can add.”

  “Yes, I see. I’m sorry. So, when do you think you can have this ready? Is three weeks too soon?”

  “No, that’s all right.”

  I arranged to pay her fifteen dollars an hour, which she seemed to find generous. “Then we’re all set, uh—do you mind if I call you Francesca?”

  Again she smiled coolly. “What else?”

  “Well, I might call you Signorina.” I didn’t mean to encourage her but couldn’t help myself. I was at a loss. I only wanted to get closer to her, befriend her.

  “I don’t think we have to be quite that formal. Professor.” This time there was no doubt. She flung her tweed coat over her shoulders and was gone.

  I locked the door, then sat down, bent my head to the desk, and allowed myself my grief. It could not wait to be taken home. And nothing about Janet belonged at home.

  When at last I looked up I thought of her, Francesca, again. My daughter. I had three fine, healthy sons: nine, twelve, and fourteen. I had renounced—my wife and I had, I should say—the prospect of a daughter long ago, without any great pangs. Yet how luscious the idea seemed, now that I’d seen her. Had she been in my department I might have invited her over, taken an interest and helped her with her work. Even so, mightn’t I befriend her through the translation, ask her over as a kind gesture to a foreign student, make her part of the family? I was aware that faculty wives didn’t appreciate their husbands’ befriending beautiful students, and in the couple of cases I had observed closely, their lack of enthusiasm was borne out by the facts. My wife was not particularly suspicious or jealous; I had never given her reason to be. How would she react to Francesca? I might tell her the truth (though not the whole truth): she was the daughter of people who had been hospitable to me in Rome years ago and I wanted to return the favor. But I knew myself. I could not live comfortably with the pretense.

  Besides, my wife knows me too, in that unnerving way that wives do. She knows, for instance, that I am less interested in finding a cure for cancer than in charting the erratic paths of the cells or unraveling the logic that makes them travel and hide, erupt and masquerade. At the university hospital—she is head nurse of the intensive care unit—she sees dying patients every day. She respects my research, yet I have a feeling she finds it somewhat abstract and irrelevant. She finds me abstracted too—though I hope not irrelevant. Maybe, in her plainspoken way, she sees the same ingenuousness Janet found so amusing. Maybe it has never fallen away with age, only transmuted into what Americans dignify with the term “absentmindedness.” I suppose I am absent, in a sense, from my life. I was present with Janet—as who could not be?—and I am present in the laboratory, and often with my sons. Otherwise I suppose I hold myself in abeyance, I don’t know why, or for what. I don’t mean any harm that I know of. I only feel vague. I’m not disappointed with my life; sometimes it feels better than I expected. There was a period, after we had been married a few years and had our first child, when my wife accused me of being disappointed and having cooled, but I denied that, and soon she stopped mentioning it. She finds great satisfaction in her work as well as in the boys, and we get on companionably. I am grateful we never had the turbulence of divorce that I have seen disrupt and sometimes destroy the lives of friends and colleagues.

  Though the Romance languages department is in the building across the lawn from mine, I had never noticed Francesca before. Now I saw her everywhere—lounging on the front steps; in the gym, where I played racquetball and she swam; in the local drugstore; in the faculty club, where she was eating with, apparently, some boisterously entertaining young instructors from her department. Each time, she came up to greet me with her mother’s provocative, ambiguous tone. And I responded. She was my daughter: how could I be aloof? I was inexpressibly touched to see she liked me, was even drawn to me. I am a pleasant-mannered, nice-looking man, but I don’t flatter myself that I cut a dashing or romantic figure. Something more obscure drew her. I felt as I do in the lab when I approach the heart of the mystery—troubled and excited, and though it is where I wan
t to be, I want also to step back.

  I tried to keep a proper distance; I would ask how the translation was going, and she would say fine. Once, coming out of the library, she said she was stopping for coffee, did I want to join her? Naturally I did—I wanted any chance to be near her.

  She ordered an espresso and tossed it back in one gulp. She was in her first year of graduate work, she told me. She had gotten her undergraduate degree from Harvard. Harvard! She was studying comparative literature; she had learned French in school and, with her Italian, found Spanish a breeze. German was more difficult. She wasn’t sure what she would write her dissertation on—at the moment she was fascinated by the Latin American novelists, but she had a new enthusiasm every month, she said with a self-mocking smile. “Intellectually fickle is what I am, I guess,” and she waved regally for another coffee.

  I said very little, just basked in her presence. In retrospect, I see I must have appeared entranced, as I truly was. I kept thinking how delightful she was, and how she would never know the truth about herself. Unless Janet had told her, and she, Francesca, was playing some sly game of privileged information. No, knowing Janet, that was most unlikely.

  “And what about you, Professor?” she said with a droll glance. “I can see from the articles what you’re interested in, but what else? Are you married?”

  “Yes.” I told her about my wife and children. I even pulled pictures from my wallet to show her, and while she said all the proper things—What adorable boys!—she seemed a trifle daunted. I wanted so badly to tell her she was looking at her brothers. Half-brothers. “Are you sure your mother never mentioned me? I know there were lots of students, but I—well, I must confess I had a bit of a crush on her.”

  “Is that so?” Francesca gave her ironic smile. “You were hardly the only one. She was Queen of the Students. She loved it. She was going strong well into her fifties, until the end. She must have broken quite a few hearts.”

  “Oh, but not really—You’re not saying that—”