Referred Pain: Stories Read online

  “I broke a tooth.” He described how.

  “That’s too bad. So go to a dentist. Did you read the paper this morning? What’s going on in Bosnia? Torture, bodies, barbed wire. Same thing all over again.”

  Koslowski was in charge of computer systems at a small music company—the best in the business, the human resources director called him—but he took faint interest or pride in his skill. He served his time in the hope that someday, through his contacts, his band would be recording in one of the studios. He rarely missed a day, but when Monday came at last, he called in sick.

  Dr. Blebanoff, greatly aged since Koslowski’s last visit, peered and probed and declared the tooth would have to be pulled. In his state of shock, Koslowski nodded mutely in submission and gazed out the window at sleet drifting into the Atlantic. With a force Koslowski wouldn’t have attributed to the old man, Blebanoff began tugging at the tooth while Koslowski, to his surprise and embarrassment, resisted with all his might, like a captured animal.

  “Come on, Richie. You can’t be feeling pain, not with the Novocain.” That was true. He didn’t fight back out of pain. Simply, the assaultive yanking of those bare pink fingers called forth a feral response, as if the tooth itself refused to be torn from its lifelong home.

  This was the most prolonged physical assault of Koslowski’s life. Peaceful by nature, he had been in the usual scuffles as a boy when they were unavoidable. He was big and solid and came out well, with the occasional bruise or bloody nose. Once he was mugged on a deserted street by three older boys who knocked him down and took his wallet; he was sore and humiliated but otherwise intact.

  How lucky he was, as his parents never ceased to remind him. Millions of people had known agonies he couldn’t conceive of. Beyond the obvious victims of war and torture, more to the point right now were all those hapless souls in the dark reaches of human history who had had teeth pulled before Novocain. To stop his involuntary struggles in the chair, Koslowski tried to picture them thrashing about. It didn’t help. This was his alone. In desperation, he conjured up images, always available, always suppressed, of his now portly father, skeletal in the striped uniform of the camps, of his mother a ragged, famished waif hunting for food on the icy streets of wartime Leningrad. All through childhood these images had kept him up at night longing to undo history, to pluck his parents from its claws; he learned to fend them off by playing music in his head. But even they lost their potency under the dentist’s relentless assault. At last, to their mutual relief, Blebanoff prevailed. Shyly, like a neophyte lover, Koslowski poked his tongue in the tender hole.

  Dr. Blebanoff outlined his options. He could have a bridge made, and when Koslowski inquired, he explained what a bridge was. Or—and this was Blebanoff’s recommendation—he could have a removable bridge. “I’ll show you.” Like a magician, the dentist reached into his mouth to remove a small object—a tooth, girded by wires!—and held it forth for inspection. Koslowski was nonplussed, almost as if the dentist had made an indecent gesture. The too-intimate display of this odd object recalled childhood games of doctor under the boardwalk with Sonya, his next-door neighbor. Modestly averting his eyes, he said, “Oh, no. I’m too young for that.”

  Dr. Blebanoff shrugged and reinserted his device. “Either way, you have to wait six weeks for the hole to heal. So, how are your parents? Did you read what’s happening in Bosnia? It never ends, does it?”

  At his weekly gig at an East Side piano bar that night, he gave the diners three hours of old musical-comedy favorites—Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Stephen Sondheim; while his head swam, his fingers moved on automatic pilot. Later, the numbness gone, he made love to Lisa, something he did as expertly as playing the piano or fixing computers but had not felt up to since the accident. In the midst of it, he was assailed by a long-forgotten image of the nine-year-old Sonya’s pink panties, which she would not remove, he recalled, only pulled down for a searing instant. Afterward, as he and Lisa caught their breath, he described the pulling of the tooth.

  “You mean he didn’t give you Valium?”

  “No. Was he supposed to?”

  “Sure. I had two wisdom teeth pulled and didn’t feel a thing. I hope he wore gloves, at least.”

  “Gloves? No.”

  “Richie, this guy is out of it. All dentists wear gloves these days. Didn’t you read about that girl who got AIDS from her dentist? Find someone else. Or leave it alone. It doesn’t show. Smile. Well, hardly.”

  “It feels funny. Like something’s missing.”

  “Well, we all know about the symbolism of teeth, don’t we?” She reached down to stroke him. “Don’t worry. Everything’s still there. Safe and sound. Very sound.”

  “I never thought of that.”

  “You’re so innocent. Like a virgin, you know? Dental virgin.”

  While the bloody hole healed, Koslowski made inquiries about bridges. Many people had them, apparently. Even his parents, as they revealed when he and Lisa went over for dinner. He listened in wonder, as if they had undergone major surgery without informing him. “When was that?”

  “I can’t remember,” his father said. “When you were a kid, I think. Maybe when you were away in college. What’s the difference? Did you hear the latest? Ethnic cleansing, they call it now. Makes it sound almost respectable.”

  “Don’t get yourself all upset,” his mother said. “You’ll bring on one of your spells.”

  He waved away her cautions with his hairy left hand, the one missing the little finger. “A disgrace. And we just stand by and watch.”

  “Hundreds of Muslim women are being brutally raped,” Lisa put in, “and as if that’s not bad enough, they’re afraid to tell. It’s used as a weapon.”

  Koslowski let Lisa handle this conversation. His parents intrigued her: their penumbra of endured catastrophe, the gruesome details they let casually drop if encouraged. He suspected that his history—their history—made him more attractive to her. Exotic. Even privileged. He would try to ignore her hushed awe as they told their stories, yet he too knew the lure, the sickly fear and sickly envy of that priceless knowledge. As a boy, lying awake in the dark, he would overhear his parents in the living room talking to friends, many of them Russians newly settled around them in Brighton Beach. He caught snatches of garish, enigmatic stories like the fairy tales in Sonya’s books, where people bled their fingers raw sewing shirts out of nettles or furiously weaving roomfuls of straw. Had his mother really chewed on wood? His father’s frozen finger been chopped off without anesthetic, the stump wrapped in newspaper? “The corpses lay in the streets.” That was his mother’s voice. “Everyone raced to strip off their clothes. If they didn’t fit we could trade them for bread.” He heard disputes about how much to tell the children.

  “It was wartime,” his mother would say. “Those things happen. Why do they have to know? Let them have a normal childhood.”

  “Why?” came his father’s voice. “It’s not a normal world.”

  How, then, could Koslowski expect his boyish tribulations to stir them, his scrapes and cuts and broken arm from leaping off the boardwalk, his little disappointments like losing a school election or a football game? Don’t be a baby, Richie, his father would say. There are worse things in the world. He didn’t need to enumerate; Koslowski could choose from an abundance of family legend.

  How lucky he was, they told him. He understood nothing of suffering. How lucky he was, until he hated the sound of the words that set him apart in his ignorance. “Okay, so maybe I don’t understand,” he shouted back one awful night. “So I’ll never know what you know. So what do you want me to do about it?” His mother looked at him sadly—what he called her martyred look—and turned away.

  In truth he was lucky by any standards: handsome, athletic, musical, popular. Girls liked his effortless charm, his curly hair and gray eyes, his slightly lopsided smile and beguiling air of both needing and offering protection. He was grateful for his blessings and tried not to dwell on th
e lore that became his bedtime stories, like the time meat appeared on the table and his mother ate it, then vomited when she discovered it was a stray cat. She was slapped for wasting a meal.

  He took it all in, though, then woke up choked by nightmares in which he rushed after his parents, chasing them through time, not space, to catch up and carry them to safety. But he was helpless: they were always swallowed up, by the earth or by the sea, or in tornadoes and hurricanes and pillars of cloud.

  All that was long ago. Now he simply tuned out as they reviewed the latest atrocities in the papers. Leaning back, he poked at the shrinking hole in his mouth. What had begun as a large round chasm that could accommodate the tip of his tongue was contracting daily, infinitesimally, leaving the new perimeter smooth; the tip of his tongue could just describe the circumference. The salt taste was fading too.

  Koslowski’s computer job might be merely his daily bread, a means to an end, yet its methods had taken root. If an imperfection existed, it must be fixed. He would have the bridge made: a new experience, maybe even a useful one. In detective stories, corpses were often identified by their bridgework. Maybe one day his teeth would save him from being tossed anonymously into a mass grave.

  Six weeks later, leaning over Koslowski, Dr. Blebanoff explained that he would grind down the tooth behind the space and, in a week or so, the tooth in front of the space, then cover them with crowns. Crowns? Koslowski pondered. As in crowned heads? How could any such object fit on a tooth? And why destroy two more perfectly good teeth? That made no sense. But virgin that he was, he must bow to a higher authority. The dental plan at work would pay the bill.

  “Why not do them both now? Get it over with.”

  “No, that’s too much for one day.”

  Too much for the patient or for the dentist? The waiting room was usually empty. Perhaps Dr. Blebanoff, past retirement age, couldn’t stand on his feet for long stretches, or suffered from attention-deficit disorder.

  Winters had always been drafty in Blebanoff’s office. Under his white smock, the dentist wore a long-sleeved knit turtleneck. As he approached, instrument in hand, he pushed up his sleeves. On the inside of his right forearm was the branded number—Koslowski had never noticed it before. It glared at him like a reminder of his own innocence, his meager pains, his easeful life. He moaned faintly, closed his eyes, and offered his open mouth to the drill.

  When the dreadful noise was over, he was sickened to feel the smooth, razed stump of an inoffensive tooth. Nearby, the dentist bent over a tray and toyed with plaster and toothpicks—making a temporary crown—just as Koslowski, in kindergarten, had labored over clay statues of horses and giraffes.

  At a club that evening, the crown slipped off into a nacho. Startled, he held it in his cupped hand like a live grenade.

  “Oh, just stick it back in,” said Lisa, and coaxed him back to the dance floor.

  After the second such occurrence, he returned to Dr. Blebanoff. “Besides, it doesn’t fit right.”

  Dr. Blebanoff ground the tooth down further. Once. Twice. Koslowski was missing hours at work. His machine blared messages of distress; his own patients weren’t used to such delays.

  “I can’t grind any more,” said the dentist. “Already it’s almost like it’s not there.”

  But it was very much there, and as he rose from the chair, a bolt of pain shot up into Koslowski’s cranium and lodged there, reverberating. Concentric circles hummed around his head. Haloes, he thought, like a martyr in a medieval fresco.

  “Relax, Richie. You must have bit down in a funny way.”

  On the subway and during the walk to his office, the reverberations gradually subsided, leaving a grainy tingle like the ebb of crashing cymbals.

  “So, how’s the tooth?” asked the human resources director, sauntering down the hall.

  “I have this pain, I don’t know what to call it. It’s like nothing I’ve ever felt. Sort of like chalk on a blackboard.”

  “I know what you’re talking about,” she said. “There’s a name for it. It’s called exquisite pain. You probably need a root canal. By the way, Joe Bracco’s been asking for you. They’re having a problem with downloading.”

  Exquisite pain. After he ministered to Bracco’s computer, he called Lisa, but she was out at a class. He called his mother.

  “That idiot Blebanoff must have hit a nerve or something. He ruined another good tooth. And tonight’s a big rehearsal.”

  “Blebanoff? You still go to him? He’s getting old, you know. That’s too bad, Richie. Take some aspirin and find someone else.”

  “Too bad! The jerk doesn’t even wear gloves. I could get AIDS. Oh, never mind. How’s Dad?”

  “The same. The doctor asked him questions, like what do you call the things you wear on your feet. He got everything right,” she said dryly. “Now they want to do an MRI. They put you in a closed coffin and take pictures.” She paused to sigh. “Don’t worry, I don’t think you’ll get AIDS from Blebanoff.”

  The exquisite pain consumed him. It was dormant except when he poked the tooth, hoping it might miraculously have vanished. But it pierced his brain like a spear. Still he kept poking, perversely reviving the sensation like an epicure craving arcane, stinging delights. Lisa recommended her dentist. State of the art. Sexy, too.

  “Oh yeah? Does he turn you on? With his big drill?”

  “Richie, I was only kidding. What’s with you? Listen, one of my professors is going to Sarajevo this summer. They’re putting together a team of lawyers and social workers to interview the women who were raped. They may take a student along to do the scut work. I’m applying. Wouldn’t that be great?”

  “Great,” he echoed.

  After releasing Koslowski from some weighty armor used for X-rays, Lisa’s dentist inspected each of his teeth one by one with a measuring instrument that filled his mouth to bursting. Like a bingo host, the dentist called out numbers to the hygienist, who wrote them down. “Before you can get a bridge,” he said, “I have to assess your periodontal situation.” Baffled but submissive, Koslowski looked around. On the facing wall hung an enlarged copy of a letter from a first-grade class in the teacher’s neat chubby print. “Dear Dr. Rodriguez, Thank you for letting us visit your office. We learned a lot and had a very good time.” Below, above, and around this message, the children had scrawled their names at odd angles, using all the colors of the rainbow—Melissa, Keisha, Jared, Esteban.

  The light out the window was a dreary March gray. Opposite, a brick wall. Mengele came to mind: his father claimed to have seen him once in the camp. Mengele was inspecting a row of naked women, pacing up and back and brandishing a stick, like a general reviewing his troops. You could tell he was evil by the way he twirled the stick, his father said. The image was a part of family lore.

  Dr. Rodriguez looked nothing like Mengele, though. More Miami Vice—slick and shady, a style Koslowski was surprised could appeal to Lisa. “By the way,” he said, “quite a few of your teeth need bonding. You should consider that at some point.”

  “Really? How many?” And what on earth was bonding?

  “Eighteen.” With a gentle tap, the probe arrived at Koslowski’s ground-down tooth. The exquisite pain shot through his head and he levitated two inches from the chair.

  Dr. Rodriguez and his hygienist exchanged a stunned, meaningful glance. “Root canal,” he announced. Not in his purview: he recommended a Fifth Avenue colleague.

  Dr. Callahan, the endodontist, thrust long needles deep into Koslowski’s tooth. As his jaw locked into position, panic clutched him. What if his jaw stayed locked this way forever? What if the dentist couldn’t get the needles out? He was puny and seemed to be yanking rather hard to remove them. Koslowski broke out in a sweat and feared he might throw up and choke. His usual remedy, devising keyboard arrangements in his head, was no help. Only with great effort could he keep from leaping out of the chair.

  Koslowski was no coward. In the past he had shown exceptional courage. At
college in Vermont, when fire broke out in the old house he shared with seven other students, he raced around waking his housemates, then went back inside to carry out two girls overcome by the thick smoke. At the service held for the one student who died, the president of the college publicly commended him (though mispronouncing his name, with a “w” instead of a “v”). The dean asked him to dinner and the school paper ran an article about his heroic rescue, with a large photo. His parents flew up—fire was something they took seriously—and his mother clasped him to her breast and sobbed. Then she looked so angry he thought she might slap him, big as he was. “You don’t take such chances! In an emergency it’s enough to save yourself.” But she cut out the photo and hung it in the bedroom beside her wedding picture.

  He knew there were worse things in the world than a root canal. He knew them like a litany. Civilian suffering in wartime. Political prisoners. Victims of famine and earthquakes … But this thing, right now, was the thing that was happening to him. Still, what right had he to complain? Tomorrow his father, whose “spells” were becoming more frequent, was scheduled for the MRI in the coffin. This very minute, as he sat helpless in the chair, the news on the dentist’s radio told of mass graves filled with mutilated victims discovered near Sarajevo. Koslowski gagged. Could the endodontist concentrate with such news in his ear?

  “Expect some discomfort,” Dr. Callahan said. “Call me if the swelling and pain don’t go away in two days.”

  He walked along the park benumbed, past the bannered Plaza Hotel with its caravan of taxis and bustle of baggage, past the carriage horses, still in their winter wraps, pawing the ground, past uniformed doormen opening doors with a practiced flourish. He saw it all, yet his eyes were as numbed as his mouth. As he trudged the mile back to his office, the Novocain ebbed, and an ache at the site of his murdered tooth blared in outrage.

  A message from Joe Bracco awaited him. “Hey, Richie. The computers are wacko again. I thought you fixed everything. Would you get down here soon as you can? We’re all jammed up.”