Referred Pain: Stories Read online

  “I’d like to try on some Rollerblades.”

  A genial West Indian sales clerk brought out several pairs. “Ever skate before?”

  “Not on these. But I ice-skate.”

  “You should be okay, then. Go on, try them out.”

  He got to his feet and slowly skated around on the polished floorboards with the three clerks cheering him on—“Go, man, go!”—even when he stumbled and nearly overturned a rack of sweatsuits. He pretended he was on ice skates and the floor was ice. Long ago, his mother would take him skating on the lake in Prospect Park. When she was six, she told him, she could already zip around on the canals and the frozen Neva. That was before the Germans surrounded the city. After, they had to cut holes in the ice and lower buckets for water, with luck catch a fish, then hunt up enough wood for a fire in the stove. One morning when she was sent out to find wood, or scraps, or anything at all, she saw blackened holes and ridges in the huge columns of the cathedral, stone columns so thick they had seemed impermeable. Shelled during the night. And as if transfixed by memory, she would stare out the window at the churning, unfreezable Atlantic.

  He left the store with a pair of very expensive skates and the knee, wrist, and elbow guards to match, all black and hard and gleaming.

  “Blades?” asked Lisa. “How come?”

  “Why not? You could get a pair too. We’ll go together. It’s spring!” He hugged her, but she stood impassive.

  “I don’t think so. It looks dangerous.”

  “So let’s live more dangerously!”

  He took readily to the skates. As skater rather than sufferer, he zoomed through Central Park, claiming and detoxifying the paths he had trod in misery, reclaiming his life. His father was feeling better too—the new pills were working; he’d known all along it was nothing serious. His mother’s reports were less sanguine. Yes, in a way he seemed better, but he wasn’t himself. “He has moods, up and down. He forgets things, he gets mixed up.” Well, his father was over seventy. It was only natural.

  For skating company Koslowski had his tapes and Walkman. Lisa never joined him. They barely had time to talk, she was so busy with her studies and projects. Too tired even for love, most nights. And she never asked about his tooth.

  It still grew during his waking hours and shrank back to size by morning, and this continued to terrify him. But the terror was familiar now. It was possible to live with terror, he discovered, to accommodate it and find a place for it, like keeping a snarling beast locked in the basement rather than giving it the run of the house. You heard its snarls, and you had to toss down some meat once in a while, that was all.

  Each morning he would probe the root canal area with his tongue to test for pain. One day he noticed a nasty taste coming from the spot where the needles had been thrust, as if something noxious were dripping down from the cavity around his brain. The next day, during his reconnoitering, he felt a sore bump under his gum, the size of a pea.

  He missed work again to have the cyst surgically removed.

  “How does the tooth feel?” Dr. Callahan asked. “Does it hurt if you tap it with a fingernail?”

  Koslowski tapped. It hurt slightly, perhaps no more than reasonably, given its recent ordeal. What degree of pain was worth acknowledging? Reporting? In the realm of pain, too, he was a virgin, lacking all sense of possibility: height and depth, scale and proportion, subjective and objective. “It still hurts a little, I guess.”

  “In that case I’d better do the root canal again, as long as I’m going back in. You can’t get a bridge if it still hurts.”

  What could he do but submit? But as the needles dug deep into his head, maybe his brain, it struck him that Callahan might be another madman, injecting toxic fluid for some insane research project. He’d read of shocking experiments performed down South on unwitting subjects, mostly black men, in the name of research. That was years ago, of course, but still … Maybe the dental cabal didn’t like his name.

  “By the way, I’m doing a bone graft. You have, what can I call it, mushy bone. Sorry to use such an unpleasant term, but it’s the simplest way to describe it to a layman. Strange that it still hurts. It looks like a perfect root canal.”

  In his drugged state, he hailed a taxi to speed him to work—six dollars and twenty cents in midtown traffic. He handed the driver a twenty, but found he couldn’t calculate the tip; the numbers lurched and jostled in a mind befogged. He struggled to think: a dollar and a quarter seemed about right, which would make the total … seven forty-five? Right. Say seven fifty. But how much change to request? As he faltered, the driver reached back and put a pile of bills and coins in his palm. Koslowski stared at the money. It seemed less than he should have received, but he couldn’t manage to count it, couldn’t assemble it in his mind. Was this milky fog what his father felt all the time, behind his brash, valiant denials? Was this how madness clawed away the mind?

  Horns honked behind them. He thrust a bill and some coins at the driver. On the street, he studied the five and few singles that remained in his hand. Had he been shortchanged, or had he mistakenly given the driver a five or ten instead of a one? He stood on the sidewalk straining to make sense of it all, then gave up in despair. Tears blurred his eyes. Through them, he pictured a straggly crew of bony men moving piles of sand from one end of a barren field to the other. His father, very young, was among them. The sun was broiling hot and his father’s head was pounding. He wasn’t trying to figure anything out, just doing the task required to live to the next day. His resilient father had managed to live. And not only to live, but to thrive: to go through night school and become an accountant. He, Koslowski, could barely live through a root canal and handle a short taxi ride. He would never have come out of there alive. Never. He was made of weaker stuff.

  At the piano bar that evening he soothed himself with a medley of Scott Joplin and Scarlatti improvisations. An older woman with ash-gray hair and diamond earrings stopped on her way out. “Let’s see your hands,” she said, and ran a finger along the tops. “Very nice hands. Where else do you play?” This happened from time to time; women found his faintly foreign look and off-center smile appealing, though the smile, since Dr. Dahlberg, was not all it had been. Sometimes he told Lisa, if the approach had been unusual. The woman dropped a ten-dollar bill in the tips glass on the piano. With this windfall Koslowski bought two bunches of daffodils at the all-night deli on the corner.

  Lisa was still at the computer, finishing her paper about the division of assets in divorce cases. She flipped on the screen saver, a quote from Margaret Fuller: “We would have every path laid open to Woman as freely as to Man.” “I see why lawyers are so nasty,” she sighed. “They get traumatized just trying to survive law school. How’d it go tonight?”

  “Fine.” He wouldn’t, after all, make an amusing story of the fifty-year-old woman. Lisa would say there was nothing laughable about a woman asserting her sexuality at any age—so long as he didn’t take her up on it. He presented the flowers.

  “They’re beautiful. Thanks. What’s the matter? Your face is a little swollen.”

  He confessed to the second root canal.

  “Richie! Why can’t you let it alone? Give it a chance to heal. You’re into some kind of, I don’t know, like masochism. You don’t have to go along with everything they say. They’ll do anything for money, especially if you don’t protest.”

  “Calm down, okay? It’s too late. It’s done.”

  He persuaded Lisa to take a late-April Sunday off. They rode bikes in the park, ate hot dogs and ice cream, danced to music in the band shell. They lay on the grass, his head in her lap, and spoke loving words, as they had not done in months. In the evening they rented an old movie: Tallulah Bankhead and a half-dozen other stars were marooned in a lifeboat in mid-Atlantic, their ship blown up by a German sub. There was no escaping the war. The best old movies were inspired by it. William Bendix’s wounded leg was infected, and the only way to save his life was by prompt amputat
ion. Tallulah Bankhead proffered her bottle of brandy to dull the pain—more comfort, Koslowski thought, than his father had had when they chopped off his frozen finger.

  He fell asleep in awe of William Bendix’s bravery in submitting to the knife and awoke charged with clarity and vigor. If William Bendix could sacrifice a leg, he could sacrifice the accursed tooth. It was corrupting his mind, spewing wretchedness and confusion. He must be rid of it. Excise it, like a tumor. Exorcise it. Once it was out, all would be well. The life he had led before the olive pit would be restored. He would play his music and love Lisa and skate: his lucky life. True, he’d be missing two teeth in his upper jaw, but he could get a little removable bridge of the kind Dr. Blebanoff had shown him months ago. In his ignorance he had rejected it out of hand, but he’d learned a lot since then. So what if the bridge symbolized old age and decrepitude; it was better than obsession and paranoia. Years from now he might look back on the whole nightmare with serenity, even amusement. Though just now he could hardly recall how life had felt before the accident.

  Dr. Callahan agreed it was a wise, if hasty, decision. “We do all we can to save a tooth,” he said gravely, “but sometimes a tooth can’t be saved.” He paused to emphasize the philosophic import of his words.

  “Right. I get it. Can you do it today?”

  “I don’t pull teeth. I’m an endodontist.” He recommended a colleague in dental surgery, Dr. Fisher.

  Koslowski dreaded the appointed hour—the exorcism—recalling all too well the mortifying battle with old Blebanoff over the first tooth. A needless dread, as it turned out. Dr. Fisher, a tall, stooped man whose world-weary face was lit by intelligence, administered a deft shot in the arm. Before Koslowski could fully savor the glorious well-being conferred by intravenous Valium, the dentist announced he was finished. The tooth was out.

  “Already?” No yanking, no struggle?

  “The Valium distorts your sense of time.”

  “Well, can you see what was wrong with it?”

  “There doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with the tooth.” Dr. Fisher shrugged. “Sometimes teeth hurt and we can’t figure out why. It could be referred pain.”

  “Referred pain?”

  “That means the place where it hurts is not the source of the trouble. The source of the trouble is somewhere else.”

  “Where?”

  Dr. Fisher shrugged to signify ignorance. Dentists, Koslowski noted, had in common a tendency to shrug.

  “So where is it? My tooth, I mean.”

  “Now?”

  “Yes.” He needed to see the thing that had caused such grief yet might be innocent after all. Was it callously dumped in the shiny stainless steel trash can, or heaped on a shelf with others that had met the same fate? For all he knew, there were mountains of teeth concealed in the office, like the mountains of shoes and suitcases …

  With tiny tongs, Dr. Fisher plucked something from the counter, placed it on a tissue and brought it to Koslowski, like displaying a jewel on its velvet bed. His tooth. It was larger than he expected—the bulk of it, with its two tiny tusks, had been concealed under the gums.

  “Okay, thanks.”

  “Do you want it?”

  “No.”

  “Just for … closure?” Dr. Fisher said with irony.

  “Yes.” And they exchanged a comradely smile.

  “They say people who lose loved ones do much better later on if they actually see the body being buried. Then they know for sure. It’s easier to accept, somehow.”

  Koslowski nodded, grateful for this knowing, subtle man.

  He left with a new bloody hole in his mouth and the usual instructions for post-surgical care. When Lisa saw him gargling with salt water at the bathroom sink, she grunted and moved on in silence. She didn’t need to speak; he knew what she thought. Later she told him she’d been offered a place in the group going to Bosnia. She’d be leaving in less than two months.

  “Terrific. That’s just what you wanted.”

  “I know. But now that I’m really going …”

  “You’re having second thoughts?”

  “No, I definitely want to go. I’m just … scared, I guess.”

  “You’ll do fine. Only I’ll miss you.”

  When his new bloody hole was healed, Koslowski explained to Dr. Eng, recommended by Joe Bracco at work, what he wanted: the removable device Dr. Blebanoff had displayed. The atmosphere in Dr. Eng’s office was promising. Chopin nocturnes played softly in the background, and a photo on the wall showed a benign domestic tableau: two small boys, presumably the young Engs, romping in a plastic backyard pool.

  “No way,” said Dr. Eng. “They’re not used anymore. Maybe in Europe or Asia. But no reputable dentist here would make you one.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, for one thing, you could swallow it.”

  “Oh, I’m sure I wouldn’t swallow it.” Koslowski’s heart thumped in frustration.

  Eng was adamant. However doting a father, he was an exacting dentist. He proposed instead a plastic plate that would extend over the roof of the mouth and hook on to the teeth on the other side.

  Koslowski fought down a wave of nausea. “How much will it cost?” he blurted out. “Because I’m not sure the insurance will keep covering all this.”

  “Around two hundred fifty dollars.”

  Two weeks later, to the syncopated sounds of Poulenc, he was presented with a large and hideous pink thing, gleaming and nacreous like a polished seashell, with two teeth wired onto one end. As he opened to receive it, his throat constricted and his guts heaved in protest. He knew, the way he knew his own name, his own history, that he should not be submitting to this violation. But how could he retreat? He was lost in an alien land; he didn’t know the language or the customs. In such circumstances people submit to anything, out of confusion and terror, ignorance and powerlessness, all of which engulfed him.

  “Keep it wet when you’re not using it,” said Dr. Eng. That, Koslowski knew, meant keeping it in a glass of water overnight. He had spied Sonya’s grandmother’s teeth once, sunk in a tumbler beside the couch where she was napping: a moment of comic horror. Teeth belonged in mouths. Anywhere else, they became grotesque.

  “You won’t be able to chew most things with it,” Dr. Eng said with satisfaction.

  “What do you mean, most things? Like what?”

  “It’s plastic. It can cut about as much as a plastic fork. I made one for my father-in-law, and he wanted to use it to chew. What do you expect? I told him. It’s plastic.”

  Why, Koslowski wondered, should he be condemned to the same fate as Dr. Eng’s father-in-law, surely a much older man, a man perhaps with no alternative, with a mouth full of bloody holes.

  “Wear it a little longer each day to get used to it. If you want, you can remove it when you eat.”

  He mumbled a hasty good-bye. He wouldn’t be returning, despite the dentist’s good taste in music. Eng had been revealed as one of the enemy.

  Lisa grimaced when she saw it. “It’s like the bite plate I had when I was twelve years old. A torture instrument. You’re not really going to wear it, are you?”

  “What else can I do? I can’t get a real bridge until six months after the root canal. Meanwhile …”

  “Meanwhile you’re on this weird trip. It’s creepy. I mean, people like your father were forced to submit on pain of death. But with you it’s some kind of perverted … What are you trying to prove?”

  Dinner that night—they went out to celebrate three years of being together—was a disaster. With his tongue he tried furtively and in vain to dislodge the bits of spinach that crept beneath the plate. The linguini deposited pasty lumps all over the plastic on the roof of his mouth, and the slippery texture of the clams was defeating.

  “I’m not very hungry, actually. I had a late lunch.”

  Lisa glared. Koslowski regarded the inviting food in front of him: he alone was excluded from this most ordinary of human pleasure
s. And he had brought it on himself.

  No. A gross cosmic error had been made. Stop! You have the wrong man, he screamed silently, like a prisoner led to the torture chamber. Others might have to wear such devices, but they had bad teeth and must suffer the consequences. He wasn’t meant for this. He was lucky—hadn’t his parents always said so? Hadn’t he escaped unscathed from the fire and the subway wreck? And he was entitled to his luck. He, after all, was the designated beneficiary of his parents’ investment of pain, was he not? The new-world heir to their untouched capital of good luck?

  In the bathroom at home, he struggled to pry the thing from his mouth.

  “Oh, great. Why didn’t you take the fucking thing out before?” Lisa said. “It ruined the whole evening. It’s ruining everything.”

  “It would never have happened in the first place if you’d come to that party. You weren’t all that sick.”

  “Am I hearing you right? It’s all my fault?”

  “I’m not saying it’s your fault. But it’s true it wouldn’t have happened.”

  “Leave me alone, would you? Get out of my life. You’re not the same person you used to be. You’re freaked out.”

  She sat up late finishing an overdue paper, then took her pillow and slept on the couch. Koslowski seethed.

  An hour later, chastened by remorse, he tiptoed to the couch, apologized, and curled up beside her. The seed of resentment took firmer root in his heart. Like anyone shamed, he watered it with unshed tears. From then on he removed the plate for meals and kept the glass of water, its nocturnal home, concealed in a night-table drawer.

  Dr. Eng’s bill was not two hundred fifty dollars but seven hundred. Despite the intervention of the human resources director, the dental plan, thus far obliging, refused to pay more than the original estimate. How misleading had been that photo of the frolicking children. Never again would he be deceived by a cheap display of sentiment. Nor would he pay more than two-fifty: let Eng sue for the rest.