Referred Pain: Stories Read online

  “Mm,” he murmured, keeping his mouth closed.

  The flight was overbooked and they were assigned seats far apart, Jody up front and Koslowski in back beside the stout, white-haired woman who thought the Lord took care of his own. When lunch arrived, he bit eagerly into a chunk of French bread. A jolt in his mouth, a hard lump on his tongue. He removed the damp, doughy wad in which the bridge was embedded. “Shit,” he muttered. “Shit, shit, shit.” He wrapped his head in his hands and groaned.

  “Something wrong?” the woman beside him asked.

  “Nothing. Sorry.”

  “You’re upset,” she said soothingly. “And no wonder. Sometimes we have to act brave, but sooner or later it all comes out. You had a frightening experience. Just let go, it’s all right. I have children older than you.”

  “It’s not that,” said Koslowski.

  “No? Then what?”

  “Well …” Airplane friendships! He’d slept with one stranger and was about to bare his agonies to another. “It’s this bridge that just popped out.” He wiped it off on the napkin. “And I thought it was the answer to my prayers.”

  “It happens to the best of us. Look.” She extracted a tiny tube from her purse. “Denture glue. You squeeze it on. You can buy it in any drugstore.”

  Koslowski studied the tube as if it contained a precious elixir.

  “Here, you can keep it. Go ahead, try. Don’t be embarrassed. I use it all the time.”

  “Thanks.” He squeezed some onto the inner ledge of the bridge, turned away, and popped it in. He’d used too much; it oozed onto his gums and tongue but didn’t taste bad, a bit like toothpaste. “What if I can’t get it out?”

  “Don’t worry. It’s usually the opposite problem. But let me give you some advice. A young man like you, you don’t want to be fussing with that kind of bridge the rest of your life. Get implants. Half the people I know have them. I’d do it myself but I can’t risk the surgery. I’m a hemophiliac.”

  His new friend settled in to watch the movie, and Koslowski fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

  As they filed out he looked around for Jody but didn’t see her until the baggage claim area, standing beside a young man with the same golden hair. The brother. Koslowski approached.

  “I just wanted to say good-bye.”

  “Oh, hi, Richie. This is my brother Bill. Richie was so great to me on the flight, Billy, when I was freaking out. Listen, we’ve got to run. Thanks again for everything. See ya!” She was gone. He’d been afraid she would want to keep in touch, had even thought up discreet ways to extricate himself. Now he felt hollowed out.

  On top of the waiting stack of mail was a postcard from Dr. Dahlberg’s office commanding that he schedule a routine periodontal cleaning. He tore it to shreds. Better a plane crash than that again.

  Even before he unpacked he called his parents. The news was not good: his father had taken a sudden and dramatic turn for the worse. Going to work was out of the question. The headaches were more severe, his mother reported, the “spells” more frequent and more intense. He forgot where he was, he repeated the most ordinary actions, he had delusions. Koslowski took the subway to Brighton Beach and found his father calmly reading The New York Times. He seemed listless and weary, but there were no other signs. Perhaps his mother was exaggerating.

  Lisa would be gone for six weeks. Koslowski embarked on his single life. Thanks to the glue of the friendly fundamentalist, his mouth felt bearable and he could concentrate at work. He skated in Prospect Park with his Walkman. He played twice a week at the piano bar and worked on new arrangements with the band, for their promotional CD. The clubs were less booked during July and August, so they got gigs readily. He would have liked to tell Hal about the bridge, but Hal’s siege of lower back pain dwarfed any dental work.

  He visited his parents whenever he could. “Take a walk on the boardwalk, Mom. I’ll stay here.”

  The first two times, his father was fretful and sulky. Koslowski felt useful, easing his childish demands. Then one day he stiffened and went quite pale. “Let me be,” he cried. “I was at the roll call. I wasn’t late.”

  “Dad, it’s all right. You’re at home. It’s okay.” He bent over, his hand on his father’s shoulder.

  “Let go! My head hurts. I need a pass for the infirmary.”

  Koslowski drew back in horror. The thing he had been fleeing and seeking all his life was suddenly right there in the room with them, invisible and charged with power, like electricity. If only he could gather his father in his arms and carry him to safety. But rescue was impossible because the thing was lodged in his father’s head where no one could touch it. He wouldn’t even let Koslowski near, waving his arms to fend him off even as he protested, “It’s me, Dad. Richie. I won’t hurt you. Please!”

  All he could do was watch him moan and mutter in his chair until the seizure passed. His ravaged face untwisted, his gaze cleared, and he looked around, blinking, like someone emerging from a cave.

  Every few days Koslowski got an e-mail from Lisa, spare and uninformative. “Hi, Richie, how’s it going? It’s not easy here, but I’m okay. We’re hearing incredible things. The papers don’t begin to tell what’s really going on. I can’t write more—this is the only computer and everyone wants it. Love, L.” He wanted to picture her at work but she gave no clues. Did she meet with the women in offices, makeshift tents, bombed-out buildings? Did they weep with grief and shame or sit mute and stoical? Where did she sleep? What did she eat? Was she dodging bullets in the street? Land mines? She told nothing. He thought occasionally of Jody, with mild curiosity. Soon she’d be back at school. Would she remember him, or had she forgotten already? Perhaps he’d become a funny story for her friends. Thank God she hadn’t seen the bridge in the glass of water—he could imagine a clutch of blonde, creamy-faced girls gathered in some dorm room, breaking up in laughter at the very notion.

  As the summer passed, the e-mails arrived less often. Much as he missed Lisa, especially at night, the absence of strain was palpable, more so than the strain itself had been. It was all the fault of the teeth.

  No. Even in his extreme state he knew better. Not the teeth, not even the botched treatments had divided them, but his utter frailty in the face of it all. His rampant obsession. And beyond Lisa, it divided him from everyone else who didn’t understand. Teeth were a joke. He’d need something far more significant to have his sufferings taken seriously.

  And maybe not even then. His father used to say that when he first arrived in this country, no one, not even the relatives who helped him get started, wanted to hear the truth. “You couldn’t talk about it. It was like you were talking dirty. Forget it, you have a new life, they said. Put all that behind you. Like it was something you could erase, just like that. Idiots. They liked their innocence.”

  Later, when the “holocaust,” a word his father never used, was taken up by the media—the books, the movies and TV specials, the museum in Washington—the elder Koslowski was not appeased. “Now they can’t get enough of it. Back then, forget it. History they like, sure. Better yet, a movie.”

  But of course there was no comparison. Of course not. He didn’t really mean that, Koslowski pleaded as if to a shocked courtroom. It was just an analogy.

  His father deteriorated so badly that his mother could no longer care for him. Besides the seizures and hallucinations, there were his physical needs: he was big and unwieldy and uncooperative. They tried a visiting nurse, then a home health aide, while the doctor helped them look into a hospice, which was, in his phrase, “not so far down the road.”

  The road was shorter than anyone imagined. Within two weeks Koslowski and his mother brought his father to the hospice, where he fought back and struggled as the nurses tried to get him into a bed. He’d always been a strong man, but now his son was the stronger. “Let me do it,” he said, and lifted his father in his arms. At his son’s touch, the old man looked at him with recognition and trust, and stopped struggling.
This was a moment Koslowski would preserve forever, an instant of grace amid the grotesque. Once he was in bed, though, the struggle began again. The nurses had to tie him down in order to give the necessary shot.

  His mother left the room, but Koslowski looked on, his heart withering in his breast. “They’re nurses, Dad. They’re trying to help you,” he repeated uselessly. Now, he thought, now he understood. To see this was to know. But as his father stared accusingly, his eyes alien and opaque with rage, Koslowski had to admit he knew nothing of what he craved. All he knew was his own sorrow.

  He took his mother home and stayed in his old room in the Brighton Beach apartment to help her through this first night alone. The bridge rested in a glass of water—its home away from home—at his bedside. He’d grown accustomed to eating with care and placing it in water every night like some delicate flower, although it more resembled a tiny embryo of an exotic species, all pink and white innocence, floating in its amniotic fluid. But seeing it in this setting jarred him. This was the room where he had been an intact child never dreaming of such indignities. Or rather he did dream of indignities, but only as stories that happened to others, long ago and far beyond any help, and he had tossed in frustration at his own helplessness. Now, in the clarity of home, he grasped that in this small instance, at least, he was not helpless. He didn’t want to be putting the bridge in its watery bed every night for the next forty years. He would explore the third option Dr. Habemeyer had suggested. Implants.

  Mellow Dr. Fisher was on vacation, but Koslowski took a liking to his partner, Dr. Ferrucci, a large, balding man whose muscular build, very like Koslowski’s own, suggested an athletic youth. He wore neatly pressed chinos beneath the white smock, and his crooked teeth were reassuring—he hadn’t seen fit to have cosmetic dentistry. His matter-of-fact style was comforting too, more that of a plumber or an electrician than a dentist. Koslowski himself, in his capacity of computer doctor, had the same unpretentious manner.

  Once the X-rays, taken by a blonde hygienist who resembled Jody, proved Koslowski a fit “candidate” for implants, Dr. Ferrucci announced, “Okay, this is the deal. It involves two major surgeries. First I open up the gums and put the implants in—two metal posts that stay in your head. I might have to go into your sinuses, I can’t tell till I’m in there. Then you wait six to twelve months, the longer the better, for the holes to close up and the area to heal. Then I open up those places again and attach screws to the implants. You wait another month or so, and a dentist attaches crowns to the screws. They feel exactly like your own teeth, and they last ten years if not longer.”

  “Do you do this often?”

  He threw back his head and laughed. “All the time. I’ve done thousands. I have a ninety-three percent success rate.”

  And the other seven percent? Dead? Surely not. Maybe their mouths rejected the implants, the way some bodies reject a new heart or liver.

  Dr. Ferrucci crossed the room and stood with his back to Koslowski, studying his X-rays projected onto the wall. He seemed so sensible that Koslowski ventured to pose the critical question: what was the infernal growing and shrinking sensation, even more mysterious since the feeling had outlived the tooth?

  “Oh, that,” the dentist said nonchalantly.

  A revelatory moment: Dr. Ferrucci’s voice traveled across the room as if emanating from his broad white back. “That’s because your jaw is in spasm. The upper and lower jaws aren’t meeting properly. It can be very uncomfortable. In fact it can drive you nuts. It causes a lot of very weird referred pain. Referred pain is when—”

  “I know what it is,” said Koslowski.

  In spasm. He wished he could invite the whole world to hear this diagnosis: Lisa. His parents. Hal. The human resources director. Cara, the human rights attorney and possible source of his trouble. All the friends who had looked askance till he caught on and stopped complaining. In spasm. That sounded serious enough. He knew when it happened, too. The root canal last winter, when he sat rigid as a corpse for an hour and a half as Dr. Callahan thrust needles into his head. Another season, another life. When he was sane. When he knew, or thought he knew, the difference between real suffering and minor problems.

  “So what can I do about it?” he asked faintly.

  “Motrin. Hot compresses. It’ll ease gradually. Or else not, if it’s been going on too long. Don’t start with surgery if you can stand it. It’s complicated, believe me.”

  “Why didn’t anyone ever tell me this before?”

  Still studying the X-rays on the wall, Dr. Ferrucci shrugged.

  A few days later Koslowski went to meet Lisa at the airport. He expected that she might look tired, but he wasn’t prepared for what he found. Her lush red hair was gone, chopped off in a rough boyish cut: too hard to wash, with no hot water. She’d lost weight, her jeans were ragged, she wore no makeup. It took some effort to match this Lisa with the radiant creature in his memory. He offered to carry her backpack but she shook her head. “There’s hardly anything in it. I left most of my clothes there.”

  “You left your clothes?”

  “What else could I do? They had nothing to wear. I have to get my suitcase, though. It’s mostly papers and stuff.”

  “So,” he asked in the taxi. “Do you want to tell me?”

  “Later.” She leaned back and closed her eyes. “What about your dad? How is he?”

  Koslowski told her about the move to the hospice.

  “Oh, Richie. I’m so sorry. Is he in a lot of pain?”

  “Mostly the headaches. I’ll tell you later, when you’re not so tired.”

  She went straight to bed. Not the homecoming he had envisioned. He’d been ready to listen sympathetically to the most harrowing details, had vowed not to mention his impending surgery. But there was no opportunity for good behavior. She was sleeping when he left for work the next morning and didn’t answer when he phoned. He brought home Chinese food and found her curled on the sofa, pen in hand, leafing through a notebook.

  “How does moo-shu duck strike you?”

  She smiled wanly and accepted his kiss.

  “I bet you haven’t eaten anything like this in a long time. So, aren’t you going to say anything?”

  “It was indescribable.”

  “Well, try.”

  “One woman slit her wrists with a pocketknife and I took her to get tetanus shots. We had to go to six places before we found one that had the stuff. A few tried to abort. One almost bled to death. Some of the families wouldn’t have anything to do with them anymore.”

  He put down his chopsticks. It didn’t seem right to eat while hearing such things.

  “Some wouldn’t talk at all. It’s bad enough to talk about rape anyway, and especially in their culture they don’t, and then in front of the interpreter, and me taking notes, and the social worker and the two lawyers … Oh; one of the lawyers said she met you at a party last year. That party I didn’t go to because I was sick? The night you broke your tooth? She remembered.”

  “I remember her too. Cara.”

  “Right. How are your teeth, by the way?”

  “Okay. The same.”

  “Do you want to tell me about your father now?”

  He opened his mouth to speak, but no words came. His father’s condition was unspeakable. Especially the hallucinations. What froze his tongue, he realized, was shame. Shame that even his father’s dying was corroded by the past, inescapable, lodged in him forever. As if he were enslaved all over again, his death not even his own. He shook his head.

  “Okay, I understand.”

  No way could she understand, but he let it go. “My mom’s been asking about you, but I couldn’t tell her much.”

  “It wasn’t easy to write or call.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “No, you can’t.”

  “Okay then, I guess I can’t. How could I, when you’re totally shutting me out? And why? I don’t like that war any more than you do. You think I enjoy hearing about
ethnic cleansing?”

  “Richie, I did a lot of thinking while I was there.”

  “I thought you were so busy.”

  “You can think even when you’re busy. When you’re far away sometimes things are clearer.”

  “So?”

  “You must know what I’m talking about.”

  “I don’t.”

  “I think … things haven’t been so good between us lately. I mean, even before the trip.”

  “Because you were so uptight about it, and I was, I was—you know, my teeth. Well, that’s all past. I get it now. Teeth are nothing in the scheme of things. In my personal scheme, maybe, but not in the larger scheme. So, fine. Forget it. I’ll never mention teeth again. I want to hear about important things.”

  “It’s not that simple. We’re not … It’s just not working for me, that’s all.”

  “This is some kind of, of political difference, you mean? Like I don’t have the right scale of values? I should forget my problems and focus more on Bosnia? That’s why you want to break up?”

  “I didn’t say break up. I thought, just for a while, you know? Try living apart? Look, I know this is a hard time for you and I’m sorry. But this is how it feels to me now.”

  Koslowski stood up and began pacing. “I don’t get you. I really don’t. You’re ready to rush halfway across the world to help people you don’t even know, and you don’t give a shit about what happens to me.”

  “That’s exactly what I mean. You sound like a child.”

  “And did you meet some grown-up there? Someone who sees the big picture, who knows what really matters?”

  She shoved her plate away. “I didn’t meet anyone. That just shows how naïve you are, that you could think I had time for anything like that.”

  “How do I know what you had time for? You won’t tell me.”

  “Because you don’t care. You ask, but you really don’t care, I mean in the way I need you to care. I know you’re upset about your dad right now, but even before he—”

  “Leave my father out of it, okay? So you think I don’t care!” I met a really nice girl on the plane back, he wanted to say. Really sweet. She wouldn’t say I didn’t care. She needed help and I gave it. She wasn’t a rape victim, but I did what I could. “So, what do you have in mind, exactly?”