REFERRED PAIN

1 3 3 R R E F E R R E D P A I N M I C H A E L C A R R O L L She was married to a man who was extremely popular with his students . The English Department had even allowed Gary to choose the title for his own chair, which he’d named after an antiquarian bookseller in Gary’s native New York who had closed his doors a while ago. People didn’t read Gary’s novels so much as talk about them. He brought them in at the rate of one every two or three years. They were short, and he did most of his work on them in the farmhouse they rented for a couple months every summer in the south of France. It was her idea to have his grad students over a few times a semester. Gary was so self-contained that he didn’t seem to need them or Diane or anyone else around, although Gary never seemed rattled by their company, either. Diane kept the house clean and cooked for him, and when he came home from the university Gary smiled at the neatness of things, and when he sat down to one of her meals he thanked her pleasantly and complimented whatever she’d bothered making, his fond, far-o√ look never wavering. She remembered the shy Gary she’d met at Columbia thirty years ago, compact and smooth-skinned, his well-formed body an unblemished envelope of unimposing masculinity. After only a year of 1 3 4 C A R R O L L Y dating she’d inadvertently proposed to him in his room one night when she’d said, ‘‘Do you think this is leading to anything permanent ? But if that’s dumb, you can just say.’’ ‘‘Well for goodness sake, Di,’’ Gary had then said, getting an alarmed look that he quickly swapped for a clever gleam, ‘‘and how long has this been going through your mind?’’ She’d read all of Trollope, then all of Dickens, and by now all of nearly everyone, trying to find distractions. She kept the garden going and mowed the lawn herself. The only thing she wouldn’t paint was exterior trim. For a long time she had felt like she owed Gary this much, but she didn’t find any of the work she did around the house too great a challenge. She didn’t have a job, and this had been a mistake, and sometimes while he slept without snoring too loudly she sat up in the living room, like a Joni Mitchell character, she thought, the speaker or narrator in a Joni Mitchell song from the mid-seventies specifically, and drank wine and wished she could ask one of Gary’s students how to get hold of some grass. She’d liked smoking grass, though she’d lied to Gary when she was helping him through grad school up at Brown by telling him she didn’t see the point of grass. She’d always wanted to be alert for him. At any minute he’d ask her to listen to something he’d written – not his own creative work, just the dull seminar papers he didn’t care anything about. He usually liked her suggestions. His main thing was to be clear and go for a decent grade, though he didn’t really care about his literature courses. Gary was con- fident about his fiction, and she left that alone. Once here, trimming the ivy that had gotten shaggy along the front of the house, she’d fallen o√ the ladder. He’d heard her impact on the lawn – somehow she managed to fall flat and not break anything – and had come running outside, then driven her to the emergency room. When she was released in a couple of hours, the X-rays a thumbs-up, he’d put her to bed and stayed close to her the entire weekend, returning regularly to her from the desk in his study, and darting in and out of their room to heat up soup and fix sandwiches and keep the...