The Pain Chronicles (3 page)

Pain Diary:

I Keep a Secret

ONSET: When did your pain begin? Was there any triggering event or special circumstances that surrounded it?

In the beginning, it was secret.

It began when I was visiting my best friend, Cynthia, and her friend Kurt in Nantucket. Kurt had been Cynthia’s boyfriend for many years, but that had been many years before. By the time of my visit, they had been friends longer than they had ever been lovers, and everything was easy. Their relationship was the kind of thing people say never works, but it did, so that was part of the fun, too.

Kurt lay on his back in the sun, reading Foucault, while Cynthia swam the perimeter of the pond. She was wearing a cardinal-colored bathing suit, her dark curls tucked under a cap. They were both academics, a decade or so older than I. Even though I was twenty-nine, I felt a bit like a child around them—bright, but slightly ignorant. Cynthia had adopted me when she was a seventh-year English Ph.D. student and I was a first-year creative writing one, and it had been my dearest hope that she’d become my friend. Kurt never would have paid attention to me, I knew, but for Cynthia. Her gaze always put me in the best light—a prettier, cleverer light.

I lay beside Kurt, covered by a frayed magenta beach towel. It’s hard to recall how I felt about my body at that time, but it involved a dim sense of unease that led me to conceal it. I remind myself of this sometimes now: I didn’t enjoy my body that much even before I got pain, so pain didn’t ruin as much as it should have. I wonder now, if I had known that that afternoon was, in one sense, the beginning of pain and that henceforth my opportunities to take pleasure in my body would be numbered, would I have thrown aside the towel?

I wanted to swim straight across the pond, as I had as a child. Then, my father had always followed me in a rowboat, which I was glad about because I was afraid of eels. Cynthia climbed out of the water and stretched out on the beach.

“Would you swim to the other shore with me?” I asked Kurt. My heart beat as if I had propositioned him.

Kurt looked up with a lazy, skeptical glance. He gazed at the pond and wrinkled his nose. “It’s too far,” he said.

“Go with her,” Cynthia said.

“Now?” he said.

We swam and swam, arms curving over heads, pausing to look up as the families on the far shore came into clearer view. Closer, breath, closer. The straps of my white suit tangled, and the top slipped down. I wondered whether my breasts, pointing down pale in the dark water, looked like eels’ faces to the eels waiting below. Finally we flopped on the wooden dock, clean and hot and cold and wet, alone together—a pond away from where we began.

“We really went the distance, didn’t we?” Kurt said later as we climbed back to the shore and collapsed, shivering, onto the warm sand at Cynthia’s feet.

I looked up at Cynthia and saw something register. In a novel, this would be a tragic turning point: the older woman realizes that her young friend wants her former lover, and even though the woman doesn’t want him anymore, even though the woman might have in fact—as Cynthia had—left the man years ago, there’s always a price for desire: someone has to drown. Our story is so different, though, I thought, because Cynthia is different—I felt her generosity, her easy love, as she rubbed suntan lotion into my back. “You and Kurt are such matched swimmers,” she said reflectively. And then: “You should go inside, sweetie. You’re starting to burn.”

Sunset fell as Kurt played guitar on the deck. The light changed on the water, and the shrubs sloping toward the sea darkened and merged into the hill. We drank and listened, and as I listened, pain set in.

It began in my neck and poured through my right shoulder, down into my arm and hand. It felt as if my right side were sunburned, but inside out, reddening and beginning to pucker and blister beneath the skin.

I usually drink wine, but I poured a glass of gin. It tasted as anesthetic as it looked, clear and cooling. But the pain seemed to be drinking, too, and as it drank, it grew bold and began to mock and turn on me.

“I think I am not feeling well,” I announced, puzzled, and went downstairs to bed.

My right side refused to fall asleep. It throbbed, reminding me of a horror movie I saw once, in which a transplanted limb is still possessed by the angry spirit of its original owner. I slipped into Kurt’s room to look in the long mirror. I turned at different angles, but my right and left shoulders looked the same.

The pain continued, lively through the night. I heard Kurt and Cynthia whispering in the hall, and the closing of doors, and then I went up to the living room and wrapped myself in a blanket on the couch and drank more gin.

I woke from a dream of terrible pain—of reaching for something you shouldn’t and arriving to find yourself stranded in a place you never wished to be.

“Hey,”
Kurt said, puzzled, as he came up the stairs.

I sat up on the couch, cradling my arm, blinking, confused, waiting for the usual feeling of emerging from a nightmare. But the pain lingered, veiling the ordinary world.

“You look—What? Are you okay?”

“Yes—yes. I liked swimming across the pond with you,” I said with unplanned passion. Why was I revealing feelings for him? Why was I concealing the pain?

He offered a mug of tea. I reached for it with my bad arm, as if to illustrate that nothing was wrong.

“Perhaps we could go again today,” I said. But the cup was oddly heavy in my hand; I could barely bring it to my trembling lips.

POENA

Romantic and physical pain have nothing to do with each other, I firmly believed at that time, just as there is no likeness between a broken heart and a heart attack. A broken heart is a metaphor; a myocardial infarction is a cardiovascular event. Indeed, even as a metaphor, a broken heart seems antiquated now that we know emotion stems from the brain.

“How do you know the nature of your ailment?” my favorite grandmother—a Christian Scientist—used to inquire when I had a headache. “How do you know that it isn’t a spiritual problem?”

“Because I know,” I would say. “Because I’m not confused.”

The feeling of Kurt and the feeling of pain had a certain similar emotional hue. And because they began at the same time, the narrative of pain and the narrative of the romance began to entwine and become a single story in my mind.

Three years later I lay in Kurt’s bed for the first time, shivery and sleepless with the hope and fear that accompanies great change—and with pain, the same ghostly pain that had arisen for no reason that weekend three years before and then disappeared beneath the surface of my body.

That day, I had taken the train to Providence to visit Kurt, something I had never done without Cynthia. Cynthia—who had recently married and liked the idea of her two friends pairing—had actually arranged for the date. I had asked if we could go swimming that afternoon, in memory of the afternoon in Nantucket. We swam past scores of anxious parents bent on keeping their children from slipping under the white rope separating them from deeper waters, and then we lay on the dock on the far shore. It was so sunny, it was as if we were still swimming in the sun-air. We lay resting on the wooden slats, gauging each other’s desire to lie there forever against the knowledge that the longer you wait, the harder it is to swim back. He was ready and then I was ready, but he closed his eyes again. I had just slipped into sleep when I felt his foot on my back, and I understood that we would sleep together that night.

I am not given to large romantic hopes—to imagining that a given boyfriend could be the last boyfriend—and I’ve never understood how that feeling seems to come so easily to most people. But that night, as I lay beside him in the dark, a sense of possibility began to dawn. The night I lost my virginity, I had stayed awake with the sense of irrevocable transformation, but since then, sex had all been erasable, like scribbling on one of those childhood magic slates that you can shake blank so the game can go on and on. Could this be different?

But I also had pain again. The old, eerie pain, familiar and strange. In the years since that day on Nantucket, I had felt a brush of this pain from time to time—a pointless ache in my neck and shoulders, which I dimly attributed to structural weakness in my body. I have a large head—poorly supported by a long neck and narrow shoulders—which I carry in a forward position, giving the impression at times that it is in danger of toppling off. I knew I should work on my posture, but it was on the list of boring beauty routines, such as working on my nails or my tan, that I had no real intention of undertaking. And the occasional achiness had become as normal as the sight of my unpolished nails and sunless skin.

Only once in that period had the pain been something odder and more urgent. I was at a roof-deck garden party on the Upper East Side of Manhattan when a forgotten friend handed me a gigantic baby—a baby I hadn’t even known existed. I stood there alone momentarily, gaping at the baby, when pain sidled up and put a hand around my neck. I thrust the baby back into his mother’s arms immediately, smarting, but the touch of pain tingled as dusk gathered and the air began to chill. I continued my conversations. I thought of it as a brush of mortality, a reminder that these parties could not go on forever.

Light began to fill Kurt’s bedroom, and pain filled the house of my body like smoke. I thought of a deer I had seen once as a child on a hiking trip in a summer nature camp. Its leg had disappeared beneath a tangle of roots. As our troop came near, the animal began to thrash, making a huge rustling noise, twisting its neck in desperation. Our leader made us stand back as he went up to examine it. When he came back, he said the deer’s leg was fractured and there was nothing to do. “It’s nature’s way,” he said. Some of the children began to cry. How could that be nature’s way? What was nature thinking? The deer would die in pain.

I finally fell asleep, but woke from a dream about the deer. I had this dream every few years, but this time my body was merging with the deer, its leg turning into my arm, disappearing into the earth, like Persephone struggling to loose herself from her captor. When I woke, the image disappeared and the dream pain remained.

“Why aren’t you sleeping?” Kurt said, stirring beside me. “I can feel you not sleeping.”

“No, nothing,” I murmured. If he became my true love, I would look back on this night and realize that it had been the happiest night of my life because it had led to lasting happiness. But I had pain. Happiness and pain. The two nested familiarly together in my mind.

Yet—
why?
Was pain the price of happiness—or a punishment for having it? Pain, from the Latin
poena
, “punishment for an offense,” and surviving in the English phrase
on pain of death
; the Greek
poine
, from the verb “to pay, atone, compensate”; and old French,
peine
, “punishment, or suffering thought to be endured by souls in hell.”

But what was there to pay for? I had committed no offense. But there it was: I wanted Kurt, and I got pain. I slept with Kurt, and the pain returned. Those two facts nestled against each other, and (in the terms with which we will one day describe everything) with the miraculous neuroplasticity of the brain, began to develop neural connections. The sex mixed with the pain: the weight of his hands, pressing, imprinting, hurting my body, irrevocable as love.

It wasn’t love, though, that turned out to be irrevocable. I never didn’t have pain again.

Of course, I know now that the pain was related not to Kurt, but to swimming! Although I had occasionally splashed around hotel pools, the only times I swam long distances were with Kurt. That day, I had strained my neck and shoulder, beginning a cascade of symptoms stemming from an underlying condition of which I had been unaware. But what did I know of
cervical spondylosis, spinal stenosis, occipital neuralgia, impingement syndrome, rotator cuff disease
?

I was years away, at that point, not only from having that information but from seeking or valuing or, one might even say, believing in it—at least with any of the same depth with which I felt the truth of other, unacknowledged meanings. As soon as I got pain, the thin veneer of science schooling began to crack, revealing conceptions of pain formed over millennia by art and literature, philosophy and religion.