Because They Wanted To: Stories (20 page)

“Well, you’ve got a dry socket,” said the dentist, drawing back from her with a mournful, empathic air. “It’s something that
can
happen sometimes, and it’s nothing to worry about, although it
can
be quite painful. We’ll just increase the pain medication and pack the area nice and tight. Then it’s up to you to keep off that sensitive
area.” He paused. “I’m sorry you’ve had to walk around with it hurting so much. With that exposed bone, I frankly don’t know how you stood it.”

“I
can’t
stand it,” she said. She hesitated, fearing that she was perhaps tastelessly spewing into the dentist’s vast spaces of professional calm. Then she decided that with all that vastness, he could afford it, and she spewed hard. “It’s not just the tooth. It’s everything. I can’t sleep. I can’t talk to anybody. I’m going broke and I can’t write my articles because I’m in a drug haze. I can’t even type an article, because my stupid word processor broke and I can’t afford another one. And now you’re telling me it’s going to keep being like this for days more. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do.”

“I can loan you my laptop,” he said. “No problem.”

She paused to adjust to the sudden shift in terrain. “I don’t know how to use a computer.”

“It’s easy,” he said. “I’ll teach you.”

She looked into his gray eyes. They were opaque with dutiful kindliness. He wants to be my friend, she thought. Probably he’s not thinking sex; he’s not the type. I’ll just have to be friendly with him, which is a pain, but if I can type that article, the activity will make me less hysterical.

“I could bring it by tomorrow evening,” he offered. “It’s no trouble at all.” His voice was like a stream of lukewarm water running over her wrist.

“All right,” she said slowly.

“And he did it,” she said to Pamela. This was much later, after the grueling drama had erupted. “He did exactly what he said. I felt sort of guarded when he first came in, but I saw right away it wasn’t necessary. He set the thing up, showed me how to work it, and
left.
He was like a UPS man or an electrician. I think even the cat was impressed with his discretion.”

“Was he friendly?”

“More like beneficent. Actually it was this combination of beneficence and self-conscious goofiness. He carried the computer to my desk with this proud little outthrust of his chest in front and this silly little outthrust of his butt in back. Like he was performing a skit he’d
done a thousand times before and was still just bemused enough to do again.”

Pamela uttered a cautious, noncommittal sound. She lived in New York and, as Jill’s oldest friend, had stood by her through many grueling dramas. But Jill hadn’t gotten involved in anything
too
ridiculous for a few years, and Pamela seemed to find this recidivism depressing.

“When he left he said I could call him at any time of the day or night. If he was at work, his beeper would go off and he’d call me back.”

“Well, his behavior is strange,” said Pamela. “Because he certainly gave you every reason to believe he was interested.”

The dentist’s rigorous and polite reliability impressed Jill, who had not often seen such behavior in men. She had left home at sixteen to live with a commercial artist almost fifteen years older than she was, and although the affair only lasted three years, she left it in a state of unfortunate attunement to the kind of refined, convoluted fellow who likes to make a very fancy mess. She had put herself through school with five years of work in various strip bars and go-go joints, and, at the age of twenty-six, had entered into journalism with the publication of an essay about down-and-out jazz musicians in a trendy men’s magazine. Because of the unusual career segue, she had few professional acquaintances and almost no experience with the sort of mundane camaraderie that makes up the common social staple; thus her baseline emotional life had consisted mainly of going from one loud mess to the next. To her, the dentist’s simple and undemanding generosity looked like a shining piece of integrity, which aroused first her surprise and then her admiration. Admiration didn’t develop into love right away, though, and the first time she called him, she did so reluctantly. It was, after all, one in the morning, but the computer had disobeyed her at a decisive moment, and he
had
said anytime.

He greeted her as if he had been waiting alertly for her call. As he solved her problem, their conversation dipped and bumped along easily. He complained mildly about difficulty he was having with a lab he used. He told her about an old movie he had seen on TV that
evening, called
Hot Rods to Hell,
in which a father (played by Dana Andrews) is terrorized and humiliated by sexy youths but eventually triumphs over the youths. The dentist compared it favorably to newer humiliation/triumph-based movies he’d seen recently. His disembodied voice was gentle and authoritative, and had an under-tone that sounded thwarted, feisty, and playful at once. She pictured him in an apartment made up of utilitarian oblongs, gray shadows, gleaming limbs of furniture, and an entertainment center, all alone with his thwarted feistiness.

“George?” she asked. “Are you happy?”

“Pretty much,” he answered. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

She hung up feeling enveloped and upheld by his “Why wouldn’t I be?” His tone seemed to acknowledge all that might threaten happiness—“It’s something that
can
happen sometimes and it’s nothing to worry about”—and then to shoulder it aside as if the important thing was to get through life somehow, to extract teeth, to follow the schedule, to do what you said you would do. This was a new point of view for Jill, and it affected her profoundly. She finished her article quickly and went to bed feeling an unfamiliar species of warmth and comfort. She woke imagining the dentist holding her from behind, and she prolonged the image, allowing it to become a thought.

That day she sent her article to the magazine that had commissioned it and, since her jaw was feeling better, arranged to have dinner with her friend Joshua. Joshua was a frustrated musician. He was frustrated mostly by himself. He had achieved a modest success in Boston and then come to San Francisco to pursue a hopeless infatuation with a lesbian who didn’t even like him as a person. He claimed the experience had damaged his “voice,” and now he worked as a cabdriver, occasionally managing a sit-in gig for some obscure band. Joshua was very intelligent and very dear, and like many people who have difficulty managing their own lives, his opinions and advice were often excellent. They went to a cheap Thai place in the Mission. Jill told the story of the dentist as if it were a funny joke.

“He’s a total nerd,” she finished. “He’s the kind of guy who says All righty’ at the end of conversations. Of course, I’m not really attracted to him. But it’s funny that the thought even crossed my mind, don’t you think?”

“I don’t know,” said Joshua thoughtfully. “I can see it, actually.”

“See what? What’s there to see?”

“Well, it’s like—remember when those weird thieves broke into my apartment?”

He was referring to the time a spectacularly eccentric thief or thieves had broken into the house he shared with three other people and apparently meandered through it, stealing a scarf, two pairs of pants, an address book, a Sonic Youth tape, and the contents of the mailbox.

“They took my unemployment check, and I had to go through this ordeal of getting it canceled, which meant I had to officially sign up for benefits again. Which meant standing in line at the unemployment office and explaining my situation and being told I was in the wrong line—it went on all day, and still it wasn’t fixed. And that’s the kind of thing that drives me crazy.”

Jill murmured sympathetically.

“So I had to come back the next day and wait in yet another line. I was almost at the end of my rope when this woman who worked there overheard me talking to another clerk about it, and she said, ‘Come over here, I’ll help you.’ And not only did she help me, but she turned the whole experience into this really nice exchange.”

“Was she good-looking?” asked Jill.

“Not especially. She was a middle-aged woman with a smart haircut. She had on a nice blouse with tiny polka dots, which I always like. But what really made me respond to her was that when these people just behind me in her line started bitching, she yelled out this funny comment off one of their complaints and made them laugh. That opened up the experience and made it okay to be standing there in line. I felt really attracted to her because she could do that.”

“Enough to ask her out?”

He shrugged. “It was more ephemeral than that. Sort of like what you’re describing. But it was a great little moment.”

“Yeah,” she said. “It is like me and the dentist. You and I are so inept at practical details that when the practical details are, like, exploding in your face, and suddenly there’s someone who can not only straighten it out for you but who seems to embody a whole universe where these disasters are just taken in stride, you’re going to be
incredibly grateful. Like, yes, there is an emotional hell that can’t be fixed, but on the other hand, there’s the dentist and the unemployment lady working away making things go smoothly at least on some level.”

“And who also acknowledge the emotional hell,” said Joshua. “Like the polka-dot lady with her joke.”

“Yes! Exactly.”

“What’s interesting about the dentist, though . . .” Joshua paused, and his face became uncharacteristically sly. “He’s solved your problems, but he also caused them to a certain extent. I mean, he hurt you.”

They finished dinner and relocated to a dark little bar. They sat in a booth with sticky wooden seats and steadily drank. Joshua described a TV show he’d seen, about an experimental program being conducted by some prison systems that enabled victims and their families to confront the criminals who had victimized them. He described the emotional scene between a thief and the clerk he’d shot, each of them telling the other what the robbery had been like for him—the clerk refraining, “Why did you do that to me?” until the robber apologized and they embraced with a great deal of emotion.

Jill was interested, but as she settled more comfortably into drunkenness, she found it hard to concentrate on the story; she was distracted by the memory of the dentist’s disembodied voice issuing instructions over the phone. “I want you to press ‘alt,’” he said inside her head. “Good. Now I want you to go to file.”

“But the last confrontation was pretty nasty,” continued Joshua. “It was between a woman whose daughter had been raped and murdered and the guy who did it. The mother was religious, apparently, and she kept trying to appeal to the guy on those terms. He seemed to have respect for religion, and a couple of times he said he was sorry for raping and killing the daughter. But he said it with this odd kind of reserve, this detached compassion for the poor old mom, and that just seemed to drive her crazy. She kept saying she wanted to know exactly what it had felt like to rape and strangle her daughter, and after a while he started to look at her like, ‘Hey, lady, who’s the freak here?’ And I have to say he had a point. But he couldn’t
remember anything about the murder or the rape, because he’d blacked out—which he also apologized for. The mom got more and more frustrated, and in this kind of masochistic frenzy she blurted out, ‘I know I should get down on my hands and knees and thank you for not torturing my baby.’ And a look of utter shock flashed in the killer’s eyes, like two live wires had just been touched together inside him. He just stared at her. Like he
recognized
her. It was way creepy.” Joshua paused. “The girl’s father was there too. But he didn’t say anything. He just sat there with his head down.”

The next evening she called the dentist. She pretended to have a question about the computer, and he said, “I want you to press ‘alt.’” The banality, the politeness, and the harmless hint of command were all accentuated by the abstracted context and took interesting forms in her imagination. Happily, she visualized all kinds of things he might want her to do.

When he finished instructing her, she asked him questions about himself. He told her that before dental school he had studied theater and film. He had done his undergraduate thesis on lesbianism among strippers—which, he confidently assured her, was quite high, at least in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

“Really,” said Jill. She felt slightly nonplussed without quite knowing why. “What kind of show did they do?”

“Show?”

“You know, when they stripped.”

He told her that he had only interviewed the strippers and had not watched them perform.

“Why not?” she asked. “I mean, weren’t you curious?”

No, he wasn’t.

“That should’ve been your first hint,” said Pamela. “A twenty-some-year-old guy who’s not interested in watching strippers but who wants to establish their lesbianism? He’s either a pervert or he’s pathologically frightened or he hates women. Or all three.”

“I don’t know,” said Jill. “I thought it might be something else with him. I was pretty surprised when he said it, but I thought maybe he was trying to be a feminist or something.”

When she finished her project, he brought her his printer.

“I must take you to dinner,” she said. “You’ve been so incredibly kind.”

He demurred, making the expected mutterings about the least he could do. “Besides,” he said, “I like to help creative people.”

They went to an Italian place in North Beach. They stared at their menus with ritual concentration. In the public setting, the dentist looked like a stranger, and that unnerved her; vainly she tried to revive the mysterious frisson that had arisen over the phone. He was wearing a loose-fitting turquoise sweater and faded corduroy pants, the casualness of which gave him a rumpled, little-boy sensuality that was pleasing but overly sweet for her tastes.

“How old were you when you did your thesis on lesbian strippers?” she asked.