The Exquisite (9 page)

My dentist has a very nice office near Washington Square, and my dentist is very nice. I better say this in the past tense—obviously, my dentist is no longer my dentist. She did, or rather would do, my teeth. She had a lovely by-the-reclining-chair manner and lovely calming eyes and her hands were tiny with fingers that could fit easily into your mouth. Her articulations were extraordinarily sensitive; even with latex covering her fingertips she could feel slight roughnesses on rear molars or gauge the severity of abrasions aicting the gums. Also, she had a very relaxed payment plan, so relaxed that I was actually able to have a tremendous amount of work done without ever paying much for it. Every now and again, before I lost my apartment, I would receive a blue envelope with a request, from her office, for some money. Never all of the money, just some. I would ignore these requests, though not the envelopes—those I kept in an ever-growing pile in a little wooden box under a pile of miscellaneous domestic accumulation by the bedroom door. Carine did some sorting one day, found the box, and got suspicious. And proceeded to let me know it. With such eventual insistence that I eventually, in her presence, threw all the little blue envelopes away, then, still in her presence, carried out the trash and threw it into the can outside. This of course didn’t stop me, a little later, from retrieving them, from carrying them over to a bar, having a few Cape Cods, and going through them again. Or from following my dentist home once.

She walked very slowly, going in and out of small stores, acquiring an ever-increasing number of plastic bags. And there I went behind her, encountering an impressive array of stores and shops I had previously been unfamiliar with, some of which I visited the following day. They were establishments in which, I discovered, one could make quality purchases, if one was so inclined and had the wherewithal. I myself purchased, so to speak, a bottle of coriander-scented hand lotion, which, out of a general sense of guilt for indulging in pointless obsessive behavior, I took home for Carine. This offering, incidentally, did nothing to assuage my guilty feelings, not least because Carine reminded me that the hand lotion I had chosen was both the brand and scent she had wrinkled her elegant nose at when we had gone out shopping the previous week.

When we arrived at my dentist’s building, I watched her disappear through handsome smoked-glass double doors as I leaned—both nervous and contented—against a lamppost. There is a curious, unquantifiable pleasure to be had in following someone home to a skyscraper, even a relatively short one. It was difficult, pleasantly so, to correlate that building, which I could only have seen all of from a considerable distance, with my dentist, whose hands and surrounding body were so small. As I leaned against my lamppost, I imagined her inhabiting whole floors of the building, palatial spaces through which she would move languorously, accomplishing tiny, mysterious tasks, looking around her as she went with wonder, satisfaction, awe.

In retrospect, as I have lain here listening to Hank Williams or to Mr. Kindt or to Dr. Tulp, i.e., while my present bleeds all over my past, this image has changed for me. Or rather another image has presented itself and vies for my attention as I think of leaning against the lamppost, looking up at the face of her building. In this competing image, my dentist, far from inhabiting whole floors, lives in an apartment the size of a closet. She has mounted hooks on the walls and on them hang all of her possessions, including the contents of the plastic bags she has most lately brought home. She cannot quite stand up in this closet-sized apartment. She has to take deep breaths to get any good out of the stale air. She sits very still on a chair in the center of all the hooks and hanging objects. Every now and again her hand goes out and brings something back to put in her mouth. Sometimes it is just the hand itself. The hand goes out then enters her mouth. Eventually, she falls asleep.

Still, what it is about the dentist I wanted to relate does not primarily concern the blue envelopes or following her home or the claustrophobic variants thereon that my memory has lately been offering up. It’s this—once it wasn’t she who worked on me. It was an associate, some guy. Now, unlike hers, this associate’s hands were very large, and his fingers were sort of spatulate, and he wasn’t too convincing with the tools. And his own teeth, on top of that, weren’t, let’s say, so nifty. In fact, more than a few of said teeth were dark brown. I think you’ll agree that nobody wants that kind of dentist. And as a matter of fact I told him so. He asked me, as a counter, if I had read the
Odyssey,
and after looking at him with eyebrow raised for a minute I said that I had. He asked me which translation and I told him I couldn’t call it to mind.

Ah, he said.

What are you talking about? I said.

Nobody. You said Nobody wants that kind of dentist. I thought you were making a literary reference.

Well, I wasn’t.

We had a little more back-and-forth and then he said, suit yourself. But at this point we were still midtreatment and my tooth was killing me. So I let him pull it, which he didn’t do too tenderly, and I left.

That evening I saw my friend Fish, a character, at the bar, and he said, how are you? and I said shitty, and he said why? and I pointed at my mouth and said, dentist. A drink or two later Fish told me a story.

He said, I had a creepy dentist once. Kind of like yours, only his teeth weren’t brown, they were fake. Supposedly he had abused his teeth pretty badly in his youth and after he lost them he saw the light and became a dentist. Kind of an oral-fixation born-again thing. Anyway, my creepy dentist, after he had done some shit to me without any pain-suppressing substance having been applied, put a needle-tipped jackhammer in my mouth and told me this anecdote: Once he had a dream. In the dream an angel with excellent choppers informed him that if he only dug deep enough he would find the answer to all his questions inside one of his future client’s teeth.

I don’t like this story, Fish, I said.

Fine, said Fish.

And we talked about something else. Since this something else was pretty interesting, and because it bolsters my contention that Fish was a character, I will include it here. What we talked about was where Fish was currently living. Or squatting.

Fish was a big squatter. Until fairly recently, Fish, who had once held down a boring but remuneratively satisfactory job as a copy editor that allowed him to inhabit a dingy one-bedroom in Chinatown, had proudly lived in a squat on East Sixth. The owners of the building, unable to get the squatters to leave, had decided to tear the building down. Fish had been the last to leave. He had been, as they say, forcibly removed. But not before making a minor celebrity of himself in the squatter and friends-of-squatters communities by standing completely naked on the fire escape, sort of dancing around and singing what I heard from other sources was a pretty decent operatic tenor version first of “Imagine,” then of “Rhinestone Cowboy.”

He had a new squat now. A big two-bedroom on Fourth between B and C. Or actually, as he explained, it was more of a share. When he moved in, it had been a squat, because the owner, according to the tip he had received, was supposedly dead and there was no next of kin and the city had no immediate plans. A key had been under the mat and there was some furniture (including a sinkful of unwashed but perfectly usable dishes) and the electricity hadn’t been cut off: paradise. He thought about letting a couple of his colleagues from the demolished squat in on his find but decided to keep a low profile for a while. Which was a good thing. Because the owner wasn’t dead. He came in the second evening as Fish was flossing his teeth on the couch: an old guy in a beat-up porkpie. Fish stopped stock-still with the piece of floss between a pair of molars. The old guy, however, did not appear to see Fish, who was sitting very much in plain sight. This was because, as Fish quickly gathered, the old guy was blind. He was also, apparently, extremely hard of hearing. Fish had spotted a monstrous pair of hearing aids by the bed in the room he had not chosen to sleep in and the old guy’s ears were currently unencumbered. Fish stood up, very slowly, and went and leaned against the wall farthest away from the door. The old guy, who had not removed his beat-up porkpie, immediately started puttering around in the kitchen and singing to himself. He did the dishes, which Fish had added to, and he put away everything that was on the counter. Fish thought about getting his stuff and making his getaway while the old guy did his thing around the kitchen, but instead he kept leaning against the wall, and when he finally moved after the old man had gone into the bathroom and started a shower, it was just to go into the little room he had chosen and to go to sleep.

He still doesn’t know I’m there, said Fish.

I don’t believe you, I said. I don’t believe a word.

I’m pretty discreet and if I see he’s got his hearing aids in I don’t move.

What, he can’t smell either?

The guy’s ancient. Plus he’s always cooking. He likes spicy food.

You’re full of shit.

I keep my stuff under the bed.

You’re squatting in a guy’s place and the guy still lives there.

Like I said, it’s more of a share. Anyway, there’s weirder shit going on.

Which of course is true, and you don’t have to look very far to come up with examples. As a matter of fact I immediately thought, as Fish said this, of the story I had read that week about a woman who had kept the remains of her dead child in a box in a closet for twenty years. The extra-creepy part was that she had two other kids and they had grown up in the apartment with the remains of their sibling in a box in their mother’s room. Then there was the guy in the Bronx who kept a tiger as a pet. When the tiger started to get surly the owner moved out, returning daily to toss meat in to it. The neighbors heard roaring along with “odd thumping noises” but didn’t, they said, give it too much thought.

Anyway, not long after my experience with the unpleasant substitute dentist and subsequent conversation with Fish, my regular dentist informed me in a rather lengthy and unfortunately detailed phone message, which Carine listened to before I returned home, that I could no longer come to her office, that I could no longer set foot on her premises, that if I came back or followed her again she would call the police.

The blue envelopes became white envelopes from a collection agency. Then they became collection agents, joining the other collection agents, not to mention some of my former friends, including Fish, in pounding on my door.

One afternoon shortly after Aunt Lulu’s visit, I told Mr. Kindt some of what I have just related, including the anecdote regarding teeth, and he said, what did the dentist do? I said I didn’t know, because I hadn’t let Fish finish his story.

What kind of name is Fish? asked Mr. Kindt. Is it short for something? Fischbach or Fischstein or Fischman, perhaps?

I don’t know, I said.

It’s a very nice name, he said.

I thought you would like it.

I would like to be called Fish, said Mr. Kindt. Perhaps under other circumstances I would ask you to call me that.

He smiled. I thought about Fish and about calling Mr. Kindt, who cried when he thought of fish but not when he ate them, Fish, and smiled too.

But it is a shame that you didn’t permit him to finish his story, it is a promising beginning.

Is it?

It is. In the Leiden of my earlier days there was just such a dentist who had just such a dream.

There were dentists in those days?

After a fashion.

And how did his story end?

I don’t know, when I was told it the teller was called away before he could continue past the point where the soon crazed dentist takes a mallet to a young woman’s tooth.

Maybe it’s the same story, I said.

Likely, said Mr. Kindt. Many stories without clear endings are the same.

This remark made me think of Aunt Lulu and of a series of unpleasant afternoons many years before. It also made me think of Dr. Tulp, who that morning had told me I might soon be moving on and that the nature of our relationship would consequently change.

Change how? I had said.

Dr. Tulp hadn’t answered.

Do you mean that things between us might become more amicable?

Don’t you think they are quite amicable now?

I mean
more
amicable.

Dr. Tulp had smirked and shaken her head.

So am I better?

I’m not sure it’s useful at this juncture to think in terms of better or not better.

This is because of my aunt, right?

Do you feel like discussing your aunt now?

No, thanks.

Then we won’t.

So what will we discuss?

Dr. Tulp had looked at me, long and hard. She had crossed her legs and uncrossed them. She had lifted her clipboard and written something on it. She had stopped looking at me and looked at the clock over the whiteboard she sometimes used for drawing diagrams. She liked to use different colored markers for her diagrams. There were bits of violet, red, green, and blue ghosting the white surface. In one corner it was still possible to make out the remains of the adapted Greimas square she had used at a previous session to discuss opposites (life/death) and negatives (not-life/not-death) and the way these binaries interacted every time we said something. A reference to Gondola Bus Lines appeared to have figured into the discussion. I said “Gondola Bus Lines” aloud. For the second time. The first time having prompted her explanation of the diagram. This time she just nodded and tapped two long white fingers on the armrest of her chair.

I think we’re done for the day, Henry, she said.

I’m not sure I like this stories-without-endings thing, I told Mr. Kindt.

No, said Mr. Kindt, neither am I. Fortunately, many stories do have endings, even if they aren’t nice ones.

The last thing I have to say, in this connection, is that once as I was walking near the smoking rubble downtown I heard a guy say, with great depth and seriousness, my friends, it is my great delight to reveal to you that it is either a Ritz or it is a Saltine, and because I wasn’t in any big hurry, I stopped and asked him what “it” was.