by Philip Roth
“I’m glad everything is going well.”
“Oh yes. You must come to see us.”
“I will.”
“I’m sure Paul would like it.”
Then why the hell hadn’t he asked me himself? I saw him three times a week, and got from him only a hello and goodbye … But his life had only just changed, I told myself, and perhaps it was true that as his several frustrations dropped away, he would come to feel less defensive about me.
“I will come,” I said.
“Come tonight.”
“I don’t think I can make it tonight.”
As we headed up toward the barracks, Libby said, “You’re certainly welcome to bring somebody with you, if you like.”
“Maybe some other night.” Obviously I could not tell her that at the moment there was a sick girl home in my bed. “After Christmas,” I said, hoping that by then there would be no girl in my bed at all.
“Paul will return the book soon,” Libby said. She pointed up to the gray hut that was theirs. “Right here. There are a lot of things to talk about, about Isabel’s character.”
“There are, I know.”
“I’d like to talk about them,” she said. “And do, really, bring anyone you like. I think Paul would like you to bring someone.” When I looked at her pulling the bundle from the car, she tried to avoid my eyes. I knew she did not want me to suggest that I carry the bundle for her.
2
We two Wallach men, my father and I, stood in place on the tennis court, pushing dull lifeless shots back and forth at one another. Each of us had been trying for over an hour not to inconvenience his opponent by so much as a foot. For four days now, life—off the court as well as on—had consisted of just this sort of polite emotionless volleying. Running into one another in the bathroom, we bowed in our bathrobes. At dinner, eyes glued to utensils, we waited for Millie to serve, then dipped into our grapefruit as though one wrist controlled our separate hands. One of us couldn’t sneeze without the other waving a clean handkerchief in his face.
Now, when a slight powder-puff shot of my father’s twisted three feet to my left, his apology was endless. He didn’t want to see me moving—three feet to the left and next thing I’d be off the courts, out of the club, gone from New York forever. For the rest of the afternoon he aimed at a dime; all I had to do, in turn, was close my eyes and bring my racket forward and I would meet the ball. See how easy life is in New York?
I chose, however, to keep my eyes open and on him. Across the court, in WSAC sweatshirt and white ducks that broke so low on his sneakers they nearly covered his toes, his undernourished figure, spidery and nervous, bounced in place awaiting my return. He had a stringy little body, a large head, and thick hair the color of iron. I am taller and heavier, like my mother, but his face, without the sags and wrinkles, could have been my own: gray eyes, flat nose, wide nostrils, and a big jaw which my father maintains has resulted in no wisdom-teeth trouble for two centuries. In his family they rise right up through the gums with room to spare. The aesthetic results of functionalism, however, are not always very satisfying; these abundant jaws of ours tend to make both my father and myself look a little like farmers. Or soldiers. You know we come from strong stock, but that’s all you know; it was on my mother’s side that all the nuance lay.
The steely Germanic strain in my father’s features may not at first seem at one with his manner—particularly with his wisecracking, which he was allowing me that day to sample after each of my returns. In part, I suppose, this wisecracking is a watered-down version of my mother’s wit; in part it arises from having lived his life in America, where he early came to admire the spirit of certain of our radio comedians. But mostly what one is witnessing when my father makes a joke, is the surface reaction of a gloomy northern disposition, the response of a man who would gush and weep if he did not kid around.
“Oh-ho,” my father called, as I, out of boredom, gave the ball a little spin. “Oh-ho, a trickster. Is that what I’ve got on my hands? What are you doing, working out your Oedipus complex?”
Subsequently I hit the ball listlessly back, a simple easy return. “So what now—giving up? Letting an old man beat your pants off? Oh-ho, a push-over, Charlie,” he called to the towel-and-soap attendant who was passing along the side of the court. “Strictly a pushover I’m up against today.”
“How are you, Doctor?” Charlie asked. “He sure has grown up.”
“Ah him, he’s still a school kid,” my father called. “Still wet behind the ears,” he added, so that Charlie laughed, and I felt provoked to give a little vent to my Oedipus complex and slammed a wicked one past his backhand. Charlie moved off, counting towels; my father quieted a moment; and I had the usual filial remorse.
At home, what was there to do? It looked as though I might at last get a chance to go out on the streets alone. Millie, the woman who had cooked and cleaned for our family for years, came into the living room directly after our return and said that there had been a phone call for me from Iowa City. My father, who had been rubbing his hands together in an anticipatory way and looking out the window at the park, asked his question without turning.
“A woman?”
“I think so. Specifically, a girl.”
“Well,” he said, “you better go ahead and phone her.” In a voice with a little edge to it, he added, “It doesn’t take you too long, huh?”
“For what?”
He looked at me, trying to grin. “To get a foot in the door. Hey, I sound dirty. To get established. You going to call?”
“Not now. I thought I might take a walk.”
“It’s freezing out. You’ll freeze to death.”
“It’s not too bad.”
“How about giving me a look at your teeth?”
“I think you looked at them in August.”
“August, September, October, November—it’s the end of December already. January is six months. (Come in the office. I’ve got new equipment you haven’t even seen yet.”
“I think I saw it in August. I thought I’d walk down—”
“Come on, it’s your vacation.”
“It’s your vacation too,” I said. “You ought to stay out of the office today. Millie says you work too hard.”
“Oh does Millie? Maybe Millie should take a couple lessons from me. Come on, you’ll get me at the top of my form. A good game of tennis makes my technique sharper. Spend an hour in the office,” he said, coming past me to put a hand to my shoulder, “you used to love it.” He started down the hallway, calling out to the maid, “Millie, we’re going out to dinner tonight.” He opened the door at the end of the apartment, and there was nothing to do but follow him into the reception room.
Up straight in the dental chair, everything was as it used to be He whistled some tuneless collection of notes, while behind me faucets dripped and little drawers were opened and closed. Over in the park, around the slickly iced reservoir, the limbs of the trees were as black this December as they’d been fifteen and twenty Decembers before. I heard my father’s rubber-soled sports shoes—his working shoes—move across the floor, just as a window at 93rd and Fifth took the sun at a wide angle and flamed out over Manhattan. A plastic bib slid past my eyes, the back rest dropped gently down, and swimming familiarly above me was my father’s face, his hand, his silver pick. Crisp from his shower at the club, his hair looked fierce as a helmet under the bluish bulb. Commanded, the patient opened wider, wider, and the slow trek began, the hunt, along the gum line into the darkest regions of the mouth. He searched deep inside me: how far down had I hidden my heart?
“Ah yes ah yes—” He lingered a while at each molar, then went on to caress the next. “Ah, this one was something. We took good care of this mouth, all right. Not a hundred mouths in all of New York like this one. People pay me to build a mouth like this—no, no, keep it open. Wider.”
Marge Howells had called. I allowed that business to occupy my mind while I obliged my father with my
mouth. I closed my eyes, shutting out his gleeful face, and took stock. Just five days earlier I had repacked Marge’s cardboard carton, and had had to pack her suitcase too, while she pounded at me from behind with her fists. “You’re not folding my skirts right!” she wailed into my ear. “Stop it, you’re getting everything wrinkled! Oh Gabe, stop! I love you I love you I love you” until at last she hurled a bottle of Breck against the bathroom wall. Nevertheless I had carried her belongings to the car and driven her, weeping, to her room. Then I drove alone to the airport, and late that night had rubbed unshaven cheeks with another weeper, my father, in the freezing rainy openness of Idlewild. Now Marge had called and I was sure it was from my own phone. I was weary with the knowledge that despite all I had determined to set right, she had managed to retain her key—which I had forgotten about in my determination just to get her out—and had probably engaged some taxi driver to carry her belongings back up the two flights to my apartment.
I would not call her back.
“I just want to take some pictures,” my father was saying. He had rolled the black X-ray machine noiselessly up to my cheek and was taking aim at my back molars. “Let’s just get the lay of the land,” he said. “Remember, Gabe, how I used to carry an X-ray of your mouth in my wallet? Just for a gag—”
“Why don’t you use that one?” I asked limply.
The prints, when developed, glowed with health. What more was there to do? I made a move to leave the chair, but my father touched his fingers to my chest. “You know,” he said, “you always have to have a total picture to see the whole thing.”
I sighed. “What whole thing?”
“The X-rays, a check-up,” he said vaguely. “Hygiene aside, consider it a matter of curiosity. A matter of self-investigation. Know thyself, you know? I’m acquainted with people who think of dentists as mechanics, carpenters, nobodies. Ridiculous. Dentists are astronomers—just let me go on—dentists are geologists. Gabe, when seen from the proper angle, dentistry is a romance. Take the stars. I see the fellow next door up on the roof charting stars. ‘Charting’ them, is that right? Looking, examining, and so forth. Now I want to put it this way: what’s so different about dentistry? I’m serious now—what’s so different about getting directly at what’s in a man’s head? Not millions of light years away, but right here—God Almighty, almost touching the brain. Now there are cases, documented cases of the tooth actually piercing the brain. Can you imagine? So galaxies, solar systems—believe me, a tooth is just as much a mystery as a star. A man’s got to have a philosophy of life, why he works, and that’s mine. You get older and you wonder why you do what you do. A man doesn’t get along without reasons. To go through life, just putting on your garters and eating your food, alone, by myself, without sufficient reasons, day after day, how can a fellow do it? Unless he’s got like Gruber, smiling sickness, smiling on the brain. For myself, Gabe, I need a little mystery in life. As I get older I haven’t got a lot of the old concerns, you know. Well, I find much to think about in terms of the human mouth. The third molar alone could occupy a lifetime. Don’t laugh—that’s a fact. Just the why of it, I’m telling you … Life makes you stop and think, that’s the thing. Life changes on a man, and then he’s got to have a little something in reserve. I feel a little ashamed about what I didn’t have in reserve.” He had then to look off for a moment in another direction. “Look, I don’t have to go on and on. It’s nice to talk to someone who understands. Lean back again, I want to clean them.”
“Dad, the cleaning isn’t necessary. Everything is fine here. I’m not going anywhere. I haven’t any plans. I’ll be here until New Year’s Eve.”
“I thought New Year’s Day.”
“New Year’s Day, right.” I tried to maintain a composed expression even while I remembered how we had tussled over dates driving back from Idlewild with his wallet-sized calendar between us. “So you can relax. Take it easy. There’s no need to clean my teeth right now. I’m sure they’re fine.”
“Have you had a chance lately to look at your last molar?” He measured off a good size fish with two hands. “Tartar,” he said. “Let me be the dentist and you be the patient.”
“Fine,” I said, smiling. “If I’m the patient, I think I’ve really had enough for today.”
“You don’t care that your teeth are all furry?”
“I have to make a phone call.”
“How long will this take, ten more minutes? You’re going to have it done you might as well have it done right.”
“Oh Christ, can’t they clean teeth in Iowa?”
A hand rose up as though to find its target on my cheek. It swiped at the overhead lamp, which buzzed and died. My father reached behind him to unbutton his white jacket. “You’ve got an important phone call, go make it.” He walked to the window, as his fingers, traveling down his back, broke off a button that rattled to the floor. “Go call Alaska, call Bangkok. Go ask the operator for the furthest place she can get you—then go dial it.” His foot slammed down on the button, producing absolute quiet in the room.
“What do you expect me to do?” I began, softly. “Sit in this chair the rest of my life?”
“I happen to be a thirty-thousand-dollar-a-year dentist. People wait hours so I can reconstruct their mouths. Some of the leading stage stars in New York have sat in this chair for weeks. I change people’s looks. I give them health and beauty, two of the most wonderful things in the world. I take an interest in teeth. You’re my son, I take an interest in yours. Is that a crime these days?”
“Nobody’s talking about crimes.”
“I get the feeling somebody around here is.”
“Please,” I said, “turn around. I only meant you don’t have to trap me in the chair. I’m sorry if I was snide. I only mean that you would be better off if you take it easy about me. Just relax, that’s all.”
“I am relaxed. I know how to relax. If you don’t relax at my age you get bad pressure, sluggishness. I am relaxed.”
“If you want to go ahead,” I said, after a moment, “why don’t you just go ahead.”
“Go ahead where?”
“Clean my teeth,” I said, finding it difficult to talk.
“You have to call some girl.”
“I’ve got a mouthful of tartar. How can I talk to anybody? Go ahead, if you want to.”
“No, no,” he said, “you go ahead. You have a life in Iowa. Go conduct it.”
“Why don’t you clean my teeth? I’m asking you to clean my teeth.”
“You’ll sit there fidgeting. I don’t do a rush job. I’m not a plumber.”
“I won’t fidget.”
Without looking at me, he walked around the chair. “I just won’t work with somebody fidgeting.” A hand appeared over my head and I was in the glare of the light again. He spoke from behind, like Marge, “I don’t know when you became so casual about your health. You used to love to have your teeth cleaned; you used to say your mouth tasted pink afterward. I still tell that to patients. I don’t know where you suddenly picked up such bad habits.” Behind me he was scratching together a sweet-smelling paste, “It’s funny,” he went on, “how a mouth doesn’t change, how yours is the same mouth now it was then. I can remember it, you know that? I can remember your mother’s mouth. I find that I can remember every single tooth in her head.” Then his face appeared above my own. I could have reached up and pulled him down and kissed him. But would he understand that I was not prepared to surrender my life to his? He was a wholehearted man, and such people are hard to kiss half-heartedly.
My mouth was tasting pink when I asked the operator for Iowa. I waited to be connected while my father’s tuneless peppy little whistle came from the bedroom. Removing my tartar had restored his belief in the future. He walked past me into the living room, a white terry-cloth bathrobe around his shoulders and oriental slippers on his feet. He was back to Yoga again. I should have guessed it.
At the other end of the line, Margie said hello.
“Marge—it’s me.”
“Oh sweetie,” she said, “how are you?”
“I’m all right. How are you?”
“I’m a little tired. I’ve been scrubbing shampoo off the walls all afternoon.”
“Have you moved back in?”
“Gabe, this disengagement policy wasn’t working at all. I was so lonely. I love you, honey.”
“Margie, we can’t keep living together. It’s bad for our characters.”
“I love you. It’s good for my character.”
“Stop being kittenish.”
“Is that kittenish too?” she whined.
“Marge, why don’t you go to Kenosha for a week? It’s a holiday. You’re lonely because there’s no one on the campus. You don’t miss me as much as you think. Why don’t you go home for a while?”
“Because those people bore me.”
“Margie, you just have to move out.”
“You come back, you’ll see. We’ll have fun.”
“You have to move out.”
“I miss you. Don’t you miss anything? How can you live with someone for a month and not miss them?”
“Missing is just more indulgence for us. The whole thing was very indulgent of both of us.”
“I feel,” she said, “very used …”
“Please, honey, don’t talk too much like a movie, all right?”
“You’re cynical about love. I’m only telling you how I feel.”
“The truth is we were both used. We used each other. Now let’s stop it.”
“I can’t.”
“Why?”
“I love you.”
“You don’t,” I said.
“Gabe, I don’t want to fight with you. I didn’t call to fight. The campus is empty. It’s depressing me.”
“What have you been doing?” I asked.
“I’m trying to read Proust,” she said. “I think the translation must be lousy. He just doesn’t seem that great. Sweetheart, I’ve written nearly fifty letters. I think all I’ve done is wash my damn hair and mail letters. Gabe, you’ve got to come back—for New Year’s at least. Oh Gabe, New Year’s Eve?”