by T. C. Boyle
The other teachers were going out to lunch at a place down by the ocean to celebrate the end of the term with steamer clams, fish and chips and a judicious and strictly medicinal intake of alcohol, but she was going to the dentist. Or rather the endodontist. Root canal. Simple dactyl. There wasn’t much metaphoric mystery there: the root of the tooth branched down into her jaw like the root of a tree, where the living nerve relayed pain to the thalamus; the canal was to be excavated through the tender offices of Dr. Stroud’s instruments, and though she’d be spared the noise that so intimidated the hearing, the stink of incineration would ride up her nostrils all the same even as the bony structure of her cranium vibrated with the seismic grinding of the drill. And the pain—there was no aural component for that. She would feel it as much as anyone, maybe more. She could see it like an aura, taste it. Pain. Of course, Bridger had a different take on it altogether—and he could afford to, since he wasn’t the one undergoing the ordeal. The night before, just to reassure her, he’d told her that the last time he’d been to the dentist he’d named names and given up all his secrets in the first three minutes and still the fiend kept drilling. She’d signed back to him, right hand open, palm in, fingers pointing up, then the fingertips to the mouth and the hand moving out and down, ending with the palm up: Thank you. And then aloud: “For sharing that.”
She’d avoided Koch since their confrontation on Tuesday, but as she was hurrying down the hall, running late, two cardboard boxes of books and papers clutched to her chest, her briefcase slapping at her right thigh and skewing awkwardly away from her, he emerged from the main office. They made eye contact—he saw her; she saw him; there was no avoiding it—and his mouth began to move. The only thing was, she didn’t know whether he was chewing gum or delivering a soliloquy out of Richard III, whether he was offering up the apology he owed her or even a threat or insult, because she dropped her eyes and went right on by him as if he were a figure out of a dream.
Because she was late, Dr. Stroud dispensed with the usual ten minutes of banter, gossip and news of the world, and settled her into the chair as expeditiously as possible. Still, he was running at the mouth all the while, filling her in on his wife’s fender bender (Dana loved the term, loved the rhyme and the function and the way it snapped on the lips to reveal the grimace of the teeth) at the farmers’ market the previous week—she was there for the cut flowers, she was mad for cut flowers, and for beets and broccolini and did he ever tell her about the time she ran out of gas in the middle of the Fourth of July parade?, and some overanxious boutique baby-vegetable purveyor backed into her in his seven-thousand-pound Suburban. Or at least that was the drift of it, broccolini a bit problematic, and that put her back a phrase or two. Before he inserted the rubber dam and the crank device that jammed her jaws open, she was able to respond by averring that broccolini was her single favorite vegetable, sautéed in olive oil with chopped garlic, shallots and a splash of Dijon mustard, and that she hoped the damage to the car wasn’t too severe, but by that time he was already onto some other subject, something dental—or endodontal—she gathered, something serious in any case, because his eyebrows suddenly collided and his pupils narrowed. A moment later he and the nurse both snapped on their surgical masks and she felt the sting of the needle as it slid into her gums and after that all communication ceased.
Two hours in the chair. The drilling, the gouging, the fitting of the post and the grinding down of the temporary cap: two hours anyone else would have written off. But not Dana. She was, as Bridger was quick to point out—pejoratively—an A-type personality, as if that were something to be ashamed of, as if civilization hadn’t been built on the backs of the A-types, as if armies hadn’t been led by them, advances made in the laboratory, in the concert hall, the universities and hospitals and everywhere else. Slow down, people told her—Bridger told her—relax and live in the moment, but they were B-types, they were slackers. Like Bridger. And were there only two types then? No, she thought, there must be a third type, type C, for Criminal. That man in the photo staring out at her from the fax in the police station, that was what he was: no need to make and build or lie back and smell the roses when you could just simply steal it all.
So she was an A-type. And she had two hours. She understood that it would be somewhat difficult to focus under the circumstances, what with the dentist’s fingers in her mouth and the nurse’s face hovering in her field of vision like the moon to his sun—no hearing person could have done it—but she was good at shutting out the world, a champion, in fact, and she’d brought the thin sheaf of Wild Child along with her. It had been over a week since she’d had a chance even to think about it in any fruitful way, and that nagged at her. She couldn’t hope to write under the circumstances—there was no realistic way and she had no expectations—but what Bridger didn’t understand was how vital it was to review and revise, to re-enter that world she’d created and find her way to a destination she couldn’t even guess at.
The drill bit, the dam held. Dr. Stroud probed. The nurse loomed. And Dana lifted the manuscript in one hand and banished them both, drifting, drifting now into another place altogether, a place where she wasn’t Dana Halter of the San Roque School for the Deaf, but a child of eleven, a boy child, nameless, naked, dwelling in his senses. There was a scar at his throat, a raised ragged island of flesh he fingered because it was there, a scar that preceded all the others and took him back to the moment when he found himself waking for the first time to the swaying of the trees and the rhythmic clangor of the birds and insects, attuned to the fierceness of the wind in the branches and the pitch of every note the branches sang. He lived in France, in the untamed forest of La Bassine, but he didn’t know it. Lived eighteen hundred years after the death of Christ, but he didn’t know that either. All he knew was to dig in the earth for grubs and tubers, to gorge on berries, grasshoppers, frogs and snails, to crouch over his haunches in a nest of leaves and listen to that symphony of the air and the melody the brooks played and the insects of the day and the insects of the night, the earth spinning for him alone and no human voice, no words, to intrude on it…
But Dr. Stroud was there, leaning away from her now, the surgical mask removed, and he was smiling at her—preening himself on a job well done. The nurse was smiling too. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?” he said, careful with his lips and teeth and tongue so that she could understand.
“No,” she said, her own lips cumbersome and without sensation, “not bad at all.”
“Good,” he said, “good. Well, you’re a model patient, let me tell you.” His eyebrows tented. Both his hands were clenched above his shoulders and rocking back and forth in celebration of their mutual triumph. “If you have any pain, Advil should do it. And nothing too strenuous”—yes, that was it: strenuous—“for the rest of the day. Take some time off. Put your feet up. Relax.”
She nodded, her mouth frozen in a Xylocaine-induced grimace. And then he went on to tell her an elaborate story about one of his other patients, whom he wouldn’t name out of professional discretion, but she was something of a hypochondriac—his mouth gaped over the word—and that was the last thing she caught because he forgot himself and began talking so fast even a hearing person would have had trouble understanding him. A term came to her—motormouth—and she had to smile, whether he misinterpreted it or not. She was on her feet now, at the door, and he was still talking away, but for all she got of it he might as well have been chewing gum.
Three
MADISON WAS AWAY at the piano teacher’s, Natalia was sunbathing on the deck and he was poised over the black granite top of the kitchen counter, mixing their second round of Sea Breezes. He stood there in a cocoon of silence (the CD needed to be punched up but he didn’t feel like punching it), appreciating one of those moments when the whole world opens itself up to you, when everything you take for granted in the daily hassle to scratch and grab and assert a little dominance is suddenly right there in front of you and the planet poises on
its axis, just balanced, just now. And he wasn’t drunk, not yet—that wasn’t it. He was just attuned to the little things: the taste of the salt air through the flung-open window, the feel of the delicate layer of ice on the neck of the Grey Goose bottle straight from the freezer, the perfume of the split lime, the sweetness of the cranberry juice and the acid pull of the fresh-squeezed grapefruit in the stone pitcher. He looked out over the salt marsh to the bay beyond, the light like something out of a painting—a thousand gradations of light, from the palest driest Arctic stripes at the wrought-iron rail of the deck to the rich tropical gold poured all over Natalia and the chaise longue to the distant white purity of the sails of the boats tacking against the breeze.
For dinner, he was going to make sea scallops braised with scallions and garlic, with a sauce he’d learned years ago while fooling around at the restaurant (a white wine reduction flavored with shallots and a splash of sherry, dollop of butter, fold in the cream at a galloping boil and reduce the whole thing again till it was a fifth of what you started with). He was thinking rice with it, flavored with bouillon, sherry and sesame oil, and maybe a salad and some sautéed broccolini on the side. Keep it simple. He could have done something more elaborate, because everything was fine and he had all the time in the world, and yet sometimes you just wanted to get back to basics and let the flavors speak for themselves. He could have made dinner rolls from scratch if he’d had the inclination, could have done up something for dessert too, but you couldn’t beat fresh-picked raspberries in heavy cream with a sprinkle of sugar and a splash of brandy to burnish the taste. This was how life should be, no hassles and strains and worries, time on your hands, time to stroll through the farmers’ market and the wine shop and have a cappuccino and croissant with your lady on a sunstruck morning, time to chop and dice and sear and lay out a nice meal for Natalia’s friend Kaylee and what was her husband’s name? Jonas, yeah, Jonas. Not a bad guy, really, for a loser. They had a chain of exercise studios—Pilates and the rest of that crap—and he supposed they did pretty well, and that was all right. At least the guy appreciated fine cuisine, a good bottle of wine—at least he wouldn’t be wasting his time in the kitchen on a couple of zeroes.
The light shifted. The world began to crank round again. His eyes went to Natalia, the sun on her legs, the sheen, the geometry of perfection, and then he came back to the business at hand: cutting two neat pale green wedges of lime to garnish their drinks.
By the time the doorbell rang, everything was ready to go—Madison back from the piano teacher, fed and in her pajamas, the videos selected, the pans laid out and the scallops prepped—and Natalia got up out of the chaise longue in her two-piece and chiffon robe and drifted through the open French doors like something floating on the breeze. She always moved like that—everything in its own sweet time, Don’t rush me, just look at me—and he heard the greetings at the door and came out of the kitchen with two fresh cocktails in hand. The kid—the daughter, Lucinda—made a bolt for Madison’s room and Kaylee, a bony blonde with pinched little shaded glasses and a frizz of hair twisted up in a bun, pulled him to her for an embrace. “Hey,” she was saying, “we just saw the most awesome thing out on the road on the way here, this white bird?—Jonas says it was an egret—just like perched there on the yellow line like it was in the middle of a river or something—”
Peck handed her a Sea Breeze, even as he gave the husband’s right hand a squeeze and fitted the cold glass into the socket of his left. “Hey,” he said, and the husband—stubble-headed, goateed, going to fat around the ring in his earlobe—returned the greeting.
“Wasn’t that an egret, Jonas?” Kaylee was saying.
“It is a white bird,” Natalia said, bending to levitate her hand two feet from the tiles as her breasts, on display, shifted in the bikini top, “about this high off the ground, yes? We are seeing them all the time,” she avowed, straightening up. “With the binoculars. Common, yes. Very common here.”
“Really?” Kaylee lifted her eyebrows, raised the cocktail to her lips. “It’s like really beautiful, though,” she murmured over the rim of the glass. “Like magical, you know?”
The husband wasn’t having it. He just held on to his grin and said, “Maybe we ought to get one and stuff it for the Corte Madera place.”
“Oh, Jonas,” the wife said, making a face. She looked to Peck for approval. They both did, the whole party arrested in the entryway, gulping vodka and making small talk about birds.
“Sure,” he said, “why not? And we can stuff the tourists while we’re at it too.”
The conversation at dinner ran to a whole host of mainly numb-brained subjects, from Nautilus machines to stair-steppers, the stock market, the Giants, A’s, farm-raised salmon and the new Kade movie to the “like super-expensive” European vacation Jonas was treating his wife to, a whole month and the kid at Grandma’s, week in Paris, week in Venice, then the rest of the time on some jerkoff’s sixty-thousand-foot-long boat off the Islas Baleares. They’d actually said that, actually given him the Spanish with the rolling r and the whole deal, as if they were a tag team of waiters in a Mexican restaurant, first him—Islas Baleares—and then her, like an echo. They’d praised the meal—and the wine, and they’d brought two bottles of Talley Chardonnay that wasn’t half bad—but as the sun went to bed and the stereo got louder and they began to put a real appreciable dent in the bottle of Armagnac that had cost him sixty bucks at the discount place, Peck began to realize he could live without these people. He really could. Kaylee he’d approved of because she kept Natalia occupied and off his back, but the husband was full of shit to his ears—they both were—and he felt himself getting restless, getting edgy, and that wasn’t good because it destroyed the mood of the day and made him think of other things, things that had a negative energy, things that brought him down. Like Dana Halter. Like Bridger, that asshole.
He’d called the number that morning and got a message—“Hello, you’ve reached Bridger’s cell; leave a number”—and he felt as if he’d pulled the handle on a dollar machine and got two cherries instead of three. Bridger. What kind of name was that? And why was he playing the game instead of Dr. Dana Halter? If he was some kind of cop he wouldn’t have been stupid enough to display his number…which meant he wasn’t a cop. But then who was he?
“So, Dana,” the husband was saying, fat-faced, red-faced, leaning into the coffee table as if it were the municipal pool and he was about to plunge in, “anything new with you?”
He felt the smallest burr of irritation. He gave the guy a look to warn him off but he was too dense to catch it.
“I mean, with your practice—that office space in Larkspur? How’d that ever work out?”
It wasn’t just a burr—it was a thorn, a spike. Who was this clown? And what had he told him? Shit, he couldn’t even remember himself. He reached for the snifter and took a moment to study the way the brandy swirled and caught at the glass—it was the color of diet cola when the ice melts down in it, and how had he never noticed that before?—and then he realized that nobody was talking. The husband was staring at him, waiting in his gerbil-faced way for a response, wondering vaguely if he was being dissed, and if he was, what to do about it—and both girls had stopped jabbering away about so-and-so’s boob job and were watching him too. “I don’t know,” he said finally, trying to control the bubble that was swelling inside him like one of the bubbles that punch through the sauce after you fold the cream in, “with all the malpractice insurance, I don’t know how anybody could say it’s worth it. Really. Sometimes I think I’d be better off just staying out of it—”
Kaylee’s mouth flapped open as if it were spring-operated: “But you’re so young—”
The husband: “And your training. What about your training?”
They’d moved into the main room from the dining table—“No, no, don’t bother,” Natalia had said when Kaylee tried to help her clear up, “leave it for the maid”—and he’d taken a certain satisfaction in
going round the room and flicking on the lamps to create a feeling of intimacy and warmth, as if lamps were hearths and the twenty-five-watt bulbs miniature fires blazing against the night and the fog creeping in across the hills behind them. He studied the husband just the briefest fraction of a second—was the fat fuck mocking him? Was that it? But no: he could detect nothing but a kind of stubborn booze-inflected obtuseness in the man’s dwindling stupid little eyes. He didn’t answer.
“But all that work, medical school and all,” Kaylee said. She arched her back and did something meant to be furtive that tautened the thin black straps of her bra. “It seems such a shame.”
“Oh, no,” Natalia cut in, making a moue over the o sound and holding it a beat too long. “Dana’s job is for looking after me and Madison,” and she reached out to caress his biceps. “Is that not so, baby?” She smiled her biggest smile. “A full-time job, no?”
The husband’s snifter was empty and he was reaching out his claws to refill it. “Where did you say you went to medical school? Hopkins, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Peck said. “But I was thinking it might be cool, really cool, to do something with Doctors Without Borders. You know, go to Sudan or someplace. Help people. Refugees and that sort of thing. Cholera. Plague.”