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By Root 505 0

in the dark, afraid. I was afraid that she was dead. I wished she had a little note on her that said, “My family is at the following telephone number.” But, then, a note could be burned up in the wreck, as could her purse, the registration to the car, all identifying numbers on the car itself. Everything but her teeth. I imagined myself telling the children that she had gone off with another man, then some blue-garbed policeman appearing at the office this week or next with Dana’s jaw. I would recognize the three delicate gold inlays I had put there, the fixed prosthesis Marty Crockett did in graduate school, when her tooth broke on a sourball. I would take her charred mandible in my hand and weigh it slightly. Would I be sadder than I was now?

Headlights flared across the porch and she drove up with a resolute crunch of gravel. The car door opened. She seemed to leap out and fly up the steps, throw open the door to the dark house, and vanish. She didn’t see me, and I didn’t say a word. I saw her, though. I saw the look on her face as if my eyeballs were spotlights. She was a soul desperate to divulge information. I got up quietly and walked down the steps, avoiding the gravel, and tiptoed across the front meadow to the road.

So how does the certainty that your wife loves another man feel? Every feeling is in the body as well as in the mind, that’s what he said. But the nerves, for the most part, end at the surface, where they flutter in the breezes of worldly stimulation. Inside, they are more like freeways—limited access, running only from major center to major center. I have to admit that I don’t remember much Gross Anatomy, so I don’t know why it feels the way it feels, as if all your flesh were squeezing together, squeezing the air out of your lungs, squeezing the alveoli so they can never inflate again. More than that, it is as if soon there might be no spaces left inside at all, no conduits for fluids, even. Only the weight of solid flesh, the conscious act of picking up this heavy foot, and then this heavy foot, reaching this cumbersome hand so slowly that the will to grasp is lost before the object is touched. But when the light went on and the door opened and Dana peered into the darkness, I jumped behind a tree as sprightly as a cricket. Every feeling is in the mind as well as in the body. She went back into the house. The light on the stairs went on, then in the upstairs hall, then in the bathroom. A glow from the hall shone in each of the two children’s rooms, as she opened their doors to check on them, then the window of our room lit up. It seemed to me that if I could stay outside forever she would never tell me that she was going to leave me, but that if I joined them inside the light and the warmth, the light and warmth themselves would explode and disappear.

I went around the side of the house, placed myself in the shadow of another tree, and watched the window to our bedroom. The shade was drawn, and I willed Dana to come and put it up, to open the window and show me her face without seeing me. She has a thin face, with high, prominent cheekbones and full lips. She has a way of smiling in merriment and dropping her eyelids before opening her eyes and laughing. In dental school I found this instant of secret, savored pleasure utterly beguiling. The knowledge that she was about to laugh would provoke my own laughter every time. I wonder if the patients swim up out of the haze of nitrous oxide and think that she is pretty, or that she is getting older, or that she looks severe. I don’t know. I haven’t had a cavity myself in fifteen years. Laura cleans my teeth twice a year and that’s it for me. The shade went up, the window opened, and Dana leaned out and took some deep breaths. She put her left hand to her forehead and said, in a low, penetrating tone, “Jesus.” She sighed deep, shuddering sighs, and wrapped her robe tightly around her shoulders. “Jesus,” she said. “Oh, Jesus. Jesus Christ. Oh, my God.” I had never heard her express herself with so little irony in my whole life. A cry came from the back