The Age of Grief - Jane Smiley [63]
“Didn’t you say you’d get paid, anyway?”
“That’s our policy, yes.”
“How long does it take you to fill a couple of teeth?”
“About half an hour.”
“Then just let me talk. I’ll pay you.”
“I don’t like to talk, Mr. Slater,” I said. “I’d rather fill teeth.”
“But I’ll pay you the money I should be paying a psychiatrist.”
I put down my mirror and my probe. Dana passed the door and glanced in, curious. Her eyes left an afterimage of blue. Slater said, “That your wife?”
“What do you want to talk about, Mr. Slater?”
He sat back and deflated with a big sigh. He looked out the window. I did, too. Finally, he said, “Hey, I don’t know. Go ahead and fill a couple of teeth. You’re probably better at that, anyway.”
“That’s what I’m trained to do, Mr. Slater.”
He made no reply, and I filled two molars, right lower. He didn’t speak again, but every time I changed my position or asked him to do something, he fetched up a bone-quivering sigh. His front teeth, I should say, were a mess. A brittle net, crooked, destined for loss. He left without speaking to me again, and paid with his MasterCard.
After he left I wanted him back. I wanted the navy-blue collarless jacket that he wouldn’t take off. I wanted the Sansabelt slacks that stretched tight over his derriere. I wanted the loafers. I wanted him to tell me about his wife. He didn’t smile much. He had a rough way of speaking. He was tall and not a pleasant man. It seemed to me that I could have drilled his teeth without novocaine, man to man, and it would have relieved us both.
He was with me all the rest of the afternoon. I imagined him leaving the office when I did. I imagined how he would walk, how he would get in his car, how he would drive down the street—thrusting and pugnacious, jamming the pedals, hand close to the horn all the time. Grief, I saw, had loosened him up, as if at the joints, and up and down his vertebrae. He had become a man who would do or say anything, would toss back his head or fling out his arms in a gesture impossible before. He wouldn’t leave me alone. I felt bitterly sorry for him all afternoon. It seemed to me that his fate would be an ill one, and mine, too. All of our fates.
By the time Dana came home, I couldn’t stop doing things as Slater might have done them. I was talkative and aggressive. I put my hands on her shoulders and turned her around so that she would look at me. I wandered around the kitchen, opening cupboards and slamming them shut. I talked about all of my patients except Slater at boring length. My voice got loud. Dana shrank and shrank. At first she laughed; then, with a few sidelong glances in my direction, she began to scuttle. I wondered if Slater’s wife was just then doing exactly the same thing. But she wasn’t. She had kicked him out, and I could certainly see why. Finally I stopped. I just stopped where I was standing, with my mouth gaping open, and Dana and I traded a long glance. I said, “What time is dinner?”
“About half an hour. Dave—”
“I’m going out. I’ll be back, okay?” Slater wouldn’t have asked in that way for permission. Neither would Dave Hurst, a month ago. I slammed out the back door and got into the car.
After I left Dana, Slater left me, and Dana joined me. I had hardly seen her back at the house, the whole time I was hovering around her, but now I could practically smell her, feel the vigor of her presence. As a rule, I don’t know what she looks like. I don’t think I have known, since the beginning, before everything about her looks became familiar to me, and saturated with feeling. As I drove along in the car, a picture of what she looks like came to me for the first time in years. And I thought, She is pretty, but she is getting a little prim-looking, with her gold button earrings and the gold chains around her neck. She wears neat blouses in the office, even now, in the midst of passion. And as this picture came to me, it also came to me that this passion was unbearable to her, and that the only way she knew to make it bearable was to pour herself into it as