TWO
THE GOLDEN VANITY
The author waited for the librarian in the coffee shop on the little commercial strip across from the campus. He sat by the window facing the Gothic stone buildings and watched the students walk head down against the wind.
Someone said his name because his coffee was ready. He approached the counter and collected the giant cappuccino, noting the flower pattern in the foam. As he started the walk back to his table, the coffee shop door opened, admitting cold air and a middle-aged woman, surely the librarian; she recognized him and waved.
His problem was that the coffee required two hands, or at least he had taken it with two hands, one on cup and one on saucer, so as not to spill coffee or upset foam; he couldn’t return her wave. He felt himself scowling at this situation, realizing too late she’d think he was scowling at her. His solution was to look at the cup with exaggerated intensity, in the hope that she would understand his dilemma. He walked slowly, eyes fixed on the dissolving flower, to the seat beside the window, having ruined everything.
But he remembered Dr. Roberts’s idea. Roberts had said that when the author found himself in one of these “false predicaments,” and he began to draw shorter and shorter breaths, he should just describe whatever little crisis he’d manufactured, what he was feeling, to whomever he was meeting in the same “winning and humorous way” he recounted it after the fact to Roberts.
The librarian was at the table she’d inferred was his destination by the time he reached it. He set down the cup and saucer with excessive care. She had a lot of curly hair he only now saw as auburn. He shook the hand she extended and said:
“I wanted to wave to you when you came in but I had this coffee in my hands and I was afraid I’d spill it and then I was afraid that by failing to wave I appeared unpleasant and then I felt myself scowling at appearing unpleasant and then realized I must really seem unpleasant and so had already made a disastrous impression.”
She laughed as though this were indeed winning, and said, “You sound like your novel.” The anxiety dissipated, but into flatness. He spilled some of the coffee lifting it to his lips.
* * *
The year before, they’d found cavities in the author’s wisdom teeth; they needed to come out. He could elect IV sedation (“twilight sedation”) or just local anesthetic, as the dentist suggested. They’d taken a panoramic X-ray of his head, chin on a little stand while a camera whirred and clicked around him, and then scheduled the extractions for the following month, when the dentist was back from vacation. There was no rush. It would be a few days of unpleasantness, that’s all. Let the office know twenty-four hours in advance if you want the IV, said the receptionist, whose fingernails were painted with stars.
He learned from the Internet that the difference between twilight sedation and local anesthesia was not primarily a difference in the amount of pain but in the memory of it. The benzodiazepines calm you during the procedure, yes, but their main function is to erase your memory of whatever transpires: the dentist getting leverage, cracking, a sudden jet of blood. This helped explain why the people he asked were fuzzy regarding the details of their own extractions, often unsure if they’d been sedated or not.
That October his ruminations about twilight sedation dominated his walks with Liza. They would meet at Grand Army Plaza in the late afternoon and head into the Long Meadow of Prospect Park, then wander along the smaller trails as the light died in the trees. Finally, it was the last walk before he had to call if he wanted the IV.
The unusual heat felt summery, but the light was distinctly autumnal, and the confusion of seasons was reflected in the clothing around them: some people were dressed in T-shirts and shorts, while others wore winter coats. It reminded him of a doubly exposed photograph or a matting effect in film: two temporalities collapsed into a single image.
“I don’t want them working on me when they know I won’t remember what they’re doing,” he said.
“We are not talking about this again,” Liza said. It was characteristic of Liza to begin an activity by claiming she’d have no part in it. “We’re not having Thai food” meant that she’d come around to the idea; “We’re not seeing that movie,” that he could buy tickets.
“But more than that,” he said, ignoring her, “I can’t figure out if abolishing the memory of pain is the same thing as abolishing the pain.”
“And who knows,” Liza said, quoting him from previous walks, “if the memory is really abolished or just repressed, distributed differently.”
“Right. And that could be worse,” he said, as if this were an original idea. “A trauma cast out of time, experienced continuously, if unconsciously, instead of as a discrete event.”
“So many of these people,” Liza proclaimed gravely, making a sweeping gesture that included couples on benches, families playing in the grass, and a group of women practicing Tai Chi, “are living lives ruined by repressed trauma surrounding their wisdom teeth.”
“If I take the drugs, it’s like dividing myself into two people.” He ignored her again. “It’s a fork in the road: the person who experienced the procedure and the person who didn’t. It’s like leaving a version of myself alone with the pain, abandoning him.” They turned south onto the path that would eventually take them to the lake.
“And then you meet him one day in a dark alley. And he wants to settle the score.”
“I’m serious.”
“Or he starts inserting himself into your life, sabotaging your relationships, causing scandals at your work. You’d have to kill him, kill yourself.”
“And what kind of precedent am I establishing, exactly, if I deal with a difficult experience by inducing amnesia?”
“You already have amnesia. We have this conversation every day.”
“Look, I have to decide tomorrow. One business day before the procedure.”
“What do you want me to say? I’d do local if the dentist says that’s sufficient, and save the three hundred dollars you’ll have to pay out of pocket for the IV. But I’m a lot tougher than you are.” She was. “You’re going to do the twilight-sedation thing because you’re a weakling. It’s a sure sign that you’re going to do it that you keep worrying about it.”
They walked in silence until they reached the lake. On the near shore, a group of teenage girls, maybe Mexican, were dressed in white, practicing a dance involving paper streamers, tinny music issuing from a portable stereo. The softening sky was reflected in the water. Airplanes moved slowly toward LaGuardia; a few swans moved slowly across the surface of the pond. Everything suddenly complied, corresponded: the pink paper streamer in a girl’s hand echoing the rose streak of cloud that was echoed in the water. He felt the world rearrange itself around him.
“I’m just doing local,” he resolved.
“The sublimity of the view has lent the young man courage,” Liza said, deepening her voice.
“Shut up,” he said.
“Napoleon alone on the eve of battle communing with the Alps, receiving their silent counsel.”
“Shut up,” he said, laughing.
* * *
When he woke up the next morning, he called the dentist’s office and told the receptionist he wanted the IV. Then he called Liza and said he’d changed his mind and would she go with him Monday because they won’t let you leave unaccompanied with all those drugs in your system. She sighed theatrically and said sure.
That night he was going on a date. Or at least he was meeting his friends Josh and Mary for drinks, and they’d invited a woman, Hannah, they thought he might like, who might like him. It was the only kind of first date he could bring himself to go on, the kind you could deny after the fact had been a date at all.