“I’m not as comfortable with lying as you seem to be,” he said.
She didn’t take offense. How could she, when he wasn’t wrong? And he didn’t know the half of it, had no idea how much of her life was a lie — although she wasn’t lying when she said she liked the receptionist job. She did; she was content — fulfilled, even — to help the dentist build his practice. She was the woman behind the throne, which in her case, was a dentist’s chair. That was her joke.
It was true, too, that she liked the dentist himself. He’d been just out of dental school when she joined him. He’d talk to her about his hopes for the business as well as his worries. He told her about his love for his slimy work in painstaking and mildly disgusting detail. He gave her generous Christmas bonuses that, in those first years, she knew he couldn’t afford, the amounts of which she had to swear never to reveal to the hygienist, an older woman with a belly slack from four pregnancies and a tight gray bun pierced with the extra chopsticks the delivery boys from Nos Gusta La Comidas China included in their lunch orders.
Lady loved that they shared a work ethic, the dentist and she. His involved never taking more than a long weekend off. Hers involved never taking even that much. What would have been the point? If she stayed home, Joe Hopper would be there, working on his thesis at the coffee table. The title of his thesis was “‘Lips — That Like Bruised Pomegranates Blush’: Victorian Woman Poets and the Sapphic Gaze.”
“His field is vaginas,” Vee finally explained to Lady, who’d been misinterpreting the reference to lips. “Vaginas and lesbian sex, and not in a political way. If I come by and you’re not home yet, he insists on reading from it to me. He stands really, really close.” She made a face. “It’s pretty porny.”
Lady’d told Vee to stop flattering herself, but she’d also gone home and reread the thesis, and she had to admit she saw Vee’s point. She tried to look on the bright side. Joe loved what he was doing. He was always engrossed in his research when she returned home. He’d gesture at her, a sweep of his hand. It meant be quiet, take off your shoes, keep your greetings, footsteps, breathing, basal metabolism rate, to a minimum. Or he’d be waiting for her, wanting to take her to bed as soon as she came through the door, some poem he’d been explicating having turned him on.
“It was my wife’s idea,” the dentist said of the vacation. He momentarily averted his eyes; at least he had the decency to do that. “She put her foot down. She goes, ‘All work and no play.’” He shrugged as if he hadn’t an idea in the world what that meant. Then he grinned, something he was good at. “You know what you should do?” he said. “You should go to one of those Club Med places. Guadalupe! Spontaneity! You could run around naked. No one’s in the city now anyway.”
“Then why not run around naked here?” said Lady.
The dentist’s face was wide and boyish. He looked like Rootie Kazootie, like Howdy Doody, like Opie Taylor — all those redheaded, apple-cheeked, freckle-faced goyishe icons of our youth. But now the face grew stern. It was as if he thought Lady was making a suggestion, offering him an alternative.
Which she supposed she was. That’s where her being a liar came in. Lady and the dentist had been screwing around on his raspy office carpet after the hygienist went home pretty much since she’d been hired. Oh, maybe for the first six months or so, flattered but loyal to Joe, Lady had gently discouraged the dentist’s advances. But when her marriage had quickly begun going south, so, with the dentist, had she.
His own recent marriage hadn’t changed anything. The woman he’d married had a name — it was Patty — but he never spoke it in Lady’s presence. He used the generic term instead. The wife’s coming in for a cleaning. If the wife calls, tell her I’m doing a root canal and can’t be disturbed. Yeah, the wife bought me this jacket; it’s not my taste, but what are you gonna do?
Lady never mentioned or even hinted at her relationship with the dentist to anyone, not to the hygienist over shared egg foo yung, not to Vee or Delph during her frequent visits home. Not even to the dentist himself. He and she had agreed upon conducting an utterly wordless affair. Their very agreement had been wordless.
Once, only once, had Lady tried to talk to him about what it was they were doing. This was soon after he’d announced his engagement, although announced wasn’t quite right; it had been more like an aside at the end of a busy day. She hadn’t even known he’d been seeing anyone. She felt knocked for a loop, stunned and disbelieving, like those women you sometimes hear about who go to the doctor with a stomachache and learn they’re not only pregnant, they’re in the end stages of labor. Still, she hadn’t said a thing other than the pleasantries anyone would utter in response to such wonderful news — the same pleasantries the hygienist had just offered.
But a few days after he’d confessed to the engagement, the two of them in his office, Lady straightening her skirt, the dentist hanging up his white tunic, Lady thought it would be nice to reassure him, to let him know she would not be falling apart or making a scene, which, while sobbing in the shower that morning, she’d decided would have to be the case. Her reassurance, she thought now, would be a type of engagement present. What else could she do? She’d long known she had no rights. She’d always known what she’d signed up for. She wanted to tell him that. “You know,” she said, pulling her sweater back over her head, “the thing about our relationship is—”
He was zipping his trousers. “We don’t have a relationship,” he said.
She made the mistake of plowing on. “Well, of course we do,” she said, “and the thing about it is—”
“We don’t have a relationship.”
Now she was considering making a scene. Although, having never made one before, she wasn’t sure how to go about it. “I agree we don’t have a relationship,” she said, “but we have a relationship.”
He put on the jacket he allegedly hated, tawny suede, expensive, indisputably gorgeous, and popped the collar.
“What I mean,” Lady said, “is that we may not have a romantic relationship with any kind of future. I get that. But we do have a relationship. I’m your receptionist. I’m your coworker. Any two people who know each other have a relationship. It’s what the word means. The kid I buy snow peas from at the Korean market — I don’t know his name, but we have a relationship.”
“Maybe you and snow pea boy have a relationship,” he said, “but you and I don’t.”
By then she couldn’t remember what she’d wanted to say in the first place. She’d forgotten what the thing about their relationship was. She said, “You know what? I’ll see you tomorrow,” and went home. She was exasperated, but only because he’d refused to admit she was right. Even at the time, even in the middle of whatever it was you’d call what they had, what they were doing, what they were to each other, she knew she didn’t love him, not really. She certainly didn’t count on him, not ever. She never initiated anything with him, although sometimes she dropped hints.