The Dentist
In Jill’s neighborhood there was a giant billboard advertisement for a perfume called Obsession. It was mounted over the chain grocery store at which she shopped, and so she glanced at it several times a week. It was a close-up black-and-white photograph of an exquisite girl with the fingers of one hand pressed against her open lips. Her eyes were fixated, wounded, deprived. At the same time, her eyes were flat. Her body was slender, almost starved, giving her delicate beauty the strange, arrested sensuality of unsatisfied want. But her fleshy lips and enormous eyes were sumptuously, even grossly abundant. The photograph loomed over the toiling shoppers like a totem of sexualized pathology, a vision of feeling and unfeeling chafing together. It was a picture made for people who can’t bear to feel and yet still need to feel. It was a picture by people sophisticated enough to fetishize their disability publicly. It was a very good advertisement for a product called Obsession.
At least this is what Jill thought about it, but Jill was an essayist who wrote primarily for magazines, and she was prone to extravagant mental tangents that were based on very little. She had to be, in order to keep thinking of things to write about. Besides, she was perhaps hypersensitive to the idea of obsession, as she had just become obsessed with someone. He was a mild, pale, middle-aged man who did not return her ardor, and what should’ve been a pinprick disappointment had swollen into a great live wound that throbbed at night and deprived her of sleep, of thought, even of normal physical sensation.
“Drop it,” said her friend Pamela. “Don’t even, as they say, think about it. He sounds really fucked up, and not in an interesting way. There wouldn’t be any satisfaction for you. It would be like jerking off forever and not coming.”
It was. She would lie curled on her bed, making sounds of animal pain, dry even of tears, as thoughts of the loved one so feverishly inflated her desire that she could not fit it into a fantasy which she could then make end in at least rote physical satisfaction.
The odd thing was that the object of her inflated feelings was her dentist.
The terrible situation had begun when she had gone to have a wisdom tooth removed. Jill was thirty-seven, and her one remaining wisdom tooth had had ample opportunity to grow where it didn’t belong, for example, around her jawbone. Neither she nor the dentist had realized this at the onset of the operation, and he had, in a professionally somnolent voice, assured her that the ordeal would probably be over in fifteen minutes. An hour later, the as yet mercifully unsexualized dentist was still gripping her jaw with enough force (as it turned out) to bruise her, perspiring and even grunting slightly as he tore her tooth out bit by tiny bit.
“It became almost comic,” she said later. “He kept heaving back, sort of panting with exertion, and he’d say, in that voice of inhuman dentist calm, ‘Just a little more; we’re going to move it around in there just a little bit more, and then I think we’ve got it.’ It got to the point where I could smell him sweating, and a certain indecorous tone crept up under that professional voice, a sort of hysteria straining at the borders. Finally, when he started to give me the speech one last time, I snapped, ‘I just want the fucking thing out.’ And he snarled back, ‘Okay,’ totally ripping the lid off the calm facade, which is probably pretty hard-core for a dentist.”
“And that’s when you got excited?” asked Pamela.
“No. No, I felt united with him in disbelief and disgust at the whole thing, but I was certainly not excited. That didn’t happen until later.”
A few days after the tooth came out, there were complications. She developed an infection and had to return to the dentist’s office twice. She had an allergic reaction to the pain medication he prescribed for her, and to make up for the unpleasantness, he gave her free medication out of his closet. The gift pills didn’t make her itch, but they made her pulse lunge and her mind twist, so that she was too disoriented to write a commissioned piece for a fashion magazine on the torment of having small lips. With a great effort, she decided not to become discouraged and instead sat down to type a long handwritten draft of a two-part series on whether or not people’s memories of being abused as children are real. She had typed the first line when her word processor collapsed.
Her word processor was so old and primitive that no local repair company would service it, and it would take weeks for the whimsical midwestern manufacturer to do it, what with shipping and all. No computer she could rent, borrow, or buy could read the old monster’s disks. Besides, she couldn’t afford to buy another machine, and since she had recently moved to San Francisco from Boston, she did not know any writers from whom she could borrow one, and she was not confident about her ability to use a new one anyway. Right about then her jaw started to throb through the pain medication. “I’m tearing my hair out,” she said to Pamela, and it was close to the truth. She couldn’t pay that month’s rent, she was lonely, she had bad dreams, she was worried about losing her looks, and her jaw hurt like hell.
There is nothing like physical pain for enlarging and enhancing free-floating emotional pain. As she walked to the dentist’s office, Jill began to feel desperate. She was maddened by the noise and motion of the street, she was irritated by the sweet spring air. A burst of purple flowers on a dirty white wall shocked her with their brightness and lulled her with their low whisper of the deep earth, making her feel pulled in two directions and unable to go in either.
“Well, you’ve got a dry socket,” said the dentist, drawing back from her with a mournful, empathic air. “It’s something that can happen sometimes, and it’s nothing to worry about, although it can be quite painful. We’ll just increase the pain medication and pack the area nice and tight. Then it’s up to you to keep off that sensitive area.” He paused. “I’m sorry you’ve had to walk around with it hurting so much. With that exposed bone, I frankly don’t know how you stood it.”
“I can’t stand it,” she said. She hesitated, fearing that she was perhaps tastelessly spewing into the dentist’s vast spaces of professional calm. Then she decided that with all that vastness, he could afford it, and she spewed hard. “It’s not just the tooth. It’s everything. I can’t sleep. I can’t talk to anybody. I’m going broke and I can’t write my articles because I’m in a drug haze. I can’t even type an article, because my stupid word processor broke and I can’t afford another one. And now you’re telling me it’s going to keep being like this for days more. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do.”
“I can loan you my laptop,” he said. “No problem.”
She paused to adjust to the sudden shift in terrain. “I don’t know how to use a computer.”
“It’s easy,” he said. “I’ll teach you.”
She looked into his gray eyes. They were opaque with dutiful kindliness. He wants to be my friend, she thought. Probably he’s not thinking sex; he’s not the type. I’ll just have to be friendly with him, which is a pain, but if I can type that article, the activity will make me less hysterical.
“I could bring it by tomorrow evening,” he offered. “It’s no trouble at all.” His voice was like a stream of lukewarm water running over her wrist.
“All right,” she said slowly.
“And he did it,” she said to Pamela. This was much later, after the grueling drama had erupted. “He did exactly what he said. I felt sort of guarded when he first came in, but I saw right away it wasn’t necessary. He set the thing up, showed me how to work it, and left. He was like a UPS man or an electrician. I think even the cat was impressed with his discretion.”