Jeremy Thrane (23 page)

“Five years,” I said. “Maybe six.”

“You’ve got a lot of tartar in here.”

“I don’t have insurance,” I said in a feeble attempt to fling myself on her mercy. “I scrimp and save to come as often as I do.”

“I know, don’t get me started, the medical system in this country. But for your own good you should try to come twice a year. Think of it like—do you smoke?”

“No.”

“Oh, good for you. I’m up to almost two packs a day and I’d smoke more if I had time. Well, like coffee and a bagel, then. Try putting two dollars a day in a jar.” Lorraine had a husky Long Island–accented voice, dark eyes, warm hands. I liked her for all these things and also for her air of breezy candor, which I hoped would translate into gentleness with my gums.

“Maybe I’ll try that,” I said, leaning back and closing my eyes, settling into the mint-green vinyl-covered chair. The air smelled faintly of drill-burned teeth, antiseptic soap, and fluoridated mouthwash, a smell that made my gums ache gently. I had forgotten how comfy these dentists’ chairs were. This one had excellent neck support and spinal curvature so every square inch of my body was met with perfectly calibrated tensile resistance. I felt like an astronaut ready for takeoff.

“Open wide,” she said a moment later, her masked face hovering above mine, mirror and sharp tool in her Latex-gloved hands, which were poised over my mouth. I opened my mouth wide until my lips stretched and I got a sharp crick in my jaw. The protracted picking and
scraping that followed was neither entertaining nor pleasant, but it bothered me less than I’d expected. The ibuprofen protected my nerve endings, and the words “nothing can be sole or whole that has not been rent” ran in a semiconscious stream through my sub-brain in Nick Drake’s voice and protected the rest of me, and pretty soon Lorraine was handing me a little paper cup half full of blue fluid and saying, “Go ahead and rinse out, and then we’ll polish you.”

As I spat bloody tissue and chunks of tartar into the sink, she fitted her drill attachment with a little round pad, and soon she was buzzing it all over my teeth, which made me want to giggle uncontrollably, or sneeze, and made my eyes tear up from a joyful surge of relief, almost euphoria, but there was an interpersonal component I couldn’t identify at first. I lay trusting, limp, my head cradled in her arms, my ears very near her breasts in a comical echo of the pietà. What was this feeling? I’d had it before, I remembered it clearly, I associated it with spring, excitement, sex, promise, anticipation of something soul-stirringly, violently wonderful.

This burst of pheromonal giddiness, yes, I remembered now, it was associated with the very existence of another person, an urge to fling myself headlong about the room. Falling in love, that was the feeling. “Love has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement.” My body, quite independently of my heart or brain or any real circumstances beyond the ticklish scrubbing-bubble action of this little brake pad of a tooth polisher, seemed to think that I was falling in love, and so my brain was synthesizing the proper biochemical drugs. “For nothing can be sole or whole that has not been rent.” And suddenly Ted’s face filled my mind. I almost heard his voice. I felt almost as if he’d just walked into the room.

“Sorry, am I hurting you?” Lorraine asked, dabbing solicitously at my eyes with a Kleenex.

“No, not at all,” I stammered. The sudden image of Ted had sparked a neuron-firing shower of almost unbearable intensity. Ted, I thought again, and like magic it happened again, a fresh explosion of cranial fireworks, light particles like a chrysanthemum’s petals bursting and floating downward through my mind’s dark sky. “Learned in bodily lowliness
and in the heart’s pride.” My unconscious mind had apparently realized that Ted was single, free, out of the closet, available now in a way he never had been before as long as I’d known him, and it was now bringing this to my startled attention here in the dentist’s office, as a message attached to the tooth-polishing machine. “Fair and foul are near of kin, and fair needs foul …” This was humiliating and sad, in equal parts; I was no better than Sebastian, clinging to his own stubborn, idealistic love for someone who didn’t care about him. If I imagined that Ted would even speak to me now, let alone acquiesce with any enthusiasm to whatever romantic reconciliation I was evidently yearning for at the very bottom of my heart, I was bughouse.

But there. At the thought of the utter futility of a reconciliation with Ted, throughout my body blasted a wild jolt of exaltation that spread to the tips of my toes, fingers, nose, penis, lips, tongue, then contracted and concentrated itself into a fiery ball of powerful hunger.

“Now let’s take a couple of X rays,” said Lorraine, and then came the lead apron draped over my chest, those hard white folded cardboard rectangles wedged painfully between my cheeks and gums, the undetectable bursts of radiation. When that was over, the dentist came in, took a cursory gander at the inside of my mouth, and looked at whatever information Lorraine had for him, then scribbled something in my chart as he told me I needed to replace all my old amalgam fillings with porcelain ones, and I should make another appointment to come back soon. Then he went unceremoniously away.

“Okay, Jeremy, you’re finished,” said Lorraine.

I scrambled to my feet, took the floss and toothbrush she handed me, and wandered out to the waiting room in an exalted funk, where I paid for her ministrations in cash at the little window and retrieved my coat from the closet.

When I got home, there were four messages on Scott’s answering machine, and they were all, as it turned out, for me. I stood and watched Juanita dip her little fluffy head repeatedly into her water bowl and then run her beak along her wings, first one, then the other. The first message was my mother, inviting me to dinner that night, the second from my sister Amanda, saying that she was running late today and would meet
me at four instead of three, the third was from my movie agent, no doubt to inform me that Sebastian was sniffing around my script with big dollar signs in his eyes.

The fourth, to my chagrined discomfiture, was Sebastian himself, who said in a drenched, breathless voice, “Jeremy, it’s Sebastian, and I’m calling because I owe you for your work. And I wanted to apologize again for my ill-advised … admission last night, I meant it only as a compliment, a tribute to your writing. I hope you’ll forgive me.” There was a pause, then he added, “Speak to you soon,” in a low murmur.

“Freakazoid,” I said, stabbing the erase button.

I fell into Scott’s vintage armchair and watched Juanita go about her speedy, lightweight day. I yawned, then twisted the top off the bottle of whiskey, which I’d left here last night after a nightcap before I went to bed, and took a swig of liquid peat. It burned its way through my chest and spread to my gut, my liver, my spleen, and eased my fierce postpartum emptiness, the cold, sunny waning afternoon of my first day with no novel to write. Felicia and her touchstones suddenly seemed poignantly understandable. I felt like going to a leather bar and finding myself a hot little whelp I could bend to my will and then send on its way, out of my life. The only trouble was that most of the people I met in those bars were too boring, vain, and needy to bother with for longer than five minutes. Necessity was the mother of invention and idle hands were the devil’s instruments: I was going to have to start another book right away, or I might as well join Felicia in her hothouse.

Then, before I could censor them, into the negative space in my head flowed, with the whiskey, various sensory memories of Ted. I was assaulted by the taut line of his profile, his pent-up long-withheld ardor the first time I touched him after a long time apart, his abrupt laughter when I teased him, that night when he’d said, “God, Jeremy, you’re the love of my life.” As my memory’s pitiless lens zoomed in on the particulars of this night, the in-love-with-Ted euphoria resurged: the two of us entangled like kids on my rug, sated with sex and olives, Monk and Bowles, the wind at sunrise blowing through the open windows. This memory had become a touchstone of sorts for me in recent months. As
hard evidence that Ted had loved me, it seemed a bit thin, but I bought it anyway.

My mother’s phone rang several times, four, five, six, before Leonard picked up and said “Yes?” in a clear, collected, normal voice.

“Leonard, it’s Jeremy. Is my mother there?”

“She just ran out to the store. Can I have her call you when she gets back?”

“She invited me over for dinner tonight and I’m planning to come, but she didn’t say what time.”

“The usual time, I guess,” he said vaguely in that impatient way he had that had always nettled me, because it made me feel as if trivial things like dinnertime were too far beneath his august physicist’s notice to be treated with anything but offhanded surliness.

But now he had Alzheimer’s, so I couldn’t justifiably say something borderline-pissy in return the way I usually did. “Okay, I’ll come around seven, then,” I said. “You’ll remember to tell her?” Immediately, I wanted to kick myself in the head; I hadn’t meant it the way it sounded, as if I didn’t trust his spongy brain to retain the information. I would have said it six months ago without thinking twice.

“Well,” he said, “I’ll try. But you might want to call back later just to be sure, or you could just show up. Either way, I know she’ll be very glad to see you.”

“Although you yourself will be deeply dismayed,” I said.

“That’s right,” he said with a little chuckle, and we hung up. I almost liked my stepfather whenever we shared a wry joke about our fundamental incompatibility, our one isthmus of common ground.

I heated a can of lentil soup, then took my lunch to my desk, where, in less than an hour, I had reworked the last paragraph of
Angus in Efes
to my immediate and probably wholly temporary satisfaction. Right away, before I could change my mind, I turned my printer on and loaded it with paper, then began the tedious, busy process of tending to it while it spewed forth inky pages one after the other. Just when I began to breathe easily, thinking it might have spontaneously recovered its youthful energies, it jammed or took two sheets at once, and then I had to hit Stop and fix everything. My printer was wheezy and whiny, and slurped
its thirsty way through expensive print cartridges, but it was all I had. So, like anyone cohabiting with a decrepit elderly person in a long, slow decline, I had learned to accommodate its quirks and appreciate its efforts.

As the printed-out stack grew on my desk, I made little penciled corrections here and there and tried and failed not to despair over how wretchedly dull, improbable, and stilted the thing was. The whole time I’d been writing the book I had felt hampered by the little I knew about my father, his rages and limitations and political fanaticism. My belief in his ultimate failure to realize his most deeply held objectives had informed every word, every scene. I wanted to shove it into the garbage. Instead, I swaddled the whole thing in an enormous padded envelope, diapered with a cover letter I’d written yesterday, and put on my coat.

The phone rang as I was looking for my keys. Without thinking, I answered it. “Hello?”

“Jeremy,” said Sebastian. “Did you get my message?”

“I got it,” I said tersely, wishing more than anything that I’d screened the call or that I could just hang up now before either of us said another word.

“Listen. I don’t expect you to want to talk to me.” He waited for me to deny this, and when I didn’t, he went on in a rush. “First of all, do you know the Song of Songs in the Old Testament? ‘Oh, give me the kisses of your mouth, for your love is more delightful than wine.’ ”

“For now the winter is past, the rains are over and gone,” I said in an impatient singsong. “Milk, olives, honey, wine. I am the rose of Sharon and the lily of the valley. Gazelles and stags. A swarthy girl and her shepherd.”

“ ‘Oh, give me the kisses of your mouth,’ ” Sebastian said determinedly. “ ‘For your love is more delightful than wine.’ Now I’m going to put the phone down and put the speakerphone thing on, and then I’ll play this song for you, and you can hang up, but I hope you’ll listen. I know this is completely off the wall, and I know you think I’m daft. I don’t care. This is important.”

I sighed audibly, but I didn’t hang up.

There was a clunk, which I assumed was the phone being set down on some hard surface, and then I heard a guitar strumming. A couple of strings sounded out of tune. I closed my eyes and clenched my fist around the phone. Would I hang up, or would I listen to this? I didn’t know yet. The strumming resolved itself into a chord, which became another chord, and I sensed some rhythmic intent in all of this, so apparently the song was off and running, and this was the intro. It was all fairly bouncy and upbeat; I guessed I was in for a folk standard, but I didn’t recognize it yet. Then Sebastian’s voice came in, sweet and high, far more tuneful than I’d had any reason to expect: “When I was a young man and never been kissed, I got to thinking over what I had missed. I got me a girl, I kissed her and then, Oh Lord, I kissed her again …” The tempo slowed, major shifted to minor, then Sebastian’s voice again, “Oh, kisses sweeter than wine,” and the song suddenly turned haunting and melancholy. “Oh, kisses sweeter than wine.”

“Sebastian,” I yelled into the phone.

Immediately, he stopped playing and said, “What is it?”

“What are you doing? Why am I listening to this song?”

“Just listen. There are only five short verses, it’ll be over before you know it and then you can get back to whatever you were doing. Trust me, there’s a point to this.”

“Can’t you just tell me the point instead?”

“No,” he said. “Ready?”

I made an impatient sound that he interpreted as assent, because the strumming started up again and he launched into the second verse, in which the narrator proposed to his girlfriend and she accepted, then came the chorus again, and then apparently their farm prospered and they had twins, kisses sweeter than wine again, and then they had four kids who got married and suddenly our hero was, Oh Lord, the grandfather of eight, Oh, kisses sweeter than wine. Sebastian was right, the song was short, I’d give him that.