Matchpoint (6 page)

And it was silver.

“Holy cow, have you ever seen the like?” Meryl, the town’s blue-haired librarian, said next to me. She whistled long and slow in appreciation. “How does he walk?”

A couple of the police officers were curious, too. They took out their nightsticks and tapped the man’s penis, making the man scream in pain and making a strange clanging noise.

“Have you ever?” Meryl repeated. She pushed forward, shoving aside the man in front of her.

“Meryl, get back here. Be careful,” I called after her.
I don’t know why I feared for her safety, but enormous, clanging penises spelled danger to me.

“Hey, is that you, Underwear Girl? I barely recognized you. Hey, guys, it’s Underwear Girl. Hi, Underwear Girl!” Officer James waved at me. He couldn’t have been more than eighteen years old. He still had teenage acne. He, like most of the Cannes police force, knew me as Underwear Girl because of an unfortunate experience that had resulted in a giant-sized photo of me hanging upside down in my underpants, which they had plastered on the wall in the police station’s processing room.

I ducked behind Meryl, hoping Officer James would forget about me, but he turned the megaphone back on. “Underwear Girl! Over here. You gotta see this.” His voice echoed off the buildings. Meryl turned around to me, a question on her face.

“It’s not what you think,” I said. And then Officer James was there, urging me to follow him all the way to the penis man.

Up close, I could see why his penis was silver. It wasn’t his penis. It was a pipe. The man had gotten his penis stuck in a pipe, and it was causing him obvious agony. He clutched his head and jutted out his pelvis, all the while biting his lip.

“He won’t say how it got in there,” Officer James explained. “But it swelled up inside, and it’s wedged pretty good.”

“I have a dentist appointment,” I said.

The man in the pipe noticed me. “I’m Tim,” he said. “I’m new in town.”

“Nice to meet you. I’m actually running late. I have cavities.”

“Oh, I hate the dentist’s office. I had a root canal. Worst pain I ever had, you know, until now.” He pointed at his pipe, and we all looked down at it.

“Are you going to leave him like this?” I asked Officer James.

The sound of sirens answered my question. A fire truck and an ambulance came careening around the corner and stopped short of the man. The police changed their focus to managing traffic and rerouting cars while the firefighters pulled out a large power tool.

“What’s that?” Tim asked, more than a tinge of panic in his voice.

“An industrial grinder,” a fireman said.

“What’s that for?” Tim asked.

“I have a dentist appointment,” I said, and took a step back.

“It wasn’t my fault,” Tim yelled as the fireman approached his pipe with the grinder. “It was the pagans. They lured me.”

The fireman started the grinder, and it made a horrible noise. I trotted back to my car without looking back, trying to blot the sound out of my mind. Meryl intercepted me as I opened the car door. She put her hand on my shoulder. “Did you hear that?” she asked me, serious like it was Banned Books Week. “The pagans lured him. If they can lure a man to stick his penis into a pipe, what else can they do? I’ll tell you, this is Jim Jones all over again.”

I nodded, waved goodbye, and started my car as the sound of the grinder’s blades hitting metal pipe cut through the evening. I burned rubber getting out of there. It was a blessing in disguise. Tim’s unfortunate circumstance had changed my perspective. I wanted to be anywhere away from his penis and the industrial grinder. I had never been so happy to go to the dentist.

THE WAITING room was empty, but Bliss Dental still smelled of fear. With Tim and the industrial grinder
still on my mind, I figured fear was relative, and suddenly a drill didn’t seem so bad.

The door dinged when I entered, and Belinda came out to the waiting room to greet me. “Any news?” she asked me. “Did you find anybody in those records of yours? I forgot to tell you I like muscles. I don’t want a pudgy man.”

People sure are hard to please. What could I tell her? I hadn’t begun to think about her match, and I didn’t have any records.

“I did meet with someone today,” I fibbed. “He’s new in town. His name’s Tim. He’s in good shape.” At least he was when I last saw him. Hopefully, the fireman had a steady hand. “But I’m not sure he’s perfect for you,” I said. “I want you to have the perfect guy.”

Belinda’s eyes twinkled. “I knew you were the right matchmaker for me. I don’t need a witch to fix me up. Are you ready? I’m heading home, but Dr. Dulur stayed late for you.”

Belinda walked me back, and my fear returned with a vengeance. I wanted to cry and run away, but I thought that might jeopardize my business relationship with Belinda. I needed to match her to have any hope of paying off my Visa. So I stayed strong and followed her to chair number three and only slightly hyperventilated.

Bliss Dental was laid out in a mostly open floor plan. Behind Belinda’s desk, there was a short hallway with Dr. Dulur’s office on one side. I got a quick glimpse of it as I walked back. It was littered with files and old takeout boxes. Eighties-style car posters covered the walls, and Dr. Dulur’s desk was oriented away from a floor-to-ceiling window that overlooked the parking lot.

The main part of the practice was a more or less open area, only separated into small examination rooms by low walls. Each room had a chair, a television, and various dental instruments, which I didn’t look at too
closely because they made me dizzy. On the other side of the large room were three smaller rooms: a bathroom, a lab/workroom, and a lunchroom/locker room.

The young man whose head I’d seen when I was in the chair that morning came out of nowhere and gave me a big smile. “Hi, Gladie. I’m so glad you made it back,” he said. He looked familiar, like I had met him somewhere else, but I couldn’t place him. He was about my height of five foot seven. Not much to look at except for big brown eyes with long eyelashes. Why did men always get the best eyelashes? What a waste.

“I’m Nathan. I’m the dental assistant,” he said. “You’ll be fine. Dr. Dulur is known for zero pain. It’s almost a spa experience.”

“I worked at a spa once,” I said, trying to stay clear of any dental conversation. “I was the towel girl at the Purple Door in Fresno for two weeks.” I saw a lot during those two weeks. Rich people like to be naked. “You look awfully familiar,” I told Nathan. “Have we met before?”

“I don’t think so,” he said. “Except for today. I moved into town a couple months ago.”

“Maybe one of your family members? My grandmother’s house is Grand Central here. Maybe I met your parents or your grandparents?”

Nathan steered me to chair number three and had me sit. He draped a spit cloth around my neck. “Nope. Sorry. I’m an orphan, born and raised. I don’t have any family.”

“This is freaking ridiculous.” Holly, the surgically altered hygienist, stormed into the cubicle with her hands on her nonexistent hips and hovered over me. She shot daggers out her eyes at poor Nathan, who flinched and took a step back. “I am not staying after hours for a lousy teeth whitening. Where the hell is that loser Simon? Off reading his magazines again?”

Holly was yelling pretty loudly, but her face didn’t move. I was transfixed, watching her inflated lips pucker and recede, pucker and recede, leaving the rest of her face completely immobile. She caught me staring, and I looked away, making a point of rearranging my bib.

“I could have worked in Beverly Hills, you know, making three times the money, but I’m doing Simon a favor,” she spat out.

“I know, Holly,” Nathan said. “But I think Dr. Dulur is going to do the whitening himself?” he said like a question. Nathan was shrinking by the second, his posture becoming more and more submissive to the overly aggressive Holly. Her boobs alone would have scared an average man.

“Taking business away from me? Whitening is my bailiwick.” She stomped her foot and stormed out. I didn’t know what impressed me more, her use of the word “bailiwick,” or the fact that when she stomped her foot, her boobs stayed in place like they were suspended in air. They were
Matrix
boobs.

Nathan busied himself with dental instruments. He opened and closed drawers more often than what I suspected was necessary. My fear started to bubble up again in the quiet, but it was interrupted by Holly’s and Dr. Dulur’s voices, arguing in another room.

Holly was yelling about deals and how much she was worth, but Dr. Dulur was not as passive as Nathan. “Listen, bitch, I don’t owe you anything,” Dr. Dulur said. His voice was chilling, like he didn’t mess around, like you wouldn’t want to meet him in a dark alley. Gone was the folksy, happy dentist of the people and giver of sugar-free lollipops and toys to the young.

“Maybe this is a bad time,” I said to Nathan. But Nathan was ignoring me. The conversation in the other room had all his attention.

“Nobody asked you to stay tonight,” Dr. Dulur told
Holly. “I got this. Listen, I’m tired of your shit. You’re more trouble than you’re worth.”

Holly replied with a string of obscenities I hadn’t heard since I worked eight days on the docks in New Jersey.

“You’re harshing my vibe, Holly,” he said in response.

And then he was there in Examination Room 3, a wide smile on his face, the scar on his cheek pulled at a weird angle. He was still dressed as a middle-aged
Saturday Night Fever
stand-in. He looked thrilled to see me, and maybe he was.

“If this is a bad time, I could come back later, say in a couple weeks,” I said.

Dr. Dulur guffawed. “Oh, that’s a good one. This will just take a minute.” He sat behind me. My chair leaned back automatically with a soft
wrr
ing noise. It was all going too fast. Fear overtook me.

“Are you going to use a drill?” I sniffed.

“Yep.”

“Oh,” I said, sniffing again. “Do you have to?”

“Nathan, the gas,” he said, and Nathan put a mask on my nose. The world spun around, and then the world was no more.

I’VE NEVER had surgery. Not one operation. I still have my tonsils, my appendix, and my gallbladder. I had had cavities filled in my life before ever walking into Bliss Dental, but I had never had anesthesia. So, lying on the Examination Room 3 chair, sucking the gas, I had nothing to compare the experience to. I thought it was perfectly normal to be flying in the clouds, and I thought it was perfectly normal to hear screams and the sounds of fighting.

But when I woke up alone on the floor of Examination Room 3, the gas mask hanging off me, I knew
something was wrong. I was woozy and nauseated. The only pain I felt was from my left knee, which must have hit wrong when I fell off the chair. My mouth was untouched. For some reason, Dr. Dulur hadn’t done any dental work on me, and for some reason, he and Nathan had left me there to fall off the chair.

It took me awhile to orient myself and wake up. I struggled to a sitting position and looked around. Everything looked normal. The lights were on, and it looked like business as usual. But Bliss Dental was quiet. It was a quiet that told me I was alone. There wasn’t a movement anywhere.

The hair on the back of my neck stood up. I was worried that I was having a bad trip, that I was hallucinating, that I was on an episode of
The Twilight Zone
, or that I had died and was damned to live an eternity in a dental office.

I found my purse and got up, took off the spit bib, and adjusted my sweater. I started to panic; I wanted to run out of there, but I was scared. I only managed a few small steps. Foreboding overtook me, and it didn’t take long to figure out why.

I got as far as Examination Room 2, and that’s when I realized I wasn’t alone, after all. Dr. Simon Dulur hadn’t left me. He was still there, but he was lying on a dental chair, and he wasn’t breathing. At least I didn’t think he could be breathing, not without a face. And Dr. Dulur didn’t have a face.

I RECOGNIZED him by his polyester shirt, gold chains, and chest hair. The world spun around, and I saw black. I was on the verge of passing out. I never could stand the sight of blood, and here I was face to face—excuse the expression—with a lot of blood. Dr.
Dulur was in there somewhere, underneath the gore, and the thought of what happened to him made me retreat toward unconsciousness.