To Rise Again at a Decent Hour (33 page)

“Any pain here?” I asked.

“No,” she said.

“You might have the start of a cavity,” I said to her, “but we’ll just have to wait until April, after the baby comes. If there’s no pain, it’s nothing to worry about right now.”

Well, how about that, I thought, hearing my own words. If there’s no pain, it’s nothing to worry about right now. You’ve got plenty of time. Worry about it later. Until then, enjoy yourself. You’ve got so much to look forward to. Really: you’re flush with good health, and there’s new life on the way. What’s the point of dwelling on all the shit and the misery?

That was how other people thought, I thought. I was having a thought that was identical to other people’s. I was on the inside with this thought. No longer alien to the in, but in the in. I was in the very in. Afraid of losing it, I took up the explorer again, ostensibly to have another look inside my patient’s mouth, but in actual fact to dwell in the in. I wanted to go in even deeper. The people who thought like this, the regular everyday people who walked their dogs and posted their updates and put off going to the dentist,
happily allowed the inevitable to just sort of slide right off their backs. Some of them, like my patient the marketing executive, didn’t even let themselves get worked up by what was upon them in the here and now. If he didn’t feel like he had a cavity, he didn’t treat it. If a patient was pregnant, she waited until April. If someone else didn’t feel like flossing, they said screw it, I’ll do it a different day. Not interested in hearing all the ways you’ve failed to maintain optimum health? Skip your appointment with the dentist. Have a drink instead. See a movie. Pet the dog. Give birth to a baby and go in and watch the baby as she sleeps in the crib. My God, I thought. This is how they think. This is why it comes so easily to them. It’s this simple.

“Will you excuse me?” I asked my patient.

I stood up with the intention of heading straight for Connie, but she was already standing there, just outside the room, looking in at me.

“Do you need me?” I asked when I reached the doorway.

“No,” she said.

“What are you doing?”

“Nothing.”

“You’re not standing there like it’s nothing,” I said.

“Let’s talk about it later,” she said.

“There’s an it? What’s the it?”

“Later,” she said.

“No, now.”

“You’re in with a patient now. It can wait.”

“I’m done with that patient,” I said. “There’s never been a healthier patient in this office. I was just coming to tell you that. I know you hate it when I drag you over to look at patients, but it’s not sickness or age or death this time. Look at her,” I said. “Have you ever seen anyone healthier or happier in your entire life?”

She peered inside. “What am I missing?” she asked.

“Don’t you see it?”

“I see a woman in a chair,” she said.

“She’s pregnant,” I said. “Don’t you see? Well, okay, just take my word for it. What’s important is her plan of action. She’s got the start of a cavity, but she’s going to wait until
after
the baby comes to have it filled.”

“Isn’t that standard procedure?”

“If there’s no pain, sure, for pregnant ladies. But not for the rest of us.”

“I’m not following.”

“Why shouldn’t it be that way for the rest of us?” I asked. “Why not just go with it? Just walk the dog and send the tweets and eat the scones and play with the hamsters and ride the bicycles and watch the sunsets and stream the movies and never worry about any of it? I didn’t know it could be that easy. I didn’t know that until just now. That sounds good to me. I think I might be able to do that. Who couldn’t do that? It would take somebody mentally ill not to do that, and I’m not mentally ill.”

She looked at me.

“I’m not,” I said. “Listen, do me a favor. Go out with me. On a date, I mean. Give me a second chance. Give me… what would this be, the sixth chance? I’m a changed man. I mean it. Let’s not even date. Do you want to get married? I do. I really do. What’s that look? Why that look, Connie? I really do want to marry you. I want us to have kids. I know I said I never wanted to have kids, but that was before. I get it now. I want you to be as healthy and happy as that woman in there.”

“I’m quitting, Paul,” she said.

“You’re what?”

“Quitting.”

Everything got quiet.

“Quitting?” I said. “What for?”

“Do you really have to ask what for?”

“But you’re the office manager,” I said. “And I love you.”

She didn’t respond.

“I can’t believe what I’m hearing,” I said. “What about everything I just said? You won’t give me another chance?”

She smiled one of those smiles that are so quick to disappear that when you think about them later it’s what puts you over the edge. I hated how feelingly she reached out for my arm, how sweet her grip was.

“Let’s just get some things squared away,” she said, “and then I’ll start looking for my replacement.”

I moved like a zombie through the rest of the day. Connie posted an ad online within an hour of her announcement, and by the end of the week, she had half a dozen candidates lined up. There was no talking her out of it. She was moving to Philadelphia with Ben. He had a job there teaching poetry.

“You don’t think you’re making a mistake?”

“No,” she said. “Do you want to look at these résumés?”

“This is really what you want? To live with a poet?”

“Yes,” she said.

“With the hot plate? And the lice?”

“What hot plate? What are you talking about?”

“Can he afford the rent?”

“Are you going to look at these résumés or not?”

At night I went home and watched the games. I had neglected all of August and now half of September. I couldn’t both catch up with the old games and watch the new ones without dedicating
myself entirely. I drank and ordered takeout and watched them back-to-back-to-back into the early morning hours.

“I can’t give you any more time,” she said toward the end of September. “I’ve quit, Paul. I have to go. Do you want to look at these résumés, or should I do it?”

“I’ll do it,” I said.

But I never did.

We had a solid summer that year, maintaining a lead over the Yankees all of July and most of August. We saw some heroic play from Pedroia and Ellsbury and, despite injuries, some solid pitching. Heading into September, there was no reason to doubt that we would clinch the pennant and enter not the first, and not the second, but the
third
World Series in seven years. But then something of an ancient order began to impose itself.

On September 1, we had a half-game lead over the Yankees. By September 2 we’d given up that lead, never to reclaim it. But a play-off berth, by way of the wild card, was a virtual lock, as we stood, on September 3, firmly in second place in the American League East, nine games ahead of the Tampa Bay Rays. We just had to stay ahead of the middling Rays to make the play-offs. To fall behind the Rays in the three weeks that remained of regular-season play, we would literally need to deliver the worst end-of-season performance in the history of baseball—and by history of baseball, I’m talking over one hundred seasons of professional play.

Baseball is the slow creation of something beautiful. It is the almost boringly paced accumulation of what seems slight or incidental into an opera of bracing suspense. The game will threaten never to end, until suddenly it forces you to marvel at how it came
to be where it is and to wonder at how far it might go. It’s the drowsy metamorphosis of the dull into the indescribable.

By the end of September, we had indeed played such fundamentally bad baseball that we had blown our lead over the crap-ass Rays. On the final day of regular-season play, the Red Sox and the Rays were tied for second place. I still don’t know how to make sense of our late-season performance that year. I was overtaken by physical disgust with each new loss. But that was not my only reaction. How happy I was that the Red Sox were acting once again like the Red Sox: a cursed and collapsing people. I didn’t want my team to lose; I just didn’t want my team to be the de facto winner. We already had a team that swaggered around as the de facto winner, that pinched players and purchased their pennants. It was less our duty, as Red Sox fans, to root for Boston than it was to ensure in some deeply moral way—and I really mean it when I say it was a moral act, a principled act of human decency—that we not resemble the New York Yankees in any respect. The days of trembling uncertainty, chronic disappointment, and tested loyalty—true fandom—felt vitally lacking. I wanted to be a good Red Sox fan, the best possible Red Sox fan, and the only way I knew to do that was to celebrate, quietly and in a devastated key, the very un-Yankee-like collapse of our 2011 September.

At that time I was still paying a nightly visit to my new patient. You and I can go a day without flossing, not without consequence, but without the imminent threat of losing our teeth. Not Eddie. I couldn’t believe he was still alive he was so rickety, bent, toneless, liver spotted, and trembling. He greeted me at the door as grateful as ever. I think he liked me almost as much as he had liked his old dead dentist Dr. Rappaport. We moved into the kitchen where he had a seat on the stepladder. I stood behind him and pulled on a
pair of latex gloves. I removed a length of floss, wound it around my fingers, and flossed him. Afterward, he got to his feet and made us both martinis. It was like stopping into a bar for a nightcap, but instead of tipping the bartender I removed bacteria from between his teeth.

Now, after six weeks of consistent flossing, there was no more bleeding. His bone loss had ceased. His gums were holding steady.

I had no idea what I was getting myself into when I agreed to these nightly visits, these uninsured house calls. The last game of the season was scheduled to start in twenty minutes. If I missed the first pitch, I’d have to wait until the game was over, rewind the tape, and watch it from the beginning, and that particular game was too important not to watch in real time. I had left the office late, the trains had moved slowly, and I was still in Eddie’s apartment on the Lower East Side at ten to seven.

He handed me my martini. “Cheers,” he said.

We toasted. I watched him battle the tremor in his hand to dock the unsteady craft upon his lower lip and drink.

“I’m in kind of a pickle, Eddie,” I said to him. “I’m a baseball fan, and in particular”—I touched the brim of my Red Sox cap—“I follow these fellas right here. I don’t know if you follow baseball yourself, but if you do, then you know that no team in the history of the game has ever lost a bigger lead in the final month of the regular season than this year’s Boston Red Sox. It’s truly a historic event. They were in first place ahead of the Yankees, and then they let the Yankees take the lead just when it mattered most. Now that’s actually a time-honored tradition, which you probably know all about if you follow baseball. It’s not the end of the world, and in fact, I don’t mind it personally, because the only way I like to beat the Yankees is when we’re the underdogs. And we were still
nine games ahead of the Tampa Bay Rays, which, if you know anything about baseball, they’re a real shit team. We would have to lose in this final month as many games as… well, the only team that even comes close is the 1969 Chicago Cubs. They were in first place basically from the start of the season, and sometimes by as many as nine games. Nobody could have foreseen them losing seventeen games in September of 1969—seventeen games, Eddie—and ending up in second place. As you know if you follow baseball, nobody but the Cubs ever plays that badly. So let me just cut to the chase. We
have
played as badly as the 1969 Cubs. Worse, in fact, because, as of today, in the month of September alone, we’ve lost
nineteen games
. Nineteen games, Eddie. While the shit Rays have climbed out of their cesspool to tie us. We are tied with the shit-ass Rays. And tonight, while we play our last regular-season game in Baltimore against the last-place Orioles, the Rays play their last regular-season game against the first-place Yankees. If we win, and the Rays lose, we go to the play-offs. If we lose, and the Rays win, the Rays go to the play-offs. We could be playing our last game of the season tonight. And because I’ve stopped by, and because the train was slow, I might not make it home in time to see the game from the start, which I have to do for superstitious reasons.”

He looked at me steadily despite his faint shake, his eyes wide as a baby’s.

“So I have to ask you a favor,” I said. “Do you have cable? And if so, what kind of package do you have? And if it’s the right package, can I watch the games here—the Red Sox game and the Yankees game—with your absolute guarantee that no matter what happens, if there’s a fire in the apartment, say, or you suddenly find my behavior peculiar, even alarming, you will not kick me out but
allow me to finish watching both games, even if either or both of them go into extra innings, and I’m here until three or four in the morning?”

“I have premium cable,” trembled Eddie, “and I’d be delighted by your company.”

“No matter what?”

“No matter what.”

“Okay,” I said. “That leaves us twenty minutes to find some chicken and rice.”

He made more martinis while I ran out for food. We ate quickly. Just before the start of the game, Eddie settled into the recliner while I took a seat on the floor, to be closer to the TV. Sometime in the second inning he crinkled open a hard candy and promptly passed out. It was dispiriting, after all those weeks of flossing him, to see his teeth bathing in sugar like that. At the next commercial break, I put on a latex glove, retrieved the candy, and threw it out without Eddie stirring an inch.

I sat back down, continuing to familiarize myself with his alien remotes. I was toggling between the game between the Red Sox and the Orioles and the game between the Yankees and the Rays. I was rooting for the Yankees, which ate me alive. But I had no choice. The Yankees had to beat the Rays to put the Rays behind, just as the Red Sox had to beat the Orioles to move ahead, if we were going to advance to the postseason—and when push came to shove, despite the discomforts of victory, I rooted unreservedly for the Red Sox. A win for the Red Sox was a win for my father. No matter that winning never did any magical good. Even clinching the 2004 World Series had failed to bring him back. That was the real adjustment. At last we had done the impossible, the curse was broken, we were champions again after eighty-six
years… and nothing changed. He was still gone, he was still dead. What had I been hoping for? Why had I been rooting for them for so many years?