The Secret Lives of Dentists

by W. A. Winter

  He parks here because he learned before leaving the Greek’s place that the dentist the skinny blonde might be visiting this evening works out of an office above the club, maybe where lights glow in a pair of second-floor windows. The supper trade, such as it is at the Palace, was over, both Tony’s old man and his ugly wife had left for the day, and Tony was talkative.

  “I’ll be goddamned if some Jew’s gonna stick his fingers in my mouth, but I heard Rose does all right,” the gimp said. “They say a lot of his trade is working girls who go to him in the evening and on weekends—when dentists generally ain’t open for business. Anyways, I’ve seen the lights on up there late, and his car parked around the corner, on Fifteenth, always the same spot, a black Packard Clipper. Someone pointed it out once, said it was his.”

  The driver was careful not to ask too many questions. The gimp’s obviously a firecracker. Unpredictable. Volatile. Maybe dangerous. You never know what a guy like that might tell the cops if it came to it. Like, Yeah, there was this guy, a regular fuckin’ nosy Ned, always asking about the girls.

  Of course, the driver can’t be certain the lights he sees in the windows above the Whoop-Tee-Doo are the dentist’s, much less if the skinny blonde is on the premises, much less what he should do if she is. Lights burning in second-floor commercial windows on a Friday night have a way of inspiring impure thoughts, but the driver doesn’t have the guts to go up there for a look-see, what with the crowd milling around on the sidewalk out front and no plan of action except to snoop. Snooping is usually excuse enough, but not tonight. Despite the coffee, the driver is tired and tentative.

  From where he parks, using one or the other of his mirrors, he can keep an eye on both the double doors that must lead to the offices upstairs and the black Packard parked where the gimp said it would be, around the corner on Fifteenth. The driver is okay parked where he is. No one pays attention to a cab when its roof light is off.

  The driver turns on the radio and listens to the news. Eisenhower this, Eisenhower that. The driver’s got nothing against the president, but he’s tempted to vote for Stevenson if he runs against Ike next year, mainly because he knows that the stingy, stuffed-shirt businessmen who make up the majority of his fares vote the Republican ticket. Plus he doesn’t like Nixon, Tricky Dick, Ike’s Number Two. Then again, the driver didn’t bother to vote for anyone in ’fifty-two, and probably won’t in ’fifty-six, either. He doesn’t see that it makes much difference.

  He lifts and shakes his Thermos jug though he knows it’s empty, and then drops it on the floor. Listening to Eisenhower droning on about Berlin and the Suez Canal, he takes off his peaked cap and sets it beside him on the seat. Then, with no intention of napping, he turns off the radio, drops his head back to rest his eyes, and falls asleep.

  Forty-five minutes later, he’s roused by a drunk rapping on his window. The drunk is standing in the street and hanging on to his girlfriend, both drunks leaning against his car and peering at him through the glass like a couple of circus clowns.

  Rolling his window down far enough to smell the booze, the driver says, “You fuckin’ blind? The roof light is off. That means the car ain’t in service.”

  The man straightens up and sways away from the window, clutching his girlfriend’s arm. The driver notices a large stain on the front of the man’s trousers. Trying to focus his eyes on the roof light, the man says, “Well, shit, fella, you’re still a taxi, aincha? We demand a ride.”

  “Take the bus, asshole.”

  The driver rolls his window up and rotates his stiff neck. He looks at his watch—it’s almost ten-forty. When the drunks stagger off and it occurs to him to check the mirrors, he sees that the Packard is no longer in its parking spot. And, when he looks toward the Whoop-Tee-Doo Club, the second-floor windows are dark.

  “Son of a bitch!” he shouts, slapping the steering wheel. He starts the car and pulls into the Friday-night traffic. He turns left on Fifteenth and proceeds down along the south side of Loring Park, where a dozen girls stand on the sidewalk facing the street, their coats open to show what they have to sell.

  But the driver doesn’t like whores. Whores are used merchandise, dirty and worn-down and mean. It’s not a whore he’s looking for tonight.

  For want of a better idea, he turns back toward Hennepin and heads south.

  Nearly two hours later, on the same April night, a young man, naked as a newborn, stretches his arms and legs and squints at the luminous hands and numerals of the alarm clock on the dresser. He reaches for his glasses, which he’d shoved under the bed, so he can get a better look.

  “You have to go, Bobby,” says the young woman beside him. “Karl’ll be on his way pretty soon.”

  In the spring of 1955, Robert Gardner has just turned twenty-three and been hired by the United Press wire service bureau in Minneapolis. He is single and lives—temporarily, he assures them—with his sister and her husband in a two-bedroom apartment on Forty-fourth Street in Linden Hills. Today, Robert worked, as he has for the past three months, the three-to-eleven shift in the bureau’s downtown office. For the lion’s share of the last hour, he’s been fucking Pamela Brantley. Karl Brantley, Pam’s husband, is an intern at Hiawatha General Hospital downtown.

  “Jesus,” Robert mutters, stretching out on his back.

  The back bedroom of the Brantleys’ second-floor apartment, two blocks west of Robert’s temporary lodging, is not much larger than a walk-in closet, and its air is thick with the musk of their lovemaking. Pam, naked as Robert, slides off the damp sheets and pushes open the room’s single window, letting in a welcome rush of chilly night air. Looking at her sweat-slicked back, plump ass, and short but nicely shaped legs, he wants to fuck her again, this time from behind, braced against the window frame.

  It is sheer coincidence—he will go to his grave believing it’s the definition of “happy accident”—that he and Pam are together, much less lovers. Pam is the twenty-one-year-old younger sister of Janice Jones, whom Robert dated while attending high school in Rochester. Robert and Karl Brantley’s kid brother, Ted, were teammates on the junior varsity basketball team. For much of their high school careers, Robert and the Brantley boys were casual friends.

  Though they dated exclusively for more than two years and talked about marriage after college, Robert and Janice never let themselves go beyond the serious petting stage. Each had reasons for restraint: Janice’s hellfire Baptist faith and Robert’s fear of scandalizing his staid, socially conscious family, pillars of Rochester’s medical aristocracy. They broke up a month after their high school graduation, and then headed off in different directions. The last time Robert saw either Janice or Pam—until he encountered Pam at the Butler Brothers drugstore in Linden Hills—was at Pam and Karl’s wedding reception eighteen months ago.

  “What are you doing here?” Pam exclaimed. She and Robert had literally bumped into each other in front of men’s toiletries near the back of the store. Born dark-eyed, olive-skinned, and sultry, she had a body that was made for the tight sweater and short skirt she wore that day.

  “I live here,” Robert replied. “Around the corner, off York.”

  “Me, too!” Pam said. “On Forty-fourth and Abbott. Karl works downtown.”

  Not yet a ladies’ man, Robert was flattered by Pam’s exuberant response to seeing him. Though he hadn’t seen her since her wedding, he’d been enjoying the occasional Pam Jones fantasy since he dated Janice. Robert is tall and conventionally handsome, though he could stand to put on another ten pounds. He’s also intelligent, well educated, and self-possessed in the way you’d expect of the son of an eminent thoracic surgeon. Pam Brantley, whose parents run a failing dry-goods store several miles beyond the shadow of tony Pill Hill, exudes a self-confidence that’s easily his equal. But what Robert discovered soon enough is that Pam is an unhappily married woman.

  She told him so when, at her suggestion, they met for coffee at a France Avenue cafe the day after their accidental meeting.
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br />   “It was a mistake,” she said softly. “Karl couldn’t get enough of me before we were married. Now I think he couldn’t care less. All that matters is his work.”

  Robert, his throat dry, said he found that hard to believe, that he couldn’t imagine ever getting enough of her. Pam smiled and reached under the table and spread her fingers on his leg. She told him he was sweet. Then she slid her hand up a couple of inches and told him that Karl worked late most nights.

  “Maybe you could come by,” she said.

  That was a month ago, and Robert and Pam have been torching the sheets in the Brantleys’ back bedroom ever since. So far, there have been no close calls nor need for extraordinary measures—scrambling under the bed, leaping from a second-floor window—and Pam insists that Karl, absorbed in his medical training, is none the wiser. Robert has yet to run into him in the neighborhood and is sure that Karl has no idea he lives nearby. On the nights they meet, Robert steps off the bus at Xerxes Avenue and joins Pam by eleven-thirty. An hour later, spent but happy, he walks to his sister’s apartment, slinking along the abandoned trolley tracks that run behind and below the modest apartment buildings, duplexes, and storefront businesses facing Forty-fourth Street. If Robert’s sister ever asks where he’s been so late, he’ll say he had drinks with colleagues downtown.

  Still, Robert is a cautious young man, a worrier like his mother and a stickler for detail like his father, both of whom, it goes without saying, would be outraged if they knew about his midnight adventures. Majoring in journalism at the University of Minnesota was heartbreaking enough—he was supposed to follow the family line into medicine. Seeking and apparently enjoying the work of a vulgar news hound have been all but unbearable to his parents. Now a furtive adulterer as well, he’s taken to wearing a black jacket and dark trousers on his tryst nights, believing himself, like a cat burglar, difficult to spot in the shadows.

  The abandoned right-of-way is weedy and littered with worn-out automobile tires, pieces of broken furniture, and discarded paint cans—rubbish that a person could break an ankle on if he isn’t careful—not to mention clumps of dog shit, a used condom or two, and other waste that he wouldn’t want to drag into his sister’s place. He wonders if he should carry a flashlight, but decides the light would attract attention.

  Tonight’s exit is no different from the previous ones. Hurriedly dressed, Robert kisses Pam, who will put on her nightgown, crawl into the double bed in the other room, and feign deep sleep when her weary husband trudges in. The lovers kiss again, and again, until she pushes him away. There are no proclamations of love, not yet, but Robert believes, and believes Pam does, too, that they’ve already become essential to each other’s happiness and will be together soon, the disapproving world be damned.

  It is well past midnight when Dr. Rose returns home, scarcely half a mile, as it happens, from Robert and Pam’s love nest on Forty-fourth Street.

  Rose also resides, with his wife and two pubescent daughters, in the Linden Hills neighborhood of southwest Minneapolis, but instead of overlooking derelict streetcar tracks, the Roses live a block off scenic Lake Calhoun. From their master bedroom, they can see a sliver of the city’s most popular lake through a small forest of elms, birches, maples, and poplars. Several other professional men—doctors, dentists, attorneys, and corporate executives—live on the same block, across the street, or in the immediate vicinity. There are two or three more exclusive neighborhoods in the city, but none more comfortably “livable,” to use a word relentlessly employed by local real estate agents.

  The Roses’ girls—Margot and Lael—have been in bed for hours, but Ruth is up when David comes home. She is a short, solid, chestnut haired woman of forty, plainspoken, humorless, and unassuming, though she comes from significant family money. Ruth is always up when David comes home.

  The Roses will have been married for seventeen years come September, and Ruth likes to tell friends that she’s never had a regret and is certain that he hasn’t either. Her friends smile, knowing full well that he, at any rate, has no reason for regret, not the way Ruth takes care of him. Ruth buys the groceries, pays the utility bills, hires the yard work, even sees that his Packard’s oil has been changed and the tires rotated. More important, she keeps Margot and Lael, fine young ladies anyway, on the straight and narrow. And David—well, her friends say, Ruth is simply everything to him: nurse, caretaker, confidante, and, once or twice a month, if he requests it, lover.

  Tonight—it’s actually early morning—Dr. Rose walks in the back door exhausted and disoriented, as though he’s entered a stranger’s house. His exhaustion is frequent and understandable, given his long hours at work and peculiar eating habits. Even the disorientation is not uncommon, probably for the same reasons. Rose is a tall man, six foot two or three, though he’s round-shouldered and somewhat stooped, the price he’s paid, Ruth insists, for bending over patients for nearly twenty years. He has a long, gaunt face, sad dark eyes, a meticulously maintained mustache, and a full head of glossy black hair. If the hair were thinner or showed the slightest sign of gray, he would look much older, given his posture and pallor.

  Rose stands in the middle of the kitchen and looks around as though he’d dropped in from Mars. Ruth steps around him and eases off his overcoat and then the jacket of his suit. She can’t reach his gray fedora and, in any case, wouldn’t dream of trying to lift it off his head, which would be not only difficult given the difference in their height but disrespectful as well. In a minute or two, he will realize he’s still wearing his hat and remove it himself.

  In another moment he looks at his wife, blinks his long-lashed eyes, and says he drove his last patient home, then returned to his office and lay down in the waiting room.

  “I must have fallen asleep,” he says, though it always strikes her as preposterous, a man of his dimensions getting comfortable enough to doze on that settee.

  “Are your knees bothering you?” Ruth asks.

  “Not so much tonight,” he says.

  “You haven’t eaten, have you?” Ruth says.

  He looks at her as though he’s thinking about the answer.

  “I don’t suppose I have,” he says at last.

  “Ronnie was here for supper,” she says, referring to her brother, a thirty-year-old bachelor lawyer and frequent dinner guest. “There’s beef stew I’ll put back on the stove.”

  Rose eats in silence, head bent over his plate, while Ruth sits silently across the table and waits. When he’s finished, he will thank her and, without another word, climb the stairs to the master bedroom on the second floor. She will rinse off his plate, drinking glass, and silverware, and follow him a few minutes later.

  Upstairs, after he washes his face and brushes his teeth, Rose slides into bed beside his wife. Both wear flannel pajamas—his striped, hers dotted—and black sleep masks, though neither will have trouble dropping off tonight. Rose reaches out and takes hold of Ruth’s hand, and in another moment both appear to be asleep.

  Robert Gardner, in his stocking feet, eases himself down the back stairs of the Brantleys’ building and out the back door. He sits down on the stoop and puts on his shoes. The night is quiet save for the sad, ragged barking of a dog somewhere in the neighborhood. The waning moon, as insubstantial as a nail clipping when it appears through the broken clouds, offers negligible illumination.

  Robert walks carefully down the cracked sidewalk to a short flight of uneven stone steps, then through ten feet of ankle-deep weeds, brush, and trash, and then onto the former right-of-way. Though unused for two years now, the tracks gleam with a dull sheen in the yellow glow of a streetlight. Robert walks between the double row of tracks, stepping carefully between the rotting ties, and wonders what he’d do if somebody jumped him. He’s a lover, he tells himself with a smile, not a fighter. One night last week, he spotted a couple of kids making out in the shadow of a garage. He pretended he didn’t see them and picked up his pace. He doubted if they noticed.

  Suppose
Karl Brantley waited in the shadows.

  The notion also makes Robert smile. Karl is not a fighter, either. A deferential, perpetually smiling beanpole, Karl was voted Rochester High’s Mr. Nice Guy of 1946. Granted, nice guys can change, wise up, and stop smiling. Some nice guys—but probably not Karl. Robert feels bad about fucking Karl’s wife, so he tries not to think about Karl any more than he has to.

  Robert is sated, bone-tired, and eager to crawl into his own bed, meaning the narrow roll-away he’s using at Gwen and her husband’s apartment until their baby arrives. He earns enough for a cheap place of his own, but wants to wait until he can buy a decent used car, which should be sometime this summer. (Robert’s father made it clear that once he moved to the Twin Cities and got a job with the wire service, he was on his own, ineligible for parental gifts, loans, or subsidies. Gwen lost her meal ticket when she married a Catholic.) If there’s an extra bottle of Grain Belt in his sister’s refrigerator, he will drink it, but he will skip a late supper and hit the sack. He expects to have a wet dream about Pam.

  Later, he will ask himself what caught his eye, what it was that snatched his mind away from Pam and that cold bottle of beer and drew his attention to the woman’s body lying on the south side of the tracks. The woman was wearing a dark green or blue coat and what looked like a plaid skirt. One hand, pale and thin, with chewed nails and a ring on the third finger—he can see the glint of a tiny diamond in the weak light—is thrust out, protruding from the brush a few inches onto the gravel track bed. It must have been the hand with its glinting gem that he spotted in the semidarkness.

  He stands a few feet from the body, staring. A moment later, his heart pounding, he looks in both directions, and then takes another step. He stops and leans forward, not quite over the body, but close enough to see more. He looks for movement or a sound, a moan or a whisper begging for help. But there is nothing. The woman is dead. Though he covered a couple of fatal car accidents during a year at the Rochester paper, he’s never seen a corpse up this close. He sure as hell has never discovered one. He is sure, though, that this woman is dead.