“Dr. O’Rourke?”
Connie was standing in the doorway.
“When you have a minute,” she said.
“Connie, what was the name of that third girl on Friends? The dumb blond one? The actress hasn’t had much luck since the show ended?”
“Phoebe?”
“Phoebe! Damn! That’s it! Phoebe! Okay, Mrs. Deiderhofer,” I said to my patient, “you’re free to spit.” Mrs. Deiderhofer spent about ten minutes spitting. I walked over to Connie.
“You got a reply,” she said.
She handed me the iPad.
How well do you know yourself?
“That’s it?” I said. “All those emails, and all he writes back is how well do I know myself? That’s totally unacceptable.”
“There’s also…”
“What?”
“Your bio’s changed.”
“Changed how?”
They had taken the site down or offline or whatever, made changes to it, and then put it back up again. Everything was the same, with one exception. A new weird quote had been added to the old weird quote.
And Safek gathered us anew, and we sojourned with him in the land of Israel. And we had no city to give us name; neither had we king to appoint us captains, to make of us instruments of war; neither had we laws to follow, save one. Behold, make thine heart hallowed by doubt; for God, if God, only God may know. And we followed Safek, and were not consumed.
“More religion!” I cried. “Betsy! Who’s Safek?”
“Who’s who?” she answered from the other side of the wall. You can always hear everything everyone is doing in a dental office because for reasons that even your most seasoned dentist can’t explain, the walls always terminate, as in cubicles and bathroom stalls, a foot below the ceiling.
“Safek!” I said.
What good was all her reading and highlighting if she couldn’t tell me who the characters were?
“There’s no one by that name in the New Testament,” she cried out.
“I’ve never heard of anyone named Safek,” said Connie. “But,” she said, “I do know the word.”
“The word?”
“Safek is a Hebrew word.”
“What’s it mean?”
“Doubt,” she said.
“Doubt?”
“It’s the Hebrew word for ‘doubt.’ ”
“How well do I know myself?” I wrote to Seir Design.
Go fuck yourself. That’s how well I know myself.
My last patient of the day was a five-year-old complaining of a loose tooth. I had the parents pegged for the type that would send their child to see a brain specialist if they heard a playmate had pulled baby’s hair. I looked at Mom, late thirties, Volvo-and-breast-milk type, purees her own veggies, etc. I looked at Dad, trimly bearded in a tech button-down, knows all the microbrews. I wasn’t going to turn them away just because they overburden the medical system with their hair-trigger fears. If it weren’t for hair-trigger fears, my monthly billings would be cut in half. (On the other hand, if it weren’t for dental dread, I could double my salary.) If these fretters felt the need to bring their kid in because of a loose baby tooth, I’d happily humor them. Which is what I thought I was doing when I focused the overhead inside the girl’s mouth. But then I found seven cavities. Five years old and she had seven cavities. The loose tooth wasn’t falling out because it was time. It was straight up rotted out. I told them I had no choice but to pull it. Mom started crying, Dad looked ashamed. They were giving the kid a lollipop every night to help her go to sleep. “It was so hard to hear her cry,” said Mom. “It really worked to calm her down,” said Dad. They wouldn’t let the kid drink out of the tap, they wouldn’t feed her anything without an organic label on it, they wouldn’t even consider a sugar-free lollipop because anything sugar-free was full of artificial sweetener and that shit caused cancer, but they let her lie in bed ten hours a night rotting her mouth out so that she’d stop crying and fall asleep. People have all this resentment against their parents for fucking them up, but they never realize, the minute they have a kid, that they cease being the child so fondly victimized in their hearts and start being the benighted perpetrators of unfathomable pain.
This was what I had tried to impress upon Connie. She wanted kids, I didn’t. I thought I wanted them when we first started dating. Now there was something that could be everything, I thought: kids. From the moment they’re born, until the time is nigh for them to gather around you for your final word, and every milestone in between. But for them to be everything, they would also have to be everything: no more restaurants, Broadway plays, movies, museums, art galleries, or any of the other countless activities the city made possible. Not that that was an insurmountable problem for me, given how little I’d indulged in them in the past. But they lived in me as options, and options are important. With options came freedom, and having kids would nullify those options and restrict that freedom, and I wondered if I would resent them for it. I didn’t want to resent my kids for a decision entirely my own, the one I’d made to bring them into the world. Too many people already felt such a resentment. They’d bring their kids into the shop, and you could see it in their harried, hateful eyes. “Hey,” I wanted to say to them, “it wasn’t this kid’s choice to have teeth. It was yours. And now those teeth are here on earth and need to be cleaned, so how about you just resign yourself to it and hold the fucking kid’s hand?” But easy for me to say. I didn’t have kids.
It would be nice, though, I thought, from time to time, to have a son and heir. I’d imagine Connie calling out, “Jimmy O’Rourke!” or “Paulie Junior! You better get your butt down here this instant!” And I’d think, me with a namesake! A son and heir! I have a son and heir! But I’d be pretty old by then, past forty for sure, and I’d start thinking less about that son and heir and more about how goddamn old I was, more than halfway to death, while that kid being called to, with his steel-cut bowels, in the flower of health, made happy by trifles, was steadily outliving me. Fuck that, I thought. I’m not having kids if they’re just going to remind me of my dying every living day.
I’d tell that to Connie, and she’d try to explain why that approach was all wrong. I’d never actually feel that way once the kid was here, among us, part of our family.
That sounded nice. But just as I didn’t want to resent my kids, I also didn’t want to find myself too much in love with them. There are parents who don’t like to hear their little girl crying at night, at the vast approaching dark of sleep, and so in their torment think why not feed her a lollipop, and a few years later that kid’s got seven cavities and a pulled tooth. This is how we’ve arrived at the point where we give every kid on the team a trophy in the name of participation. I didn’t want to love my kids so much that I was blind to their shortcomings, limitations, and mediocre personalities, not to mention character flaws and criminal leanings. But I could, I thought, I could love a kid that much. A kid really could be everything, and that scared me. Because once a kid is everything, not only might you lose all perspective and start proudly displaying his participation trophies, you might also fear for that kid’s life every time he leaves your sight. I didn’t want to live in perpetual fear. People don’t recover from the death of a child. I knew I wouldn’t. I knew that having a kid would be my chance to improve upon my shitty childhood, that it would be a repudiation of my dad’s suicide and a celebration of life, but if that kid taught me how to love him, how to love, period, and then I lost him as I lost my dad, that would be it for me. I’d toss in the towel. Fuck it, fuck this world and all its heartbreak. I’d tell that to Connie, and she’d tell me that if that was how I felt I was already a slave to the fear, and good luck.
There was a final reason I didn’t want to have a kid. This one I never shared with Connie. I never seriously considered killing myself, but once you have a kid, you take that option off the table. And like I said, options are important.
Four
THE FIRST THING
WE had to do, according to my lawyer, Mark Talsman, of Talsman, Loeb, and Hart, was find out who registered the site. The site’s URL was www.drpaulcorourkedental.com and would be registered with the WHOIS database, which required the registrant to list his (or her) personal contact information.
The C in that muddle came from my middle name, Conrad, which was my father’s name. I hated the name Conrad. I especially hated that Conrad had been called Connie all his life. Connie wasn’t a man’s name. It was a woman’s name—specifically, as far as I was concerned, the name of the woman I once believed I would marry but who now was only another reminder of a terminal hopelessness. For a time I failed to make the connection, so wildly at odds were the two Connies. One I hardly knew at all, the other I knew every intimate inch of. No one, I mean no one, not even Connie, knew about the C in my name. It was not listed on my license or on any of my professional certificates or other official documents. The only time that a middle name came up in conversation between Connie and me, I lied straight to her face. I told her my middle name was Saul.
She looked at me quizzically. “Your name is Paul Saul O’Rourke?”
It had come out so naturally, and no wonder. I had chosen the only name that rhymed with my actual name. In the ensuing seconds, I let any chance to correct myself simply pass by and saw no choice but to push on through.
“Weird,” I said, “isn’t it?”
“I know a few Sauls,” she said. “You don’t look much like a Saul.”
“That’s what my second-grade teacher always used to say,” I said, really doubling down. Why did I have to lie? “What can I tell you,” I added, “I had strange parents.”
“Were they hippies?”
“No,” I said. “Just poor.”
At least that part was true.
Anyway, whoever had created www.drpaulcorourkedental.com knew more about the biographical me than even Connie, who knew more than anyone else. Although she still thought my full name was Paul Saul O’Rourke.
Where was I when I lied? I mean the essential me, the self I knew and was proud of, the straight talker, advocate of truth and destroyer of illusions? Nowhere to be found. Boy, if that’s not how you knew I was surely cunt gripped, a big old fat fucking lie. Trying to make its way into the world by way of a lie was a better version of myself, a person who had grown up in Florida and went to space camp or in Montana and broke horses or in Hawaii where he windsurfed in tournaments; whose father played for the minor-league Red Sox before dying in Vietnam; and whose mother, after losing the love of her life in the Battle of Suoi Bong Trang, was still sharp as a tack and playing tennis all day. A better biographical me. But I never liked the liar, despite his starburst past, as much as the me who might have been had I only told the truth and been myself. I had no choice but to flee the relationship or break down and come clean. Or, as in the case of Connie, always do something in between.
There was a macadam ashtray outside the Aftergood Arms that I shared with the building’s residents. One or two of my fellow smokers enlisted my professional services, but no more—it’s never easy to trust your dentist after you’ve seen him debase himself over the macadam with two quick final drags. Whenever I went out to smoke, I could always count on being asked again about the glove. I had a theory, whether true or not I don’t know, that it cut down on that just-smoked smell. I wanted to avoid that smell as much as possible, to keep Mrs. Convoy off my back after returning inside. And so with my left hand unclad, my right hand brought the cigarette to my lips inside a powdery new latex glove, which the residents of the Aftergood Arms, all wizened and in need of intubation, kept eyeing as if memorizing it for the eventual police report.
The day after the website appeared, a heat wave curled up out of the calm waters of hell, blanketing the Eastern Seaboard. I was clammy with a creeping headache after returning inside. That cyanide stick left my capillaries all tied up in knots, and my temples were tight and hot. The medicinal smell of a dental office, antiseptic and colloidal, prevalent everywhere but penetrating nothing, floated above the central air conditioning. I loved my waiting room. I loved the paired chairs, the framed folk art. I loved the discriminate occupancy. I never wanted my waiting room to appear overtaxed. We weren’t some Appalachian drill-and-bill shop where the meth heads twitched in terror while the cries of their children went choral during another round of punch tag. This was Park Avenue, the Upper East Side. The waiting rooms of Park Avenue must be civilized. They must be boutique. Mine was boutique, full (but not too full) of a reassuring age spread, of faces (if not mouths) of advertorial good health. One had the immediate impression from my boutique waiting room of clean contoured surfaces and a steady professional hand. I often considered it a great shame not to spend more time in my waiting room, admiring the comfortable and curated space all too frequently traversed as a mere afterthought.
I sat down in one of the chairs. Things were buzzing on the other side. Mrs. Convoy was in with a hygiene patient; I could envision the flavored polish flying up into the light streams. Abby was no doubt in with a second patient and wondering where I was. I was here, in my waiting room, hiding behind my me-machine to better watch Connie. Her hair had been pulled back tightly that morning, as if she were about to perform for the Bolshoi. But when she turned, you could see how, in back, after coming together at the hairband, her curls exploded, ringlets shimmering along the continuum from chestnut to caramel. Connie dyed her hair, but its thickness and curliness were products of her own genetic good fortune, as was the way her smaller curls had of crimping at the hairline around her ears and neck. Boy, I tell you, it was one good God-almighty head of hair. Sometimes, her bun sat on top of her head like a minitwister; other times it possessed a greater Oriental orderliness, in which case it was situated farther back. I watched her redo it. Parking her hairband around a wrist, she brought her right hand to her brow and began to feather back the hair in front, which her left hand kept secure. She worked one side until that hair was thoroughly collected, and then she worked the other side, and finally the hair in the middle. She did this all very quickly, with elbows raised, as if preparatory to flight. She stopped only to work out a tangle, some missed curl that lay like a spur under the otherwise smoothed-back hair. And then, just as I thought she might be finished, she switched hands and let her left hand have a go at capturing even more hair while her right hand kept the hair in back contained. Finally, with great speed, she removed the hairband from her wrist and whipped it on. She expanded the elastic and threaded her voluminous curls yet again through the band’s tightening bottleneck. She did this once more, and then a fourth and final time. By then the opening in the hairband had become impossibly small, the action slowed, and her hair resisted every inch of the way. She winced briefly at what I imagined were little cries of pain at the roots of her hair. Then came that part where, her hair caught now, and her hands free, she made little adjustments, easing the pressure here and there, but always carefully, so as not to undo all the work, the work of ten or fifteen seconds at most, that had gone into getting her hair into place. Then, with her unruly hair utterly tamed, she was free to carry on with her various activities.
Connie was always complaining that I objectified her and idealized her physical beauty and then, when she turned out to be a mere mortal, went around pissing and moaning about being sold a bill of goods. She thought I stacked the deck against her, and most other people, too, by beginning every new relationship with exalted opinions that no one, in the long run, could possibly live up to. My problem was that I was too romantic. People impressed me in one way or another on first blush, but once I’d scratched the surface and detected a flaw, it was all over. She said this basic stance toward life had made me misanthropic and chronically unhappy. I disagreed. But I did like looking at her. It was harder now, knowing all the ways she sucked, but she was still gorgeous.
That morning was a little different, though, because while I took great pleasure in watching her reconstruct her ponytail, I soon
found myself paying more attention to what she was doing than how she looked. One minute, she was standing over the desk; the next, she was balancing on tiptoe to pull a file from the shelf; she was reaching for the ringing phone; she was handing off an appointment-reminder card with a smile (her white canines just half a millimeter longer than her front teeth); she was readying a clipboard for a new patient.
During that time I began to feel that I, too, was being watched. I turned and saw a patient of mine, whom I had worked on half a dozen times or more, scrutinizing me, trying to place me. I think she believed that I might be her dentist.
To Rise Again at a Decent Hour: A Novel Page 8
