by Nancy Pearl
This somewhat abbreviated background (he left out the beret and Earth shoes and the psilocybin) was what he told reporters about his first meeting with Cynthia Gordon. She was his last patient on a late Monday afternoon in January of 2001. Cynthia hated her ugly teeth, she told George, and didn’t believe that, given those teeth, anyone at all would ever find her attractive. George could tell at a glance that hers were the teeth of someone whose parents hadn’t been able to afford braces for their daughter. Now, as a reporter for the Ann Arbor News who was often interviewing people for the stories she was writing, Cynthia felt increasingly self-conscious about how other people judged her teeth. “I just hate the gap between my front teeth. It’s like you could drive a truck through it,” she said.
(When George first told Lizzie about what Cynthia Gordon said, Lizzie wanted to be sure that George reminded her that in The Canterbury Tales the Wife of Bath, who’s a sexy babe, also has a gap between her two front teeth. Or, Lizzie, offered, she’d be happy to call Cynthia and fill her in on the literary precedent of her dental situation. George assured Lizzie he’d relay that information to Cynthia, who turned out not to be noticeably impressed. “Chaucer, right,” she said. “He wrote a long time ago and in that funny English. If she lived now she’d get them fixed too.”)
George really enjoyed dentistry and sincerely liked all his patients, even the ones who blatantly, flagrantly, refused to floss, but there was almost nothing that he loved more than doing aesthetic dentistry. All the root canals, routine fillings, and crowns were swell, but it always gave George an extra-good feeling to know that through the work he did he was helping someone feel better about herself. Not to be sexist, George would add, but when it came right down to it, it was almost always a “her,” only occasionally a “him.”
At that first appointment, George recommended that they do veneers on Cynthia’s front teeth and the two adjoining them on either side. That would fix the gap and straighten out the others. “Perfect,” she said, and they’d been moving ahead on the project in weekly appointments ever since—first whitening all her teeth and then attaching the veneers. Porcelain veneers were not cheap, and George wanted to make absolutely sure that Cynthia would never feel her hard-earned money hadn’t been well spent. During these appointments, he’d learned a few facts about her life. She’d grown up in Hamtramck, a small city adjoining Detroit. She’d gone to Macomb Community College for two years, and then finished up at Wayne State, where she’d majored in journalism.
About a month later, when the whitening process was over and the serious work was about to begin, George found Cynthia Gordon sitting in the dental chair, sobbing. He was not unused to tears. No dentist is. No matter how hard you might work to make things painless for the patient, it often took a fair amount of pain to ultimately ease the pain, and tears were a common response. But what he was currently doing didn’t involve anything that could possibly hurt: the drills and picks and scrapers and gum-depth readers were all still on a tray, unused. Yet here Cynthia was, in tears, while George simply held up tooth-color samples to find the best shade to match her unveneered teeth.
“What’s wrong, Cynthia? Are you in pain?”
If possible, although George doubted his perception, the quantity of her tears increased. “Oh, Dr. Goldrosen, I didn’t get the promotion I was hoping for. I just feel so unappreciated. Like I work hard, I do. And I really wanted the chance to write a column—you know, sort of a society column, what’s happening, what’s hot, what’s new—and now it just seems as though I’ll never get to do that. And what’s worse is that they hired someone just out of the J-school at Michigan State, somebody with no real newspaper experience at all. And I’ve been there for six years. It’s just not fair.”
George’s first thought, luckily unspoken, was that he’d never want to read such a column, but he could see how unhappy Cynthia was. He put down the sheet of colors and sat on a stool so he was facing her.
George would have sworn that he had no recollection of what Dr. Kallikow said about suffering, but now he unexpectedly remembered bits and pieces of what he’d learned. He began talking slowly, feeling his way through his memories and trying to be as clear as possible in what he said to Cynthia.
“You know, Cynthia, I had a class in college that I probably haven’t thought about since I took the final exam. But now I see how it could apply to you. Listen, most of us think that getting what we want will make us happy. You know, because not getting what we want isn’t pleasant, like how you’re feeling now. But if that’s how you’re going to define ‘happiness’—getting a raise or a promotion, having a successful marriage, being the best at beer pong, whatever it is that you want—then sooner or later you’re doomed to unhappiness, because we just don’t get what we want all the time.
“See, what my professor said was something like what’s important is learning how to respond the right way, the healthy way, when you don’t get what you want. It’s the difference between responding to something and reacting to it.”
Cynthia’s tears slowed. “I don’t get the difference between ‘react’ and ‘respond.’ I’m pretty sure that I’ve always used them as synonyms.”
The more George talked, the more his memories of the class came back to him. He could see Dr. Kallikow in full lecture mode, walking back and forth in front of the class, sockless in his Earth shoes, talking about suffering. “What he said was that a reaction is more like a reflex, sort of like a sneeze. It just seems to happen. But you can choose how to respond. Dr. Kallikow talked about how to train yourself to respond skillfully to not getting what you want.”
Cynthia was doubtful. “‘Skillfully’? That’s a weird word to use. Are you sure he said that?”
George nodded. He was absolutely sure because he’d had the same questions about the word that Cynthia had. “What he said when I asked was that ‘skillful’ in this context was more or less a technical term, which makes it sound unfamiliar. So we could say ‘respond wisely’ instead, or even ‘respond well.’ The point is, we can learn to respond so that the experience of losing, or not getting what we want, isn’t a problem for us.”
He paused for a moment, to see if she had any questions for him, but she just waited for him to continue. The tears had stopped.
George went on. Whole paragraphs of Kallikow’s lectures had now come back to him, almost verbatim. “See, we’re always writing the narrative of our lives, and when you respond badly you turn the event into a burden, something that you carry forward into the next moment, the next hour, the next day, and the rest of your life. It fills up your narrative. It weighs you down. You never forget it. But when you respond well, you have nothing to add to the narrative. You simply experience the unpleasantness, then let it naturally pass away, and then greet the next moment of your life with no trace of the last.”
Cynthia seemed doubtful. “That sounds impossible. How can I do that?”
“It’s not so easy,” George admitted. “One problem is that trying to avoid unpleasantness only makes it worse. The smart response is to relax, to accept the experience, instead of turning away from it. It might seem counterintuitive, but that’s what makes it better.”
“So having an experience of failing at something doesn’t mean that I’m a failure?”
He nodded.. “Yes, that’s it exactly. Think about it. Give it a try. But now”—picking up the sheet of colors—“here’s the one that I’m thinking will work best for you.”
When they’d agreed that was the right shade, Cynthia got up out of the chair and shook his hand. “Thank you, Dr. Goldrosen.”
“It was amazing, what happened with this patient,” George told Lizzie excitedly over dinner that evening. “It was so strange; it’s never happened to me before. It must be what people who have a photographic memory can do. It’s like all of a sudden I could remember in great detail everything I’d read for that class, and everything that Kallikow said. When I needed it, there it was.” He began to tell Lizzie what he’d
said to Cynthia Gordon but then stopped. What if Lizzie’s unhappiness could be eased by the same method? How would that work? How could he convince her to try it, to start responding to her unhappiness—hell, to her life—in a more skillful way?
George didn’t say anything to Lizzie about that—he needed to think about it more—but he did finish telling her what exactly he’d said to Cynthia Gordon. Lizzie replied that she had never understood a word that he’d said all throughout their married life, and now had given up any hope of doing so. George thought that perhaps that didn’t bode well for his developing plan to make Lizzie give up her sadness. But he was determined to try.
The following Sunday George was showering after his morning jog when he heard Lizzie calling. He ran out of the shower, forgetting to turn off the water and neglecting to grab a towel, only to find Lizzie sitting at the kitchen table, reading the paper.
“What? What’s happened?”
“Oh my God, George, look at this: that Cynthia Gordon wrote an op-ed about you in the Ann Arbor News!”
“What? Really? What’s it say?”
Lizzie handed him the paper, open to the editorial page. “The headline’s ‘My Dentist Doesn’t Just Know Teeth.’”
When he sat down and read the whole article, it was clear that not only had Cynthia heard what he’d said to her, she remembered most of it, nearly word for word. She either had an awfully good memory or carried a voice-activated tape recorder around with her. Since she was a reporter, either one was a reasonable possibility.
Then the Detroit News ran Cynthia’s op-ed, and as a result USA Today sent a reporter and a photographer to Ann Arbor to do a story on George, which they called “The Philosophizing Dentist.”
The first invitation to speak came from the Michigan Dental Association. They wanted George to talk about dealing with patients who found going to the dentist to be an “unpleasant experience.” Michigan Public Radio had him on for half an hour: the response was so positive that the next time they asked him to come on the show for a full hour and take phone calls from their listeners. He started appearing on the morning show monthly. He began receiving a significant amount of fan mail from all over the country.
Scott Simon from Weekend Edition at NPR featured him on a segment. The dentists from Ohio came calling, and Wisconsin, and as far south as Atlanta. When the Ontario (Canada) Dental Association asked him to keynote their annual meeting, George felt himself on the verge of something big; but when he was asked to speak at the annual meeting of the Estonian Dental Association (Eesti Hambaarstide Liit), he knew his life was changed for good. And so did Lizzie.
* More About Estonia *
They had a wonderful time in Estonia. The dentists drove them around the country, from the Russian-speaking Narva, where the women in their babushkas looked like George imagined his great-grandmothers must have, to Kuressaare, where Lizzie dozed off in the midst of a massage. But on their last night in Tallinn, Lizzie had trouble falling asleep. Rather than wake up George, she got out of bed quietly and put on the thick towel-y bathrobe the hotel furnished for guests, rummaged through her purse for a notebook and pen, then took her pillow and got into the waterless bathtub. She listened to the voices in her head—they were quieter tonight, perhaps because they were transmitting from far away—and thought about Jack’s absence from her life. She thought about how much fun she and George had when they were traveling together. Finally, she wrote a poem:
Tallinn
In this fall-away-moment, between
(ago) that fall-away-moment and
(then) that fall-away-moment, you lie, cocooned
under a symphony of ivory linen.
The cold has invaded my heart.
You are asleep
in room 205
Hotell St. Petersbourg
Rataskaevu 7,
Old Town,
10123 Tallinn,
Estonia,
The Baltics,
Europe, the Western Hemisphere, the world, the solar system.
And I am writing this—so as not to disturb—
in the darkness
of room 205
in this one fall-away-moment between ago and then.
When she finished writing she was very tempted to wake George up, give him the poem, tell him about Jack, about the Great Game, about the voices, about everything that kept her from loving him the way she felt she should. She got back into bed and scrunched as close as she could to George to absorb his warmth and finally fell asleep.
* George’s Secret *
Lizzie read every newspaper and magazine story about George avidly and with great pleasure. What amazed her was that every article, every interview showed the real George, the George she was married to. She knew—from the personal experience of her own lying and devious heart, if from nothing else—that most people have a private self that’s often deeply at odds with their public persona. But with George there was no persona. The real George was kind, good-natured, and evidently very concerned about the unnecessary suffering of the peoples of the world. Probably he would have eventually achieved sainthood, if the Jewish religion had saints. Certainly in the tiny world that constituted George and Lizzie’s marriage, George was almost endlessly patient in putting up with Lizzie’s crankiness, her emotional distance from him, and her constant pessimism.
For in George’s world there were no tragedies: rained-out picnics, famine in China, lost library books, monsoons in Bali, divorce, children drinking at ten, mainlining heroin at twelve, and dead at fifteen: of course these events occurred regularly, but George refused to see them as tragedies. In his world there were no irretrievable bad choices or wrong turns. Each one was, instead, an Opportunity for Growth, which would come if you were able to respond skillfully to events as they occurred.
George understood early in their marriage that his life with Lizzie was not going to be easy, despite being desperately in love with her. He thought she was smart and beautiful and would have loved to possess the dazzlingly agile mind she had, which was able to perform backflips and front flips with ease. He was eternally grateful for Lizzie’s place in his life and for his place in hers, although he was never quite sure what that place was, or how important he was to her, or how seriously she took his feelings. He knew, for example, that she didn’t consider herself either beautiful or brilliant. On the other hand, so what if their life together didn’t come even close to perfect? Really, what marriage is? Bring on the difficulties, George often felt, because Lizzie is his own personal Opportunity for Growth.
Lizzie was the catalyst who brought his inchoate feelings about tragedy and sorrow into focus and clarity. He believed he owed his success entirely to her, to the depth and scope of her unique unhappiness and self-hatred. Given the profundity of Lizzie’s feelings, it made total sense that much of their marriage was difficult. George would give anything at all, including every bit of his fame and certainly the money he’d earned from that success, to make Lizzie happy. Where did all her sadness come from? She never told him. George was incapable of violence of any sort, but sometimes he had this fantasy of shaking Lizzie so hard and for so long that she’d be forced to tell him what was making her so damn miserable so damn much of the time.
Not surprisingly, Lizzie and George had a huge disagreement about suffering. To George, it was a valuable stimulus to emotional and spiritual growth; to Lizzie, it was merely suffering. Suffering was something she knew well. It went a long way (too long, George said, frequently) in defining Lizzie’s very existence, and yet it always felt alien to her, as though she had an extra hand, or an eye in the back of her head. She knew that extra appendage should be removed because then she’d be less of a freak, but it felt like such an integral part of her that to stop suffering would be like getting rid of something necessary to her being, perhaps the purest, most honest, most important part. Despair made her a whole person. And, of course, it gave George his life’s mission.
Here was a typical evening a
t home in Ann Arbor with Lizzie and George: they’d be sitting next to each other on the couch, shoulders touching, watching the news, Lizzie reading and drinking tea, George eating a bowl of low-fat ice cream, when Lizzie would put down her book and say, perhaps apropos of some news story, “Listen, George, I know that pain is not gain, no matter what you say. I know it’s your philosophy, but you will never convince me that the lousy things that happen in this awful world wouldn’t be so terrible if we thought about them differently. Maybe you’ve convinced a lot of idiotic people looking for answers, but you haven’t convinced me.”
“Oh, Lizzie,” George replied sadly, putting down the bowl. “Just because you haven’t come to terms with your own unhappiness, just because you wallow in it, just because you’re afraid to look at it honestly and then turn away from it, is exactly why you don’t believe that what I have to say is important. You romanticize suffering because you believe it gives you some crazy kind of nobility. But how else can we learn, except by using our despair skillfully?”
Lizzie always chose the words she used to counter George’s statements with great care, since she didn’t want George to give up on her entirely. She needed him to be pathologically optimistic. As he began his rebuttal, and the discussion segued into what any normal person would deem an argument, Lizzie, who, like many of his fans, found George’s voice extraordinarily soothing, would sidle into their bedroom, with George following close behind her. He kept talking while she put on an old T-shirt of his, got into bed, piled the blankets over her, and drifted off to sleep. Meanwhile, George was still trying to get her to see the world his way.
Lizzie hoped that George, being the kind, generous, pathologically optimistic, etc., etc., person that he was, was never going to leave her despite the fact that she refused to take him seriously, refused to accept the truth of his theories, and never acknowledged or applauded his deepest-held beliefs about suffering. Yet every speech he gave, every television or radio interview he sat down for, was aimed at Lizzie, trying his best to show her how to be happy. The audiences that hung on every word he said? They were chopped liver. That was George’s one great secret.
