The receptionist opened the door that led to the little rooms and their low-slung medical-modernist chairs. She motioned Margaret to follow her, and Margaret obeyed, stung by the sudden scent of cloves.
She stretched herself out on the dentist's chair and closed her eyes. The room was cool and she was tired. Muzak burbled gently from a loudspeaker somewhere above her. She wondered what Edward was doing at that moment. Waving his arms at his students, reciting to them. Who were his students this term, anyway? Had he mentioned any?
No. He hasn't mentioned any, has he? she thought. She lay in the dentist's chair in the dim and frigid pearl gray room. Sprawled there, she suddenly felt the cold.
Why hasn't he? He always talks about his students, especially the one or two bright ones who frequent his office after class to talk, but mostly, Margaret suspected, to listen. And to flirt.
"Margaret?" An oddly textured hand touched her cheek. She opened her eyes and saw him. His black hair was slicked back like a TV drug dealer's. Beneath his starched white doctor's coat, a white polo shirt clung to a slender but startling, articulated, muscular torso. Around his neck, he wore a thin gold chain with two small gold charms. His watch, which touched her cheek, beeped in little shrill, computerized gasps. His face was covered by a large transparent blue plastic shield. The hand that had touched her was covered by a milky yellow rubber glove, the color and texture of a condom. Margaret was in love.
***
Margaret knew that since coming home from Prague she'd felt increasingly guilty and increasingly suspicious, that the sight of Edward had become distressing, almost an accusation, a reminder of her flirtation with faithlessness, of his own probable faithlessness, and worst of all, of her failure to be faithless in the face of his presumably successful faithlessness.
But did that mean she had to fall in love with the first thing that crossed her path, as if she were a duckling that hatched from its shell to follow a bespectacled naturalist, quacking the duckling's equivalent for "Mama!" because it knew it was due for a mama, and the man in the hiking shorts was there first?'
Dr. Lipi had put his rubber-gloved hand on hers, and said, "What is your relationship to your teeth?" She lay in bed at home, dizzy from codeine. What is my relationship to my teeth? she wondered. Close? Estranged? Frosty? Neurotic?
And with a sigh of pleasure she again felt his hands brushing her shoulders as he unhooked the cool metal chain that held the wrinkled square bib of sea green paper. He had lifted his mask to reveal a face oddly balanced between absurd sensuality and stony severity. His cheekbones were high and angular, his eyes lurking narrowly above them. But beneath, the soft landscape of his full lips curved seductively. He stared at her blankly, his eyes, deep and remote, seeming to focus only when he trained them on her teeth. He was horribly handsome, a puzzle of exaggerated features. Margaret had not been able to take her eyes off him. His very indifference excited her.
Margaret lay in bed and thought longingly of the dentist's chest and the dentist's lips and the dentist's latex-clad finger along her tender gums. She saw the dentist's narrow eyes neutrally moving toward their goal, her diseased molar, then brightening with excitement. She saw this, in her mind, and her pulse quickened. "Mama!" cried the duckling.
And she thought she had caught something in his manner when he told her she would have to come back, something in the way he swung the blue protective mask he was holding to and fro, his nervous throat-clearing, the extra moment, the pause, as he accidentally caught sight of himself in the small round mirror he set down on the table—something, anyway, that suggested he would be pleased if she returned, that he wanted to see her again.
"There will be a bruise," he had said, with particular tenderness, she thought.
AFTER THE SECOND VISIT, Dr. Lipi asked her to come into his office and sit across from him, his large mahogany desk between them, just like a regular doctor. In England, Margaret thought, you'd be Mr. Lipi, so what is all this about? You're just a dentist, after all.
"I am a dentist," Mr. Lipi said with an almost solemn excitement, and then he paused.
"I hope so," Margaret said, putting her hand to her cheek.
"Now please pay attention," he said. His eyes had a zealous, discomfiting sparkle. In fact, there was something generally sparkling about him, an electricity, a static, a charge with no place to go, a light with no bulb to contain it, a radio wave with no receiver.
He pulled several photographs from his desk drawer. "The movement of the human mandible is forward and downward," he said.