Mandible, she thought. Renamed the desmoulins, after Camille Desmoulins, a lawyer who placed leaves in his hat, calling for all patriots to arm themselves and don a similar green cockade.
Dr. Lipi had moved on to explain the anatomical correspondence between the forms and the arrangement of teeth, in particular the form of the condyle of the inferior maxilla. Individuals who have teeth with long cusps have the head of the bone much rounded, he said, and he paused dramatically, staring at her, waiting for a response.
She looked away, embarrassed by his intensity, until he began to speak again.
"There is a preponderance of the direct over the oblique muscles of mastication," he said loudly, almost angrily, and he thumped the desk with a clenched fist. Then he smiled, and in an ordinary, genial voice, said, "But of course that's not an issue with you, Ms. Nathan," handed her a new toothbrush, and dismissed her.
Whew, she thought, when she'd left the office. Someone has not been taking his lithium.
Margaret looked forward to another of these meetings, to sitting before the immense, glossy desk, waiting restlessly for the room to fill with the edgy vanity, the urgent, heroic sense of importance of Dr. Lipi the dentist. And Dr. Lipi did call her in, several times. He tenderly handed her samples of dental floss, as if they were the Host and he a prophet of a particularly mighty God. He scolded her for past transgressions against her teeth and, worse, her gums. He encouraged her with the possibility of redemption through quarterly curettage.
But mostly he discussed the way things worked—the mechanical operations of the jaw, the chemical composition of enamel. He considered it part of being a dentist, teaching his patients, alerting them to the wonders of their own mouths. She found herself caught up in his need to explain, feeling a corresponding need to understand.
"I know it seems silly," he said softly, after showing her a series of drawings depicting the evolutionary relationship between the ape jaw and the human jaw. "But the mouth does so much! It's miraculous, and, without teeth, what are we?" He showed her a drawing of the vertical section of the tooth in situ. "Toothless."
Margaret lusted after Dr. Lipi, Dr. Lipi the beautifully proportioned, proselytizing tooth scholar. Once he projected onto a screen slides of bacteria he had scraped from her teeth. Margaret sat attracted, repelled, transfixed. They discussed the anatomy of teeth, Margaret wondering at his unquenchable fascination with the bits and pieces of the mouth, looking at his own mouth, his sensuous lips, his teeth, listening and watching, occasionally offering one of the new names created by Madame de Montigny, to Dr. Lipi's obvious delight. He was an extraordinarily handsome man, muscular but without bulk, his face half soft and sensuous, half craggy and almost unnaturally alert. He stood often in a pose so suggestive and so familiar and yet so unusual that Margaret felt her breathing lose its rhythm and the blood thump crazily in her ears. His wide shoulders and slim torso tilted languorously back, his flat stomach curved in gently, one leg bent at the knee, one arm curled up in front of him until his cupped hand rested in the crook of his neck, as though he were holding something slung over his shoulder, and sometimes he did hold something like that, a manila folder or his blue plastic mask. Margaret stared and stared until she realized that he stood as Michelangelo's David stood, a perfect, magnificent copy, like the one in the square by the Uffizi, the one covered with pigeons. Pigeons would have gathered with pride on Dr. Lipi, so elegantly did he stand, Margaret the pigeon delirious among them.
Dr. Lipi had a cable dentistry show called "Eye on Your Teeth." He had a tooth spa at Elizabeth Arden. He traveled in private jets to attend to the teeth of the rich and famous. He chatted on about osteoblasts and cement corpuscles, Hertwig's epithelial sheath, and the interglobular spaces of Czermak. And sometimes he wondered if perhaps he didn't owe it to the world to minister to those less fortunate as well.
"You could have a truck," Margaret suggested. "Like the Lubavitchers."
As Dr. Lipi gravely considered this suggestion, Margaret considered his lovely, shapely, sinewy arms as they emerged from his short-sleeved shirt, and she thought, He's mad as a hatter, isn't he?
But the spark of fanaticism was itself a draw. Excitement burned within Dr. Sammy Lipi, glowing embers of proselytizing passion, and excitement excites those around it, like a preacher howling in the stifling shade of a southern tent.
I believe, Margaret thought. I can floss, oh, Lord! I can floss!