“Do you think that’s why none of his girlfriends stick?”
“Maybe. I can imagine a scenario where he takes some girl to a party, abandons her there, and leaves with someone else. Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that I’m glad you’re you and not Todd.” Lizzie tried not to think about another possible way to end that sentence, tried not to let the words “but it would be even better if you were Jack” even enter her mind.
*?George’s Road to Fame?*
The first question reporters always asked George was what inspired him to put a thriving dental practice on hold and embark on what Lizzie called his happery-quackery crusade. His one-sentence answer was that he had a patient named Cynthia Gordon and she was sad. Then he’d add, trying (and pretty much succeeding) not to sound smug, “I realized that no matter how gratifying it might be to help people have healthy gums, it was so much more important to help someone live a happy and satisfying life.”
The second question—“What influenced your theories of suffering?”—was impossible to answer in one sentence. As George grew more experienced with the media, and discovered that most reporters only have a very limited attention span, he’d worked out a short handy-dandy guide to his ideas.
When George was a senior in college, facing hours of chemistry and biology labs and studying madly for the Dental Admission Test, he decided on a whim to sign up for a class on something as different from dentistry as he could get. Perusing the catalog, he came across a course called Buddhist Insight Meditation and the Psychology of Spiritual Development. Whew! The title, which didn’t appear to have anything to do with dentistry, was a mouthful and way too long to fit the space it was allocated in the catalog; it was abbreviated Budd Ins Med/Psych of Sprtual Dev, and was popularly known on campus as Hippie 101. Dr. Robert Kallikow, aging beatnik, taught the course. He wore a beret (even in the heat of the Oklahoma summer) and the only Earth shoes ever seen in Stillwater, Oklahoma (which he wore sockless, even in the occasional chill of the Oklahoma winter). His many odd tics and traits were widely thought to have been the result of his taking part in Tim Leary’s experiments with psilocybin at Harvard.
George initially regarded the class as a sort of mini-vacation, a chance to relax in the midst of his pressured academic life. To his surprise, though, the main theme of the course—what the Buddha taught on the nature of suffering, the cause of suffering, and the way to end suffering—fascinated him, though not quite enough to abandon his career plans and go to Thailand and become a monk. At the end of the semester, he turned his full attention back to his predentistry studies but remembered the course fondly and entertained a vague hope that one day, when his dental practice was well established, he could do some more reading on the topics covered in the class.
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?”