Rameau's Niece (20 page)

***

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.

A
FTER 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.

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!

Just as Richard predicted, Margaret began receiving newsletters from Dr. Lipi. They touched on dental implants, the controversy over fluoridated water, adhesion techniques, base and noble metals, acrylic and porcelain, treatable anatomical deformities, as well as total etch, "wet field" dentin bonding, and intra-oral plating. She kept the letters in her dresser drawer among her socks, taking one out and perusing it occasionally as if it were a billet-doux. But her favorite remained the first, a letter sent routinely to all new patients, an introduction of sorts, entitled "Enlightened Dentistry."

NEWSLETTER
#101

Dear Patient:

I am a dentist, it is my job. But in the United States, at the dawning of a new decade, "to dentist" is more than an occupation. With the most recent technological and scientific progress in oral health care, Americans, indeed all of modern mankind, have the opportunity to reach higher than ever before toward dental achievement. Perfection is no longer an unattainable myth, but a real possibility. Dentistry, for me, is a search for that perfection for
my
patients, for patients everywhere.

A natural contract exists between each of us and his or her teeth. Each has a responsibility to the other. Man was born with an innate ability to care for his teeth—saliva. Saliva is nature's own cleansing solution. But it is through observation and education that we build on nature's gifts. Observe, keep in touch with your teeth. Listen to what they have to tell you. If you were to pay half as much attention to your teeth as I do, thousands of teeth could be saved each year. A tooth is a terrible thing to waste. Visit your dentist, periodontist, or oral-maxillofacial surgeon for regular checkups.

And remember, I am here for you twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Your teeth don't take vacations. Neither do I.

As patients, all of us can play a role in the realization of universal dental health.

Your dentist and fellow patient,
Dr. Samuel Lipi

A
T LUNCH WITH LILY,
this time in the park, Margaret sat on the bench trying not to lose control of her tuna fish sandwich and wondered if love would improve her memory. Could she recall Dr. Lipi's voice? His words? The curve of his neck, the hue of his skin? Perhaps. She wasn't sure, so overwhelmed were all her thoughts of him by simple desire, her own desire.

The person who is completely deprived of a good memory feels; but he does not judge: judgment implies the comparison of two ideas.

"I'm in love with my dentist," she said.

Lily looked at her attentively. Her mouth was full.

"I think I got married too young. I showed a lack of judgment. Judgment requires comparison."

"Margaret, you can hardly claim a dearth of experience," Lily said.

"Yes, but a person completely deprived of a good memory feels but cannot judge. I am completely deprived of a good memory."

"Judgment is tyranny, Margaret. Anyway, Edward is so sexy."

"Yeah," Margaret said. She ate her sandwich and silently admired the green of the new grass, the warm air, the pink flush of Lily's cheeks, the highly intellectual nicotine stains on her fingers, the rough whisper of her starlet voice.

"I like you, Lily," she said, embarrassed by her earlier confession. "You listen to any old crap I feel the need to say." And I to you, she added silently, as Lily happily wondered if the homeless men camped in the tunnel over there had chosen it because of its vaginal resonance.

Dr. Lipi was in her thoughts. Margaret daydreamed like a teenager. They would go to the beach and walk, the way teenagers went to the beach and walked. They would ride in a car and talk, earnestly, with the radio playing. They would hold hands in the park. In all of these fantasies, Dr. Lipi wore a white dentist's shirt, suggestively unbuttoned, then abruptly removed.

"Richard," she said to her editor on the phone, "I'm in love with your dentist. Our dentist."

"Oh, yes, so was I. You'll get over it."

"No I won't. Will I? Why will I?"

"When the bill comes."

"Richard, I'm not joking. I have a burning crush on Dr. Lipi the dentist," Margaret said. She meant to seem as if she were joking, or could be joking, but there must have been something in her voice that betrayed her.

"What does Edward think of your new interest in dentistry? Planning caps, dear? Laminates, perhaps. Margaret, behave yourself."

"Why?"

"Open wide!" Richard said, laughing.

Dream on, Margaret thought, but she couldn't quite bring herself to say it.

"Margaret, finish your dirty book, for God's sake," Richard was saying. "Is your husband neglecting you?"

"No. Edward doesn't neglect anyone. Not even me."

"Margaret, what ails you these days?" Edward said when she came home from the library and walked past him without saying a word. "It's spring!" He spread his arms dramatically and spoke in his deep, booming teaching voice. "But you come in the door like a blast of winter. The sun pales; gray winds howl; leaves shrivel on their branches." He stopped and then added in an ironic, gently mocking tone, "What is going on, Margaret?"

Problems were delicate, mysterious objects to him, to be handled gingerly, with a mixture of self-deprecation and awe, as a new father handles a new baby. So few things were problems for Edward that when he encountered one, he slowed down the great roar of his being to a soft purr.

"What's the matter, Margaret?" he said again, and he put one hand on her shoulder and stroked her cheek with the other. "What have I done?"

"I don't know," Margaret said.

"But I've done something?"

"Have you?"

"Well, it appears so," he said.

"Aha!" she said, and turned to walk away.

"Margaret," Edward called after her. "Margaret, you know I am a man of unlimited patience. But even unlimited patience has a limit." And his voice was no longer ironic, or gently mocking.

That desire is a state of uneasiness, everyone who reflects on himself will quickly find. Like hope deferred, desire deferred makes the heart grow sick.

My desire and my hope had both been deferred at the sight of my pupil lying in the green grove, there bestowing in so liberal a fashion the favors of her understanding on another. And my underlying desire was of so high a pitch that it now raised my uneasiness to such a level that the heart within me cried out, "Give me the thing desired, give it me or I die!" Life itself and all its enjoyments became such a burden that it could not be borne under the lasting and unremoved pressure of such an uneasiness.

After leaving my student still sitting, with no sign of remorse, upon the shaded green grass, I walked through the grounds of the estate of the Marquise de-, heedless as to my surroundings. I could have been walking in the shade of coconut palms, banana trees, and lemon trees in flower, on the slope of a mountain on a little island in the southern ocean. For all I could see before me was Rameau's niece.

Anyone reflecting upon the thought he has of the delight which any present or absent thing is apt to produce in him has the idea we call love. I reflected upon the thought of the delight my pupil had produced in me in the past. I reflected upon it helplessly and without end.

When a man declares in autumn when he is eating them, or in spring when there are none, that he loves grapes, it is no more but that the taste of the grapes delights him. Certainly, I thought, the taste of Rameau's niece had delighted me when she was there to be tasted. And when she was absent, then the recollection of that delight had followed me for hundreds of miles, accompanying me deliciously for days, for week after week, on my trip to Geneva. I had loved her.

But let an alteration of health or constitution destroy the delight of the taste of grapes, and a man can be said to love grapes no longer. On the contrary, the thought of the pain which anything present or absent is apt to produce in us is what we call hatred.

When I thought of my pupil, I thought of the pain she had produced in me, and the thought of that pain did indeed produce in me what we call hatred. I hated Rameau's niece.