The Counterlife (5 page)

“You'll be able to say your parents, plural, whenever you talk about the past. You had thirteen years of that. Nothing you did with Henry is ever going to go away. He'll always be your father.”

“Dad would take us alone, two times a year, without Mom, shopping in New York. It was his treat. Just him and us kids. We went shopping first and then we went to the Plaza Hotel and had lunch in the Palm Court—where they play the violin. Not very well, either. Once in the fall and once in the spring, every year. Now Mom will have to do all the things our dad did. She'll have to do both their jobs.”

“Don't you think she can?”

“I do, sure I do. Maybe someday she'll remarry. She really likes to be married. I hope she does do it too.” Then, very gravely, she rushed to add, “But only if she can find somebody who'll be good to us children as well as herself.”

They waited there close to half an hour before Carol, walking briskly, emerged from the cemetery to drive everyone home.

*   *   *

Food had been laid out by a local caterer under the patio awning while the mourners were still at the synagogue, and scattered around the downstairs rooms were folding chairs rented from the funeral parlor. The girls from Ruth's softball team, who had taken the afternoon off from school to help out the Zuckermans, were clearing away the used paper plates and replenishing the serving platters from the reserves in the kitchen. And Zuckerman went looking for Wendy.

It was Wendy actually—when she'd become frightened that Henry was beginning to lose his mind—who had first suggested Nathan as a confidant. Carol, assuming that Nathan hadn't the slightest authority over his brother any longer, had urged Henry to talk to a psychotherapist in town. And for an hour each Saturday morning—until that horrendous Saturday expedition to New York—he had done it, gone off and spoken with great candor about his passion for Wendy, pretending to the therapist, however, that the passion was for Carol, that it was she whom he was describing as the most playful, inventive sexual partner any man could ever hope to have. This resulted in long, thoughtful discussions of a marriage that seemed to interest the therapist enormously but depressed Henry even further because it was such a cruel parody of his own. As far as Carol knew, not until she'd phoned to tell Nathan that Henry was dead had he even been aware of his brother's illness. Scrupulously following Henry's wishes, Zuckerman played dumb on the telephone, an absurd act that only compounded the shock and made clear to him how incapable Henry had been of reaching
any
decision rationally once the ordeal had begun. Out at the cemetery, while Henry's children stood at the graveside struggling to speak, Zuckerman had finally understood that the reason to have stopped him was that he had wanted to be stopped. The last thing Henry must have imagined was that Nathan would sit there and accept with a straight face, as justification for such a dangerous operation, the single-minded urging of that maniac-making lust that he had himself depicted so farcically in
Carnovsky.
Henry had expected Nathan to
laugh.
Of course! He had driven over from Jersey to confess to the mocking author the ridiculous absurdity of his dilemma, and instead he had been indulged by a solicitous brother who was unable any longer to give either advice or offense. He had come over to Nathan's apartment to be told how utterly meaningless was Wendy's mouth beside the ordered enterprise of a mature man's life, and instead the sexual satirist had sat there and seriously listened. Impotence, Zuckerman had been thinking, has cut him off from the simplest form of distance from his predictable life. As long as he was potent he could challenge and threaten, if only in sport, the solidity of the domestic relationship; as long as he was potent there was some give in his life between what was routine and what is taboo. But without the potency he feels condemned to an ironclad life wherein all issues are settled.

Nothing could have made this clearer than how Henry had described to him becoming Wendy's lover. Apparently from the instant she'd come into the office for the interview and he'd closed the door behind her, virtually every word they exchanged had goaded him on. “Hi,” he'd said, shaking her hand, “I heard such marvelous things about you from Dr. Wexler. And now that I look at you, I think you're almost too good. You're going to be so distracting, you're so pretty.”

“Uh-oh,” she said, laughing. “Maybe I should go then.”

What had delighted Henry was not only the speed with which he'd put her at her ease but having put himself at ease as well. It wasn't always like that. Despite his well-known rapport with his patients, he could still be ridiculously formal with people he didn't know, men no less than women, and sometimes, say, when interviewing someone for a job in his own office, seem to himself as though
he
were the person being interviewed. But something vulnerable in this young woman's appearance—something particularly tempting about her tiny breasts—had emboldened him, though precisely at a moment when being emboldened might not be such a great idea. Both at home and in the office everything was going so well that an extraneous adventure with a woman was the
last
thing he needed. And yet, because everything
was
going well, he could not rein in that robust, manly confidence that he could tell was knocking her for a loop already. It was just one of those days when he felt like a movie star, acting out some grandiose whatever-it-was. Why suppress it? There were enough days when he felt like a twerp.

“Sit down,” he said. “Tell me about yourself and what you want to do.”

“What I want to do?” Someone must have advised her to repeat the doctor's question if she needed time to think up the right answer or to remember the one she'd prepared. “I want to do a lot of things. My first exposure to a dental practice was with Dr. Wexler. And he's wonderful—a true gentleman.”

“He's a nice guy,” Henry said, thinking, altogether involuntarily, out of this damn excess of confidence and strength, that before it was over he'd show her what wonderful was.

“I learned a lot in his office of what's going on in dentistry.”

He encouraged her gently. “Tell me what you know.”

“What do I know? I know that a dentist has to make a choice of what kind of practice he wants. It's a business, you have to choose a market, and yet you're dealing with something that's very intimate. People's mouths, how they feel about them, how they feel about their smiles.”

Mouths
were
his business, of course—hers too—and yet talking about them like this—at the end of the day, with the door closed, and the slight, young blonde petitioning for a job—was turning out to be awfully stimulating. He remembered the sound of Maria's voice telling him all about how wonderful his cock was—“I put my hand into your trousers, and it astonishes me, it's so big and round and hard.” “Your control,” she would say to him, “the way you make it last, there's no one like you, Henry.” If Wendy were to get up and come over to the desk and put her hand in his pants, she'd find out what Maria was talking about.

“The mouth,” Wendy was saying, “is really the most personal thing that a doctor can deal with.”

“You're one of the few people who's ever said that,” Henry told her. “Do you realize that?”

When he saw the flattery raise the color in her face, he pushed the conversation in a more ambiguous direction, knowing, however, that no one overhearing them could legitimately have charged him with talking to her about anything other than her qualifications for the job. Not that anyone could possibly overhear them.

“Did you take
your
mouth for granted a year ago?” he asked.

“Compared to what I think of it now, yes. Of course, I always cared for my teeth, cared about my smile—”

“You cared about
yourself,
” Henry put in approvingly.

Smiling—and it
was
a good smile, the badge of utterly innocent, childish abandon—she happily picked up the cue. “I care about me, yes, sure, but I didn't realize that there was so much psychology involved in dentistry.”

Was she saying that to get him to slow down, was she asking him politely to please back off about
her
mouth? Maybe she wasn't as innocent as she looked—but that was even
more
exciting. “Tell me a bit about that,” Henry said.

“Well, what I said before—how you feel about your smile is a reflection of how you feel about yourself and what you present to other people. I think that whole personalities may develop, not only about your teeth, but everything else that goes with it. You're dealing in a dental office with the whole person, even if it just looks like you're dealing with the mouth. How do I satisfy the whole person, including the mouth? And when you talk about cosmetic dentistry, that's
real
psychology. We had some problems in Dr. Wexler's office with people who were having crowns done, and they wanted white-white teeth, which didn't go with their own teeth, with their coloring. You have to get them to understand what natural-looking teeth are. You tell them, ‘You're going to have the smile that's perfect for you, but you can't go through and just pick out
the
perfect smile and have it put in your mouth.'”

“And have the mouth,” Henry added, helping her out, “that looks like it belongs to you.”

“Absolutely.”

“I want you to work with me.”

“Oh, great.”

“I think we can make it,” Henry said, but before
that
took on too much meaning, he moved quickly to present to his new assistant his own ideas, as though by being dead serious about dentistry he could somehow stop himself before he got grossly suggestive. He was wrong. “Most people, as you must know by now, don't even think that their mouth is part of the body. Or teeth are part of the body. Not consciously they don't. The mouth is a hollow, the mouth is nothing. Most people, unlike you, will never tell you what their mouth means. If they're frightened of dental work it's sometimes because of some frightening experience early on, but primarily it's because of what the mouth means. Anyone touching it is either an invader or a helper. To get them from thinking that someone working on them is invading them, to the idea that you are helping them on to something good, is almost like having a sexual experience. For most people, the mouth is secret, it's their hiding place. Just
like
the genitals. You have to remember that embryologically the mouth is related to the genitals.”

“I studied that.”

“Did you? Good. Then you realize that people want you to be very tender with their mouths. Gentleness is the most important consideration. With all types. And surprisingly enough, men are more vulnerable, particularly if they've lost teeth. Because losing teeth for a man is a strong experience. A tooth for a man is a mini-penis.”

“I hadn't realized that,” she said, but didn't seem affronted in any way.

“Well, what do
you
think of the sexual prowess of a toothless man? What do you think he thinks? I had a guy here who was very prominent. He had lost all his teeth and he had a young girlfriend. He didn't want her to know he had dentures, because that would mean he was an old man, and she was a young girl. About your age. Twenty-one?”

“Twenty-two.”

“She was twenty-one. So I did implants for him, instead of dentures, and he was happy, and she was happy.”

“Dr. Wexler always says that the most satisfaction comes from the greatest challenge, which is usually a disaster case.”

Had Wexler fucked her? Henry had never as yet gone beyond the usual flirtation with any assistant of any age—it wasn't only unprofessional but hopelessly distracting in a busy practice, and could well lead to the
dentist's
becoming the disaster case. He realized then that he ought never to have hired her; he had been entirely too impulsive, and was now making things even worse by all this talk about mini-penises that was giving him an enormous hard-on. Yet with everything that was combining these days to make him feel so bold, he couldn't stop. What's the worst that could happen to him? Feeling so bold, he had no idea. “The mouth, you mustn't forget, is the primary organ of experience…” On he went, looking unblinkingly and boldly at hers.

Nonetheless, a full six weeks passed before he overcame his doubts, not only about crossing the line further than he had at the interview but about keeping her on in the office at all, despite the excellent job she was doing. Everything he'd been saying about her to Carol happened to be true, even if to him it sounded like the most transparent rationalization for why she was there. “She's bright and alert, she's cute and people like her, she can relate to them, and she helps me enormously—because of her, when I walk in, I can get right to it. This girl,” he told Carol, and more often than he needed to during those early weeks, “is saving me two, three hours a day.”

Then one evening after work, as Wendy was cleaning his tray and he was routinely washing up, he turned to her and, because there simply seemed no way around it any longer, he began to laugh. “Look,” he said, “let's pretend. You're the assistant and I'm the dentist.” “But I
am
the assistant,” Wendy said. “I know,” he replied, “and I'm the dentist—but pretend anyway.” “And so,” Henry had told Nathan, “that's what we did.” “You played Dentist,” Zuckerman said. “I guess so,” Henry said, “—she pretended she was called ‘Wendy,' and I pretended I was called ‘Dr. Zuckerman,' and we pretended we were in my dental office. And then we pretended to fuck—and we fucked.” “Sounds interesting,” Zuckerman said. “It was, it was wild, it made us crazy—it was the strangest thing I'd ever done. We did it for weeks, pretended like that, and she kept saying, ‘Why is it so exciting when all we're pretending to be is what we are?' God, was it great! Was she hot!”