To Rise Again at a Decent Hour (6 page)

But Sam had a change of heart. We were running hand in hand at breakneck speed toward the cliff of endless love, but she stopped short just as I upshifted, so that I ran straight off without her and hung there for a second like in a cartoon, trying to find the ground beneath me, but there was no ground, and I plummeted. I failed to see it coming, or willed myself not to see it, despite half noticing that my heavy and fatal proclamations of love were no longer being returned with the same frequency and then not at all. I tried to understand what had happened, what I’d done. It appeared that what I’d done was nothing more than continue to do what Sam and I had been doing together for eleven straight weeks, which was making of the other our everything. Abruptly she stopped while I went on, and on, and my going on made her more certain that her stopping had been the right thing to do. I no longer had a self of my own, except the one full of love for her, and as everyone knows, that’s a self that invites abuse quicker than it does affection.

I guess I began to menace her. All I did, for the most part, was sit on the outdoor stairs leading to her apartment and cry, and when at last she let me in, try to get a grip on myself so that I could talk over the tears that, now in her presence, were less hysterical but still ongoing. Once or twice they found me inside the apartment, her and her roommates, when they returned home. I was waiting in Sam’s room, on the bed, facedown, crying into her
unwashed pillow, no harm to anyone. But they didn’t like finding me there. The first time was scary and weird, and I surrendered my key and promised not to do it again. But of course I had a spare and did do it again, addicted as I was to Sam’s bedsheets and sick to death at the idea of her out in the world without me. I was unable simply to sneak in and breathe in the sheets and touch her things and smell her lotions and look through her Santacroce photo albums and then leave, because I couldn’t leave. Her room was the only place I cared to be, with or without her. And because she didn’t want to be with me, I was in her room without her, and when she found me there a second time, she called campus police. My mother had to come get me. She was afraid for me, they were all afraid for me, and they should have been, because I was nothing, I was Paul-who-loves-Sam, now Paul-who-loves-Sam-without-Sam, and so less than nothing. I had seen God, but God was gone.

A few years later, when I was more or less over her and had completed two semesters of premed at a different branch of UMaine, Sam found me and told me that she looked back on our time together with regret. She was sorry she’d lost me because no boy before or after had loved her as I once had. At last she knew the importance of that and wanted a second chance. She asked if I still loved her and I said I did. Six months later we were living together—not with her parents’ blessing, but I didn’t care and neither did Sam. I wasn’t cunt gripped this time, merely in love. More than anything, I was amazed: amazed that I had Sam Santacroce back and that she was more in love with me than before. What a reversal!

It lasted for about a year, during which time we made a few trips to the Santacroces’ and I tried my best to see them as I once had. But I had ruined my chances with them, and they didn’t
know forgiveness. They didn’t approve of me, and now that I was love-sober, not to approve of me was not to approve of the world. And in fact they didn’t approve of the world: they judged and condemned the world. They made donations and participated in food drives, but they despised the poor. They blamed homosexuals for the spoliation of America, and probably African Americans and working women, too. Old Santacroce, Sam’s grandfather, held a bewildering grudge against FDR, widely considered one of America’s greatest presidents and dead by then over fifty years. When Bill Clinton came on the TV, Sam’s mother would have to leave the room. I understood so little of it, and slowly my old self reasserted itself. I found it impossible to believe that I had once considered converting to Catholicism for these troglodytes, and in retaliation I made poor Sam sit through long diatribes on the hypocrisy of Catholics and the stupidity of Christianity in general. And then one night I confessed my atheism at the Santacroce dinner table, and the Santacroces all turned to me in horror. Sam ran after her mother, who, from the other room, called me Satan himself and forbade me from ever entering the house again. That was fine by me. Sam and I didn’t last much longer. Her parents were asking her to choose between me and them, and she was not going to give up the two people who had nurtured and loved her more than anyone in the world. I was sad to lose Sam, whom I was all wrong for and who was all wrong for me, but I was pleased to know that after the cunt gripping eased, I returned to my former self: that there was, however nebulous and prone to disappear, a self to return to.

Connie came to work at O’Rourke Dental as a temp. On the first day, I could feel my self going. At the end of the second day, I suggested she leave the temp agency and come to work for me full-time. She would be paid a great salary, receive full health benefits,
and enjoy the best dental care at no cost. I proposed paying her much more than your average receptionist would ordinarily be paid. Yes, I was fading fast. But something told me to call myself back, to remember my old self-respecting self, to move slowly this time and with great caution into the orbit of this beautiful temp, so that I would not repeat the embarrassing mistakes of the past. Awareness: that was new. And when Connie accepted my offer and came to work for O’Rourke Dental, I did my best to keep busy, because no small part of my real self was the dentist who tended to patients all day every day, longer on Thursdays, and who had a practice to grow and a staff to oversee and about sixty thousand in monthly billings to protect. It would not be wise, I thought, as I was falling in love with Connie, to compromise any of that with my predictable love shits. And so, though as cunt gripped as ever, I tried a different tack. I stayed silent. I feigned indifference. I acted cool, which is not to say
cool
cool, but contained, arriving in the morning with an aura of mystery and departing for the day with heartsick dignity. I pivoted cannily to my best self, implementing pizza Fridays, treating Mrs. Convoy with respect, and suppressing my complaints and dissatisfactions as if I were a Christian monk with endless recourse to prayer. I mean, it was a
show
, man. Love makes you noble. So what if it’s self-directed? So what if, eventually, as love fades, we revert, like the lottery winner and limb loser alike, back to our base selves?

I did not let on about my love for Connie for six agonizing months, until drinks on O’Rourke Dental put us alone at a dive bar one night, and lubricious confessions poured from us both, and after that we were a couple.

I must have looked so with it to her. Dentist. Professional. Owner of real estate. I didn’t let on that my self was gone now that I was with her, and she didn’t seem to notice. She didn’t notice
until my self reasserted itself. And that’s when things went all to hell.

After watching Connie lotion her hands, I went to work. An old woman with Parkinson’s came in that morning, assisted by her late-middle-aged son who supported her on his arm and eased her down into the chair. Her tremors were unrelenting. She had a hard time holding her mouth open. I used a prop, which made it impossible for her to swallow. Abby kept the evacuation going even as the old woman continued to try to swallow with stubborn regularity, an instinct of pale pink muscle at the back of her throat. She was like a condemned person, my Parkinson’s patient, facing death after a long stay in an unquiet prison. She was in that morning because she had lost a tooth to a piece of toast. Her son had been unable to find the tooth. He apologized profusely, as though he had failed his mother in some way. People bring in their broken teeth all the time as if they are still-warm fingers and toes, believing I might do some kind of quick graft. If you ever lose a tooth, just toss it. Or put it under your pillow. There’s nothing I can do with it. I explained that to him, which put his mind at ease. Then I had a good look inside his mother’s mouth—a mouth that had a year or two left on earth, straining in the agony of its tremors and its thwarted swallows—and what I found was a rare but immediately identifiable condition likely brought about by chemotherapy: osteonecrosis of the jaw. My condemned patient could now add jawbone death to the list alongside whatever cancer she’d had and the Parkinson’s she would die with. Her jawbone was so soft and rotted that her morning piece of toast had managed to push the lost tooth past her gum and into the bone, where it was presently lodged. I took a pair of tweezers and removed it without causing her any pain at all. “Here’s that tooth,” I said.

Connie appeared in the doorway with an iPad.

“Yes?”

“When you get a moment,” she said.

We had iPads by that point. The year before, we’d bought new desktops. And the year before that, the folks from Dentech came out and upgraded our entire system, so that we could do everything electronically better than we could do it electronically before. In almost every respect, purchasing something for the improvement of the office was a rational choice based on a cost-benefit analysis, but when new technology made itself known, it was a mortal terror not to seize it at the first opportunity.

“I just wanted to ask you,” she said as I stepped out into the hallway, “have you read your bio on here?”

“On what?”

“On this website of ours.”

I seized the iPad. “This is maddening,” I said. “They had all weekend to take this thing down. They haven’t even answered my email.”

“Did you read your bio?”

Again I wondered, Who could have done this? Had I been late with a patient? Curt with a temp? An idea struck me. “You know who this might be?”

“Who?”

“Anonymous.”

“Who’s Anonymous?”

I reminded her of the scumbag who had failed to pay for his bridgework and then left nasty reviews of me on Google.

“Wasn’t that, like, two years ago?” she said. “Would he really still be—”

“It’s unfair!” I said. “It really doesn’t take a lot to have a cave dweller.”

“Read your bio,” she said.

I looked up at her. “Whoever did this has an intimate knowledge of me and this office,” I said.

“Have you gotten to the weird part?” she asked.

The bio ended with the weird part.

“What the hell is this?” I said, searching her face. “Something from the Bible?”

“Sounds like it.”

“What’s this doing in my bio?”

She shrugged.

“Is there anything like this on your bio page?”

She shook her head.

“Betsy’s? Abby’s?”

“Only yours,” she said.

“I’m not a Christian,” I said. “I don’t want a quote from the Bible on my website. Who did this?”

She relieved me of the iPad. “Maybe you should talk to Betsy,” she said.

Mrs. Convoy came to and from work with a floppy-eared Ignatius—highlighted, of course—with her name, Elizabeth Anne Convoy, inlaid in faux-gold lettering on the green pleather cover. It had been in her possession nearly half a century, since the day of her First Communion. There was nothing that so perfectly embodied my ambivalence toward Mrs. Convoy. First, because she was an expert in goddamned everything, and her authority and its imperious tone were bestowed upon her by that archetype of all knowingness, the Bible. But later, in a casual moment, when she was out of sight, I’d catch a glimpse of that totem resting faithfully inside her open purse, and Mrs. Convoy, head ballbreaker, would reincarnate into Elizabeth Anne Convoy, a perfectly insignificant, irredeemably homely creature who, I could easily imagine, thought so little of herself that to find her name engraved on God’s book would move her to tears. Conjuring that awkward, insecure girl, I wanted to tell her that God loved her. I did not want Betsy Convoy, or anyone else for that matter, believing that down deep they were ugly, worthless, unwanted, inconsequential, and unlovable. If God served no other purpose, I thought, this alone justified Him. Thank God for God! I thought. What work He did, what love He extended, when mortal beings failed. The travails of lonely people, of the disfigured and the handicapped, need not seize the heart of the sympathetic observer with suicidal pity, because God loved them. Because of God, even the imperious ballbreakers, moralizing windbags, and meddling assholes may know love.

“I already told you,” she said when I confronted her. “It wasn’t me. Do you think I would lie to you?”

“I don’t know what to think, Betsy. First I find somebody’s gone against my express wishes and made a website for my practice, and then I find a bunch of biblical gobbledygook on my bio page. And you’re somebody who knows the Bible.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, that doesn’t mean I know how to make a website.”

“I’m not suggesting you made it personally.”

“I did not make that website any way at all,” she said. “I am not responsible for it, and I did not put quotes from the Bible on it. And if I had, that’s certainly not the passage I would have chosen.”

“What passage is it?” I asked.

She looked again at the iPad. Whenever Mrs. Convoy read something to herself, the small contracted hairs around her pursed lips went wiggling up and down with the consumption of every word, as if she were a caterpillar working through a leaf.