THE FOLLOWING MONDAY I sat down next to Connie at the front desk. I almost never sat down next to Connie when she wasn’t just starting to rub lotion into her hands. I watched her rub her hands together. Her hands were like lubed animals doing a mating dance. And she was hardly alone: people everywhere kept bottles of lotion in and around their desks, people everywhere that morning were just starting to rub lotion into their hands. I missed the point. I hated missing the point, but I did, I missed it completely. If I could just become a lotioner, I thought, how many other small, pleasurable gestures made throughout the day might click into place for me, and all that exile, all that alienation and scorn, simply vanish? But I couldn’t do it. I despised the wet sensation that refused to subside even after all the lotion had been rubbed in and could be rubbed in no farther. I hit that terminal point and wanted nothing more to do with something either salutary or vain but never pleasant. I thought it was heinous. That little hardened dollop of lotion right at the lip of the squirter, that was really so heinous. But it was part of the point, the whole point. Why was I always on the outside looking in, always alien to the in? As I say, Connie was not alone. In medical offices, law firms, and advertising agencies, in industrial parks, shipping facilities, and state capitols, in ranger stations and even in military barracks, people were moisturizing. They were in possession of the secret, I was sure of it. They slept soundly. They played softball. They took walks, sharing with one another in the soft fall of night the events of the day while the dog trotted alongside them. It was terrifying. Their leisure was a terror to me. So at ease it was, so natural. And yet you had to wonder: whence this mania, this scampering frenzy to lotion yourself throughout the workday? Connie’s hands were dancing and copulating, working the wet lotion down to an evenly distributed film across the surface of her hands. It was really almost a kind of grotesquerie that should have been done only in private. And unnecessary. Connie had good hands. Old-people hands are the only hands that seem to the naked eye in urgent need of a new coat of moisturizer. They are liver spotted, bony, thin skinned, tendony, and dying. I will be sitting across the patient from Abby, who is just waiting to pass off an instrument, and I will point at the patient’s hands, the hands of an old person distracted by trying to keep her mouth open under the light, and I will say, pointing at the old poxed and spotted hands, “Is that what Connie is trying to forestall?” Abby being Abby, she’d have no opinion on the matter. Oh, she had plenty of opinions, I’m sure, but none she cared to express through her pink paper mask. Though I think she would have happily expressed them had I not been present. At some point every day, I’m sure that Abby wanted me to be the victim of a disabling stroke. Then she would be free to unleash at last. My rolling eye, my sunken cheek, my mouth unable to call back spit, would only encourage her, and from the floor I would hear for the first time every last unedited truth. Still tending to the woman in the chair, I asked her, “Do you moisturize, Abby?” She looked at me like, Do I moisturize? “It’s very important to lubricate your hands, apparently,” I said. “And other parts, too.” And other parts, too! My mouth was constantly pouring out the stupidest shit! The stupidest, always-innocent, all-too-easily-misinterpreted shit! She would never say it, but of course that’s what she was thinking, what the two of us were thinking, probably also what the old broad in the chair was thinking.
At some point in Connie’s moisturizing, her hands downshifted. All that manic whipping around turned into something gentler, more deliberate. She had reached that point when the lotion, absorbed into the skin, ceased being a sloppy slick and now retarded as much as lubricated motion. She was no longer just applying the lotion. She was working it in with more attentive strokes, concentrating on one finger at a time and on the little blond webbing between fingers. She conjoined her hands as if in sensuous prayer and then unconjoined them to make a pass across the spur of a thumb, all of this as patiently as a player working oil into a new ball glove. She concluded (her attention half turned now to something new) with a series of ritualized, perfectly silent hand embraces, one hand clasping the other, the other hand clasping the first, the first on top again, and so on, conveying to anyone watching an indescribable sense of satisfaction at another satisfying job complete. I tell you without exaggeration that I was brought to tears. I admit, it could not have been just anyone. I would not have been brought to tears watching Big Jim the Ranger hydrate his hands. It was Connie who brought me to tears and always made me sorry that I did not understand in a more intuitive and personal way the multitude of minor banes people everywhere around me were trying to soothe in what were so easy to dismiss as vain and empty rituals of comfort.
“You’re doing it again,” she said, without looking over.
“What?”
“Staring at me. Objectifying me.”
“I’m not objectifying you.”
“You’re always objectifying me,” she said. “You idealize me, and then you’re disappointed when it turns out I’m not perfect. You blame me for not being godlike. It’s tiresome.”
“Trust me,” I said. “If somebody knows you’re not perfect, it’s me.”
“Then why do you do it? Why do you scrutinize me? Aren’t you sick of it by now? Especially when you’ve made it painfully clear just how far I fall short?”
“I used to think you were perfect, but those days are long past.”
“So please, stop looking.”
“I wish I had let you teach me about lotion,” I said.
“Teach you about lotion?”
“Yeah, the reasons for it.”
“The reasons for lotion are self-evident,” she said. “You put it on, you feel better.”
“I never feel better. I always feel icky.”
“Not after you rub it in. After you rub it in, you feel good. Your hands feel good. They feel moisturized.”
“But what does that matter when they’re just going to become all liver spotted, bony, thin skinned, and tendony?”
“Because it’s what you do with them in the meantime,” she said, turning at last and slapping my forehead with her palm. She turned back and, peering up at God, made a vigorous full-armed gesture of supplication that might have been comedic if it didn’t go on so long. “Now take a squirt and rub it in and see if your hands don’t feel better.”
“I don’t think I will,” I said.
“No,” she said, “because if you did that, you might like it. And heaven forbid you should like something, knowing what’s coming, knowing they just turn liver spotted and die. Better never do it at all than do it, enjoy it, and lose it in the end.”
I stood up and walked away. Then I came back.
“You didn’t return my call,” I said.
“You have to stop calling, Paul.”
“It’s the time of night. I’m not in my right mind.”
“The time of night is half the problem.”
“I try just to text.”
“I’ve never once received a single text from you.”
“Texting is for children, I hate texting, it hurts my fingers. But that doesn’t mean I don’t try.”
“A call or a text, Paul. At that hour, they’re pretty much signaling the same thing.”
“I wasn’t calling to get back together,” I said. “We said we could be friends. Friends call friends.”
“We can’t get back together,” she said. “We will never get back together.”
“And that wasn’t why I was calling.”
“Why, then?”
“Night.”
She looked over at me for the second time.
“It’s not my problem anymore,” she said.
The phrase “pussy whipped” gets the job done, I guess. It evokes. You picture a milquetoast, a little pansy boy. He takes his balls off, like a pair of dentures, and places them on the nightstand before snuggling up to Queen Nefertiti to watch Sleepless in Seattle. If that’s your thing, God bless. Me, I never do anything romantically that doesn’t involve blood, fever, and the potential for incarceration. I don’t get pussy whipped. I get cunt gripped. I get cunt gripped and just hope to get out alive. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, as the saying goes—so that you can look forward to that one irrecuperable battering ram of a ballbreaker that will finally do you in.
To be cunt gripped means to show up at the door unannounced. It means calling at all hours. It means saying “I love you” far too soon, on or around the second date, and saying it all too frequently thereafter. When they caution that I might be moving too fast, I double down and send them flowers and fruit. To be cunt gripped is to believe that I have found everything heretofore lacking in my life. They fill an enormous void, the women I fall in love with, and I will revert to nothing—to less than nothing, now that I know consummation—unless they remain filling it forever. Fear of losing them provokes me to act desperate in a whole host of ways that inevitably sends them scrambling for the door. I’ve only been properly cunt gripped four times, not counting a dozen or so partial or short-lived cunt grippings: once when I was five, once when I was twelve, a third time at nineteen, and finally with Connie, who came to work for me when I was thirty-six and she was twenty-seven. Each time—with the possible exception of that first time, when I was still so new to the world that it’s hard to remember much beyond her name (Alison), our hand-holding, and a long cry under trash-strewn bleachers—I have never been able, once cunt gripped, to hold on to my essential self. I mean by that whatever makes me me: a success at school, a dedication to the Red Sox, a determined belief in the nonexistence of God. It all vanishes, leaving… what? Was there a person there? All I could ever find was untethered want. The girl, or woman—first Alison, then Heather Belisle, then Sam Santacroce, and finally Connie—consumed me to the extent that I could say of myself only that I was Paul-who-loves-Alison or Paul-who-loves-Connie. It was flattering to them at first, of course, that someone should take such a dire interest, but the flattery was soon smothered under a shit-storm of need, jealousy, irrepressible and indiscriminate praise, and an obsession that scared parents and friends. Everything I held in high regard before falling in love dropped away, and I appeared to myself, and no doubt to the objects of my desire, as a tiresome refrain offering them nothing to love in return. Needless to say, it never lasted long. Of Alison I’ve already recounted everything I remember. I fell in love with Heather not long after my father died, and as I look back on it now, that love affair was as much about Roy Belisle, Heather’s dad, who coached our coed baseball team and drove a pickup truck and had really cool arm veins, as it was about the wet new thrill of Heather’s tongue. (I couldn’t picture Mr. Belisle in a dry bathtub with his clothes on, staring for hours at the browning grout, and then rushing me off to the mall to buy ten pairs of running shoes, which he’d hide from Mrs. Belisle by digging a large hole in the back of the apartment complex.) I spent a long Presidents’ Day weekend making out with Heather in her garage and, during meals, admiring Mr. Belisle’s arm veins while watching him turn the dials of his police scanner. It all came to a swift end when school resumed on Tuesday and Heather dropped me for a boy with a bad haircut. I was stunned, hurt, and embarrassed, in withdrawal from Heather’s tongue—the first tongue I’d tasted and the reason, at least in part, that I became a dentist, awakened to the mouth and all its marvels—and angry that first my dad and now Mr. Belisle had been taken from me by a fickle and irreconcilable force. I did what anyone would do: I walked twelve miles to the mall, got into the backseat of an unlocked car, drove with my unsuspecting chaperone another dozen or so miles, waited in the garage a long time before entering his house, found a closet, masturbated, fell asleep, and in the morning came full upon all the family at breakfast.
The cunt gripping I underwent at the hands of Samantha Santacroce was a much more involved ordeal, ending with my transfer out of the University of Maine at Fort Kent, with certain restrictions on my freedom to reenter campus grounds. Sam and I spent eleven weeks together, during which we both understood our souls to have awakened at last and our hearts to have been filled for the first time. We were instantly inseparable, arranging our walking patterns to and from class to minimize the time we had to spend apart. We ate together, studied together, and slept together, whispering late into the night so as not to disturb her roommates. We shared the same coffee cup, the same straw, the same toothbrush. We fed each other watermelon from our mouths. We watched movies and football games under the same blanket and sat together doing our homework in the student union, looking up at regular intervals to moon at each other with shameless abandon. Sammy was always sucking on a lollipop. I loved nothing more than to hear that sugary globe knock against her sturdy white teeth while the stick grew moist and pulpy at her lips, until at last she took the nub of candy between her molars and cracked it to smithereens. She swished the clattering shards around, melting them down to oblivion. When she was finished, and the stick had been deposited with others inside an empty bottle of Diet Coke (which also contained wrappers and wads of gum), she ran her tongue over her upper lip in search of some minuscule overlooked crystal and, if she found one, drew it in and pinned it between the cairn of her canines. Then she sucked her lips clean of their sugary coats—first the upper lip, plump and double peaked, followed by the lower one, seated upon a more perfect plumb line. Of the character and true nature of Samantha Santacroce, I knew essentially nothing, but that I wanted to live forever on the edge of her glossy red lower lip, that crimson promontory, warmed in the winter by her syrupy breath and bathed with the same summer heat that brought out her freckles, I had no doubt.
What I did know about Samantha Santacroce, because she impressed it upon me at every turn, was the fierce and unconditional love she felt for her parents. This stood in stark contrast to my impulse to hide my parents away in a closet of shame. Sammy talked about hers as if they were the people with whom she willingly planned to spend the rest of eternity, college being less a time of rebellion and self-discovery than a temporary parting in a lifelong affair. I was almost jealous of them. Bob Santacroce was a big man with fair hair who had done well in the furniture business and now spent many of his mornings on the back nine. Barbara had raised Sam (and her little brother, Nick) and now remained busy with tennis and charities. I heard so much about them before we met that they grew incomparable within a few short days and mythical within the week, so that by the time Sam and I showed up at their house for Thanksgiving, when I planned to announce my intentions of marrying their daughter (“Wait, wait,” Sam had said, “you plan to do what?”), I was intimidated, nervous, and as in love with them as I was with Sam herself. The Santacroces were a picture-perfect family of Catholics whose tidy garage, sturdy oak trees, and family portraits through the ages would absolve all the sins and correct all the shortcomings of my childhood. Like my infatuation with Heather Belisle, my infatuation with Sam Santacroce had this extraneous element that had nothing to do with our shared love of dogs and Led Zeppelin, her blond pageboy, or the taste of her red mouth. There were no poorly attended funerals in the Santacroce family, no scrounging for quarters under the car seats, no runs to the recycling center for macaroni money, no state-appointed psychologists, no suicides. I loved Sammy and wanted to marry her, but I also loved Mr. and Mrs. Santacroce and wanted to be adopted by them and live under the spell of their blessed good fortune forever and ever. I would affirm God and convert to Catholicism and condemn abortion and drink martinis and glory the dollar and assist the poor and crawl upon the face of the earth with righteousness and do everything that made the Santacroces so self-evidently not the O’Rourkes.
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.”
Dr. O’Rourke has been practicing dentistry for over ten years. A native of Maine, he is committed to the highest standard of treatment for his patients. His friendly, personable nature combined with his extensive background guarantees you a pleasant, relaxing, and stress-free visit.
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.
Come now therefore, and with thee shall I establish my covenant. For I shall make of thee a great nation. But thou must lead thy people away from these lords of war, and never make of them an enemy in my name. And if thou remember my covenant, thou shall not be consumed. But if thou makest of me a God, and worship me, and send for the psaltery and the tabret to prophesy of my intentions, and make war, then ye shall be consumed. For man knoweth me not.
“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.
“ ‘If thou makest of me a God,’ ” she said, reading aloud the last bit slowly, “ ‘and worship me, and send for the psaltery and the tabret to prophesy of my intentions, and make war, then ye shall be consumed.’ I don’t think Jesus ever said anything like that,” she said.
“So where’s it from?”
“The Old Testament would be my guess,” she said. “It’s a very stern, Jewish thing to say.”
She handed the iPad back to me.
“Maybe you should talk to Connie,” she said.
I would be less annoyed to be portrayed as a Jew online than a Christian. Still annoyed, because I was not Jewish, but it would be better somehow. You could be a nonpracticing Jew, and while I was not a nonpracticing Jew, because I had not been born a Jew and converting to Judaism just to persist in nonpractice would have been pointless, I could not be a nonpracticing Christian in any respect. You either believed or did not believe in Christ the Savior and all His many miracles and prophesies. It was ironic, I thought, to talk about “practicing” Christians when, to be a Christian, you didn’t have to do much of anything at all, you just had to profess your faith, while Jewish people, even nonbelieving ones, did more in a single Seder than a full-bore Christian obedient in his pew might do all year. Whether you were born a Christian or a Jew seemed tantamount to the same thing from the perspective of the newborn, but growing up made all the difference in the world. A Christian could slough off his inherited Christianity and become an atheist or a Buddhist or a plain old vanilla nothing, but a Jewish person, for reasons beyond my understanding, would always be Jewish, e.g., an atheist Jew or a Jewish Buddhist. Some of the Jews I knew, like Connie, hated this primordial fact, but as a non-Jew, I had the luxury of envying the surrender to fate that it implied, the fixed identity and tribal affiliations—which is why I minded the slander of being Jewish online less than the outrageous and vile insult of being Christian.
I knew nothing about Judaism before Connie. Before Connie I didn’t even know if I could say the word “Jew.” It sounded very harsh to me, to my Gentile ears, maybe particularly inside my indisputably Gentile mouth. I was afraid that if someone Jewish heard me say it, they would hear a reinforcement of stereotypes, a renewal of all the old antagonisms and hate. It was a minor but significant legacy of the Holocaust that non-Jewish Americans born long after World War II with little knowledge of Judaism or the Jewish people had a fear of offending by saying the word “Jew.”
My interactions with Jewish people before Connie were limited to looking inside their mouths. A Jewish person’s mouth is identical in every way to a Christian’s. It was all one big mouth to me—one big open, straining, gleeking, unhappy, discomfited, slowly decaying mouth. It was all the same cavity, the same inflammation, the same root infection, the same nerve pain, the same complaint, the same failure, the same fate. Look, here’s what I knew, all I cared to know, and for that matter, all I thought I’d ever need to know, about the Jews: they’d given the world a son, a southpaw by the name of Sandy Koufax, who pitched three Cy Young seasons for the Dodgers and hated the Yankees like a true American hero.
Connie came from a family of Conservative Jews, and to my surprise I found I liked attending the High Holidays, participating in the atonement, and even sitting through the absurdly long services, because they weren’t played out for me. They were plenty played out for Connie, who was no longer an active Jew and felt pretty much as I did on the subject of religion, even if she could not yet bring herself to say, “I do not believe in God.” Not on account of a superstition, or some vestigial faith, but rather a quibble with definitive statements. She preferred to call herself a nonpracticing atheist. This, she thought, would not totally close out the religious impulses that a poem sometimes demanded.
She was an interesting contrast to Sam Santacroce, who thought that Catholicism was tops and that her family dwelled in a three-dimensional holiday card of matching sweaters and Titleist health. Although years had passed since I’d been disabused of Santacroce nuclear perfection, having discovered, beneath a Huxtable veneer, their cynicism, venality, and prejudice, I still regarded Sam’s open love for her family as a demonstration of remarkable poise. I wanted us all to have such unchecked hearts. I wanted it for Connie above all, because her family, I thought, might actually deserve it. But she hesitated. The traditions were dull. Her family was nuts. And there was so much God. Wouldn’t the God stuff get to me?
The God stuff did not get to me because it had nothing to do with a guy on a cross. The God of the Jews and His effect on His people were blessedly free of punishment and priggishness, the Savior and His rising from the dead on the third day, the Eucharist, the logical contortions brought about by the Trinity, a long history of bloodshed and torture, looming threats of damnation, sexual prudery and guilt, stubbornly persisting Puritan mores, smugness and the foreclosure of curiosity, and, above all, the warrior mind-set ready to kill for Christmas trees and the Ten Commandments. In place of all that, the Plotzes had prayers and songs whose dogmas were disguised by the Hebrew they were sung in; rituals and traditions with a provenance of thousands of years and a persistence against great odds; heated debate at the Sabbath table; distant relatives as at ease with one another as the closest of siblings; debates in which bits of food flew from impassioned mouths; deeply learned references casually tossed into the conversation; and, at the end of the night, a parting so spirited it alone might leave you hoarse. I had no problem with any of it, and that was the problem.
Connie never gave me reason to break and enter or masturbate in a stranger’s closet or call her mother, as I had once called Samantha Santacroce’s mother, and make desperate, cryptic remarks like “The voices… the voices.” Connie returned my love as no one who had cunt gripped me ever had, and while that came with its own problems—namely, my suspicion that for the sake of love she was muting her true self as effectively as I was mine and that a day of reckoning awaited us—I was able to act more or less like a self-respecting adult aware of personal boundaries and in possession of his mind. I did not fall in love with Rachel and Howard Plotz as I had fallen in love with Bob and Barbara Santacroce or with Roy Belisle and his arm veins before them. I behaved. But for a while I was in danger of becoming a little too fixated on Connie’s entire extended family, and the feeling was not dissimilar to the one I had had in the company of the Belisles and the Santacroces: the ingratiating, slightly unhinged desire to belong to them, to be one of the family, to fit in with self-assurance, to reach without apology across the table for a baby carrot or a potato chip, to sprawl out upon their carpeted floors and speak my mind (which would accord perfectly with their innermost thoughts), to initiate hugs readily returned, and to hear, from the doorway, at the end of the night, “We love you, Paul.” It was really that “we” I wanted more than anything else. For all my proud assertions of self, I really only wanted to be smothered in the embrace of an inclusive and coercive singular “we.” I wanted to be sucked up, subsumed into something greater, historical, eternal. One of the unit. One with the clan. Connie’s extended family was the very essence of such a “we.” It had a central core—her mother, father, a brother and two sisters—and then offshoots and branchings of uncles, aunts, cousins, second cousins, nieces, nephews, grandparents, and great-uncles and -aunts: a family like none I’d ever known. Inside that sprawling mass of humanity hummed a tightly coiled heart of unified purpose whose signal achievement, it seemed to me, was a defense against loss. There were deaths, of course, and apostates among the young who acted out, smoked pot, and disliked being Jewish. But those were exceptions. Most of the time they took good care of each other. They kibitzed and gossiped and worried over this one and that, rescued one another from trouble, and of course gathered together, come hell or high water, for Bar and Bat Mitzvahs, wedding anniversaries, important birthdays, Passover, and the High Holidays.
Though Connie initially rolled her eyes and feigned dread when we had to spend time with her family, I gave her license to love them freely, without embarrassment, and soon enough I witnessed the special closeness between her and her mom and the tenderness that passed between her and her dad. She teased her siblings and laughed with her cousins, and she tended to her elders as if taught to do so in a small hamlet in the Pale of Settlement. But she was also fiercely protective of me, her shegetz. If she ended up marrying a non-Jew, it would not be cause for family celebration. They would accept it, just as they had “accepted” Connie’s secularizing, but they would hold out hope that we would move closer to Judaism and that I would convert—which I never would, of course, because I didn’t believe in God. For my part, I refrained from insulting them with cold declarations of my atheism, as I had failed to do with the Santacroces, because I loved them. I tried not to let on that I loved them, both because I didn’t want to look desperate in Connie’s eyes, and because I thought it was a kind of sickness in me, how I always fell in love with the close-knit and conservative families of the girls who stole my heart. I was tired of putting myself at the mercy of these unsuspecting recipients of irrational love. I wanted to be one of those criminal-looking boyfriends put-upon at family gatherings for having to take part. Dudes like that basked in a cool reticence and never gave a damn what was being said behind their backs, and the girls loved them all the more for it. If I managed not to wear that goofy smile of mine whenever a Plotz opened his or her mouth, if I refrained from laughing the loudest at their witticisms, and if I resisted the urge to send gifts in the mail following a gathering, I could never be that shining example of male surliness. Irrepressible enthusiasm still made me feel like a happy whore at the Plotz dinner table. Womanish tears still spilled out during Connie’s sister’s wedding. I still got drunk at the wedding feast and went from Plotz to Plotz telling this one how much I liked her shoes and that one how impressed I was with his medical-supply business. I danced the hora, the traditional celebration dance in which the bride and groom are lifted into the air on chairs and dipped up and down on a tide of dancers. I really got in there, I really lifted the groom’s chair (I hardly knew the groom) and went round and round the room and had a blast.
When the dance ended, I couldn’t find Connie, so I got another drink and sat down to take a breather. Her uncle Stuart came up to me. “Hey, Stu,” I said. I instantly regretted it. To call such a man Stu! I had this obnoxious tendency of shortening certain men’s names in a transparent bid to fast-track a friendship. It was never the name that prompted it, but the man who bore the name. Connie’s uncle Stuart was small in stature but loomed large in the room. He was quiet by nature, but when he spoke he was heard. The eldest brother, the patriarch, the leader of the Passover service.
Now, maybe my calling him Stu didn’t have a thing to do with what happened next. Maybe he overheard some of the compliments I had paid Connie’s relatives throughout the night and found them excessive. Or maybe he just didn’t care for my abandon out on the dance floor. He sat down at the table, keeping a chair between us, and leaned in slowly. I had no prior evidence that he had so much as noticed me.
“Do you know what a philo-Semite is?” he asked.
I said, “Someone who loves Jewish people?”
He nodded slowly. His yarmulke, arced far back on his thinning hair, adhered to his head as if by magic. “Do you want to hear a joke?”
I didn’t consider him the sort of man who would tell a joke. Maybe he knew I liked jokes?
“Sure,” I said. “I’d love to.”
He looked at me a long time before beginning, so long that, in memory, the blaring music faded to near inaudibility, and his eyes eclipsed the light.
“A Jew is sitting at a bar when a Jew-hater and a Jew-lover walk in,” he said at last. “They have a seat on either side of the Jew. The Jew-hater tells the Jew that he’s been arguing with the philo-Semite about which of the two of them the Jew prefers. The Jew-hater believes the Jew prefers him over the philo-Semite. The philo-Semite can’t believe that. How can the Jew prefer somebody who hates the Jews with a murderous passion over someone who throws his arms open for every Jew he meets? ‘So what do you say,’ says the Jew-hater. ‘Can you settle this for us?’ And the Jew turns to the philo-Semite, jerks his thumb back at the Jew-hater, and says, ‘I prefer him. At least I know he’s telling the truth.’ ”
Uncle Stuart didn’t laugh at the conclusion of his joke. He didn’t even crack a smile. My laughter, which was excessive but almost entirely polite, stuck in my throat as he got up and left the table.
“Why me?”
“She says it’s not something Jesus would say,” I said. “She thinks it’s a Jewish thing.”
“A Jewish thing?”
“Something from the Old Testament.”
“Well, if it’s a Jewish thing,” she said, “it must be me, right? I mean, I am the Jew here.”
“Will you please just take another look and tell me if you think it’s from the Old Testament?”
“I have the Bible memorized?”
“You had how many years of Hebrew school?” I said.
“And look where it got me: to this great think tank dedicated to all things Hebraic.”
“Connie,” I said. “Please.”
She took another look at the passage.
“Still sounds to me like one of those ass-backward things Christ is always saying to make the people go ‘Ohh, ahh, wow,’ ” she said. “But who knows. Maybe it is a Jewish thing. Why don’t you Google it?”
Connie was a big one for Googling things. It helped out enormously with all sorts of crises and brought relief to the most pressing concerns. At a restaurant, the two of us would momentarily forget the difference between rigatoni and penne, and she would Google “difference between rigatoni and penne” and provide us the answer. We no longer had to listen to the idiosyncratic replies of the waitstaff on the differences between rigatoni and penne, which were always so full of human approximations and stabs at essences. We had hard definitions straight from the me-machine. Or while we were drinking our wine, I might ask Connie, who knew more about wine than I did, “Do white wines need time to breathe like red wines?” She wouldn’t know the answer, or had known it at one time but had forgotten it and now needed to know it again very badly, so she’d look it up right then and there, at the dinner table, while I waited, and learn not only about aeration effects on white wines but also quite a lot about grapes, tannins, and oxidation techniques—random snippets of which, with her eyes cast down on the phone, she would share with me across the table, distractedly and never coherently. She’d also forget who starred in what, who sang this or that, and if so-and-so was still dating so-and-so, and for those things, too, she’d abandon our conversation to secure the answer. She no longer lived in a world of speculation or recall and would take nothing on faith when the facts were but a few clicks away. It drove me nuts. I was sick to death of having as my dinner companions Wikipedia, About.com, IMDb, the Zagat guide, Time Out New York, a hundred Tumblrs, the New York Times, and People magazine. Was there not some strange forgotten pleasure in reveling in our ignorance? Couldn’t we just be wrong? We fought about that goddamn me-machine more than we fought about where to go and what to do, sex and its frequency, my so-called addiction to the Red Sox, and a million other things combined. (With the exception of kids. We fought most about kids.) I’d had enough and would say things like “The moon is really just a weak star” or “Flour tortillas have ganja in them” or “My favorite Sean Penn movie is Forrest Gump” and then really dig in until she’d Google it and waggle the screen before my eyes as if the thing itself were saying na na na na na, and I’d say, “Tom Hanks my ass! It was Sean Penn!” and she’d say, “It’s right fucking here, look! Tom Hanks,” and I’d say, “I can’t believe you needed the Internet for that!” and the night would descend from there.
She sat down and Googled the passage. It returned no exact matches.
“Not from the Bible at all,” she said. “Looks to me like somebody’s fucking with you.”
“Somebody is fucking with me,” I said.
“Now that,” she said, “is a Jewish thing.”
At 11:34 a.m. that morning, I wrote Seir Design:
I’ve been waiting since Friday for you to reply to my email. I assume that people making their living in the IT sector check their email with great regularity, since people in every sector check their email with great regularity. It’s upsetting that you have failed to respond. This is an urgent matter. Someone has stolen my identity. With your help. As far as I can tell, YOU have stolen my identity. Please be advised that if I do not hear from you, I will report you to the Better Business Bureau.
Please reply ASAP.
“The Better Business Bureau,” said Connie. “The kids on Facebook are going to love that one.”
“Do you have another suggestion?” I asked.
Fifteen minutes later, I wrote again:
Is this Chuck Hagarty, aka “Anonymous,” the guy into me for eight grand in bridgework? One man should not have this kind of power over other people’s lives. But as you have so expertly demonstrated in the past, that’s how things work on the Internet, eh, Chuck?
“Betsy’s done with Mr. Perkins.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’m coming.”
Please explain the quote from the Bible and why it’s on my bio page. I don’t appreciate being associated with any system of belief. I’m an atheist. I don’t want people thinking I run some kind of evangelical operation here. A mouth is a mouth. I will treat it to the best of my ability, no matter what variety of religious horseshit might later come flying out of it. I consider that bio a personal attack on my character. Have it removed or you will hear from my lawyer.
“Dr. O’Rourke?”
“Yes?”
“Mr. Perkins is waiting for you.”
This was Betsy. “I know about Mr. Perkins, Betsy. I will be with Mr. Perkins as soon as possible, but as you can see, I’m a little busy at the moment.”
“What I see is you on the Internet,” she said. “I didn’t know the Internet was more important than Mr. Perkins.”
“I will seat Mr. Perkins’s veneer when I’m good and ready, Betsy. Please mind your own business.”
After seating and shading Mr. Perkins’s veneer:
I don’t need these kinds of distractions when I’m trying to seat and shade a difficult veneer. Maybe you’re dealing with an emergency. I could imagine a scenario in which your kid’s sick and you need to run him to the doctor. But come on. You know as well as I do that you’d have your phone with you, and probably your computer, and you’d be fully operational in the waiting room, because you’re no longer able to sit in the waiting room and not check your email no matter how sick your kid is. I know, I have a waiting room, I see it happen all the time. Even in the emergency room, you’d be texting and emailing and tweeting about how your kid was in the emergency room and how worried you were. So odds are you have read my email and you’re just choosing not to reply. Which is unacceptable. I’m on the Internet all day long and I’m not even in IT.
My relationship with the Internet was like the one I had with the :). I hated the :) and hated to be the object of other people’s :), their :-) and their :>. I hated :-)) the most because it reminded me of my double chin. Then there was :( and :-( and ;-) as well as ;) and *-), which I didn’t even understand, although it was not as mystifying as D:< or >:O or :-&. These simplifications of speech, designed by idiots, resulted in hieroglyphics of such compounded complexity that they flew far above my intelligence. Then came the animated ones, the plump yellow emoticons with eyelashes and red tongues suggestively winking at me from the screen, being sexy, making me want to have sex with them. Every time I read an email with a live emoticon, I’d feel the astringent sexual frustration ever threatening my workaday equipoise, and the temptation to yank off in the Thunderbox while staring down at the iPad was broken only by the hygienic demands of a mouth professional. I swore never to use the emoticon ever… until one day, offhandedly and without much thought, I used my first :) and, shortly thereafter, in spite of my initial resistance, :) became a regular staple of my daily correspondence with colleagues, patients, and strangers, and featured prominently in my postings in Red Sox chat rooms and on message boards. I was defenseless against the world’s laziest and most loathsome impulses, defenseless against the erosion of principle in the face of technology. Soon I was incorporating :( and ;) and ;( too, and, after that, the live emoticons, and now, without any intention of ever reducing the enormity of my human emotions to these shallow shortcuts, to this typographical juvenilia, I went around all day reducing them and reducing them, endowing emoticons with, and requiring them to carry, the subtle quivering burdens of my inner life… and I was still unsure how and when it happened. Even as I stood indignantly hating the emoticon for its facile attempts to capture real emotion, I was using it constantly. It wouldn’t have caused me such grief if my repulsion and eventual capitulation to the emoticon had not mirrored my larger struggle with the Internet itself. I tried my best to fend off the Internet’s insidious seduction, until at last all I did—at chairside, on the F train, supine upon the slopes of Central Park—was gaze into my me-machine and lose myself on the Internet.
Which is to say that, after emailing Seir Design, and even as Mr. Perkins was waiting, I took a moment to surf the Internet, clicking when I found something worthy of clicking on… Taliban Assault—… Rebel Gains—… Weak Ec—… Red Sox Kick Into High Gear… South Sudan Declares—… Adele Debuts—… Bangla—… BoSox Making Big July Impression… Prosecutors Seek—… Insure again—… Hot Girls Showing Off There Legs in Heels… Like Us on—… Protect Your—… Free Shipp—
“Dr. O’Rourke?”
It was Connie. “Yes?”
“Abby says something’s off with Mr. Perkins’s veneer.”
“Why can’t Abby come and tell me that herself?” I asked. “Why can’t Abby tell me anything?”
“You intimidate her,” she said.
“Intimidate her? We sit across from each other all day long!”
“Don’t shoot the messenger,” she said.
I went and tended to Mr. Perkins. There was nothing wrong with his veneer.
You want to know the irony here? My staff has been telling me that my desire to avoid the privacy risks and the ugliness of the Internet and blah blah blah could never be endangered by a little shop-around-the-corner website that told people when we were open and how to reach us. But guess what? My privacy concerns look pretty damned justified right now on account of a little shop-around-the-corner website! That you made! So how about you fucking respond!
“Dr. O’Rourke?”
It was Betsy. “Yes?”
“I’m sorry to intrude on your schedule like this,” she said. “I can see how busy you are. I just wanted to let you know that I am done with Mrs. Deiderhofer.”
“Thank you,” I said. “Betsy?”
“I’m sorry I was short with you earlier. I’m on edge.”
“Why are you on edge?”
“Have you forgotten about that website? Have you forgotten that my identity has been stolen?”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she said. “Let’s not blow things out of proportion.”
“Why aren’t you more disturbed?” I asked. “They went to the trouble of finding your high-school-yearbook picture.”
“I have never minded that picture.”
“That’s not the point.”
“You now have a wonderful little website for your practice,” she said. “I hardly think that constitutes identity theft.”
“Then you and I will never understand each other, Betsy.”
She walked away. I wrote:
This is sick, what you’re doing.
“Dr. O’Rourke?”
It was Connie again. “Yes?”
“Mr. Perkins refuses to leave. He says the color’s off.”
“The color isn’t off.”
“He says it is.”
“Christ,” I said. “I’ll be right there.”
I went and tended to Mr. Perkins. The color wasn’t off.
You created a website for me that I did not ask for. That needs to be remedied. Quickly. Before this gets out of hand. Are things already out of hand? Is it possible to stop “my” website from existing? What is a website and how does it get online and how do you take it down? I’m sure those are stupid questions that will make you laugh at me for how little I understand of the modern world, but so be it. Is there somewhere I can go to get at the physical thing that reflects the code that creates the design that throws up the images you’ve dreamed up for my website and remove that thing and destroy it? Would that mean it was off the Internet for good, or does it somehow live on? I have a vague notion that it lives on. Is that what people call “cached”? Is “my” website “cached” for all eternity? A website I did not ask for?
Usually I’m sitting there doing something to a patient and I’m thinking something like Ross and what’s her name, what’s her name, it’s Ross and… what’s her name, it’s, starts with a, what’s it start with, shit, can’t, was it, uh… oh, wait, right, of course, duh, how stupid can you get, it was Ross and Rachel! Ross and Rachel, everyone remembers that. It’s catchy, Ross and Rachel. And Ross’s sister’s name was… the girl who’s friends with Rachel… well, they’re all friends, obviously, but specifically the one who was also Rachel’s roommate, unless that was the other girl, the dumb blond, Lisa Kudrow, she hasn’t had much luck careerwise since that show ended, actually none of them have, although they’re bajillionaires, so you might ask what does it matter. But the truth is, once you’re on a popular TV show, you’d better just enjoy yourself, because you’re never going to act again. You are that role. Depressing, when you think about it, because though each of them will live a life of luxury, it will be one increasingly devoid of purpose. I can’t imagine a life where I can’t do what I was put on earth to do, tending to patients, like this one here whose tooth broke off in the night during a dream… name started with a… I don’t know what it started with, I could run down the alphabet, see if that jogs my memory, that works sometimes, not always, but, why not, what else do I have going on… A, no, B, no, C, no, but C… why does C… C definitely… someone on that show’s name started with a… ah, Chandler! And Monica was the name of the friend Chandler was dating. Monica was Rachel’s friend… well, they were all friends, obviously. It was Ross and Rachel and Monica and Chandler, and the other two… I can’t believe I can’t remember the other two, although the one, the Italian guy, his name’s right here, I mean right here, right on the tip of my… was it Joey? I think it was Joey. I wonder if Abby knows. She probably does. Just look at her. Of course she knows. But think she would tell me? If I asked her, she’d be like, Huh, what, me? I really think it was Joey. But then what was the name of the—
“Dr. O’Rourke?”
Connie was standing in the doorway.
“When you have a minute,” she said.
“Connie, what was the name of that third girl on Friends? The dumb blond one? The actress hasn’t had much luck since the show ended?”
“Phoebe?”
“Phoebe! Damn! That’s it! Phoebe! Okay, Mrs. Deiderhofer,” I said to my patient, “you’re free to spit.” Mrs. Deiderhofer spent about ten minutes spitting. I walked over to Connie.
“You got a reply,” she said.
She handed me the iPad.
How well do you know yourself?
“That’s it?” I said. “All those emails, and all he writes back is how well do I know myself? That’s totally unacceptable.”
“There’s also…”
“What?”
“Your bio’s changed.”
They had taken the site down or offline or whatever, made changes to it, and then put it back up again. Everything was the same, with one exception. A new weird quote had been added to the old weird quote.
And Safek gathered us anew, and we sojourned with him in the land of Israel. And we had no city to give us name; neither had we king to appoint us captains, to make of us instruments of war; neither had we laws to follow, save one. Behold, make thine heart hallowed by doubt; for God, if God, only God may know. And we followed Safek, and were not consumed.
“More religion!” I cried. “Betsy! Who’s Safek?”
“Who’s who?” she answered from the other side of the wall. You can always hear everything everyone is doing in a dental office because for reasons that even your most seasoned dentist can’t explain, the walls always terminate, as in cubicles and bathroom stalls, a foot below the ceiling.
“Safek!” I said.
What good was all her reading and highlighting if she couldn’t tell me who the characters were?
“There’s no one by that name in the New Testament,” she cried out.
“I’ve never heard of anyone named Safek,” said Connie. “But,” she said, “I do know the word.”
“The word?”
“Safek is a Hebrew word.”
“What’s it mean?”
“Doubt,” she said.
“Doubt?”
“It’s the Hebrew word for ‘doubt.’ ”
“How well do I know myself?” I wrote to Seir Design.
Go fuck yourself. That’s how well I know myself.
My last patient of the day was a five-year-old complaining of a loose tooth. I had the parents pegged for the type that would send their child to see a brain specialist if they heard a playmate had pulled baby’s hair. I looked at Mom, late thirties, Volvo-and-breast-milk type, purees her own veggies, etc. I looked at Dad, trimly bearded in a tech button-down, knows all the microbrews. I wasn’t going to turn them away just because they overburden the medical system with their hair-trigger fears. If it weren’t for hair-trigger fears, my monthly billings would be cut in half. (On the other hand, if it weren’t for dental dread, I could double my salary.) If these fretters felt the need to bring their kid in because of a loose baby tooth, I’d happily humor them. Which is what I thought I was doing when I focused the overhead inside the girl’s mouth. But then I found seven cavities. Five years old and she had seven cavities. The loose tooth wasn’t falling out because it was time. It was straight up rotted out. I told them I had no choice but to pull it. Mom started crying, Dad looked ashamed. They were giving the kid a lollipop every night to help her go to sleep. “It was so hard to hear her cry,” said Mom. “It really worked to calm her down,” said Dad. They wouldn’t let the kid drink out of the tap, they wouldn’t feed her anything without an organic label on it, they wouldn’t even consider a sugar-free lollipop because anything sugar-free was full of artificial sweetener and that shit caused cancer, but they let her lie in bed ten hours a night rotting her mouth out so that she’d stop crying and fall asleep. People have all this resentment against their parents for fucking them up, but they never realize, the minute they have a kid, that they cease being the child so fondly victimized in their hearts and start being the benighted perpetrators of unfathomable pain.
This was what I had tried to impress upon Connie. She wanted kids, I didn’t. I thought I wanted them when we first started dating. Now there was something that could be everything, I thought: kids. From the moment they’re born, until the time is nigh for them to gather around you for your final word, and every milestone in between. But for them to be everything, they would also have to be everything: no more restaurants, Broadway plays, movies, museums, art galleries, or any of the other countless activities the city made possible. Not that that was an insurmountable problem for me, given how little I’d indulged in them in the past. But they lived in me as options, and options are important. With options came freedom, and having kids would nullify those options and restrict that freedom, and I wondered if I would resent them for it. I didn’t want to resent my kids for a decision entirely my own, the one I’d made to bring them into the world. Too many people already felt such a resentment. They’d bring their kids into the shop, and you could see it in their harried, hateful eyes. “Hey,” I wanted to say to them, “it wasn’t this kid’s choice to have teeth. It was yours. And now those teeth are here on earth and need to be cleaned, so how about you just resign yourself to it and hold the fucking kid’s hand?” But easy for me to say. I didn’t have kids.
It would be nice, though, I thought, from time to time, to have a son and heir. I’d imagine Connie calling out, “Jimmy O’Rourke!” or “Paulie Junior! You better get your butt down here this instant!” And I’d think, me with a namesake! A son and heir! I have a son and heir! But I’d be pretty old by then, past forty for sure, and I’d start thinking less about that son and heir and more about how goddamn old I was, more than halfway to death, while that kid being called to, with his steel-cut bowels, in the flower of health, made happy by trifles, was steadily outliving me. Fuck that, I thought. I’m not having kids if they’re just going to remind me of my dying every living day.
I’d tell that to Connie, and she’d try to explain why that approach was all wrong. I’d never actually feel that way once the kid was here, among us, part of our family.
That sounded nice. But just as I didn’t want to resent my kids, I also didn’t want to find myself too much in love with them. There are parents who don’t like to hear their little girl crying at night, at the vast approaching dark of sleep, and so in their torment think why not feed her a lollipop, and a few years later that kid’s got seven cavities and a pulled tooth. This is how we’ve arrived at the point where we give every kid on the team a trophy in the name of participation. I didn’t want to love my kids so much that I was blind to their shortcomings, limitations, and mediocre personalities, not to mention character flaws and criminal leanings. But I could, I thought, I could love a kid that much. A kid really could be everything, and that scared me. Because once a kid is everything, not only might you lose all perspective and start proudly displaying his participation trophies, you might also fear for that kid’s life every time he leaves your sight. I didn’t want to live in perpetual fear. People don’t recover from the death of a child. I knew I wouldn’t. I knew that having a kid would be my chance to improve upon my shitty childhood, that it would be a repudiation of my dad’s suicide and a celebration of life, but if that kid taught me how to love him, how to love, period, and then I lost him as I lost my dad, that would be it for me. I’d toss in the towel. Fuck it, fuck this world and all its heartbreak. I’d tell that to Connie, and she’d tell me that if that was how I felt I was already a slave to the fear, and good luck.
There was a final reason I didn’t want to have a kid. This one I never shared with Connie. I never seriously considered killing myself, but once you have a kid, you take that option off the table. And like I said, options are important.