 ate that night, she was startled awake by sounds that she thought might've been made by someone coming in the window. The first thought that followed her fear was that the intruder was the dentist, but there wasn't anyone there at all. She lay back in bed and breathed deeply to slow her heart. It occurred to her that her feelings about the dentist were like the feelings she'd had when she'd seen those cheap, poorly done cartoons, that they were the echo of something that was not fully visible to her. Except that while the cartoons had nothing to do with her molestation, she couldn't believe that the dentist's almost morbidly bland public self had nothing to do with the increasingly alarming image she had of him. She felt she was sensing some secret part of him, something that was hurting him as well as her.
She had a lull in writing assignments. She watched TV a lot, mostly shows about crazy middle-aged women who were trying to kill the husbands who had left them for younger women, or shows about crazy perverted men who were trying to kill teenage girls who wouldn't have sex with them. After she was finished watching TV, she sometimes went to bars and drank. She woke in the afternoon with slow, heavy headaches that were almost sweet. She met Joshua for dinner and Doreen for coffee. She talked to Pamela on the phone. At night, the dentist wafted peacefully above her head, close enough to keep her company but too far away for her to beat off about. That was fine with her. When he came into her mind during the day, she regarded him as a friend. She felt they'd gone through a lot together.
It felt very natural for her to call him and leave a message on his answering machine, inviting him to come to her apartment and have a drink. It must've seemed natural for him too, because he called her back that night, sounding bright and enthusiastic, for him. He said he'd just enjoyed several martinis but that, as usual, "I don't feel a thing." She asked him if he'd like to come to her house the following evening and not feel a thing with her--that is, to have a glass of wine after work. He said yes, he'd like that.
When she described the evening to Alex, the magazine editor, she said that she'd grabbed the dentist and reached for his fly, but in truth that never happened; she was just trying to make a good story of it. Alex and she had just cautiously reconciled, after all, and she had wanted to feel close to him. He had started the conversation by telling a story about his unrequited passion for a beautiful young lap dancer, and her lie about the dentist seemed to follow naturally. "No!" said Alex. "You didn't!"
"Well, why not?" she replied testily.
"My God, Jill, you probably frightened him to death. Couldn't you have been more gentle?"
She was taken aback; she would've expected a comment like that from Joshua, but Alex was an outrageously self-confident and rather jaded fellow. "But I wanted him to know how much I liked him," she said.
"In that case, hold his hand, don't grab his dick."
"Really? You think?"
"Yes! He probably felt totally unmanned. He sounds like the type who needs to feel in control, and you took that from him."
It was a nice observation, and probably an apt one even though she'd exaggerated the events of the evening.
They had spent the first hour of their 'drink' in stop-and-start conversation. They talked about Truman Capote and sexual harassment on the street. The dentist expressed outrage at the latter. Jill told him a story about a boy on the street who'd recently grabbed her breast, and how, although she'd turned around and kicked him in the butt, she actually had a certain perverse sympathy for the kid.
"Oh, Jill," said the dentist, "you think you're so perverted, but you're really not."
"I didn't mean perverted, I meant perverse. It's different."
"Even so. I've seen things you'd never even think of."
This remark so puzzled her that she disregarded it and raced ahead to describe how she could imagine that if she were a boy and she saw a pair of tits coming down the street, looming out of the dark in a skintight white shirt, she'd probably feel like grabbing one too.
"You mean that was okay with you? Somebody just grabbing your body?"
Under the propriety of the words she felt the other thing move. "George," she said, "I've got to ask you something."
The dentist stood. The expression on his face and his eyes sank inward until nothing showed. "What?"
She stood too. "Do you have sexual feelings for me?" she asked.
When she described what had followed to Joshua, she said it was as if they were from different cultures, or that each of them was so involved in projecting onto the other that they weren't actually addressing each other. But it was worse than that.
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