"Was she good-looking?" asked Jill.
"Not especially. She was a middle-aged woman with a smart haircut. She had on a nice blouse with tiny polka dots, which I always like. But what really made me respond to her was that when these people just behind me in her line started bitching, she yelled out this funny comment off one of their complaints and made them laugh. That opened up the experience and made it okay to be standing there in line. I felt really attracted to her because she could do that."
"Enough to ask her out?"
He shrugged. "It was more ephemeral than that. Sort of like what you're describing. But it was a great little moment."
"Yeah," she said. "It is like me and the dentist. You and I are so inept at practical details that when the practical details are, like, exploding in your face, and suddenly there's someone who can not only straighten it out for you but who seems to embody a whole universe where these disasters are just taken in stride, you're going to be incredibly grateful. Like, yes, there is an emotional hell that can't be fixed, but on the other hand, there's the dentist and the unemployment lady working away making things go smoothly at least on some level."
"And who also acknowledge the emotional hell," said Joshua. "Like the polka-dot lady with her joke."
"Yes! Exactly."
"What's interesting about the dentist, though..." Joshua paused, and his face became uncharacteristically sly. "He's solved your problems, but he also caused them to a certain extent. I mean, he hurt you."
They finished dinner and relocated to a dark little bar. They sat in a booth with sticky wooden seats and steadily drank. Joshua described a TV show he'd seen, about an experimental program being conducted by some prison systems that enabled victims and their families to confront the criminals who had victimized them. He described the emotional scene between a thief and the clerk he'd shot, each of them telling the other what the robbery had been like for him--the clerk refraining, "Why did you do that to me?" until the robber apologized and they embraced with a great deal of emotion.
Jill was interested, but as she settled more comfortably into drunkenness, she found it hard to concentrate on the story; she was distracted by the memory of the dentist's disembodied voice issuing instructions over the phone. "I want you to press 'alt,'" he said inside her head. "Good. Now I want you to go to file."
"But the last confrontation was pretty nasty," continued Joshua. "It was between a woman whose daughter had been raped and murdered and the guy who did it. The mother was religious, apparently, and she kept trying to appeal to the guy on those terms. He seemed to have respect for religion, and a couple of times he said he was sorry for raping and killing the daughter. But he said it with this odd kind of reserve, this detached compassion for the poor old mom, and that just seemed to drive her crazy. She kept saying she wanted to know exactly what it had felt like to rape and strangle her daughter, and after a while he started to look at her like, 'Hey, lady, who's the freak here?' And I have to say he had a point. But he couldn't remember anything about the murder or the rape, because he'd blacked out--which he also apologized for. The mom got more and more frustrated, and in this kind of masochistic frenzy she blurted out, 'I know I should get down on my hands and knees and thank you for not torturing my baby.' And a look of utter shock flashed in the killer's eyes, like two live wires had just been touched together inside him. He just stared at her. Like he recognized her. It was way creepy." Joshua paused. "The girl's father was there too. But he didn't say anything. He just sat there with his head down."
The next evening she called the dentist. She pretended to have a question about the computer, and he said, "I want you to press 'alt.'" The banality, the politeness, and the harmless hint of command were all accentuated by the abstracted context and took interesting forms in her imagination. Happily, she visualized all kinds of things he might want her to do.
When he finished instructing her, she asked him questions about himself. He told her that before dental school he had studied theater and film. He had done his undergraduate thesis on lesbianism among strippers--which, he confidently assured her, was quite high, at least in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
"Really," said Jill. She felt slightly nonplussed without quite knowing why. "What kind of show did they do?"
"Show?"
"You know, when they stripped."
He told her that he had only interviewed the strippers and had not watched them perform.
"Why not?" she asked. "I mean, weren't you curious?"
No, he wasn't.
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