"But something about him feels off," said Jill. "Like maybe he's a pervert of some kind."

  "Why do you interpret his behavior as in some way perverted?"

  "Because...well, I don't think it's conscious. But it's like he's being apparently nice to me, and then when I respond he pulls away. Only it's more complicated. First he seems like one thing, and then like the other." She paused. "I can't explain it. I just feel it. There's something funny going on."

  The therapist said that "in the culture," many people had not been confirmed enough so that they could extend themselves to other people with "the full capacity of their being," because "the culture" was in a state of spiritual lassitude that enforced a level of blandness as the only acceptable way of relating. Underneath, she continued, was a great longing for free, unconvoluted expression, in which beings could be fully present with one another. She thought Jill's dream was about this desire in herself, that the man on the path was her unintegrated male side, who was providing her with an opportunity to "take the initiative" and thus integrate her maleness. Why not just call him, she suggested, and tell him she would be delighted to get to know him in an unguarded way?

  Jill liked the sound of this, although she wasn't sure it had anything to do with the dentist. She discussed it further with her friend Doreen.

  "I don't know," said Doreen. "He just sounds like a prick to me."

  "Why? I mean, an actual prick?"

  "Look, he's fucking with your mind. He does all this stuff for you, which usually would mean he wants to do it with you, and when you get interested he's not there. 'Feed the dog'? What's that? All this crap about saying he'll call and then he doesn't? I'd say your instincts are right on."

  Doreen was a former backup singer Jill had met through Joshua. She was forty-two. She lived in a tiny basement room in a house that she shared with several people, all of whom were on minimal government support for ex- drug addicts. The house was an odd mix of squalor, comfort, and mundane beauty. In the small, sorry yard giant roses grew, the petals almost fleshy in their dense unfolding, swollen with failing beauty. Adults, children, and animals lived together in the house, all scrambling after their divergent, yet interwoven, lives. The TV was usually on. They ate awful food and snacked hideously from pails of discount ice cream and bowls of candy. Doreen thought one of the little girls was being molested in day care, but the mother, who suspected Doreen of secret drug use and was trying to get her thrown out of the house, thought Doreen was dramatizing.

  Doreen kept to herself in the basement, where she could smoke. She had covered the walls with paintings depicting horrible scenes from her childhood and posters of rock stars. Every time they talked, Doreen told the same stories about her abusive mother and her experiences with bands and coke dealers. They talked of other things too, but variations of these stories always ran through the weave. Jill had heard them many times, but she still liked the way Doreen told them: as sad and absurd as they were, she brought them out as if they were exquisite silk prints that she fluttered before Jill's eyes and then lovingly folded away. It was as if, in preserving and keeping the stories present, she was somehow preserving herself, even though the stories were often about situations that had hurt her and led to her decline. Doreen was sick with hepatitis C, which would probably kill her one day. Even in this state her face had a strong, bitter beauty. Her full lips were well defined and richly striated, so that they resembled thick, fleshy petals. When she listened to Jill, she kept her lips open in a tense oval, which made her look dramatically receptive.

  Doreen thought the dentist sounded like a speed freak ex-boyfriend of hers, who had cruelly manipulated her and stolen drugs from her besides. Jill thought it was an odd comparison. But as she sat there amid Doreen's paintings, watching her put her cigarette between her dry, beautifully striated lips, she imagined the strange, staring night face she had given the dentist, his actual stilted calm, his jovial, seducing phone voice, all in contrast to Doreen's wounded, still-potent femaleness. Again, she thought of the killer and the weeping mother who willfully drew near him.

  Which made no sense, she thought. Surely the dentist was not a killer. She walked up the steep hill to her apartment, the cool wind making her dried sweat feel matte and almost grainy on her skin. It was night, and the slim branches of flower bushes swayed against the city light of the sky, their silhouettes trembling eerily. She remembered the dentist at his office with his hands in her mouth. She was aroused, and the ridiculousness of her arousal embarrassed her. But that wasn't the dentist's fault, was it?