 n Jill's neighborhood there was a giant billboard advertisement for a perfume called Obsession. It was mounted over the chain grocery store at which she shopped, and so she glanced at it several times a week. It was a close-up black-and-white photograph of an exquisite girl with the fingers of one hand pressed against her open lips. Her eyes were fixated, wounded, deprived. At the same time, her eyes were flat. Her body was slender, almost starved, giving her delicate beauty the strange, arrested sensuality of unsatisfied want. But her fleshy lips and enormous eyes were sumptuously, even grossly abundant. The photograph loomed over the toiling shoppers like a totem of sexualized pathology, a vision of feeling and unfeeling chafing together. It was a picture made for people who can't bear to feel and yet still need to feel. It was a picture by people sophisticated enough to fetishize their disability publicly. It was a very good advertisement for a product called Obsession.
At least this is what Jill thought about it, but Jill was an essayist who wrote primarily for magazines, and she was prone to extravagant mental tangents that were based on very little. She had to be, in order to keep thinking of things to write about. Besides, she was perhaps hypersensitive to the idea of obsession, as she had just become obsessed with someone. He was a mild, pale, middle-aged man who did not return her ardor, and what should've been a pinprick disappointment had swollen into a great live wound that throbbed at night and deprived her of sleep, of thought, even of normal physical sensation.
"Drop it," said her friend Pamela. "Don't even, as they say, think about it. He sounds really fucked up, and not in an interesting way. There wouldn't be any satisfaction for you. It would be like jerking off forever and not coming."
It was. She would lie curled on her bed, making sounds of animal pain, dry even of tears, as thoughts of the loved one so feverishly inflated her desire that she could not fit it into a fantasy which she could then make end in at least rote physical satisfaction.
The odd thing was that the object of her inflated feelings was her dentist.
The terrible situation had begun when she had gone to have a wisdom tooth removed. Jill was thirty-seven, and her one remaining wisdom tooth had had ample opportunity to grow where it didn't belong, for example, around her jawbone. Neither she nor the dentist had realized this at the onset of the operation, and he had, in a professionally somnolent voice, assured her that the ordeal would probably be over in fifteen minutes. An hour later, the as yet mercifully unsexualized dentist was still gripping her jaw with enough force (as it turned out) to bruise her, perspiring and even grunting slightly as he tore her tooth out bit by tiny bit.
"It became almost comic," she said later. "He kept heaving back, sort of panting with exertion, and he'd say, in that voice of inhuman dentist calm, 'Just a little more; we're going to move it around in there just a little bit more, and then I think we've got it.' It got to the point where I could smell him sweating, and a certain indecorous tone crept up under that professional voice, a sort of hysteria straining at the borders. Finally, when he started to give me the speech one last time, I snapped, 'I just want the fucking thing out.' And he snarled back, 'Okay,' totally ripping the lid off the calm facade, which is probably pretty hard-core for a dentist."
"And that's when you got excited?" asked Pamela.
"No. No, I felt united with him in disbelief and disgust at the whole thing, but I was certainly not excited. That didn't happen until later."
A few days after the tooth came out, there were complications. She developed an infection and had to return to the dentist's office twice. She had an allergic reaction to the pain medication he prescribed for her, and to make up for the unpleasantness, he gave her free medication out of his closet. The gift pills didn't make her itch, but they made her pulse lunge and her mind twist, so that she was too disoriented to write a commissioned piece for a fashion magazine on the torment of having small lips. With a great effort, she decided not to become discouraged and instead sat down to type a long handwritten draft of a two-part series on whether or not people's memories of being abused as children are real. She had typed the first line when her word processor collapsed.
|
