But later that night, his plaintive joke had its effect. She lay in bed, fantasizing about the dentist lording it over a grinding stripper, then interposing it with another fantasy, in which he trembled in fear before her. Each image was affecting in its own way; together, they were dramatic and moving. The dentist was complicated and unusual, she thought, yet decent. Like her, he had done things not everyone could understand, and he was perhaps not sure what he felt about it all. She went into sleep imagining that she was leading the dentist up a gentle, grassy hill over which a primary-colored rainbow stoutly arched.
She woke the next day feeling very emotional. She decided she was going after the dentist whether he was a ridiculous love object or not. She went for a long walk, during which she brooded, toiling uphill and down, on how to best declare herself.
"I got him some flowers," she reported to Lila, her hairdresser. "And I brought them to his office."
"That's so sweet," said Lila as she moved efficiently about Jill's perched, enrobed frame. "How did he respond?"
"Well, I was planning to just drop them off with his secretary, but he happened to be standing there by her desk when I walked in with them. He just gave me this glassy-eyed stare. His face looked frozen, like he was suppressing insane rage. And then he looked normal and flustered." Just beyond the dentist's shoulder, Jill had glimpsed the profile of a woman's head lying on the headrest of the reclining dental chair; her open mouth made her look stunned and victimized. "He said thanks, I shouldn't have, and that he had to get back to work. He took them and just wandered off to some back room, while his secretary beamed. I figured, okay, he's not into it. But then he called that night and asked me to the movies."
In fact, he had asked if she wanted to go to a body-piercing exhibition. She was surprised, as she would not have thought piercing was the dentist's kind of thing--it certainly wasn't hers, at least not as it would occur in the gaudy vacuum of a public exhibit. She said she'd rather see a movie, and they decided on an art film about a drug-addicted police officer who sexually abuses young girls.
The dentist arrived at her apartment an hour early, which was awkward as Jill had just emerged from the shower and had to answer the door in her bathrobe. Still, she chattered enthusiastically all the way to the theater, in spite of her crude, unkind thoughts when the dentist proudly described his car as "the smallest in the world."
She had hoped the vaunted sex scenes in the movie would provide a delicious cocoon of titillation and embarrassment that they could inhabit together. But she just felt embarrassed.
"I hated it," she declared as they left the theater. "I thought it was pretentious and boring, except for that one jerk-off scene. I have to admit, that wasn't bad."
"I thought that went on a little long--for what it was," said the dentist judiciously. "And it was very unrealistic that the nuns they raped were all so good-looking."
They went to a restaurant and talked about random minor subjects. Neither one of them, it seemed, was at ease. The dentist's facial skin appeared strangely immobile, and although he looked at her, his eyes seemed shut from the inside. As if in reaction to his stillness, Jill's voice leapt and darted with an animation that embarrassed her and could not be restrained. She ordered glass after glass of wine. Her animation felt increasingly like a sharp object with which she vainly poked the dentist. What a boring person, she thought. I definitely don't want to have sex with him. This thought calmed her, and as they sailed back to her apartment in the smallest car in the world, she felt so calm that she wanted to put her head in his lap.
"Would you like to come in for a little bit?" she asked as he pulled up to the curb.
"I can't," he said. "I have to feed the dog."
She took a deep breath and exhaled. "Could you please come in for just a minute? It'll make me feel safer."
" nd that's exactly what he did," she told Lila. "He came in for a minute. He stood there while I fed the cat, and then he said, 'Had fun. I'll call you,' and left."
"This guy really likes you," said Lila.
"You think so?"
"Yeah." Lila gazed at Jill's hair in the mirror, meditatively cupping its new shape with both hands. "I think he likes you a lot."
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