“No, hell,” Caldwell says. “What can you do, Peter? The damage is done. Don’t worry about this old heap of junk. Stay here where it’s warm and you have friends.”

So Peter’s first piece of work in carrying out his mother’s injunction to take care of his father is to watch the suffering man, his coat unbuttoned and too short and his knit bullet cap pulled down over his ears, head out the dark door alone into one more doom.

Johnny Dedman calls from his booth, sincerely, “Hey Peter. With you and your father standing up there against the light for a second I couldn’t tell which was which.”

“He’s taller,” Peter says curtly. Dedman as a sincere good boy doesn’t interest him. He feels in himself with the coming of night great sweet stores of wickedness ripen. He turns, pivoting on the weight of the five dollars at his hip, and tells Minor triumphantly, “Two hamburgers. No ketchup. And a glass of your watered milk and five nickels for your rigged pinball machine.” He goes back to his booth and relights the Kool he had stubbed out half-smoked. Polar ice thrills his proud throat; he preens on the empty stage of Minor’s place positive that all the eyes in the world are watching. The stretch of necessarily idle time ahead of him, a child’s dream of freedom, so exalts his heart it beats twice as fast and threatens to burst, tinting the dim air rose. Forgive me.

“Darling. Wait?”

“Mm?”

“Isn’t there some better place than your office?”

“No. Not in winter.”

“But we’ve been seen.”

“You’ve been seen.”

“But he knew. I could tell by his face that he knew. He looked as frightened as I felt.”

“Caldwell knows and yet he doesn’t know.”

“But do you trust him?”

“The matter of trust has never come up between us.”

“But now?”

“I trust him.”

“I don’t think you should. Couldn’t we fire him?”

He laughs richly, disconcerting her. She is customarily slow to see her own humor. He says, “You overestimate my omnipotence. This man has been teaching for fifteen years. He has friends. He has tenure.”

“But he really is incompetent, isn’t he?”

It disagrees with him, makes an uncongenial texture, when she turns argumentative and inquisitive in his embrace. The stupidity of women has a wonderfully fresh power to disappoint him.

“Is he? Competence is not so easy to define. He stays in the room with them, which is the most important thing. Furthermore, he’s faithful to me. He’s faithful.”

“Why are you sticking up for him? He could destroy us both now.”

He laughs again. “Come, come, my little bird. Human beings are harder to destroy than that.” Though her turns of anxiety are sometimes disagreeable, her physical presence profoundly relaxes him, and in his condition of innermost rest words seem to slip from him without trouble of thought, as liquid slips from high to low, as gas spins into the void.

She becomes vehement and angular in his arms. “I don’t like that man. I don’t like his smirky childish look.”

“His face makes you feel guilty.”

This surprising remark turns her inquisitiveness tender. “Should we feel guilty?” The question is actually shy.

“Absolutely. Afterwards.”

This makes her smile, and her smiling makes her mouth soft, and in kissing her he feels he is coming at last to a small sip after an interminable thirst. That the kissing does not quench the thirst, but quickens it, so that each kiss demands a more intense successor and involves him thereby in a vortex of mounting and widening appetite-that such is the case does not seem to him a cruel but, rather, a typically generous and compelling providence of Nature.

A tree of pain takes root in his jaw. Wait, wait! Kenny should have waited a few minutes more on the Novocain. But this is the end of the day, the boy is tired and hurried. Kenny \ had been one of Caldwell’s first students, back in the Thirties. Now this same boy, badly balding, braces one knee against the arm of the chair to win more leverage for the pliers which are grinding around the tooth and crushing it like chalk even as they try to twist it free. Caldwell’s fear is that the tooth will crumble between the pliers and remain in his head as a stripped and scraped nerve. Truly, the pain is unprecedented: an entire tree, rich with bloom, each bloom showering into the livid blue air a coruscation of lucid lime-green sparks. He opens his eyes in disbelief that this could go on and on, and his horizon is filled with the dim pink of the dentist’s determined mouth, odorous of cloves, the lips pressed together a bit lopsidedly: a weak mouth. The kid had tried to become an M.D. but hadn’t had the I.Q. so he had settled on being a butcher. Caldwell recognizes the pain branching in his head as a consequence of some failing in his own teaching, a failure somewhere to inculcate in this struggling soul consideration and patience; and accepts it as such. The tree becomes ideally dense; its branches and blooms compound into one silver plume, cone, column of pain, a column whose height towers heavenward from a base in which Caldwell’s skull is embedded. It is pure shrill silver with not a breath, not a jot, speck, fleck of alloy in it.

“There.” Kenneth Schreuer exhales with relief. His hands are trembling, his back is damp. He displays to Caldwell their prize in his pliers. As if emerging swollen from a dream, Caldwell with difficulty focuses. It is a little dull crumb of ivory, dappled brown and black, mounted on soft pink bow legs. It seems preposterously trivial to have resisted removal so furiously.

“Spit,” the dentist says.

Obediently Caldwell bends his face to the yellow basin, and a gush of blood joins the filmy swirl of clear water spinning there. The blood seems orangish and muddied with spittle. The sense of his head being pure silver yields to an airy giddiness. Fright and pressure flee through the gap in his gum. Abruptly he feels absurdly grateful for all created things, for the clean gleaming rounded lip of the circular enamel basin, for the bright little bent pipe shooting water into it, for the little comet-tail-shaped smear of rust this miniature Charybdis had worn down the section of the vortex where its momentum expires; grateful for the delicate dental smells, for the sounds of Kenny restoring his tools to the sterilizer bath, for the radio on the shelf filtering a shudder of organ music through its static. The announcer intones”, “I-Love-a-Mystery!” and the organ swirls forward again, ecstatic.

“It’s a shame,” Kenny says, “the caps of your teeth aren’t as strong as the roots.”

“That’s the story of my life,” Caldwell says. “Big feet, weak head.” His tongue in enunciating encounters a bubbly softness. He spits again. Strange to say, he finds the sight of his blood cheering.

With a steel tool Kenny picks at the pulled tooth, now severed forever from its earthly connection and somewhat starlike held high above the floor. Kenny gouges out a chip of black filling and puts the pick to his nostrils and sniffs. “Mm,” he says, “yes. Hopeless. This must have been giving you a good deal of pain.”

“Only when I noticed it.”

On the radio, the announcer explains, “We last left Doc and Reggie trapped in the great subterranean metropolis of monkeys [sound of monkeys chattering, yipping, cooing sadly] and now Doc turns to [fade] Reggie and says…”

Doc: “We gotta get out of here! The Princess is waiting!”

Cheepy cheep. Birrup, birrrooo.

Kenny gives Caldwell two tablets of Anacin in a cellophane jacket. “There may be some discomfort,” he says, “when the Novocain wears off.” It never wore on, Caldwell thinks. Preparing to leave, he spits for the last time into the basin. Already the flow of his blood is slowing and thinning and yellowing. He timidly touches his tongue to the place where a slippery crater now is. A vague numb sense of loss afflicts him. Another day, another molar. (He should be writing Valentines.)