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What
Might Pass Between Them
By
Alexandra Leake
It was June, and
Sheila was
in love with her dentist. She was a forty-seven year old
travel
consultant, and this year she had already been in love
with her
hair stylist and her personal trainer. But now she didn’t
like
to think about those others - the imposters. The dentist
was
serious, the real thing. Those others were probably gay,
anyhow. Quand
meme, she thought to herself, as she leaned her head
back
against the headrest of the reclining chair. Even so. The
hair
stylist was good with layering.
Her dentist’s name
was
George. George Desjardins. People in his office had no
sense of
romance. They pronounced it, dez-jar-dins, striking
the
first syllable like a Pez dispenser, when he was a man des
jardins. A direct descendant of a medieval French
landscape
designer - who laid out kilometers of pebbled paths, slate
steps
and stone walls - yet went about unheralded, nameless. In
his
buckled shoes and silk shirt, he was, simply, “of the
gardens”
- ready for picking.
Sheila was just
calling up
that shirt - its soft gathers at the wrists and shoulders,
its
muted café crème color, the way it pouffed gently
over
the waistband of his thick wool britches - when he brushed
against
her. He, George Desjardins, in faded blue scrubs, brushed
her
shoulder on his way to the sink. His powerful compact body
was
meant to be outside, Sheila thought, though as he bent to
wash his
hands, the short-sleeved scrubs seemed almost pajama-like,
his
bare forearms amazingly intimate.
“They booked you
into my
lunch break,” he said, over his shoulder. “So what are we
doing?” He was scrubbing a plastic nailbrush over his
knuckles,
but his voice had an expectant timbre.
Prosciutto and
melon? Sheila
thought. A little ripe St. André cheese, with a salad of
chilled
beets, packed in a wicker basket? They could eat on the
grass,
down by the blue bed - columbines, gentians, veronica,
geranium,
phlox. Sheila smoothed her skirt. The challis had a
delicious feel
to it. She could smell blue, blue, blue.
“You told them one
of your
crowns was loose. Lower right?” He had already dried his
hands.
She wanted to tell him that she had first felt the crown
jiggle on
her vacation. Or maybe, she would say, laughing, that she
had just
thought she’d felt it jiggle after the cruise
company
hadn’t comped her the single supplement for the barge
trip. She
had been assigned a stateroom with a fifty-nine year old
oncology
nurse. The first morning, Sheila had half expected to see
the
woman’s teeth in the etched glass tumbler on the
nightstand.
But George was
standing at
her elbow in a hurried sort of way so Sheila simply opened
her
mouth. Love was like that, Sheila thought: You had to be
flexible,
cleaving to his needs, his desires.
“She wouldn’t let me
take the crown off,” Malissa, the hygienist, said.
Sheila started at
Malissa’s
reproachful, confidential tone. I am right here,
Sheila
thought, I am not a she. I am paying for him
to
touch me. Sheila had forgotten that Malissa was there
behind her,
just as Malissa was ignoring her. The two of them
were
even-steven.
George touched
Sheila on the
shoulder. “Wider?”
I couldn’t let just
anyone
take it off, she wanted to tell him, though Malissa did
have a
nice name. Not that you could ever tell about a name.
Malissa came
from Corsicana, Texas. Before Malissa had realized they
were
rivals, she had told Sheila that her mother thought that
was how
you spelled “Melissa.” Mostly Malissa prattled on about
Texas-sized weddings. She was a regular professional of a
bridesmaid.
“Wider?” George said
again as he adjusted the light. Sheila hoped that his
slight
undertone of impatience was directed at Malissa, because
Sheila’s
mouth, her whole body, felt flayed open like a trout.
Sheila-trout was
halfway to
pointing at the offending area - God, had she come
to the
age of mysterious ailments and offending areas? - when
George
leaned over her. “Turn towards me, just a bit. Good.”
She was just
noticing how
the hair at his temple was slightly damp with sweat when
he blew
pressurized air into her mouth.
“Ooooph!”
Sheila
jumped with the surprise of it.
The little
involuntary oooph
seemed to spur him on. He picked up a stainless steel
probe and
began tapping its impossibly fine hooked point around the
margins
of the porcelain crown - plink, plink - like a
miniature
miner. As he leaned in closer, his touch felt so delicate,
Sheila
could easily envision his index finger circling the
plum-colored
aureole of her breast. Yes, she thought, as he adjusted
the angle
of his little mirror-on-a-stick. Yes. She still had young
breasts,
especially when she was lying down.
Why then did Sheila
suddenly
feel unaccountably anxious? As if some unbidden darkness
were
rising in her chest like water, shadowing the chambers of
her
heart? She closed her eyes to shut out the specter of past
failures: how the trainer had lost interest in her when
she couldn’t
get her heartbeat up to its target zone, how the stylist
had
frowned at her bangs’ refusal to stay side-swept, how the
barge
captain had--
(Turn
the page)
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