|
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)
|
