She enjoyed her job. Each will she prepared was like an allegory, where this everyman called Testator gives away his house and his furniture, his cars and his cash until there’s nothing left but his kids. He takes a deep breath and gives them away, too, hands them over to some guardian who will never love them like he does. Now bereft of all he’s ever held dear, he signs his name and admits it at last: he’s going to die. Vee found the whole process romantic and literary. Also, there was medical and dental and a fully vested retirement plan.
As for Lady, in 1976, she was twenty-six and living alone on Amsterdam Avenue in the slummy fifth-floor walk-up she’d once shared with Joe. The weekend she decided to kill herself, she was nearing the end of a ten-day vacation that had been neither her idea nor her desire. It was the dentist she worked for who’d suddenly decided to take some time off and shut the place down. “Spontaneity is the word of the day,” the dentist had said, a line he’d clearly rehearsed.
The hygienist had been thrilled, but not Lady. She was the one who had to call the patients, reschedule appointments. “Something’s come up,” she had to say. “An emergency,” she’d add if a patient got testy. Or, if a patient grew concerned, “A less-than-dire emergency.”
The patients weren’t really the problem, though. The problem was that she didn’t know what to do with a vacation. Ten days. New York in late June, early July. It wasn’t as though she had a little place in the Hamptons.
“Remind me again why we’re doing this?” she asked the dentist after the hygienist had left for the day. She’d been working for him for four years by then, ever since she dropped out of school to marry Joe. It had been a wretched idea—the marriage, not the job. The job she liked. Office manager slash receptionist was not the sort of occupation Barnard wished for its girls, which, bewilderingly, was how that self-proclaimed bastion of second-wave feminism referred to its students, but Lady was as aspirational when it came to career as she’d been when it came to finding a life partner—that is, not very. She’d married Joe because he’d trusted her with his deepest darkest secret, a secret that had caused him such shame he’d bitten his lower lip as he revealed it, until a few discreet drops of blood dribbled into his Frank Zappa–esque lip beard. He wasn’t aware that he’d nibbled himself bloody, that’s how wrapped up he’d been in confessing this secret—and stoned, he’d also been extremely stoned—but Lady had seen the self-inflicted cut in his trembling lip, and it had touched her heart. Such a vulnerable boy behind the layers of sarcasm and arrogance, and of all the women he knew, he’d unburdened himself to her. How could she resist? She didn’t even mind that he was unemployed. He had a higher calling: he was working away on his master’s, after which he’d be getting a PhD in literature. Then a professorship somewhere Ivy Leaguish. His area of specialty was Victorian female poets. How could Lady not support this? He was a feminist! He wanted women artists to take their rightful place in the academy! They’d tied the knot in Central Park, and she’d willingly left school and taken the first job that allowed her to cover the rent on the apartment they were already sharing.
Joe Hopper, lanky and hairy, with a penchant for fringed suede vests over bare skin. He disliked Lady’s job, found it personally humiliating. Dentistry. It was so bougie, he said, so middle class. Even a minimum-wage job would have been better. The store on 112th that sold cheap sundresses and paper parasols was hiring. Ta-Kome always needed someone to make sandwiches. Or, if it was all about money, then what about waitressing at some Midtown dance club where lawyers and bankers tipped beaucoup? She said that she preferred the receptionist job—she liked getting to sit down all day—and reminded him about the benefits and free fillings. Their dental was even better than Vee’s, she said. Why didn’t he just lie to his friends about what she did, if he was so embarrassed by it? She wouldn’t care if he made up a story. “Tell them I man the ovens at Ray’s Pizza,” she said. “Tell them I drive a cab in the Bronx.” She’d go along with it, she assured him. She’d lie too.
“I’m not as comfortable with lying as you seem to be,” he said.
She didn’t take offense. How could she, when he wasn’t wrong? And he didn’t know the half of it, had no idea how much of her life was a lie—although she wasn’t lying when she said she liked the receptionist job. She did; she was content—fulfilled, even—to help the dentist build his practice. She was the woman behind the throne, which in her case, was a dentist’s chair. That was her joke.
It was true, too, that she liked the dentist himself. He’d been just out of dental school when she joined him. He’d talk to her about his hopes for the business as well as his worries. He told her about his love for his slimy work in painstaking and mildly disgusting detail. He gave her generous Christmas bonuses that, in those first years, she knew he couldn’t afford, the amounts of which she had to swear never to reveal to the hygienist, an older woman with a belly slack from four pregnancies and a tight gray bun pierced with the extra chopsticks the delivery boys from Nos Gusta La Comidas China included in their lunch orders.
Lady loved that they shared a work ethic, the dentist and she. His involved never taking more than a long weekend off. Hers involved never taking even that much. What would have been the point? If she stayed home, Joe Hopper would be there, working on his thesis at the coffee table. The title of his thesis was “‘Lips—That Like Bruised Pomegranates Blush’: Victorian Woman Poets and the Sapphic Gaze.”
“His field is vaginas,” Vee finally explained to Lady, who’d been misinterpreting the reference to lips. “Vaginas and lesbian sex, and not in a political way. If I come by and you’re not home yet, he insists on reading from it to me. He stands really, really close.” She made a face. “It’s pretty porny.”
Lady’d told Vee to stop flattering herself, but she’d also gone home and reread the thesis, and she had to admit she saw Vee’s point. She tried to look on the bright side. Joe loved what he was doing. He was always engrossed in his research when she returned home. He’d gesture at her, a sweep of his hand. It meant be quiet, take off your shoes, keep your greetings, footsteps, breathing, basal metabolism rate, to a minimum. Or he’d be waiting for her, wanting to take her to bed as soon as she came through the door, some poem he’d been explicating having turned him on.
“It was my wife’s idea,” the dentist said of the vacation. He momentarily averted his eyes; at least he had the decency to do that. “She put her foot down. She goes, ‘All work and no play.’” He shrugged as if he hadn’t an idea in the world what that meant. Then he grinned, something he was good at. “You know what you should do?” he said. “You should go to one of those Club Med places. Guadalupe! Spontaneity! You could run around naked. No one’s in the city now anyway.”
“Then why not run around naked here?” said Lady.
The dentist’s face was wide and boyish. He looked like Rootie Kazootie, like Howdy Doody, like Opie Taylor—all those redheaded, apple-cheeked, freckle-faced goyishe icons of our youth. But now the face grew stern. It was as if he thought Lady was making a suggestion, offering him an alternative.
Which she supposed she was. That’s where her being a liar came in. Lady and the dentist had been screwing around on his raspy office carpet after the hygienist went home pretty much since she’d been hired. Oh, maybe for the first six months or so, flattered but loyal to Joe, Lady had gently discouraged the dentist’s advances. But when her marriage had quickly begun going south, so, with the dentist, had she.
His own recent marriage hadn’t changed anything. The woman he’d married had a name—it was Patty—but he never spoke it in Lady’s presence. He used the generic term instead. The wife’s coming in for a cleaning. If the wife calls, tell her I’m doing a root canal and can’t be disturbed. Yeah, the wife bought me this jacket; it’s not my taste, but what are you gonna do?
Lady