THE TEETH
And "How about the drinks?" someone else.
And the first again, "Ub-bub-buh." They were too far from the
door, and were speaking quietly in the first hush of the evening. It had
hardly been worth listening.
As
he rose, disgusted, his fingers went again to his pocket, redis–
covering the teeth; and without time for decision he fitted them into
his mouth, the gross incisors, secure on wires, lapping over his lip. It
was as
if
he submitted to, rather than assumed, the disguise. The angle
of protrusion, the size of the teeth were outrageous to a point just
short of advertising their falsity, and his upper lip curled back from
their marginal horror in a grimace of self-contempt.
He had bought them once in one of those Fun Shops, where
among small boys coveting sneezing powder, exploding cigars, and
stink bombs, he used to go to refresh his metaphors of malice and
weakness. The teeth ("How to greet your Mother-in-law," the box
had suggested above a detached, toothy grin) had seemed to him a
revelation, a completion of himself that his flesh had not achieved,
nor his imagination foreseen. He touched almost guiltily
his
half–
finished mouth, and then, with feigned indifference, the teeth. These
would be the point of his inconclusive ugliness: the stubborn pallor,
the mouse-colored nap of hair, the faded lips redeemed from the non–
descript. Craftily, he piled them with a pack of magic cards, a three–
ring puzzle.
"And these?"
"Four bits, mister."
"O.K. Don't bother to wrap them." And as a final gesture he
had pretended to forget the teeth, lingering outside the shop so that
the storekeeper had had no trouble catching him.
He pressed the bell and, too quickly (they must have heard his
scuffling), a dark, drastically corseted girl opened the door to
his
show of teeth.
"Oh," she said in soft amazement; and, gauchely dissembling
her start, "I'm Hilda."
The other two girls had edged up close behind her, and sick at
heart before their assembled ugliness, he stopped at the doorway,
unwilling to commit himself to their acceptance. "It is a mistake,
.a
mistake," he thought. They would never understand the equivocal
53
