TEETH
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closet which barely enabled his movements, and certainly no nurse's.
As
for answering the phone, tucking it between shoulder and jaw
while continuing to drill, or taking long looks at Educational Channel
Spanish lessons while working in a silver filling, these were procedures
which-Miss Wilmott imagined-might lead to dismissal from the
A.D.A. Yes, there was almost no limit to the external defects of Dr.
Hobbie's practice.
But Hobbie was a dental genius. In thirty years of agonized
dental visits, Miss Wilmott had never known such not-only-painless,
but even pleasurable, sensations. Dr. Hobbie's office did not face the
strawberry-colored lake air but the west wall of the Bank Building;
there were no couches, no magazines, in fact nothing at all in the
scarcely redeemed cave of a waiting room but a kitchen chair and
a coat rack. But you almost never had to wait, and when you were in
the chair, there was almost no pain. The fees were ludicrously small,
even for her, a low grade instructor in the History Department. Ten
dollars for her impacted wisdom tooth, and for that there were sound–
wave drills, the best Swedish steel, a lecture on her lower jaw,
Mantovani playing Cole Porter on the hi-fi, and the sweetest of all
analgesics, Dr. Hobbie's account of his personal troubles.
These came out of him as naturally as his pale, thin back out
of the white smock. They were not unlike Miss Wilmott's own
troubles, at least his implicit ones. They had to do with Suzanne, his
tall, expert-dancer of a wife, who'd left him last June to live with
the Bank Building florist, Mr. Consolo, but who still somehow or
other extracted money from him, though they had no child to
support. Which led to another trouble: here he was, forty-two years
old, the only fellow he knew who had no children, as well as
the only one who had to spend half his time looking for girls with
whom to dance the samba and the twist, though he had a perfectly
good dancing wife of his own. The implicit troubles were, she knew,
those for which she had female equivalents.
It was her early insight into their equivalence that made her
think that Dr. Hobbie could help her with more than her teeth.
He wasn't the world's most attractive man, not even the most at–
tractive she'd known, which said a great deal; for her timid six
feet, popped eyes and no-nose face-she'd overheard someone say she
looked as if she'd been blotted-were no powerful magnet for men.
