Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

Here again is the hospital, its upper storeys lit up like a Radisson, its middle ones blacked out, its broken ground floor exterior turned incandescent by spotlights on metal scaffolds, shining alarmingly onto the distressed earth, turning the air pale metallic through the rain and dark. Humans — I see the FBI and ATF in blue rain jackets and white hard hats, and plenty of yellow-coated HPD — are in motion around the scene, so many hours after, their movement stylized and ominous. Yellow police tape cordons most of the grounds, and plenty of official vehicles, including an ambulance, a fire truck, more cruisers and two black panel trucks are parked helter-skelter inside the perimeter, as if something else is anticipated. No faces appear at the high hospital windows. The upper floors, the burn unit, the oncology ward, the ICU and maternity wings — the alpha and omega services — are in full swing, nobody with time for a crime scene outside. Officers, the same as earlier, their blue-flashing police cars parked up on the curb, wave me and the few other drivers on through. Red fusees sputter on the pavement.

Naturally, I’d love to shake loose some info, a name, a theory, a motive, a clue, but no one would spill any beans. “You’ll know as soon as we know.” “Everybody’s doing their best out here.” I stare up at the babyish rain-slick face of the young traffic cop, cold under his cop hat. He’s rosy-cheeked, accustomed to smiling, but for the moment is as stern as a prosecutor. He peers inside my car with another practiced gaze. Anything suspicious here? Any tingle that says, “Maybe?” Any sign this could be Mr. Nutcase? A BUSH? WHY? sticker. A REALTOR sticker. Faded red Suburban with an Ocean County transfer station windshield sticker. Haven’t I seen you pass by here already today? Maybe you’d better pull over…. I glide through, glancing in the rearview. He watches me as the red of my taillights fades into the dark, reads my license numbers, registers nothing, turns to the next car.

I turn onto Laurel Road, and immediately ahead is Calderon’s office, on the back side of an older blond-brick sixties dental plaza that fronts on 206 and where I’ve always used this rear entrance. As I cruise up Laurel, toward the little three-storey cube down a flight of steps below a grassy embankment, I see two sets of lights are, in fact, glowing within. One suite, I know, is the endo guy, finishing off an after-hours root canal on some friend’s impecunious sister. Another is the dental psychologist who works, evenings-only, on secretaries and dress-shop clerks who don’t have the moolah for implants but still want to feel better about their smiles.

But no lights issue from Suite 308—Calderon’s office. All’s dark and buttoned up. Although up ahead, out at the curb as if awaiting a bus, is someone who actually looks like Calderon — topcoat, beret, a big-featured face distinguishable by black horn-rims and a black mustache I’m used to seeing sprouted behind his dental mask while he scrutinizes my bicuspids through a plastic AIDS shield. Here is my dentist — an odd vision to encounter after dark. Calderon’s probably my age, the doted-on only son of Argentine renaissance scholar-diplomats who couldn’t go home. He attended Dartmouth in the sixties and settled in New Jersey after dental school. He’s a tall, handsome, wry-mouthed, dyed-hair pussy hound, married to the fourth Mrs. Calderon, a young, tragically widowed, crimson-haired Haddam tax lawyer who makes poor Calderon dye his mustache, too, and work out like a decathalete at Abs-R-Us Spa in Kendall Park to keep him looking younger than she is. In his dental practice, Calderon affects bright tangerine clinical smocks, shows Gilbert Roland oldies on the patients’ TV instead of tapes about what’s wrong with your teeth and only hires blond knockout assistants who make the trip over worthwhile. He was briefly a member of our Divorced Men’s Club in the eighties and still is known to specialize in married female patients who require their cavities be filled at home. I’m always cheered up by my visits, since not only do I leave with shiny teeth, soft tissue checked, fillings tucked in tight and a feeling of well-being, but I’m also happy to pass an hour with another consenting adult who understands the lure of the Permanent Period but who hasn’t had to dream it up the way I did. I, in fact, sometimes go right to sleep in the chair, with my mouth propped open and the drill whirring.

It makes me feel good now just to see Calderon waiting for who-knows-what out on the curb, though it’s a long shot he’ll take me back inside and knock off an adjustment.

I shoot down my driver’s side window and angle over, satisfied if we only share a word. Calderon immediately smiles conspiratorially — with no idea who I am. Rain drizzle whooshes past on 206, thirty yards away.

“Hola, Erno. ¿Dónde está el baño?” I say this out my window — our usual palaver.

“El Cid es famoso, ¿verdad?” Ernesto beams a big scoundrel’s smile, still not recognizing me, but putting his big veneers on display. His are white as pearls and made for him by a dental colleague at his wife’s insistence. In his beret, he looks more like an old-timey film star than a philandering gum plumber. “Monet didn’t have a dentist, I guess.” This bears upon some lusty joke he told me the last time and has treated all his patients to for months. I don’t remember it exactly, since I haven’t been in since April. He doesn’t know I’ve had/have cancer — which is a relief, since it makes me forget it. “What’re you do-ing out here, a-mi-go, looking for houses to sell?”

Ernesto pretends to be more Latin than he is after thirty years. I’ve heard him on the phone with his denture lab in Bayonne. He could be from Bayonne. He does know who I am, though. Another small benison.

“I was hoping for a little after-hours dental attention.” He’ll think I’m kidding, but I’m not. Though having a night guard in my pocket feels ridiculous.

“No! Hombre! Don’t tell me. Look at myself.” He gaps back his topcoat to display a tuxedo with flaming red piping. His shoes are the shiny patent-leather species, and he’s wearing a red bow tie and a red-and-green-striped cummerbund that does everything but blink and play music. Calderon’s headed somewhere fancy, while I’m adrift on the back streets with a sore mandible. Who could expect a dentist to be late for a dinner party just because a patient’s in need?

“So where’s your big shindig?” I’m happy to get into the party spirit if I can’t get my night guard fixed.

“Bet-sy went to see her old daddy in Chevy Chase. So…I am left alone once again con my thoughts. ¿Entiendes? I’m going to New Jork to my club.” Ernesto’s donkey eyes brim with the promise of extramarital holiday high jinks. He’s regaled me in the dentist’s chair with winking accounts of his upper-Seventies “gentleman’s club,” where it’s understood he’d be happy to take me and where I’d have the time of my life. Everything top-drawer. The best clientele — former Mets players, local news anchors, younger-set mafiosi. Black tie required, high-quality champagne on ice, the “ladies,” naturally, all Barnard students with great personalities, making money for med-school tuition. I’ve pictured the “gentlemen” rumpus-ing round the plush-carpeted, damask-wallpapered rooms with their tuxedo pants off, in just their patent-leather pumps, dark socks and dinner jackets, comparing each other’s equipment, of which it’s my guess Ernesto probably has a prize specimen.

“Sounds like a blast,” I say.

“Yeees. We have loads of fun. They send me down the leemo. Sometimes you should come with me.” Ernesto nods to certify I wouldn’t be sorry.