The Veneer
By Chase Ebert
The veneer would have to come off. It had lasted Noah fifteen years before yielding to a shard of walnut shell at an alumni cocktail party. The drinks had been free, but the snacks, it turned out, had not. The dentist peered down at him through two tiny telescopes.
“Wery easy. We will fix it up for you no problem,” he said. He had a thick accent and struggled with his v’s, Noah noticed. He hated noticing every minor misspeak or typo—it made him feel like a prick—but twelve years of studying English will do that to a person. The dentist tapped the top of each of Noah’s teeth with the sickle probe and settled back on his stool.
“Erm, are veneers covered by insurance?” Noah said.
“By insurance? Not sure. But it is a wery simple fix. I can do it now no problem.”
Noah remembered the balance of his checking account and felt a sinking feeling in his stomach.
“Can we try going through insurance first?”
#
Noah moped down Whalley Avenue. In the near distance, the few towers of downtown New Haven strove toward the cobalt sky. He paused by the windows of a shuttered Brueggers Bagels and leaned toward his reflection, baring his teeth. The dentist had removed the jagged remnants of the shattered veneer, leaving obvious gaps on either side of the second upper left tooth. The unnatural narrowness of the tooth that had occasioned the original veneer made his two front incisors look bigger by comparison. Like he was bucktoothed, Noah thought.
“Mah name’s Know-uh,” he said in a caricature of the drawl with which he spoke for the first eighteen years of his life. “Kin you spare a few hunerd dollars?”
Treading home along High Street past the Neogothic residential colleges, Noah was so lost in brooding that he nearly literally ran into a former professor. John Pottle was a grandfatherly figure who had given him a second chance on a term paper that he had, in the end, still neglected. He was taking Pottle’s class merely for the Renaissance credit; it had little to do with his own research. He knew he had hurt the old timer, who had been so generous, so gracious: Pottle was known for providing copious, encouraging feedback, but the paper that arrived in Noah’s mailbox was unmarked other than by a red “B-" They had met just once after that at a departmental mixer. Stooped, white haired Pottle, merely frowned and cricketed an embarrassed “Noah,” before trundling on.
Now, here was Pottle, not ten yards off, deep in conversation with a colleague. Noah darted off the sidewalk and was nearly hit by a beat-up Honda. Noah scurried across the street, head down.
Noah prepared his dinner— Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom and a pilfered loaf of bread Atticus Bookstore had put out for the homeless — and ruminated on his bad luck. He was due in Palo Alto in just seven days to interview for an Assistant Professor position, a real start to the career he had spent twenty of his twenty-nine years building. He was two years out of his Yale PhD program, and, like many of his cohort, he had yet to find gainful employment. Too many people, it seemed, were selling themselves as Victorian scholars. That hiring season, he went through the motions of launching a third salvo of applications. Then, a few days before his PO Box was due to expire (even that expense had to be trimmed), he received an eggshell envelope embossed with the big cardinal S.
He rinsed out his bowl and padded to the closet-sized bathroom. He stood on the cracked tiles, which were faded from porcelain white to smokers’ teeth yellow, and stared at his ruined smile. Associations rose from his subconscious like a miasma. A policeman’s voice from long ago lashing his mother’s crumpled form: “Meth mouth! Junkie! White Trash! Hillbilly!” The cop turned and met his gaze. Grown up Noah shut his eyes against memory and imagined himself in a wingback chair in the Bodleian, which was, though he had never been there, his happy place. His old case worker’s soothing voice crooned through the years. “Your happy place is a safe place. Nothing can touch you there.”
He closed his mouth, turned his head this way and that, brushed a mass of black ringlets back from his high forehead. A girl had called him darkly romantic at a party once, said he reminded her of the portrait of Lord Byron hanging in the Center for British Art. As she chirped about the Vineyard and Nantucket, he realized she took him for one of those posh kids who go to grad school just to have something to do. He did nothing to disabuse her of this illusion. “Just like Byron” she had said. Handsome, she had meant. Tragic, he now thought. Doomed.
#
Noah ticked through his options. His work as a high school writing tutor had dried up in December, and since then, he got by on food stamps and scavenging at friends’ grad student functions. He couldn’t stand work as a barista or office temp, though he had tried both. The problem of human interaction was too awkward.
“It’s just not a good fit,” the law office manager had answered when asked why he was being let go.
“Not a good fit?” Noah asked. The manager chewed her lip.
“It’s like you think you’re better than everyone else,” she said. She shrugged, rose from her swivel chair, and showed him the door.
A week waiting tables wouldn’t kill him, but there wasn’t time for applications and interviews now. With his current income, or lack thereof, he couldn’t even secure a payday loan.
Were he to call his mother, if she even had a phone or address just then, she would probably hit him up for money. He had never met his dad—his mother had never been sure which of her boyfriends had knocked her up. He had deliberately lost contact with one pair of foster parents. The other set were too poor to bother. As for friends, he hadn’t talked to anyone from Ohio in years, and his New Haven friends were more colleagues (if the unemployed could be said to have colleagues), and they were certainly not close enough that he could ask them for money. He recoiled at the thought. He would not ask them for money. He had never asked for help—not when his foster parents refused to pay the fees for his college applications, nor when he found when tasked with writing a personal essay “on family” that he had nothing to say—and he was not about to start now.
Noah used the five of the twenty minutes left on his plan to call Mark Bech. Mark had been a sort of undergrad wunderkind who by junior year was already taking mostly graduate level courses. Somewhat bafflingly, he had gone on to start a tutoring company, his familiar face tacked up in every local coffee shop, beaming above tear-off contact slips.
“Ohh yeah,” Mark said through a bad connection. “Noah. You were the grad student who used to embarrass me in seminar.” Noah cleared his throat. “I’m just messing,” Mark said. “Water under the bridge. What’s up, man?”
“Mark, you see, I’m looking to supplement my income while I apply for positions. You know how dismal the job numbers are for English PhDs.” Noah laughed nervously.
“We do need calculus tutors. But that probably wouldn’t be your thing.”
“It sure would!”
“Really? I feel like I remember you used to joke in class that you couldn’t balance a checkbook.”
“Ha! I, uh, joke about that, being a humanities guy and all. I’m really good with numbers actually.”
“What was your math score? On the SAT?” Static rippled the line.
“On my SATs?”
Noah couldn’t remember what the score was out of, but five hundred something seemed a bit low. Fortunately, dyscalculia had not stymied his literary pursuits.
“You know, Mark, it’s been so long I can’t remember exactly. But I can try to look it up for you.”
“For sure. Listen, man, I have a thing I need to go to. Why don’t you send your resume and official scores over and we’ll let you know if anything opens up.”
#
Noah awoke the next morning to a heaviness, a miasma that encumbered his limbs and weighted his chest. He normally rose at dawn, but as the sunlight unfolded across his wall he could not bring himself to sit up. By noon he felt well enough to shave and shower.
At the Chapel Street Starbucks, his old manager laughed in his face when he asked to have his job back.
Back at his apartment, he sprawled on the mattress and stared at the ceiling light that had long ceased to function. He picked a collection of Browning poems from the floor and read for a while and without knowing it fell asleep.
His dreams were febrile, tumbling one into another. In one, his dissertation advisor donned a Stanford hoodie and cackled at him. He tried to hide his mouth but his hands were too heavy. Then he was in a church whose stained glass swirled and billowed. All four foster parents were there: kindly but weak Joe and Doris, who could not stop the other boys from drowning his books in the bath tub, and cold, angular Reverend and Mrs. Graves, who had made him rebuild the retaining wall as punishment for getting a tattoo. They huddled whispering around a casket whose occupant Noah could not see. He only caught the phrase “such a pity…just like his mother.”
It was dark when he woke. He sat for a while on the sill of his window. At night the streets in his part of New Haven were mostly devoid of pedestrians. He watched the occasional car or delivery truck drive by. In the distance, an ambulance wailed. He had the sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach, and his palms felt damp. He chewed the inside of his cheek. He picked Browning up again, tossed him aside, then dug his emergency pack of Marlboro 27s from his sock drawer. A flash in the dark. He opened the window and blew a long jet of smoke into the cold night.
He ashed out the window and contemplated the thought that had been waiting for him when he woke from his nap. An acquaintance of his, a poet, had once confided to him at a party that he had turned a few tricks one summer when times were especially tough. In the sex-positive culture of Yale, this revelation, though far from the norm, was not a badge of shame. Still, it had shocked Noah.
“It wasn’t so bad,” he had said. “I just let this old guy suck my dick. Easiest money I made in my life.”
That phrase, “easiest money,” echoed through Noah’s mind into the next morning. It followed him to the public library as he worked on his new article, “The Perils of Pedigree: Proletarian Verse in British India.” It followed him to a poetry reading at Blue State Coffee.
Five days. In five days he would be on a plane to California, yet he still looked like something out of Faulkner. He would not go to the interview like this, the interview that was his ticket out of this impoverished limbo. Back at home, computer in lap, he looked up Craigslist and clicked “Men Seeking Men.”
#
He did not have to wait long. He must have learned the argot of the male classifieds well enough. “GENtlemen to the front,” he had written, having determined from other ads that GEN was shorthand for ‘generous.’ It gave him plausible deniability if the guy on the other end of the email chain was a vice cop. “I just meant I like classy guys!”
When Noah went to meet the first john, he barely made it to the right block before turning on his heel and speedwalking home. He steeled himself for a second attempt that same night, but the 47 y/o white male never showed, left him standing twitchy and wild-eyed in the shadows near Wooster Square. He slept the balance of the night poorly. He had never felt so alone.
The third man to email him lived on the far side of the city, in East Rock, a neighborhood of graduate students and young families. Was this some poor woman’s husband, he wondered, as he walked down Whitney Avenue. Someone’s father? He pushed these thoughts aside. He was worried enough already about being able to get it up for a guy.
A narrow walk of cobblestones led through the wrought iron gate to a two story Victorian painted evergreen with white trim. Above the brass knocker hung a wreath, though the holidays were months past. Noah shifted from foot to foot and tried to slow his heart beat. His mouth tasted like breath mints and cigarettes and copper, like he’d been sucking on pennies. He could still turn back. But he imagined the look on the Stanford interviewer’s face, nose crinkling behind the smile. He raised the knocker and tapped twice. Shuffling footsteps approached the door. The man who answered was John Pottle.
Noah felt violently nauseous. His first instinct was to run, but his leg muscles locked and would not obey. Pottle did not make eye contact. He uttered a formal hello and moved so Noah could enter. Noah took a deep breath and stepped over the threshold.
Pottle swept his arm in the direction of a short hallway that opened on a sitting room. Out of habit, Noah removed his boots. The wood floors creaked. Pottle followed at a distance.
“Hum, er, make—” Pottle said. He cleared his throat. “Please make yourself comfortable.” Noah’s hands trembled as he settled lightly onto the sofa. Pottle shuffled two steps toward the fireplace and two back towards the door before settling in a green wingback chair. The room smelled strongly of wood smoke, and Old Spice, and old paper. The walls were lined with rows of books, not decorative leather-bound ones, but paperback editions with creased spines that showed they had been well used. This quieted Noah’s trembling some.
Pottle finally met Noah’s gaze. Noah had never really looked closely at him. The man was much older than he had thought. His hair was a wispy white. A small pot belly distended the front of his button-down shirt and was supported by a worn black belt. Blue eyes bore outward from drooping lids. They were two pools in which the man’s emotions teemed like shimmering fish. In them, Noah saw anxiety and not a little guilt. His eyes flitted about under a furrowed brow. He lowered his head and hunched his shoulders. Those eyes took Noah in without surprise. He realized then that Pottle did not recognize him.
Pottle shifted in his seat and cleared his throat. His age-spotted hands produced from his blazer an open envelope of money and held it gingerly, like a baggie of dog shit. He looked at it for a moment, then at the floor, and returned it to the coat pointlessly. He looked again at Noah, his eyes inquiring.
Is it possible, Noah thought, that he doesn’t know how to go about this anymore than I?
“Nice place,” Noah said. Pottle jumped a little.
“Um, yes,” he said. Then, “I mean, thank you. My wife’s doing more than mine, so I can’t take credit, I’m afraid. My ex-wife’s, I mean.” A sad smile crept across the old man’s lips. “Forty years together, thirty in this house. You’d think someone would determine spousal incompatibility sooner. But it always takes Janie a while to make up her mind.”
“I’m sorry,” Noah said.
“Oh, I wouldn’t change a thing, though. We raised three children in this house. Great kids, every one of them. If only they visited more often I’d do more to keep the place up. It wouldn’t be so lonely.” He drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair and stared at the Persian carpet. “Maybe that’s what happened. The silence made us realize how little we had to say to each other.” He looked up. “I’m sorry to talk so much. It’s just that it’s very pleasant to talk to a young person outside of the classroom.” His eyes narrowed and lingered on Noah’s, then widened.
“I know you from somewhere. You’re that graduate student, the one who…”
Noah’s face felt hot. He wanted to jump up and run into the night, but his legs again betrayed him. “This is surprising,” Pottle said. “Very surprising. Remind me of your name?”
“Noah McLean.” Noah felt like a child caught in a lie.
“Noah. That’s right. Your field is…Romantic poetry?”
“Victorian.”
The grandmother clock kept time on the mantle. A car thrushed by outside.
“I’m sorry to hear about the divorce, Professor Pottle.”
The old man inclined his head. “I take it you are in need of money,” Pottle said. Noah nodded. The fact of this hung in the air. “If you’ll excuse me, I need to use the restroom.” His tone was one of grim determination. Noah swallowed hard. What was supposed to be a simple transaction easily forgotten felt like it had turned into something else. Noah allowed himself to think for the first time of the old man’s body. Sagging pectorals. Wrinkled scrotum. He rode a wave of nausea. His penis drew closer to his body. He could flee, run out the door and never look back. No. He needed those five hundred dollars.
Noah cast about for a distraction. Anything. He looked over the titles on the table by Pottle’s chair: The Norton Shakespeare, with an introduction by Stephen Greenblatt. Women In the Renaissance. The Collected Works of John Donne. The very stuff that had so turned him off. Beside the tomes, behind a pen holder, was an old photograph of Pottle and what must have been his family. He wasn’t a bad looking man in his prime: a strong jaw, long chestnut hair, a healthy tan. The children were two boys and one girl, the latter adorably gap-toothed in a way that reminded him of his current predicament. They leaned in together with young Pottle at the center, as though they had all fallen into the couch just as the shutter closed. Noah could tell from the way the children’s eyes smiled along with their mouths that this flash of emotion was not something posed or feigned. He felt a kind of spasm behind his eyes and breastbone and his face grew hot. He realized with some perplexity that he was jealous. Jealous, and, after a while, sad: something in Pottle’s expression whispered a paradox, a secret, the awful truth that as physically close as the family was in that moment, he was far, far away.
Pottle returned fully clothed, to Noah’s relief. He hovered at the edge of the room.
“I hope you don’t think, think that this is something I do often,” Pottle said. “It’s difficult for me, at bars or clubs. At my age.” Here he brushed his hand over his furrowed forehead, his head a field of thinning cotton.
Pity stabbed Noah in the groin and opened him from pelvis to sternum, the way romantic love was supposed to but never had. He thought once more of the money, but its urgency had faded.
“Professor Pottle,” he said, his throat tightening, “Don’t worry about it. Let’s forget this ever happened.”
The old man quickly took Noah’s hand. His skin was surprisingly rough, as though the words they parsed and wrote were as real as timber and as heavy.
“I’d like to show you something. If I may.” His blue eyes flickered, pleaded.
Pottle had converted the garage into a home movie theater. Cement had been covered by a thick purple carpet illuminated by art deco sconces along the fabric walls, which were decorated by vintage advertisements promoting extinct brands of French absinthe, vermouth, and champagne.
“My latter-day bachelor pad,” Pottle said, settling in to an avalanche of cushions on an overstuffed sofa. Noah looked more closely at the posters and saw that not just one of the flappers indulging in these spirits sported a thin mustache over their red lips.
An old timey projector whirred to life, the reel making a steady fluttering sound like a small fan. The film was experimental, filled with sepia tones and long silences, oddly hypnotic. Something about it reminded Noah of a Borges story he had read. Or was it Calvino? He thought of mentioning this to Pottle, of putting an idea between himself and the world. A barrier. But for once he did not.
Pottle was easier now, and Noah, too, had finally relaxed. About twenty minutes in, Pottle timidly brushed Noah’s hand. The couch’s new fabric felt staticky and rough, like towels laundered without softener. Noah’s hand did not retreat. He inhaled gently and turned his palm toward the ceiling. And so the young man and the old man held hands as each frame flickered across the screen, the meaning of the act for each distinct and private. As the credits rolled, the back of Noah’s eyes stung. He whom a long list of women had called heartless. He took his hand back to wipe the dampness from his cheeks.
Pottle’s smile was beatific as he led Noah to the door. The grandmother clock chimed three times.
“You are welcome to stay,” Pottle said easily, as to a friend. “New Haven as you know can be rough at night. I do have three extra rooms.” Noah thanked him and gently demurred. He turned to leave, but before his foot hit the stoop, Pottle touched his shoulder and handed him the envelope from before.
“I, too, was young once,” he said, and with a small wave, closed the door.
#
Downtown Palo Alto glowed in the afternoon sun as Noah, eyes shut, basked in its warmth. So this was California.
The day had been long but not particularly arduous. A breakfast meeting in Margaret Jacks Hall over bagels followed by introductions to various faculty. He had been nervous about the talk on Kipling he was expected to give, but the warmth of the welcome buoyed him right through it. Then a more formal panel interview and, finally, a short meeting with the dean, whose sweaty handshake gave the feeling of a deal sealed.
Several members of the department were to meet him for dinner at a place called Bird Dog, but he had some time to kill until then. He felt he should explore, but there would be time enough for that if all went well. He instead found a cafe with outdoor seating and ordered a cappuccino.
He took a first sip. A smile crept across his lips. His tongue flicked over his new veneer, which felt smooth and too-big. There lingered yet a slight taste of bonding agent. It was whiter than the rest of his teeth, but not noticeably. The panel members had all smiled graciously at him. No eyes had flickered nervously toward his mouth.
And yet something about the day troubled him. He left each interview with a feeling akin to not having quite eaten one’s fill at dinner. Like moving on from a song just before its final dissonance has resolved. Finally, Madeline, the Modernist on his interview panel, had smiled and asked jauntily “Who is Noah McLean?” In retrospect, it was an obvious question, one he should have prepared for, but it was the only one on which he had to deflect. His redirection to his teaching evaluations seemed not to bother Madeline, but it bothered him.
Something had shifted. In the days and nights since he stepped off that porch in East Rock. A lack he had not been sensible of before. A space no number of accolades could fill.
Noah frowned. His coffee grew tepid. His vision unfocused. A pair of blue eyes appeared before him. He at first mistook their softness for self-pity, but he soon realized that their mournfulness was not directed inward; it was directed at him. He meant to say something. He really did.
High overhead, palm fronds brushed wordlessly against the sky.
THE END