“Are you going to take the job, if it comes?” He found my scars to remind me of the necessary distance between us, the dentist and the hatchet girl. But his had done nothing worse than pull teeth and fix caps for Victor and his men. The dentist’s hands were chapped with alcohol and smelled like rubber, while I rubbed mine with shea butter every morning. I hated when he did that, though I never stopped him. I leaned over the dentist to take another cigarette too, but instead he caught up my hand and gently traced its scars. But my own lover couldn’t bother himself to remember the name of some Negro showgirl. Lately, because my life has not tended to kindness, she’d also been Dev’s girl. The star of the famous snake dance at the Pelican Club was my best friend in the city. “Tamara,” I said, not for the first time. You just like him because he likes you … you and that snake girl, what’s her name-” “You know what they say, the things he’s done. “Christ, where’s that lighter? I hate even thinking about Red Man, and you have to go and dream about him…” “Christ,” said the dentist, jamming his cigarette into my silver ashtray and getting another. He had only ever called me Phyllis in extremity: mortal danger, orgasm. It had been Dev’s voice at the end of the dream just his voice, warning me against nothing I could see just his voice, pushing me awake, and away from him, again.
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