‘No,’ she said, remembering her little bottle of codeine pills on the table of a restaurant between here and there. ‘No, it doesn’t bother me too much.’

‘Well,’ the nurse said, ‘good luck.’

She went down the stairs and out past the doorman; in the fifteen minutes she had been upstairs he had lost a little of his pristine morningness, and his bow was just a fraction smaller than before.

‘Taxi?’ he asked, and, remembering the bus down to Twenty-third Street, she said, ‘Yes.’

Just as the doorman came back from the curb, bowing to the taxi he seemed to believe he had invented, she thought a hand waved to her from the crowd across the street.

She read the address on the card the dentist had given her and repeated it carefully to the taxi driver. With the card and the little slip of paper with ‘Lower molar’ written on it and her tooth identified so clearly, she sat without moving, her hands still around the papers, her eyes almost closed. She thought she must have been asleep again when the taxi stopped suddenly, and the driver, reaching around to open the door, said, ‘Here we are, lady.’ He looked at her curiously.

‘I’m going to have a tooth pulled,’ she said.

‘Jesus,’ the taxi driver said. She paid him and he said, ‘Good luck,’ as he slammed the door.

This was a strange building, the entrance flanked by medical signs carved in stone; the doorman here was faintly professional, as though he were competent to prescribe if she did not care to go any farther. She went past him, going straight ahead until an elevator opened its door to her. In the elevator she showed the elevator man the card and he said, ‘Seventh floor.’

She had to back up in the elevator for a nurse to wheel in an old lady in a wheelchair. The old lady was calm and restful, sitting there in the elevator with a rug over her knees; she said, ‘Nice day’ to the elevator operator and he said, ‘Good to see the sun,’ and then the old lady lay back in her chair and the nurse straightened the rug around her knees and said, ‘Now we’re not going to worry,’ and the old lady said irritably, ‘Who’s worrying?’

They got out at the fourth floor. The elevator went on up and then the operator said, ‘Seven,’ and the elevator stopped and the door opened.

‘Straight down the hall and to your left,’ the operator said.