The Strangers' Gallery

by Paul Bowdring

  I’ve never liked getting up in the middle of the night. Objects, things, seem more manifestly there, sharing your house, your home. In the bathroom, Anton’s brown-stained partial denture, immersed in a glass of water and half a glass of undissolved baking soda, was very unvainly displayed on the vanity for my viewing pleasure. I moved the glass and the teeth shifted and settled in the soda like an ancient artifact in the molehill sand dune of a display case. Anton is very informal about personal hygiene. Like a tomcat, he sprays all around the toilet bowl and forgets to flush what gets inside. He leaves a mess of toothpaste, mouth sludge, and razor hair in the sink, body hair in the tub, nail clippings on the floor. He thinks nothing of using my hairbrush and leaving it choked with hair. He farts cathartically and clomps about the house in his wooden slippers and underwear after a shower looking for a T-shirt he’s mislaid. He is totally unselfconscious about his body. It is not the same with his feelings, which he usually keeps to himself; but complete strangers whom he meets in bars or cafés spontaneously open themselves up to him, pour out their dark and painful secrets, as if he were a brother or a husband or a very close friend.

  Usually, he brings home just the stories they tell him, but once in a while, the storytellers as well. One day I came home from work to find an elderly woman sitting on a lawn chair in the front garden with white canvas bags in a circle around her feet. Anton had met her on the street lugging home groceries, which he offered to carry. Walking past our house, they stopped for a rest, and Anton went inside to get her something to drink. The woman was grey all over—hair, skin, and clothes—with an innocent, if sorrowful, face. And whether by way of explanation or apology or simply introduction, she turned her head and repeated, or incanted, in a childlike way, “I told him my husband turned to stone. My husband, Malcolm, turned to stone, turned to stone, turned to stone.” And what I felt at that moment was neither bewilderment nor surprise, but an unsettling sense of déjà vu.

  Once, in a crowded department store at Christmastime, I was doing some last-minute shopping, sizing up a small kitchen appliance on a bottom shelf—a waffle iron, I think it was—the top of which was shaped like a toilet seat, and even lifted up like one. I was crouched down at a child’s height, with shopping bags all around my feet, when a toddler whose mother was also looking at something on the bottom shelf approached me cheerfully and held her small white bear up to my face. “Baby Ted,” she said, telling a childless and uncomprehending stranger, whom she had not yet been warned to avoid speaking to, about the emotional ties that bound her to the earth. They were perhaps the only two words she knew, but sometimes two words, even no words, are enough. Though the child and the old woman were a lifetime apart, on their faces there was the same look, set in their eyes like the warm light trapped in the amber eyes of the bear: an absolute assurance that this stranger understood.

  Fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva, or FOP, was the clinical name, Anton informed me that evening. He’d gone straight to the library after walking her home.

  “Bone, not stone,” he said. “Her husband turned to bone. The strangest disease they know. Muscle, ligament, and tendon become real bone, marrow too. A new skeleton comes around the old one. No one knows why, though the first case reported was in 1692. But then, why did Gregor Samsa turn into a hard-back insect? ‘What happened to me? he thought. It was no dream.’”

  After Anton had been here a couple of weeks, I had to call in Mrs. Somerton ahead of her time. She was still there in the afternoon when I got home from work, flat on her back on the chesterfield with her feet up on the cushions. Though she was a far cry from Anton, after more than a year of conscientious housecleaning, she had graduated to a certain level of informality around the place.

  “I’m sorry, my love,” she said, “but I had to lie down. I’m after cleaning it from top to bottom, but it took me all day.”

  I thought she was going to say because of the mess, but she said it was because of the pain in her side. Her hernia was acting up again.

  “I s’pose I’ll have to let him put me in after all,” she said. “Dr. Crowley’s been after me for the past five years. But, Sacred Heart, he wants me to go into St. Clare’s, and I’m frightened to death to go near that place. The bathrooms don’t even have sinks in there, and they had a case of that flesh-eating disease, I heard.”

  “No, I don’t think it was that,” I said. “But it was some kind of strange bacteria they found,” I added, not too reassuringly.

  “Well, it was in the paper, my love, and whatever it was it don’t make you feel too safe. All the ones I sees comin’ out of there look even sicker than when they goes in.”

  No, I’ve never liked getting up in the middle of the night. My own body is starting to give trouble, like Mrs. Somerton’s. At what age does the prostate begin to tighten its grip? I thought it was in your fifties or sixties, not your forties. Why does urination take so long late at night? You’d expect the muscles to be relaxed at that hour, but they’re tensed as if for another fire alarm. It’s worse than standing at a urinal in a public washroom at some big event, with curious urinators on either side of you and a pawing impatient pack at your back.

  Tired of standing, I sat down on the toilet seat, tucked Its Eminence between my legs and pointed it back into the bowl. The muscles usually relax when I do this, but the womanliness of the act makes me self-conscious, even alone and half-asleep late at night. I didn’t have my glasses on, but I tried to focus my eyes on the set of burgundy towels on the rack behind the bathroom door. Mrs. Somerton had arranged them as a floral display, a still life: the bath towel, a sort of background wash; the face towel in the shape of a hanging basket; and the face cloth, an open fan or scallop shell set in the basket. She’d worked at a hotel for many years, where she’d been taught clever arranging tricks like this, along with exasperating habits that she’s been unable to break, though I’ve mentioned them to her a thousand times. She tucks the top sheet, for instance, in under the mattress, so snug that it’s impossible to kick out. I have to get out of bed and lift up the mattress all the way round. I’m six-foot-two, and my feet hang out over the edge.

  Sitting and staring at this towel display, like some esoteric object of meditation, seemed to do the trick. My bladder began to drain more quickly, but my muscles tensed again as an alarm did sound—a loud shout from Anton’s room at the end of the hall. I tightened the drawstring of my bathrobe and ran down to find Anton crawling around on the bedroom floor in his undershorts, hissing and moaning, with blood all over his hands and arms.

  “I lost my crown,” he said, lisping through white, sucked-in lips.

  For a moment, I didn’t know what he was talking about. I thought he was drunk or cut or had taken leave of his senses; but it was not the blood of a deposed monarch that was flowing, just the tomato juice and vodka of the reigning insomniac. Drinking from a heavy whisky glass, he had broken off the gold cap of his tooth. His tongue was capping the tooth now, and he was talking thickly and nasally and moaning majestically as both of us, on hands and knees, tried to find the crown.

  “I hope I didn’t swallow it again,” he said, wincing and pulling his lips tight over his teeth, or half his teeth, the other half resting in the baking soda solution in another whisky glass in the bathroom.

  “What do you mean, again?” I asked.

  “Well…I swallowed it before…but I passed it on. I watched for it among my stools.”

  “You what?”

  “Among my stools…I watched for it among my stools. It was my ex-wife Darka’s wedding ring. It has—how do you say?—a sentimental value for me. She left it when we parted and I melted it down. I told her she would stay a part of me, and I thought of how to do it. Marieke, my girlfriend, has big teeth and likes to bite. She broke my tooth when we were making love, then she broke my gold crown when I had it done—on purpose, I thought, when she found out where the gold came from. She was on top, where s
he likes to be, and I swallowed it. Took three days for it to pass.”

  We searched everywhere for Anton’s crown—in the bedclothes, under the bed, in the closet. He shook out his clothes, which were on the floor, and removed the sheets and blankets and pillowcase from the bed. Finally, he looked forlornly down into the dregs of his drink, threw his head back and drained the contents of the glass as if filtering it through baleen plates.

  It was three in the morning, but he asked me to phone my dentist, Dr. Winston Giovannetti, or Dr. Wins, as I had taken to calling him—never to his face, of course, but always affectionately, for he was a top-notch dentist. I called his home but, as expected, only reached an answering machine that informed me his office would be open at eight-thirty in the morning. I offered to take Anton to the hospital, as he seemed to be in some pain, though it was unlikely that there would be a dentist in the emergency department.

  “Maybe they could give you some painkillers,” I suggested.

  “No no no,” he said, shaking his head and waving his hands like windshield wipers across his grimacing face.

  He might have been averse to going to the hospital, but he wasn’t to taking painkillers. He said he had some codeine in his knapsack, which was lying on the floor. He took two tablets, then lay down on the stripped bed in the fetal position and tried to go to sleep. Lying there in just his underpants, he looked so bare, helpless, and miserable that I picked a blanket up off the floor and covered him up.

  At exactly eight-thirty I called Freshwater Dentistry. The name of Dr. Wins’s dental practice, which of course merely referred to the location of the office on Freshwater Road, had always suggested to me some radically new aquatic dental technique. Mrs. Halfyard, the receptionist, never one for stalling half measures, agreed to take Anton in right away. We arrived at the office even before the dentist, but Mrs. Halfyard said that Dr. Giovannetti was just on his way in.

  She had checked my records when I called in and now informed me that I hadn’t had a checkup in over four years. This I found hard to believe, but she looked unblinkingly at me over the top of her glasses—a blatant imitation of Dr. Giovannetti, I thought—when I leaned in over the counter to glance at my chart.

  Hadn’t I received my annual reminders? she asked. I said I couldn’t recall. There was a cancellation that very afternoon, she said. One of Dr. Giovannetti’s patients had died. That was why he was a bit behind, she explained; he was visiting the bereaved family on his way in. She said I could come back at two o’clock, and though I was a bit hesitant about replacing a dead man, especially with Frank Morrow for a neighbour, I agreed.

  Dr. Wins shared his office space with two junior colleagues, and the waiting room was already filling up with victims of “compromised dentition,” as a poster on the wall referred to our common dental ills.

  “I guess I’ll see you after work,” I said to Anton.

  “Okay…I’m okay,” he replied, half-heartedly.

  I left him sucking on his knuckles and reading Oral Health. In an old issue of this magazine, here in this same office, I had once been most surprised to learn that dentists had the highest rate of mental breakdown and suicide among all professional groups. To think that these most stolid of professionals, these maintainers of our molars, bicuspids, canines, and incisors, these trusted mechanics of our working mouths, more trusted perhaps than the most invasive of surgeons, for they work while we are awake (and, of course, some of them are surgeons)—to think that they were cracking up and killing themselves much faster than the rest of us had come as a shock. I thought about it again on my way to work.

  In the article, a detailed sociological and psychological analysis had been presented to account for these alarming statistics, but it all seemed beside the point. My theory was this: the mouth is not only the most used and most important but also the most intimate, the most sacred orifice of the human body. Air and sustenance enter, the voice comes out; it is where the soul, it is said, leaves the body after death. And then there is lovemaking: the mouth bestows and receives the most intimate of kisses, performs the most intimate of acts. No wonder a person would feel constant stress working inside such a hallowed place. But alas, chipped, yellowed, abscessed, decaying, plaque-covered teeth may also be in there, and work inside it he must.

  No doubt some would cast their vote for other orifices. The vagina, for example. What is more important than conception and birth? (What is the suicide rate for obstetricians? I wonder.) The vagina, of course, is no longer necessary for either. We have long had the Caesarean, and now egg and sperm can meet in Dr. Petri’s dish.

  “I knew the Dutch were economical, but this is a bit much,” Dr. Wins said to me when I came back for my checkup at two o’clock. He was chuckling to himself as he checked his instruments.

  Anton was really going to go through with it, to watch for it among his stools, as he put it. A lonely vigil, if ever there was one. Gold crowns were indeed reusable, Dr. Wins said, but in his twenty-five years of dental practice he had never come across this kind of recycling effort. He had, however, agreed to wait, and had fitted Anton’s tooth with a temporary cap.

  I apologized for the long gap between appointments, expressed surprise that it had been four years. He responded by explaining how four years can telescope into one, why time seems to go much faster as we get older. He didn’t look any older, but a few things had changed in those four years. Caution was now in the air, and his cheerful, boyish face looked a little more sombre. He was putting on rubber gloves and a mask.

  “It’s simple arithmetic,” he said, clipping on my bib and adjusting the harsh examining light. “A year is 20 percent of a five-year-old’s life—even a summer seems to go on forever—but it’s only 2 percent of a fifty-year-old’s. It’s all relative, if you see what I mean.”

  “Absolutely,” I said, finding a choice place for the irritating intensifier of choice these days, and surprising us both with my little joke. The tone of our conversations has always been earnest and straightforward, but the hilarity of Anton’s request seemed to have lightened us up.

  Actually, I’m not so sure that I do, I was about to say, but he was inside my mouth with the mirror and the explorer and I didn’t have time to revise my views. He is still in the habit of naming these instruments as he uses them, as if we are all children who need reassurance, have to be told what he is doing at every step. He always names the tooth he is working on, too. He once gave me the thirty-two-stop grand tour, including the eye teeth, the wisdom teeth, and a long stop for a stern little lecture at my very own sweet tooth. One feels very childlike in his big-handed, fatherly grasp, though no doubt this is something he’s hardly aware of. He has a dental assistant but still prefers to do all of what he calls “the mouth work” himself.

  Dr. Winston Giovannetti was of Italian and Newfoundland-Irish parentage, one of “the Placentia Bay Giovannettis,” as he liked to say when anyone inquired about his name, as if there were scores of Giovannettis around Placentia Bay, and in all the other bays, as if there’d been a wave of nineteenth-century Italian immigration to match the Irish one. But there were scores of soccer players, if not Giovannettis, in Placentia Bay, and not only in the small Burin Peninsula town of St. Lawrence, where Winston grew up, but in small towns all around the peninsula, which is shaped like a boot, appropriately enough. This, Winston claimed—he was a star soccer player himself—could be attributed, in no small part, to “the Italian factor.”

  I had once heard him counter a more probing question about his ancestry with the rhetorical riposte: “Correct me if I’m wrong; but didn’t an Italian discover this place?” Winston, however, had not been named after the discoverer of Newfoundland, Giovanni Caboto—Giovanni Giovannetti would have sounded a bit redundant, perhaps—but after Winston Churchill, who, in August 1941, a few years before Winston was born, had met with US president Franklin D. Roosevelt on a warship in Placentia Bay and signed the famous
Atlantic Charter.

  Or the infamous Atlantic Charter, as gadfly public historian Miles Harnett would say. Our “associate,” our “mascot,” our “conscience,” at the Archives—grumbly epithets my colleagues had pinned on him over the years—used to spend almost as much time in there as we did, but he has slacked off somewhat in recent years. He knows his way around the place so well, in fact, that he sometimes takes it upon himself to help other researchers.

  I had written about the charter in the Evening Telegram on August 14, 1991, on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary. Often criticized by Miles for my “unimpeachable neutrality” (he really means impeachable neutrality, for he sees it as something of a vice), he had, as usual, in a letter to the editor, delivered a typical jousting reply. It had focused on the “abject insincerity” of Article 3: They respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live; and they wish to see sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them.

  “The irony for Murphy,” he wrote, by which he meant the irony for all of us, “was that this outrageous piece of political hypocrisy, referring to such things as ‘the Nazi tyranny,’ was spouted in a country—Newfoundland, you may remember, the COUNTRY of Newfoundland—that was also being run by a tyranny, a dictatorship, the Commission of Government. What sins didn’t it commit I ask you—and in the name of Churchill’s Mother of All Democracies, at that. The Omission of Government is a better name for it. Newfoundland was a COUNTRY where no one had the right to vote, you may remember, where no one had cast a vote for almost ten years.