by Julia Stuart
When Yves Lévèque finally returned home, he lay on his back on top of his bed still wrapped in his green-and-white-striped dressing gown fuming at the indignity of being seen by his neighbours in his nightclothes. As he tugged the pillow further under his head, his eyes fell to his feet and he saw to his horror a cigarette butt stuck to the bottom of his shiny maroon backless slippers. He immediately suspected Didier Lapierre the carpenter, who had not only insisted on smoking in the queue despite the dentist’s protests that it was making him feel nauseous at such an early hour, but who had also made a sly attempt to push in by coming up to ask him whether he could borrow his soap. But the dentist was having none of it. As soon as he realized that the carpenter was still standing there long after his request had been turned down, Yves Lévèque sent him to the back of the line of humiliated villagers shooting furtive glances at each other’s state of undress while complaining bitterly about the council.
The dentist kicked off his slippers in disgust. He had told the carpenter countless times that smoking restricted blood flow to the gums, but like all his patients who indulged in the pernicious habit, the stained results of which he was obliged to remove, the man never listened. He removed his glasses, carefully folded them and placed them on the bedside table. However, despite the fact that it was still almost two hours before the time he usually woke, he was unable to drift off again. It wasn’t his affront over the municipal shower that kept him awake, but the undulation of his innards and the grip around his heart as he thought about what lay ahead of him at lunchtime. As he lay looking at the ceiling, he remembered when, two days earlier, Guillaume Ladoucette had formally telephoned him, despite having just greeted him over the garden wall, and asked if the dentist could come and see him at Heart’s Desire. His mind crawled over every detail, from sitting down on the cushion with the hand-embroidered radish, to watching the matchmaker take out a stapler and rubber from a drawer above his stomach and line them up on the desk as Yves Lévèque wondered what he was about to be told. The man with the formidable moustache had then got out a file, which struck him as rather thin, and announced with a degree of fanfare that he now had ‘a number’ of clients on his books, and that he had found him a most suitable match. The dentist had watched as Guillaume Ladoucette then sat back and did nothing further than smile. When he asked for more information about the woman, the matchmaker had stirred himself from the comfort of his contentment, apologized and then read out her particulars. She was a woman in her late thirties with splendid teeth and an array of other notable attractive features. She had a love for nature and was financially solvent, having worked in retail ever since leaving school. ‘So she won’t be after your money,’ the matchmaker had remarked, raising his eyes from his notes. ‘Nor are there any children to support.’
Such was his desire to end his years of loneliness, and the resulting curse of constipation, Yves Lévèque had immediately suggested that they went for lunch.
As he continued to look up at the ceiling, spotting a new spider web that he had never noticed before, the dentist wondered what he was going to wear. He soon decided on a white shirt and a pair of jeans, which he hoped would give him a youthful, casual air. But what worried him most was not his appearance, but what he was going to say to his match. There was, after all, only so much conversation to be had about the many benefits of flossing.
Yves Lévèque had no idea why people chose to become dentists. It was a question that perplexed him on a daily basis as he stared into yet another mouth harbouring a set of ramshackle teeth, the enormous challenges of which held no allure. His had never been a conscious decision, but a matter of honour that came to him as instinctively as breathing. It was three days after his fifteenth birthday when he learnt the family secret. Tortured for days by toothache and intoxicated from the amount he had drunk to distract his mind from the agony, his father had suddenly raged: ‘I wish my bloody parents were around!’ Unable to defend himself adequately against his son’s battery of questions, he then confessed that far from being a farmer who had received a fatal bolt of lightning while working in the fields one day, Yves Lévèque’s grandfather had in fact been an itinerant piglet dentist. He would follow the fairs and markets, where he would break the young animals’ pointed teeth so they were unable to bite each other while being transported by train. Despite the grubbiness of his trade, his grandfather had always been exceptionally well turned out, instantly recognizable by his elegant straw hat and silk necktie.
It wasn’t chance that had brought Yves Lévèque’s grandparents together, but fate, which made their eventual parting even more mournful. An illegal tooth-puller, his grandmother also followed the fairs and markets. Travelling in a red-and-white-painted horse-drawn wagon, she attracted crowds even bigger than the most accomplished magician. A trumpet and trombone player would sit on her roof; their role was not only to attract customers with their rousing music, but to drown out the wails of those who came on board, rested their heads between the illegal tooth-puller’s formidable thighs and submitted to her pliers. Whenever they happened to turn up at the same venue, she and the piglet dentist would make love in the back of the wagon well into the night, the band having to play even louder to drown their howls of delight. It wasn’t long before she fell pregnant. But before they could marry, the piglet dentist was struck down by a disease that was sweeping the pens, and within days he had turned the same curious shade as the animals and was dead. Fearing for the life of their baby, as well as for her own reputation, the mother gave the infant to her parents who lived in Amour-sur-Belle. The child–Yves Lévèque’s father–never saw his mother again.
When he had finished the story, he poured himself another glass of red, instructed his son never to repeat the tale and refused to talk about his parents ever again.
Despite his youth, Yves Lévèque could see that his father had passed through life crippled by the weight of his illegitimacy. When, several months later, his father asked him what he wanted to do with his life, he replied without hesitation that he wanted to be a dentist in the hope that it would restore his father’s dignity. The man watched his son flourish in his profession until he became the richest person in Amour-sur-Belle. Yves Lévèque’s success was not, however, down to inherited talent, but a consequence of the fact that there was no other dentist for kilometres because his contemporaries had set up in towns and cities to seek their fortune. But with the relative wealth had also come the burden of keeping it, and his father also heard the whispers about his son’s meanness, which he disputed loudly until his death, his self-respect long since restored.
Having cancelled his patients in order to prepare for his lunchtime appointment, the dentist got up and moved slowly around the house so as not to generate a sweat. In the hope of weighing down his undulating innards, he cooked himself a breakfast of two soft-boiled eggs and six plump asparagus spears from Gilbert Dubuisson’s garden. The postman had given him the vegetables by way of a bribe to treat him gently whilst in his chair. It was a gift the dentist had been hoping for, ever since smelling their distinct scent in the vapours of Gilbert Dubuisson’s urine rising from behind an oak tree.
As he dipped a spear into the yolk with his long, pale instruments of torture, his mind turned to the last woman he had truly loved. There had, of course, been others since. But, despite five years of searching, none had provoked in him the same ferocity of affection that he had felt for his ex-wife. It wasn’t the thunderbolts of life that had felled their marriage but an infestation of termites that had gnawed silently away at it. The petty grievances stacked up one on top of the other until they were so high they became insurmountable. By the time the couple parted, the dentist was so enraged he could not believe his foolishness in having married her in the first place. But as the years passed, and the tethers of anger worked loose, Yves Lévèque was able to see her for who she was rather than for who she wasn’t, and he bitterly regretted his foolishness in having let her go. Hoping that they could start aga
in, he spent eight months trying to track her down. But when he eventually found her, she had grown her hair and was happily married to a man who didn’t mind her speaking for long periods on the phone and whom she tolerated putting empty bottles back into the fridge.
Yves Lévèque spent the rest of the morning sitting on the bottom stair trying to conceive inspiring conversation. Defeated, he picked up a book and started to read, but was unable to take in the meaning of the words. He then rearranged what few ornaments he had before returning them to their original positions. When, eventually, it was time to get ready, he ironed his jeans and white shirt, put them on and inspected himself in the mirror on the front of his wardrobe. But instead of the young, casual reflection he was hoping for, he saw a forty-four-year-old bespectacled dentist with a haircut which, although the height of fashion, still gave him a start whenever he caught sight of it.
Aware that there was nothing more he could do with his appearance, he dribbled some aftershave on to his long, pale instruments of torture and patted his neck in the hope that he would at least appeal to one of his match’s senses. Pulling the front door shut behind him, he got into his car and, as he drove through the village, told himself that the date would go splendidly. But any sense of calm he had manufactured was immediately dispelled when Madame Ladoucette suddenly stepped into the road from behind the crumbling communal bread oven, followed by a tottering entourage of demented pigeons drawn to a fellow sufferer. The dentist’s heart pinched with shock. Immediately he stood on his brakes and watched the procession until the last bird had reached the other side. He then slowly pulled away, shaking his head. As he turned right at the field with the ginger Limousin cows that winked, his thoughts turned to the advice that Guillaume Ladoucette had given him. He was not to talk about himself incessantly, a male trait which women apparently found particularly irksome. He should demonstrate interest in his match not only by asking her questions, but also by listening to the answers. At the end of the meal he was expressly forbidden to ask her to split the bill. And while the dentist couldn’t understand how vegetable counsel came into the remit of the Unrivalled Silver Service, as he got up to leave the matchmaker had put his hand on his shoulder and informed him gravely that of all vegetables, cornichons were the most sensitive to the cycles of the moon, and that if he really wanted to get anywhere with them he ought to sow them when it was passing in front of the constellation of Aries.
As he turned off the road to Périgueux and pulled into the restaurant car park alongside a field of green, stubby maize, Yves Lévèque recalled the disagreement they had had over his choice of venue. The matchmaker had insisted that Le Moulin de la Forge, renowned for the fact that its six-course set menu only cost eleven euros, including wine, was far too modest a place for a first date. But Yves Lévèque had been adamant. Why, he argued, would he want to invest any more in a woman when there was no guarantee that he would like her? After trying to cajole him Guillaume Ladoucette had finally given up. Not only was the customer always right, he reasoned, but it was better for the woman to know what she was getting herself into from the start.
The dentist pushed open the restaurant door and looked around at the labourers and artisans in their jeans and short-sleeved shirts, resting their enormous hands on the white paper tablecloths. Choosing a table in the far left-hand corner, he pulled back a chair and sat down facing the diners. After moving his knife and fork slightly further apart, he surveyed the room again, congratulating himself on his choice of venue. While it couldn’t be described as elegant, there was undoubtedly a degree of charm about the place, he thought. In a recess was a washbasin with a large bar of hand soap jutting out of the wall like a cream marrow where customers could wash before eating. And while the choice of décor wasn’t to everybody’s taste, you had to admire the owner’s courage. Marie Poupeau had selected a wallpaper depicting the interior of a wood which engulfed diners in a perpetual state of autumn. Whenever newcomers asked where the lavatory was, she would always reply: ‘Up the path,’ while pointing to a section of the back wall which showed a leaf-strewn track disappearing into a boisterous orange horizon. It wasn’t until they approached that they noticed a handle and then a door. The proprietress had advanced the motif further by hanging on the walls the mounted heads of deer and wild boar, caught by regulars.
Yves Lévèque watched as Marie Poupeau in her straight black skirt and tiny pink blouse darted around the room like an erratic breeze, never forgetting at which stage of the six courses her customers were. But her vigilance wasn’t only needed in the dining room. Each time she went into the kitchen she had the added burden of having to fend off the gropes of the chef, who was not only her husband but also a Companion of the Dish of Tripe. For the ardent promoter of cow stomach recipes was unable to resist the tantalizing curve of his wife’s belly.
As he poured himself a glass of water, Yves Lévèque noticed Sandrine Fournier, the mushroom poisoner, come in and start talking to Marie Poupeau, who was on her way back to the kitchen with an empty carafe of wine. He remembered the sight of the woman speeding past him in the early hours with a white cotton nightdress hitched up to the knees and a pair of towelling slippers, which she had stopped to take off as they were impeding her trajectory. The assistant ambulant fishmonger had beaten him easily to the shower, despite his last-minute sprint which brought him in second. Not only had he had to wait in the place du Marché in his nightclothes while she worked out how to turn the thing on, but he’d been further inconvenienced by the protracted seventeen minutes and twenty-three seconds she had spent under the water. Then, when she finally emerged, still wearing a floral shower cap, she’d stuck up loudly for the postman and baker during the ensuing row, both of whom were insisting that they went in after her as they had to get to work. The dentist reluctantly waved them through, unable to bear the thought of having to wait for either his bread or post. He stood outside the cubicle complaining bitterly to Lisette Robert, a sympathetic ear as she should have been third, insisting that if it hadn’t been for Sandrine Fournier he would already be at home smelling of sandalwood.
After counting all the leaves on the wall to his left, the dentist then looked at his watch and saw that his match was eleven minutes late. As doubt over her arrival swelled up inside him, he started to count the leaves on the wall to his right to distract himself from his unease. When he had finished, he realized that he had forgotten the total for the first wall, and started counting them again so that he could compare the two. Once he had come to the useless conclusion that there were more leaves on the right wall than on the left, he looked at his watch again and surveyed the room with a short sigh. Apart from the workmen and artisans with their enormous hands, the only women there were Marie Poupeau, who was bringing in a platter of quiche, and the assistant ambulant fishmonger, who was sitting alone on the table in the adjacent corner looking directly at him. It was then that Yves Lévèque realized to his horror that Sandrine Fournier was the woman he was waiting for.
The dentist tried to avoid her eye, but it was useless. Within seconds she was standing at the side of his table and he could think of nothing else to do other than get up, kiss her on both cheeks and gesture to the chair opposite him. The mushroom poisoner sat down and the pair looked at each other, both wondering what on earth Guillaume Ladoucette had been thinking. They spent the first few minutes talking about the man they couldn’t get out of their minds, such was their desire to throttle him, who at that very moment was sitting underneath his walnut tree with a large bowl of cassoulet, silently congratulating himself on his brilliance. They praised his enterprising spirit, the colour of his walls and his hand-painted sign. And when they had run out of things to say, they suddenly remembered the comfort of the cushion with the hand-embroidered radish.
Much to their relief, Marie Poupeau then arrived with a large steel bowl of communal soup which was passed from table to table. Putting it down in front of them, she complimented Sandrine Fournier on her hairstyle, tellin
g her that she should pin it up more often as it suited her. And when she asked whether her sleeveless blue dress was new, Sandrine Fournier, who had bought it only the day before, replied firmly that it wasn’t.
After they had helped themselves to a bowlful of the clear liquid steeped with tiny pasta stars, they immediately started eating without wishing each other a good appetite. It was then that Yves Lévèque noticed that his match had a tendency to slurp.
‘Guillaume Ladoucette said that you loved animals,’ said Sandrine Fournier after several minutes of silence.
‘I fish,’ the dentist replied, presuming it was what the matchmaker had been referring to.
‘I like fish too,’ replied Sandrine Fournier. ‘But admittedly they’re dead ones.’
‘So how long have you been working on the fish van now?’ he asked.
‘Twenty-two years. As we travel around so much I tend not to get bored.’
‘You like it then?’
‘I’m allergic to shellfish, so it keeps me on my toes.’
When the second course arrived, the dentist was unable to enjoy his quiche, which was widely exalted, such was the strength of the noxious waves of perfume lapping his nostrils. Instead, he spent the time explaining–at considerable length–the dos and don’ts of fishing, during which Sandrine Fournier noted his habit of pointing at her with his fork.