Other People's Love Affairs: Stories

by D. Wystan Owen

  “In most practices the hygienists make the coffee,” Kenneth said, but stood anyway.

  “This is why I could never leave you,” she said.

  It was to be expected that he should feel agitation; often he did before Alma’s appointments. He felt it even though things had never been unpleasant between them: not before the divorce, and not after it, either. Quarreling wasn’t their way. The whole thing, in fact, had been absurd in its ease—amicable, frictionless even—and it was precisely that that now caused the disquiet. Everyone had been so well behaved. He’d sent a gift when Alma remarried; she sent him a basket of fruit every Christmas; for years he’d feigned interest in Rick’s legal firm and gladness when Rick appeared at speech days, recitals. Kenneth had never been close to remarriage. At first he tried to date here and there but found that it only made him feel sad. That he had resigned himself to the split did not mean it hadn’t been a devastation. He had wanted to say that to Alma, if only to acknowledge the loss, but for so long he had been too polite, and now felt that too many years had gone by.

  He brewed the coffee, enough so that he could have a cup, and enough also in case the periodontist, Mel, barged in and helped himself to the dregs. The practices had been conjoined from the start, the two men being friends from their dental school days. In the early years, Mel had made a troublesome habit of knocking after hours at the door from reception and availing himself, under pretense of sociability, of Kenneth’s nitrous oxide supply.

  Now Kenneth drank the coffee alone in his office, with Ruby whistling and making a clamor among the morning’s necessary equipment.

  Along the corridor, she called, “It will be nice to see Alma.”

  He checked the clock; it was just past eight thirty. His wristwatch—an early present between them—he’d already placed in the drawer of his desk.

  When first he had brought Ruby into the practice, Alma had been cold and suspicious. “A bit young, don’t you think?” she had said, and it had seemed to him that jealousy of any kind, no matter how unfounded, was a marginal victory. That, of course, had worn off over time, and now Alma was closer to Ruby than he was.

  He called back to her, “Oh, is that today?” and heard her laugh, because she knew he was different on these mornings, had learned to sense the changes in his disposition.

  Alma drifted in ten minutes late, not waiting to be met in reception. She wore large sunglasses, which she did not remove until she was standing in the doorway of Kenneth’s office, smiling.

  “Hello, darling,” she said, the words drawn out as an actress would do. She kissed him once on each cheek, an affect he did not recall from the past. She’d have picked it up on some trip or another, Côte d’Azur, maybe, the vineyards of Marche.

  She was nearly sixty, as he was now, too, and though he saw her routinely, every six months, he experienced each time this brief dislocation, as if he’d expected her still to be young. There was elegance, though, in the way she had aged; in her green eyes, her pale throat, beauty remained. Her dark hair was shot through with silvery strands. His own hair had thinned considerably, and he sagged about the midsection, the line of his jaw.

  “You look great,” he said.

  She rolled her eyes. “Neither of us looks great, and you know it.”

  She had long had this way of upsetting his balance. Early on she had enjoyed making him blush, saying, for instance, after they had agreed to their first dinner date, “Now don’t start thinking I’m one way just because I do what I’m told in the dentist’s chair.” In his office now, Kenneth found himself at a loss, afraid they might fall irreparably into his silence, and was beginning to stammer when Ruby appeared.

  The two women embraced.

  “How is that gorgeous husband of yours? You know, if you ever get tired of him, I’d be happy to sit for the weekend.”

  It was a joke Alma had made many times. Ruby laughed and led her by the arm from the room. He could hear them as they moved down the corridor, their voices falling to a conspiratorial whisper.

  He waited, clicking at a solitaire game while Ruby started in on the cleaning. With patients he maintained a flow of light conversation, as if their captivity obliged him to do so, and at dinner parties during his marriage he had often found himself speaking at length about his work, or a sporting event, or about some odd piece of nautical esoterica that had caught his fancy in a book or on TV. Still, he had always favored solitude, quiet; those forced bouts of sociability left him exhausted. Alma had found him more than once in the kitchen late at night, unable to sleep, with cards spread across the surface of the table, not wishing to be near even her. In those moments he’d felt guilty of something, but later he came to see how it was: her objection had not been to his silence but to his talk; she had found it embarrassing, dull. Rick spoke less but with a measured authority: “I’ve got a tooth man in Brill,” he had said, when first Kenneth had shaken his hand. He’d smiled, revealing a mild fluorosis. “Only I’ll dance with the devil I know.”

  Since the divorce, he’d taken interest in model airplanes and cars, and lately in small figurines cast of pewter, which he painted with great care at the desk in his spare room. He liked the minute detail in the craftwork, found it not unlike the finer tasks of dentistry: the way the smallest pieces of a model fit into place, the shading required to bring out the pleats in a warrior’s garment. Under lamplight he worked with dental forceps and loupes. At times he felt as much passion for models as he did for filling cavities or restoring worn enamel. It was something he hid from the world. When last his daughter, Miranda, had visited Glass, he had hastened to pack all the models away; she might have seen them and found it pathetic, he thought—not so much the hobby itself but the pleasure it gave him, the fulfillment. The fact that it was, really, almost enough.

  Down the corridor, he could hear Ruby’s voice as she worked, and he waited for Alma’s to join it again, which would indicate that her cleaning was done. Then, when at last her voice did emerge, he remained a few minutes more. He listened but couldn’t make out what was said.

  Approaching, he found Alma upright, laughing, it seemed, at some clever remark. When she saw Kenneth she said, “Well, don’t just stand there, Doctor.”

  He smiled and lifted his hands from his pockets; he adjusted the tilt of the chair. Ruby was removing her gloves near the sink, and he busied himself with old X-rays and charts, all of which he remembered by heart.

  “And by the way,” Alma continued, “you still haven’t RSVP’d. Don’t think for a moment you’ve gone undetected.”

  “Kenneth!” Ruby wheeled round to face him. “We got those invitations ages ago.”

  He shrugged. “I’m not any good with the mail.”

  “Some things never change,” Alma said.

  “He’s impossible.”

  “Miranda will be there. With Patrick. Do not tell me you have other plans.”

  “I’ll be there.” His voice emerged with some force. He knew they were only being playful with him, but nonetheless he felt bullied. Women had a way of ganging up on a man.

  Ruby held up her hands and slipped out. He pulled on his gloves and his mask.

  “Of course I’ll be there,” he said again. “I would have thought that went without saying.”

  He swung the lamp into place over her open mouth, prodding the craggy surface of a molar. They’d been together only ten years, twelve if you counted the dating and courtship. Mostly they had been happy, he thought, and when he looked back now on those years they seemed to him much longer than the seventeen that had followed. How many times had she been in this chair? How many times had he traced this terrain? She’d been frightened of seeing a dentist at first, and he recalled her gripping the sleeve of his lab coat, not letting go until he’d finished the exam.

  The probe slipped along a graded premolar cusp.

  “Alma.” He paused and pulled down the mask. “You’re still grinding. What happened to the guard I prescribed?”

  Th
e tool was still resting on the side of her tooth. She made a few unintelligible sounds.

  “Have you worn it even once? You haven’t. I know.”

  She shook her head very slightly in protest.

  “Well, don’t think you’ve gone undetected.” He sighed. “You used to be such a good patient.”

  At the window, the day’s early fog was retreating, discrete shafts of light emerging red and refracted. Her mouth, at a glance, was as it had been—the filling in twenty, the crown on eighteen—but the slow degradation of matter upset him. When all else has vanished or faded away, the teeth are what is meant to remain. Sometimes, lying awake in the night, when his solitude seemed so complete and profound as to cast doubt upon his very existence, he would walk himself through this familiar landscape and think, Here is proof. Here witness is borne.

  He prodded further, scarcely attending.

  “I really don’t understand. You keep coming in, twice every year. Is it only to show me how little you care?”

  He returned his instruments to the tray. Sweat pricked the back of his collar, his throat. He held Alma’s X-rays again to the light, shook the film like a damning exhibit at trial.

  “This is from six months ago, and already it shows erosion. You can’t see it, but I can. It’s only worse now.”

  He pointed at the offending gray slides, where the pale stalks of teeth arose blunt and diminished. Her neglect of them seemed a desecration to him.

  “Well?”

  She turned, a hand held to her face, and spat into the bowl at her side.

  “You get crueler every time I visit,” she said.

  “And you get more negligent.”

  Already his anger was ebbing; in its aftermath shame and exposure remained. Among other things, he’d been unprofessional with her.

  “I’ll do what’s required here, Alma,” he said. “But I’ll not be the one who fits you for dentures.”

  “So what am I in for?”

  “Come in for a sealant. And you’ll have to start using the guard. You want to wait until after your party? That’s fine. Fifteen years, he can stand to see you in a mouth guard.”

  “The party. So you’re coming?”

  He said nothing, which she seemed, this time, to take as assent. She had removed the paper bib from her chest, was straightening her cream-colored blouse, her silk scarf.

  “Are you doing all right, Kenneth?” she asked. “I’d love it if you brought a date to the party. Ruby says patients still ask about you.”

  She must have known he didn’t date anymore. Early on he had lied about that, but now he had brushed the questions off for so long that the truth would have had to be clear. He wondered, then, if she asked out of kindness or cruelty.

  “No more patients,” he said. “I learned that lesson when you stopped flossing.”

  She swung her legs over the side of the chair.

  “Listen, are you sure you want me to come? Don’t you think it would be a bit strange?”

  “Why? Because you’re my dentist?”

  “Because I’m your ex-husband,” he said.

  Her apparent amusement was painful to him. “That was a long time ago,” she said. “It would be strange if you didn’t come. Don’t you want to meet Patrick?”

  Miranda was twenty-seven years old, a schoolteacher, though his image of her had remained somehow suspended in girlhood. After the divorce she’d lived mostly with Alma, a space opening slowly between them, untraversable not so much for its breadth but for the haze of guilt and diffidence that suffused it. Over the telephone and every other weekend, he had been told of first dates, A-level exams, details of rows had with Alma and Rick. Alone he’d fretted over signs of eating disorder, as later he’d been relieved to see them abate. It hadn’t ever reached the point of estrangement. In some sense, he’d been the favored parent, in fact, but he knew that it was only because they had never been close enough to harm one another. She had spoken of Patrick at length on the phone, but all Kenneth could remember for certain was that he was older than she—thirty-five—an attorney, like Rick, at a firm in the city. Now, picturing them at the party, he was unprepared for his own resentment. How could he bear it, people remarking: mother and daughter, each so lucky and adored?

  “Of course I want to meet him,” he said. “Only shouldn’t we all get together some time? In private?” Just the four of us, he wanted to say.

  “Oh, we’ll do that, too,” Alma said. “But you know how it is to make the schedules work. And, anyway, this will be fun. You’ve already said you’ll be coming, and I intend to hold you to that.”

  “Of course I’ll come,” he said, a third time.

  Ruby took her time arranging the follow-up, and Kenneth spent it alone in his office, feeling that on the subject of the anniversary party, everything had been decided without him. He looked about the room at his diplomas and licenses, the photographs in small frames on his desk; he so rarely noticed them anymore. The acoustic tiles of the ceiling were still dimpled and scuffed from the days when he and Mel had flung pencils at them, trying to make them stick overhead.

  Alma appeared in the doorway.

  “Do you remember how we used to play that game?” he said, pointing. She had liked to hang about in those days, wasting time with him after hours.

  “Sure I do.”

  “I miss it,” he said.

  She glanced, briefly, over her shoulder, as though she might have thought her name had been spoken.

  “Feel free to choose a toy from the chest,” Kenneth said.

  She gave him a look.

  “Take a sugar-free mint?”

  She pointed to a bulge in the pocket of her slacks. “I cleaned you out. It’s been lovely, as always. See you on the seventeenth, darling.”

  All morning, as other patients arrived, he felt his usual compulsion to speak but found himself disclosing small, private details that he ordinarily would have held back. Performing a root canal on Joe Frank—a retired professor of literature—he told of reading, in secret, the books assigned for Miranda’s grammar school courses, listening while she detailed their plots, not minding if she gave away endings or twists (the dissipation of Wickham, the prescience of Starbuck). When Paul Gillett—a teen with third molar impaction—made mention of The Lord of the Rings, Kenneth leaped up to retrieve a figurine from his office, a goblin the boy examined with interest. To Mrs. Winfield—a widow he’d known thirty years and whose husband had been a favorite patient as well—he said, “You’ve got the teeth of a debutante, Alice. My ex-wife is a younger woman than you are, and already I see Fixodent in her future.”

  There was thrill in being so unwontedly open, a manic, unsettling sense that he had nothing left about which to be guarded. Alma had said, “That was a long time ago,” and it was true, though he knew it might never feel that way to him.

  He ate lunch in his office, day-old fish and chips, his fingers wiped clean on a torn bit of newsprint. The post had come and he sorted the bills. He replaced the watch on his wrist. Vaguely, his limbs still buzzed with disclosure. “Sure I do,” her voice said again. At his sink, he paused to brush his teeth twice and floss them, eyed his own exaggerated grin in the mirror as—he realized now—he so seldom did.

  When, some hours later, the last patient left, he was startled, as though waking up from a dream. He could hear Ruby whistling as she wiped down the counters and chair, a tune he felt he recognized but couldn’t quite place. When she had finished, she came in and sat down, again in the seat opposite his desk, smiling now in a mild, distracted way.

  “If you need to take tomorrow off, go ahead,” Kenneth said.

  She dismissed him with a wave of the hand. “You know better than to listen to me when I’m like that. I’m never myself in the morning.”

  “Well then, I’ll see you tomorrow,” Kenneth said, but Ruby made no motion to leave. She stayed seated in front of him, smiling, a kindness that made him look briefly away.

  At length, she said, so
ftly, “You don’t have to go.”

  He shook his head. “I think I do.”

  “No. She’d like to see you, but you don’t have to go.”

  “She wants it to be as if nothing happened.”

  “Something happened,” she said. “And it mattered.” She splayed her elbows over the desk, leaning forward as though it were hers. “It still matters, Kenny. She knows it does.”

  Kenneth regarded Ruby in silence: her short black hair, the strength of her aspect. He had known her nearly ten years, had dined at her house, thrown rice at her wedding. What you missed, really, wasn’t marriage itself; it was only the knowledge that there was someone.

  “Why don’t we go together,” she said. “I’ll be your date. It’s the last thing Luke wants to do. All those lawyers, and he doesn’t even like shrimp cocktail.”

  “I’m no good at parties,” he said. “You know that. I’ll wind up doing the dishes.”

  “I’ll dry. Or better yet: I’ll put a rock in the dip. Someone breaks a tooth, we come to the rescue. No socializing, and you go home a hero. How’s that?”

  “It’s a sound proposition,” he managed.

  “Think about it. You’d still have two weeks to choose an outfit.”

  He nodded.

  “Good. You’ll give it some thought. But you’ve got to promise not to abandon me when we get inside. Luke does that. I hate talking to strangers.”

  There was a small red windup toy on his desk, a mouthful of teeth Ruby had brought him years ago, when she had just begun in the office. She picked it up now and set it to marching with its white plastic feet across the surface of the desk, chomping noisily as it went.

  “See you tomorrow,” she said over the grind of toy gears, and slowly she gathered her things.

  Daylight persisted when Kenneth stepped out; he had lingered only a little. The sky above him was pale blue and milky, the iris of an unseeing eye; fog had not yet rolled in off the sea, though it hung, as if waiting, along the horizon. He would walk the short distance home, his car safe in its space at the rear of the practice. The air was full of all the scents of late spring; the evening was like something lost and then found.