THEME: Your story is about a dentist in New York kissing in dreams.
New York was not the place for me. I never should have gone there. My life was full of never-shoulds. I’d pinch a tiny piece of skin between my thumb and my pointing finger whenever I had a never-should. That didn’t stop them coming.There was too much going on: horns blaring, people screaming,cursing, laughing, pigeons flapping.
My office was full of fish, three big tanks: one in the waiting room, one in reception, one in my office. Only the second held tropical fish, to which my receptionist Janie personally tended. I could tell from the moment I hired her that she cared about things deeply. I could tell from her perfectly smooth hair and trimmed nails. I could tell from the bags under her eyes which she couldn’t quite disguise.
She always stayed late and cleaned up, though it wasn’t her job, aligning the magazines perfectly so that all of their corners touched. She fed the fish. She smiled at me, asked if I needed anything done, told me about my appointments for the following day. And then she left, click click click, and I made sure my dentistry was in order and watched the fish circle in a slow blur of silver and orange and white. I liked to reduce the world like this: a tail, a fin, a canine, a molar.
Wisdom teeth were the worst. They were pointless creations and, like most pointless creations, caused much pain. Wisdom comes from pain. That was how I believed they got their name. Swollen mouths, anaesthetic-glazed eyes, restricted diets. I had pulled over a hundred wisdom teeth in my time, and I still did not feel any wiser.
Annabel Cotter was due to have her wisdom teeth pulled. She was a nightmare for my hands and mind, a fantasy for my bank account. She drank too much coke and had a fondness for barley sugars. She told me she flossed but I knew she didn’t. Once I had given her floss to bring home with her, but her next visit suggested that it had remained unopened on her bathroom shelf. She still had all her teeth, and this made her careless. She never listened to my warnings. She could not afford to lose this wisdom. I could not afford my telephone bill as well as child support.
She sauntered in in a cloud of perfume. It smelled pink and made my nostrils tingle. She smacked her gum and flicked her perfect red curls back over her bare, lightly freckled shoulders, flashing her long maniqured nails. I marvelled, as always, at the fact that she paid so much attention to these aspects of her appearance, while completely neglecting the small issue of dental hygiene. Her lips were coloured deep red. It showed up the yellow on her teeth. I suspected this was why she smiled with her mouth closed.
She lay on the chair as if it were a sunbed. Cab drivers blared their horns below us on the street. One yelled something in Spanish. She closed her eyes and gave a pressed-lip smile.
“Will this hurt?” She sounded worried in a way she never did when I talked about plaque and tooth erosion and fillings and bleeding gums. All of these were bandied around too much. Pain was different.
“Yes, badly,” I told her as I prepared my utensils. There was a reason that people hated dentists. “But pain is the only way to receive the wisdom of the wisdom tooth.”
She looked confused, then chose to ignore me. I cleaned her teeth before I put her under anaesthetic.
And then the room blurred around the edges. Her perfume was working its way into my mind, cushioning it. I could be hated. I could give wisdom through pain.
The first time my ex-husband kissed me, he bit my lip. It bled through my red lipstick and stained his mouth. I could have learned from the pain. I could have learned not to kiss him, to walk away.
I didn’t have my wisdom teeth.
Annabel’s lips were like magenta slugs. It looked like one would bounce off them. She wouldn’t bite, and if she did her teeth weren’t that sharp – she didn’t care for them well enough. She opened her eyes and they were greener than ivy. The whites of her eyes could be the poison. That would mean that the poison wasn’t in her lips.
The fish swam slowly. Car horns blared, pigeons flapped, cats screeched. I needed to reduce my attention. My attention to the miniscule was the reason I was a dentist.
Her eyelashes barely fluttered and then she was kissing me. We were wrapped in a violet cloud. Ethics did not exist in clouds. All they knew was to rain, and all this love was raining on me. I had known she loved me all along, I realized. Why else did she get all dressed up for her dentist’s appointment?
And then there was a knock. We broke apart, floating away on seperate rafts of teeth, across cool glass. She gripped her chair, reclosed her eyes.
“Dr. Nolan? Dr. Nolan?” Janie was shaking me. She disaprooved.
Annabel Cotter was asleep in her chair and I was curled on the floor beside it.
“The anaesthetic leaked. I’ve shut it off now and arranged for your ex-husband to come drive you home. I think you should reschedual Miss Cotter’s appointment for when you’re less groggy. I’ll clean up.”
I glanced at the mouth-wash which I had knocked over: a lurid pink lake.
I could shrink back from the noise of New York, focus my attention on two red lips, a single wisdom tooth. I could lose the noise of the street as I had lost my husband. I could make my world smaller and smaller, invent and reinvent, and I would remain none the wiser, no matter how many wisdom teeth I pulled.
