The Strangers' Gallery (7 page)

“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 she 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.