Other People's Love Affairs
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dark without their having noticed.
A Romance
93
“I hope you won’t hate me when you look back,” he said.
“Oh, you’ve got it wrong if you think that. Quite wrong.”
They were silent a minute more, and then she let go of his
hand. She was nearly home, and she turned once more toward
him. He had not moved, was framed in the light of a lamp.
“Archie?” she said. “Tim?” She remained at a distance, stand-
ing with one leg crossed over the other. “Only I was wondering
something. When you said I had the look of an actress, was it one
in particular you had in mind? Only I was wondering that.”
“You’ve got a look to beat them all,” he had said.
Outside, she took the condoms from the bag she’d been given
and threw the brown paper into the rubbish. Tim Garvey would
be on the road again now. The condoms were of no use at all.
When she reached the gown shop she would put them on the
counter for Bethany to see, perhaps afterward she would take
them home for her mother to see also. But in the end they, too,
would be consigned to the rubbish.
In later years there would be fondness in the memory of
youth’s urgency, gratitude for a passion, however short-lived. For now, though, as she walked about Glass, there was nothing of
that, only bitter, premature resignation. Beneath the awning of
Hyde Pantry, Debra sat smoking; at the Gem, the marquee’s red
letters announced the film he had spoken of going to see. The
vision in which she was married to Harold, having first visited her in the night, seemed more plausible now than finer things ever
had. What was easy for others was not easy for her. She moved
in a medium denser than air. Bethany would be at the wedding,
a bridesmaid; she would say that a girl could do worse. Mrs. L,
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present also, would remark on the gown while Abigail’s mother
complained of the heat; and down the aisle her father would
shamble, distracted even as he gave her away.
Harold’s ambition would come to nothing, of course, and
she envisioned the charade of tender disappointment with which
they would meet its failure together. He would be good to her,
surely, but hopelessly dull, and she would have to try her best to be good in return. She would not hold against him what he never
was and could not be, or the natural impermanence of a sum-
mer’s romance. She would not speak the name of Archibald Gates
or give voice to the dreams in which he remained. There would
be between them no cruelty after today’s, but the memory of it
would surely persist. Regret about that would come later, too, on
nights when, lifting her head in the dark, she would find that he’d gone out walking again. “Couldn’t sleep,” he might say, returning
later to bed, and unspeaking she would move herself near, allow
the chill of her body to say what was true: that she had, until
only moments ago, stood at the window gazing privately out; that
while no love had welled in her chest as, at last, his distant figure appeared, it had made nonetheless a welcome sight in approach:
slow-moving, blue against the black, rutted road, and beyond it
the moon a broken dish on the sea.
What Is Meant to Remain
z z z
On the morning of Alma’s examination and clean-
ing, Kenneth Rivers woke early, restless and tired,
aware that he owed her an RSVP. He didn’t linger
in bed; he showered and dressed, not allowing himself to take extra care. There was to be, in some weeks, an anniversary party, given
at her home overlooking the bluffs. Cocktails, hors d’oeuvres, a
view of the sea. Again, he thought about it with dread, making
toast for his breakfast, lacing his shoes. Outside, morning was
slow to emerge, a dense fog laying itself over Glass. Sleepily, the village was stirring; seabirds, unseen, called to each other. He had long ago discarded the invitation, resentful of its presumption and
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pomp. The gaudiness of it: formal script on the address. Naturally, she’d used her married name, Alma Newhouse. He’d forgotten
the precise date of the party, though of course he remembered the
wedding itself, as well as the date of his own wedding to Alma and the date they had finalized the divorce.
She had secured the day’s first appointment, as she always did
and had done since he’d known her: the two years of courtship, ten years of marriage, and, now, seventeen of divorce. They’d agreed
to the split one night after dinner, speaking quietly, the television muted in their bedroom, mindful of their daughter sleeping just
down the hall. Neither had wept or cast blame on the other. It
was only they weren’t in love. Later, with the lights turned out in the room and uncertain if she was still awake or not, Kenneth had
said, “You’ll need a new dentist.” They were lying there together in the still, moony night, and Alma had taken some time to respond
before saying, unfeelingly, “I don’t see why.”
The office was in what had once been a house, semi-
detached with a pink-washed facade, a periodontist’s next door.
At the rear of the building were the office and surgery, gutted
and rebuilt in medical fashion, but the reception still resembled
a Victorian cottage: dark, exposed wood with wainscoted walls.
Thirty years he had worked in that space; every part of it held a
memory now.
Ruby arrived just after eight, lurching with exaggerated fatigue.
Kenneth was seated at the desk in his office, and she slumped
down in the chair opposite him, arms dangling at her sides like a
catatonic’s. She was the practice’s only hygienist; not yet thirty-five,
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already she’d been with him nearly a decade. Sometimes, passing
the surgery door, he’d hear her tell a client, “That’s enough out
of you!” She liked to flirt with him, always had, a habit that had made him uneasy at first but that now had become a familiar comfort. He knew she never meant anything by it. She was married
to a doctor at Mercy, handsome, easy mannered, a man Kenneth
liked. Ruby was the same way with him. My Swede-heart, she
called him, for his height and blond hair. Ruby’s own parents were both from Raipur.
Kenneth asked how her weekend had been.
“Short,” she said. “You’re bleeding me dry. I told Luke it’s high
time he got me with child, that’s how bad I need a day off. Kenny, I’m telling you, I’m considering bringing a life into this cruel
world just to get the maternity leave.”
She swiveled back and forth in the chair.
“You get holiday.” He held up his hands. “Take a day off, Rube.
Take a week if you want.”
“I always feel so bad for the temps. They don’t know what
they’re walking into: the old biddies of Glass, the absentminded
dentist. No, this job is my own cross to bear.” She winked. “A
strong cup of coffee would do.”
“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 th
at 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
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thing, in fact, had been absurd in its ease—amicable, friction-
less 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 wrist-
watch—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
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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
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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 con-
versation, 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
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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.
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“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?”
The 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.”
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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