Other People's Love Affairs

by D. Wystan Owen

  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 expo-

  sure remained. Among other things, he’d been unprofessional

  with her.

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  “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.

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  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

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  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 gram-

  mar 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

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  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 debu-

  tante, 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, unset-

  tling 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 recog-

  nized 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, smil-

  ing, a kindness that made him look briefly away.

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  At length, she said, softly, “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

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  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.

  At Douglass, Mel was crossing the street, and Kenneth quick-

  ened his own pace to catch up.

  “Mel,” he said. “Do you walk home every day?”

  The periodontist had his hands in his pockets, his head tipped

  back and bathed in the light. With his long hair and round eye-

  glasses, he was plainly himself: an old burnout made perfectly

  good.

  “Often,” he said. “When the weather permits. It’s good for

  you, Kenny.”

  “It’s a beautiful day.”

  “I’m of quite the same opinion,” Mel said. “Speaking in my

  capacity as a doctor, of course.”

  An old joke.

  They walked together some blocks. Kenneth said, “I was think-

  ing today. About the dinners we used to have in the office.”

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  Mel looked up without recognition.

  “You remember. Alma would show up with dinner and three

  bottles of wine, and we would sit around in the examination chairs or up on the counters. We just couldn’t get over owning the place.”

  “Are you sure I was there for that?”

  “Of course. I’m certain. You used to use my scalers as forks and

  tease Alma with the mirrors, like you were looking up her skirt.”

  Mel laughed. “I admit, that sounds like something I’d have

  done.”

  It was strange that he shouldn’t remember. In Kenneth’s mind

  it seemed there had been countless such dinners, but perhaps there had only been two or three. It happened that way with memory

  now; time warped, the same as it had with Miranda, the same as

  it had with the years of his marriage.

  “I was doing a lot of nitrous in those days,” Mel said, still

  chuckling. “But I know we had fun.”

  They parted ways, and Kenneth walked on. Gulls passed over-

  head; something larger, a swan. In gardens along the road, honey-

  bees gathered, humming in bushes of rosemary, bluebeard. Across

  Birch the old vagrant, Whitaker, passed. One man jump-started

  another man’s car. A pair of boys kicked a ball against a battered garage door. A woman walked an old and timorous dog.

  In their respective homes, Alma and Ruby would be prepar-

  ing to sit down with their husbands to dinner. Miranda would

  perhaps already have finished hers. He would eat his meal alone

  at his crafts table, surrounded by his models, as he did every

  night, a practice that, by now, could only be counted among the

  choices he’d made. At the anniversary party he would be the one

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  hovering at the edges of other people’s lives, unconnected but by

  the diminishing pull of memories either shared or disputed. What

  he had been offered was a place on the periphery, a chance to play at something that was not quite his: like a plain, unmarried girl

  asked to hold the train of her younger sister’s wedding gown, or

  an infirm boy sent onto the field with a bandage or water for the

  winger to drink. The thought of such a role had always saddened

  him, but as he turned for home it seemed that perhaps it would

  be enough, that he might manage eventually to supplement his

  solitary pleasures with new vicarious and borrowed ones, as he

  had come through the years to enjoy hearing stories of his patients’

  successes and good fortune, to take them, in small measure, for

  his own.

  A Bit of Fun

  z z z

  From the main road, heading west with the sun,

  slowly, Gerald Malden withdrew. Beyond him, a

  narrow country lane twisted south, descending as it

  drew nearer the coast. It was a long way for an afternoon’s enter-

  tainment—two hours’ drive in either direction—but the mid-

  August weather was fine and in the end he couldn’t see any harm.

  There was a cinema called the Princess he fancied a look at, an

  old fashioned one he knew was still there. He knew because he

  had looked it up on the web. The facade had been painted, the

  marquee restored. He remembered the titles of movies displayed:

  Date with Disaster, The Imperfect Crime.

  A Bit of Fun

  113

  The buildings were brick and cob, near to the road; on one an

  ad was painted over the whitewash—Fulton’s Sweet Cream—let-

  ters chipping away. He recognized everything, the advertisement,

  too. He recognized the trees, chestnut and birch, and the soft,

 
verdant weeds that followed a rain.

  Seeing the photographs on the web, he’d been gripped at

  once with the need to return. It surprised him, rather: the inten-

  sity of it. Nearly sixty years it had been. Tickets had cost half

  a crown in those days. A sixpence for crisps, and soft drink

  as well.

  There would be plenty of time to see a picture, he thought. It

  was midafternoon; he had nowhere to be. Peter had rung Sunday

  morning again, a routine that seemed subtly to forbid further con-

  tact. Leslie’s youngest had been down with the croup but was bet-

  ter now. They had their own lives.

  “My husband isn’t any good to me, Gerald.”

  The words, spoken in a whisper, returned. In his small car,

  nearing the theater, they did. A summer night when she said

  them, with autumn approaching.

  He had been working for his father’s delivery firm, driving an

  ancient Morris Z into town, fruit for the greengrocer, cloth for the gown shop, sometimes even whiskey brought to the pub. Sixteen,

  he would spend his summer that way. “You’ll know a day’s work

  by autumn,” his father had said.

  He let the window down, turning the knob, taking in the salt

  dampness of air from the sea. He and Elsie had sometimes vis-

  ited Glass, even after his mother and father were gone. With the

  children they’d picnicked overlooking the pier; at the adventure

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  playground Peter had got a splinter and cried. Already then, the

  flower shop had become a café.

  The Princess wasn’t really in Glass. There was a different picture house there, called the Gem. The Princess was some miles away

  in a repurposed barn beside the Payne Road. A novelty now in its

  resurrection, it had once been a gathering place for the residents of smaller villages and farms in the days when Glass was considered

  too far. They’d arrived on bicycles, on foot, or in cars. Beneath the marquee, they’d stood and chatted or smoked, men and women

  who had saved for an evening of pleasure. You wore a suit to the

  pictures back then; ladies wore dresses, false jewels in their hair.

  All of this Malden recalled, and his own suit: heavy tweed too

  warm for the season. “Handsome,” Mrs. Trilby had said.

  You couldn’t miss the cinema, so alien on the hillside. With its

  new paint it was almost the same. The marquee was said to come

  from a Hollywood theater, art deco, not matching the plain stone