Uncle, break up the party. Once upon a time I would have let you get away with it, but now it is just too late for any of this. Gnashing of teeth will get you nowhere but it will cost you later. Would you like me to describe myself now that you have lost your sight? It would be my pleasure, I love this sort of thing.
So, here I go: wallflower, pretty tall, about five six. When I grow up I'll be a whopper. Freckles everywhere, running all over my face and shoulders. There are teeth in my mouth and they seem still to be growing, down, pearly white. My skin is starting to wear out, paper-thin, easily wounded. Against all the odds I keep on.
Will you tell me about yourself? I'm a good sort in the morning, a witch by the middle of the day, a hard-working beast all night. Started out a foundling. They lost the way and I had to imagine my path. And I did. Turning the form around on its head, turning on the edge of a knife. Everything is related, so why not acknowledge it right at the start. The great excitement happened yesterday when the postcard finally arrived. That photograph of the horse: I knew him in a prior life. Loved him, once, for his own qualities.
Every idea a new idea, but now you've got to get thinking and make your own abstractions. The woman talks on and on, deliberately, but she is not deliberate in her gender blindness. She forgot that there was a single other woman in the world. She surely was enough. Deliberate about space, but not about travel. A traveller across inspiration and discipline; her own disciple. Writing as a meditation on life. Tomorrow. Dentistry. Cake-eating.
ÒHoo boy, I had a feeling you were going to be difficult,Ó he said, talking all the more slowly. He - twenty-seven, tall, someone who always looked as though he had recently lost weight (people commented), not exactly beautiful, but with a particular gap-toothed appeal he liked to think of as Chaucerian, aquiline nose, wistfully uneven eyebrows, a fleck of green in his blue eyes (this was something his male and female patients always noticed, but they couldnÕt see the gap in the teeth, the fine nose), a dentist who liked to leave work at work, or so he said, and unlike his medical colleagues he was unlikely to be bailed up with symptoms at a party (more possible at the gym, but no one knew him) - couldnÕt stand the talkers, delighted in making them help him out by holding the instruments hard against the tongue, made a point of saying this wonÕt take long, perhaps an unpleasant man, probably unpleasant (ask his ex-wife, whose teeth are now green, such was the extent of her anger with Everything He Stood For), certainly unpleasant you think, as you hold the icecream stick against your tongue, which in this situation does feel uncontrollable, is wriggling from side to side despite your conscious effort, and you imagine him blinded, the mask pulled up and over his eyes, your mouth clogged with instruments, and youÕd be the two wise monkeys, no, the two idiot pigs, you for choosing this dentist (too young, too arrogant), him, well, itÕs obvious why heÕs in the category, and the lightÕs shining in your eyes, and heÕs talking about anaesthetic top-ups, and youÕre thinking about a friend of the family who wanted to write, who wrote you a picture postcard from Cairo, the home of dentistry. People are trying to remember when they first read Shakespeare, what it was like at school. Some of them secretly pissed off, right off, that their pet hate is now the big fad. That those wankers with good memories, with all of those rote skills, can now look all smootchy in public as they recite that sonnet, number 106 as I recall, that they had learned way back when during the voice training, for a while the preferred career path. You recall the little worm, even then, reciting it at a party to his girlfriend and everyone showing their appreciation and respect, a private moment for fifty bedraggled and perplexed arts students, filmmakers, hippies. No wonder she went over to the other side, found a girlfriend of her own. Of course, he followed; too lonely there by himself, obliged to declare at some stage Ñwell, yes, I think IÕm that way too. What do you think? Mister predictable. All I wanted was to listen to that pumping song again, who was it? I think it was Blondie but I could be wrong.
Wasted on the dentistry gas in the back yard, the cylinder supplied by the medical students, I did a dance behind the outhouse. All by myself. My preferred arrangement. Years later at parties, IÕm the youngest and unable to hide or dance alone. Back to this drip reciting sonnets. Reminiscence is the name of the game tonight. The woman from Piedmont, beautiful still, tells me about coming to Perth at sixteen and falling in love with a man on the spot. She thought she was coming down with a fever but it was love. CouldnÕt even walk: the love cut off her legs at the knees. This was in 1951. She still loves her man.
He too, the dentist, is recollecting nitrous. HeÕs twenty again, squatting in a warehouse in Newtown which will soon be serviced apartments. HeÕs thinking about dentistry: should he enrolÑwould it be just too responsible? He sucks on the soda siphon and laughs. ÒDentistry,Ó he says to Carol, as she inhales.
ÒJesus Christ,Ó she splutters. ÒYouÕre going to fucking kill me.Ó
He loved all the hippies, but once he started the course, they abandoned him, despite him filling his parties with nitrous cylinders and the best northern English dance music. (ÒHate that London shit.Ó) He was wrong about his friends, about his life, about his good-looker appeal. Nothing overcame dentistry.
ÒSuction, please,Ó he says to his assistant, then: ÒIÕm going to ask you to be really still just for a few more moments. IÕll just be few more minutes.Ó
She makes an assenting noise. You can keep them quiet, but you canÕt tell what theyÕre thinking; the way they look up at you, expressionless, as you lever out a molar, or whatÕs left of it. This oneÑthe woman, not the toothÑseems to be a thinker, always careful with opinions during the small talk.
Looks vaguely familiar, but who can tell?
ÒThis is a little deeper than IÕd initially thought,Ó he says, Òso IÕm going to strengthen the anaesthesia. IÕd like you to close your eyes and try to relax.Ó
SheÕs feeling okay, but then he starts: ÒHow many thousand of my poorest subjects
Are at this hour asleep! O sleep! O gentle sleep! NatureÕs soft nurse, how have I frighted thee, That thou no more wilt weigh my eyelids down And steep my senses in forgetfulness?Ó
ÒJesus Christ,Ó she tries to say, forgetting, as the blues and pinks, fathoms down into the dental lamp, begin to whirl.
I'll take you anywhere you want to go. On a nostalgia trip this week, a return to sites of pleasure. Hell, that's all I do, hang around and find pleasure. Embedded. Going back to music that made me what I am; some of the influential streams that have stayed with me even when I haven't kept listening. Looking through my dinosaur collection of long playing vinyl, I realise that nearly any one of them can be recalled, played out in my head, with more clarity than back then. Says something about this brilliant adventure of a life. Half of the Go-Betweens in a smoky crowded bar, just the boys. With two guitars and two voices they cook up a storm of remembering, and some longing. And so I'm now back to those old songs of yearning, and identifying with their small-city experience of writing a picture of home.
He was brought up in a house of women
In a city of heat that gave its children
Faith in the fable of coral and fish,
Told them the world was something to miss.
Behind me the two men have a conversation about boats, buying and selling, racing and the club, and they are so close their breath drops down onto my head. It isn't offensive, but it is surprisingly intimate. Perth is a city that sanctions sailing; its incongruity: this music, that sporting class-ridden pursuit, is maybe only in my head. This was the home of the America's Cup.
At the Billy Bragg concert another night this week the ghosts of my past came crashing in: one, a man I once tried to fuck in a car, in the front seat, parked outside his parent's house in the cold light of dawn. You can tell he now wishes he'd tried harder back then.
Sometimes dentistry makes him want to cry; his eyes fill. He thinks of his former friends whirling, spinning, remembering, and is overcome with remorse because he need not remember, he need only look up to see what others must recall in their minds. He could cry in his surgery as the CD slides in and plays the tunes he listened to, and he has never listened to anything else. His life is a life of dental modalities. He has befriended other dentists. He is the most morose of all his acquaintances and bloody well knows it. Patients file past, and he is as if on autopilot, as if travelling through the air at speed, the days a blur, every molar like every other, impaction after impaction, all the tiny haemorrhages of unhealthy gums, and always he winds up thinking of regrets, this woman in the chair who does not recognise him, that the skills to which he has devoted his life - spent his life practising, rather, he corrects himself bitterly - that these are the skills his patients take to be mechanical, skills any dentist should possess, and for once he decides to be the one to move, and he tells his patient she is to be his last patient, and that he will give it all up although he has nothing to go to, no way to take his life "forward", no momentum but that provided by his knowledge of the history of dental anaesthesia (nitrous: Humphrey Davey, 1799; common in clinical practice by the late 1840s...) and he offers, "rinse?" for the last time, and she spits out, wisp of saliva which will not drop from her lip enclosing traces of blood, and she says, "Thank you, dentist" with respect for what he had been. He is crying.
And I am in denial. The teeth are on the verge of falling out. That is how it feels, anyway. I cannot deal with the emotional range that seems to be required to make an appointment, so nightly I dream of the teeth in a life of their own. By the way, I also dream of football. Footballers and their bodies, whacking each other by accident, taking an elbow-full of pearly white teeth to the turf. The blood follows, the crowd roars. At home, on the television, his mother recalls what had been sacrificed to get those lovely milky teeth straightened. The years of bus trips to the orthodontist in Saint George's Terrace. The expense, the resentments of the other children to the special attention to Tommy's mouth, the little rubber bands he was supposed to clasp to the contraption of his mouth and that ended up all over the house.
Last night I went to a nightclub in a five-star hotel, deliberately modelled on a shiny silver disco of another age. It included in the back of the back bar a big silver bed with console lights and the rest of the gear. I was tempted: a love-in might have been fun, but there was noone to fuck anyway. Three big fish tanks, well appointed; no easy escapes. Proponents of noise, Merzbow, from Japan. It was loud but not that loud. Everybody fixated by claims of 'the loudest' wore the earplugs offered at the door. The earplugs our focus. It was ghastly, this desire to talk about what wasn't important. So loud that people gestured, to their ears, to the spare sets in their hands. My earplugs were in, but after a while I figured it'd be better with the real noise instead of the muted noise. It was.
She leaves the surgery. The former dentist waits till he can no longer hear her, then finds a large screwdriver that he once used to frighten an old schoolfriend. He pulls open the frosted glass door and looks along the route she and the thousands before her have taken to leave him, some numb, some aching, some supremely satisfied with their oral hygiene practices. Fluorescents reflect on the green vinyl floor. He pulls the door behind him and with the screwdriver levers his name plaque from the wall. Further along the hallway is a thigh-high cylindrical wastepaper bin, with an ashtray set into its top. The former dentist fits the nameplate through a swinging opening in the side of the bin. Now what? He continues down the hall and steps through the mesh-metal-reinforced doors into the street. Colder than expected, or he is underdressed. He enters a convenience store and purchases a packet of individually sealed chocolate biscuits. He unwraps one and takes a bite. Stale. Opens another. "Munted". Half size.
Dear Sir or Madam, I recently purchased a packet of your individually wrapped chocolate biscuits. In the past I have always found this brand more than adequate, but on this occasion I am disappointed to report that not only were the biscuits less than fresh, one was less than one-third the size pictured on the wrapping. I would be grateful if you would forward not only a refund, but a full explanation of the defect's causes.
Yours faithfully.
He turns "on his heel" and goes back up to the surgery, allowing himself a satisfied nod at the oblong scar where the nameplate had been. On top of the out-tray he sees her dental records. He folds them lengthwise, and puts them in his trouser pocket. On the radio years ago he recalls hearing a long, detailed and utterly compelling narrative of a woman who had been seduced by her psychiatrist. It was about seduction and abandonment and the ethics of the medical profession. The program was "Background Briefing" and they clearly imagined they had a winner here, because I heard it repeated at least three times. Once, it must have been the second time, I was late for a chamber concert because I couldn't move out of my car in the car park. I couldn't move away from her voice. She had become a psychologist herself in an effort to work against her bad experience of exploitation or ethics in progress, whatever it was. But you see, now I'm in detached mode. I walked out of the surgery today and I did not know where to take myself or what to do. He didn't remember me, not once, not ever. And it was his responsibility to do the remembering, I'm quite clear about that. I'm spiralling down with this burden of being overlooked. He didn't acknowledge me, he didn't acknowledge me, and he should have. What about when I was sprawled out there in his chair with the dribble, more than likely, judging by the wet spot on my bosom, sliding down my face, didn't he then think, yes, she is the one.
Do you know what I did when I left his rooms? I went to the Town Hall Public Conveniences, I spent my twenty cents and I sat down and bawled for over an hour. The cooing sounds of the attendants and the others there to pee or brush their hair did nothing at all to discourage me. I sat there and cried, and then a Salvation Army lady came in and tried to talk me through my grief. I stood up and left and walked around and around the central city area, I bought a doughnut, an Arthur Hailey book at a second-hand bookshop, and I looked, through still streaming eyes, at the latest models of Mont Blanc pens at the old tobacconist. Then I walked home.
Sorry to ring you like this, out of the blue yet so soon after seeing you, me a professional, you a patient; me uninteresting and you indifferent or puzzled; me with developed and practised fine motor skills; you with a world view and a natural sense of context, me suddenly unfixed, you with a busy schedule of which dentistry was probably the least desirable entry; me desperate for explanation, full of misunderstandings about my life and knowing no one to ask, you having moved on to your next appointment, gladly putting dentistry out of your mind and thinking forward into the future; me for whom the future will be your response to my telephone call, indecision as I walk up and down past my former place of work, scepticism as I test my motives for telephoning you and an uncomfortable night, too afraid to return home, you for whom the past could be divided into the epochs between fillings, the intrusion of dental discourses on your imposed silences, the dread of keeping appointments with professionals of all persuasions and a whole smile-inducing life hidden from medical and paramedical practitioners, lawyers, bankers and accountants.
Sorry, I can't justify the call. I have left dentistry, and the decision came to me as you sat there, a standard patient undergoing a standard procedure. I'm sorry also that this detour from the ordinary was not a lottery win. I don't understand what I have done. I don't understand your role in it, but am determined you have had one. I distrust my psychiatrist's methods, yet she somehow calms me and therefore I continue to see her, to argue about nothing. Thank you for listening to this. I'm sorry to have rung you. I guess it would be improper to ask to meet you?
Out of the corner of my eye I saw it. Floating. This is what happens when you look at an angle that is odd. Now I feel dizzy, nauseous perhaps. It's all my mother's fault for mollycoddling me all of those years. She hasn't yet let up; I haven't yet started to separate, no, what is the correct term for this? I've read my psychoanalytic theory over the years so why can't I remember the right term? There's a block there, but now I am digressing.
And what happens when desire takes over as the powerful force that it is, that it can be. I drew the pig in the email exercise in pop psychology and I drew it without a tail. That means, according to the author of the chain letter, that I don't have a sex life. So? Whose business is that other than my own? I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. When people step over the boundaries of what is allowed, and what is reasonable, when they ask, in an inappropriate manner to meet me for a drink or a torrid session of sexual congress, what am I to do? What am I to do when it is me who posits the question? I've never known who to ask for advice on matters like these, matters of the heart, of ethics.
One day I will see myself as comforting; one day as heartful. With circumstances that make me scared, secretly, childishly confident which, generally speaking, isn't saying much. You are reduced in my eyes when I imagine you dancing.
I am full of judgement; rich and strange and I care not to arbitrate on anyone else's behalf. I drive my Rambler Rebel sedan straight through the city in the middle of the day intending always to be seen.
"Sorry I'm late," said the dentist cheerily.
She just looked at him. Perhaps she was conscious not to show her teeth.
"I wondered if that was your car, because I noticed it in the carpark at that unmentionable place I used to work, and wondered whose it was then, and now I know."
He smiled, and she changed expression, but he couldn't say from what to what.
"I'm really glad you came," he said. He imagined she was looking at him. "I feel like I've been away for years, even though I hardly know you, and I guess neither of us is used to speaking to the other. I'd like to say I missed you, while I was away that is, but that wouldn't be the feeling, and I spose I haven't been away. What do you think."
He imagined she replied: "I'm not going to help you, you know. I haven't met you out of charity."
"What, then?"
"Curiosity. What did you think you'd say to me? Have you worked that part out? Are you planning to try to seduce me? Have you worked that part out?"
"Are you angry with me for this?"
He couldn't imagine any answers beyond yes or no. (Later he thought "junk mail", use of address and phone number for purposes other than those for which they'd been solicited. He couldn't imagine why she had met him.)
"Do you like dancing?" he asked. "You strike me as someone who might enjoy dancing."
He imagined a nod.
"Forget about the bloody dentistry, for fuck's sake!" he shouted. "I'm not a dentist. I didn't mean to be one. I hate the idea of teeth altogether. I won't be a dentist dancing, I won't be that. I'll be someone engulfed in music, someone impossible to look at."
Do you want to dance? In the wide open cavernous space of memory where every single dance floor is held, in abeyance, to make up that entire picture of the body moving not through utility but out of pleasure, is where I am trapped. A nostalgic entrapment, self imposed. Because every swaying movement, every fancy step and funny tic of response to music and being watched, stands in for something else and all of that something else sadly is sex, sexual pleasure, frustrations, whatever you might like to call them, these substitutions. In the seedy bar a woman is dancing alone, not on the designated dance floor but alongside her funny spaceship looking table where she plonked her Pina Colada (an old-fashioned girl, this one). A man joins her and it's the wrong thing. He's a loser and she was making a spectacle for herself, not for some potential coupling in the heat of the moment later in a hotel room that smells like dead people once relaxed in, took off their shoes and had a bath, but to show herself and any audience from afar that she can still cut it. This one looks goofy: his teeth were once immaculately cared for by an orthodontist and they are his proudest feature, certainly his mother's, but somehow his face has shrunk and there are all of these teeth and not enough else going on. If he grew his hair, stopped being ridiculously fashionable, it might restore a balance that is vital for basic good looks. Oh hell, this is all so difficult, this idea that looks are important. They are, and yet whyforeartthou my prince, my pauper, I'm going nuts and here is this guy leering at me and doing a dance I laughed at back in 1979. This is 1999 and I'm trying to party. I wanna whack him and walk away. Why am I trapped here, not looking at him but aware of his presence, playing up somehow to my horrible predicament, unable to step off the dance floor because I'm not on it.
"I love this music," thinks the former dentist, "because it reminds me how easy it would be to kill myself."
He smiles at his former patient, who does not bother to smile back.
"Mistake," thinks the dentist, "coming here, thinking there was meaning with this person who's giving me 'dentist' stares all the time."
"Excuse me," says the dentist. "I'll be right back."
She looks at him, meaning "okay".
He goes into the gents and throws a couple of painkillers into his mouth.
He goes out to the bar and orders a triple bourbon - who cares what kind? -and pours that down too. Burns the throat beautifully, and he pictures his father approving, "Better than sandpaper," and a big wink for the fourteen
year old son: "Have some!" and the boy dentist coughing half up again.
He orders another drink, and a glass of water. Sips the water and tastes the bourbon in his nose. Yeah, he thinks, that's rough. He catches sight of himself in the mirror behind the narrow bar area. For some reason, his reflection is grinning. He ought to get some pliers and smash a couple of those fucking dentist's teeth up. He glances across to where she's sitting, now tapping both feet against the stool's footrail.
She's cute, he supposes.
I'm drunk, he thinks. So what?
She's sipping her milkshake.
Or "milk plus", perhaps. Would he describe her self-assurance as "fascist"?
Don't know.
Ah, stuff it, he decides. He knocks back the last millilitre of bourbon, drains the water glass. Breathes out through his nose by habit. He walks towards her, noticing his unsteadiness.
She looks up, and her face registers that she knows he's changed.
"If you despise me so much," he asks as evenly as he can, "what are you doing here?"