Day off. 7.30 dentist appointment. A severe start to the Friday that is my Saturday, no less for the poor hygienist who’ll have to contend with the calcified evidence of my sins, none of which are original. Coffee. Red wine. Crow. Hat. The human stains. That is a hard job, for sure, dental hygienist. Who chooses such a punishing line? There are two who work in this office, one male, one female, and I shouldn’t play favourites, but I do kind of favour the woman over the man. Nothing to do with competence, they’re both excellent, but the man is silent, and in his silence I can’t help but read judgment, and the woman, whose tender ministrations I’ve experienced but once, has a sort of Scheherezade knack with narrative that I found reassuring, even lulling. I was nervous when we met because I was coming off a ten year stint of not seeing a dentist and my mouth was an encyclopaedia of neglect. She had many stories to tell about growing up on a horse ranch, about her family which was now far-flung, about movies she’d seen before the Pandemic, about what she was looking forward to doing once the all-clear had been sounded. At a given point, after she’d taken yet another scraping tool — expertly choosing one from among the many before her, each one designed for a particular purpose, each one engineered by someone who’d really thought long and hard about oral crevices their amelioration, each one with a patent registered in some well-guarded office, probably in Germany — I did what I do best and apologized for all the hard labour I was causing her. She was nonchalant. She said, “Oh, no worries. I just love what I do. I do it on my days off. I volunteer at clinic on the downtown eastside. My favourite patients are the new immigrants, you know, the ones who have had a really hard time before coming here, the ones whose mouths are a real mess, who maybe smoke a pack a day, and have never flossed and so on. I just love getting in there and fixing things up. I mean, these are people who maybe haven’t seen a dentist ever in their lives. Ten years is nothing. Open wide.” It’s good to know that the person wielding the pick they could easily jab through the soft flesh of the upper palate and into your brain is a kind of saint.
Of course, one of the reasons I didn’t see a dentist for so long was because I was between gigs and didn’t have The Plan. Now, I do. Some of my colleagues are Plan Experts, know exactly what they can get and make sure to avail themselves of every single advantage over the course of a given year. I’m sure there are some with 20/20 vision who get themselves a new pair of glasses every June, just on principal. I have a sensible aversion to massage — the goopy music, the oils, the table with the hole for your face, the towel placed just so, the strong caresses of a stranger — and I wish I could deed to someone else the half dozen sessions, or however many, Manulife allots me. But no. These things are strictly regulated. It’s a bit creepy, really, the way your personal information is gathered up and stored and possibly examined by some data entry clerk who may or may not be inclined to pull back the towel placed just so. Best not to dwell on this. I shall go to the dentist — she was very welcoming when I came back after my long hiatus, and it made me wonder about why we never hear about the mother of the prodigal son, the one who was presumably charged with cooking up the fatted calf — and I shall wonder, as I always do, about why those offices smell that way, what is it, what chemical agent gives those offices their particular carbolic scent, and I shall think about Proust, will remind myself that I must order up that book Lydia Davis translated a few years back, the slim volume — so rare for Proust — that collects his letters to the wife of the dentist who was his neighbour and to whom he complained about noise.
One hundred years since the birth of Mavis Gallant (MG) who was one hundred days alive when Marcel died one hundred years ago. 1922. That would have been an exciting time to be an Earthling, though I expect dental care has come a long way in the interim.
I keep finding MG oddments in unexpected places. If you’ve got twenty minutes, I really recommend you watch this video, which is a reading MG gave at the Village Voice Bookshop in Paris in 2009. It’s the source of the image at the top of this entry. I wonder if this might have been her last public reading. She would have been 86 at this point, in quite frail health, but as you’ll see her presentation is lively, her mind engaged. That must be Jhumpa Lahiri, seated at her left; she was the one who conducted the Q & A at the end, and it was she who interviewed MG for Granta, which is the source of the video. She reads her short story “In Transit,” which is a companion piece to the novel Green Water, Green Sky, and then a few pages from her one and only play, What is to be Done?
She says something cryptic about the television production business on the cover — she’s blacked it out on her copy. It’s a wonderfully comic passage about an exchange of letters between a young couple who have been separated by the Second World War, and it presents an interesting, if grim, parallel to a passage from the short story Virus X which I quoted in the Canada Day entry. It has to do with how Canadian soldiers killed German prisoners or combatants. Sharp objects are involved, and I perhaps shouldn’t have watched this in the hours before going to the dentist.
It was 20 years ago this month, July 2012, that the Village Voice Bookshop in Paris — it was one of MG’s favourite haunts — shuttered operations. It was the site of many readings over the years; it was Michael Ondaatje who gave the last one. Here’s a fond tribute to the shop in The New Yorker by the Italian journalist Livia Manera Sambuy, whose 2015 reading at the American Library in Paris I also recommend. The first half has to do with Philip Roth; MG enters the picture, briefly at 38.38.
(I may have linked to this before, but this, also by Livia Manera Sambuy, is an excellent piece on MG from the Paris Review. MG talks about men…)
While I’m at it, here, also in a library setting, also in Paris, and from this year, is Fran Leibowitz with a somewhat hapless interviewer; she speaks about her fondness for MG at the 8.40 mark. Nice boots, Fran!
Back in library school, we learned about SDI, the Selective Dissemination of Information, the gathering for a client of intelligence in a particular subject area. I think that what I’ve provided for you today fits that category, and I hope it does you some good. And now I’m gone, off to find out how I’ve made out in the hygienist lottery. When you read this I’ll be lying prone, worrying that the television suspended above the chair (why?) will come unbolted. Think me, slack jawed, fretful, holding onto the gizmo that suctions out the spit. What a pretty picture. The clouds are either dispersing or gathering. It will rain or it won’t. Who cares? I’ll have my refurbished smile to be my umbrella. No time to read this through, errors must stand. Oh, well. Thanks for reading, xo, B
speaking of errors, the story In Transit is connected to A Fairly Good Time, not Green Sky, Green Water. This I realized en route to the dentist where now I wait…
How I loved hearing MG read and at 86 still a strong voice and presence. But what unfortunate placing of the video cam with a railing or ? hiding her face, although MG might actually have loved it: her face half-seen, half unseen.
“What do I mean to you?” What a line - full of meaning and longing and existential questioning. Nail on the head. Spot on. All the other cliches to say that MG once again goes straight to the heart of the matter. What do any of us mean to anyone - unless you have a dog and then it’s obvious: love.