Cavity

What’s the normal place to look when the dentist is working on you? You can focus past them, at the ceiling. You can look at the swingy light thing, but that could give you a migraine. You can close your eyes, but whose survival instinct is so weak it lets them close their eyes while someone footles around in their open mouth?

I ask because I try to get away with watching my dentist’s eyes for as much of the procedure as I can. They’re a shade of green I’ve never seen anywhere else, but what I like best is the attentive way they flick around, focused but easy, and easy to trust. I have my excuse lined up: that I’m watching my own reflection in his safety glasses; it helps to take me outside the moment and deal with the discomfort. But I’m never outside the moment. I’m looking through myself and into his eyes.

I’ve never needed the excuse. I suppose he doesn’t notice, with all that focus. I suppose he wouldn’t say anything if he did. And perhaps it’s normal after all. There aren’t that many places to look. But I don’t want to freak the man out.

The problem with being in love with your dentist is that you have to choose between only seeing them every six months and being a huge disappointment. And I say that to be glib, but it really is true. You know how when you love somebody your head wants to connect everything to them, so it can drive you crazy better? And you know how you’re supposed to brush your teeth twice a day? I bet you’ve tried to get over somebody before; I bet you’ve done an awful lot of carefully not thinking about them. Try it when you have to spend two solid minutes thinking about them, first thing in the morning and last thing before bed, or else all your teeth fall out. I am a fucking hero and I deserve a medal.

My dentist’s name is Mr Koterski (and I try to say the ‘Mr’ in a way that shows I know it reflects his status as a surgeon). He has been my dentist for four years, although his practice is a forty minute drive away. This, I know, sounds pathetic, but this one small part of my idiot behaviour is not down to my idiot heart: I am on the surgery’s NHS list, and I will be adding Koterski to my own name well before I can find an NHS dental spot closer to home. I wonder if partners get special rates on private treatment? A little whitening would not go amiss, although cosmetic treatments from one’s husband might have a sniff of the Pygmalion about them.

There is, as everyone knows, a very easy way to deal with my predicament. I can simply wait until after my six-month checkup and ask Mr Koterski if he would like to go for a drink sometime. I have absolutely no doubt it has happened to him before, and if he’s not interested then I do not have to see him for six months, by which time it will be easy for us both to pretend that it never happened. I have planned to do this for three straight visits. At the first, I chickened out in the thirty seconds between closing my mouth and returning to reception. At the second, he noted some flaws in my flossing, under which conditions my plan was impossible. At the third, we somehow got into a conversation about mouthwash and the next patient arrived, doubtless ready to ask him out as soon as his fingers were out of her mouth. But this time, I am flossed and brushed and have been using disclosing tablets for three months, and I will not fail again.

There is traffic, and I am smug about the time I have left to get through it just as I am smug about flossing. And with it I feel the same fear, the kind that is not felt as fear but as a kind of certainty: that I will need fillings anyway; that the traffic will get worse and worse until all my extra time has burned away and I am unavoidably, unlovably late.

So it proves. The ETA on the satnav slips away and away, past the time of my appointment, past any reasonable late arrival time, but there is nowhere to turn off until the turnoff for the dentist (I am surely now a turnoff for the dentist) so I keep going, arriving later than I think I have ever arrived for anything. I apologise seven times to the receptionist and she says she will call up to ask if anyone can still see me. After ten minutes (‘he is with someone else’) I am told that I can be squeezed in at the end of the day, though not told who by, and I am glad that I will at least not be dropped from the NHS list.

I go up ten minutes after the posted closing time and the man I love finds a cavity right at the back where, clearly, my toothbrush does not always reach. I am late and I have tooth decay and the red face I get when I am stressed. But also, he has stayed late to see me after closing, and I heard the receptionist say my name when she rang up. So when the nurse leaves the room I count to three in my head, and on three I ask him if he would like to go for a drink sometime. And he tells me I am his last patient, so how about right now?

We go to a pub a little way down the street and we stay there until closing time. We agree to meet again. Three weeks later he gives me the filling I need.

For six months, the world is suddenly a kind place, welcoming in a way it has never been. We don’t see each other often: we are both busy, and the drive does not help. But knowing that he is mine, and that I made it happen even though it was hard, makes everything else feel so much easier. I don’t count down the days until I see him anymore, though seeing him is much more fun now than it used to be. Our meetings are the like those few final brushstrokes by which a street-artist reveals the beauty and the order that were there all along. Like a disclosing tablet for everything that’s good in the world. So at the end of six months, when I sit in the waiting room and hear the receptionist call up and say ‘Mr Koterski, your wife’s on the phone’, I don’t mind it so much. I think to myself: isn’t falling for your dentist much more interesting than having an affair with your patient? I go upstairs for my checkup, and then I book in for the next in six months’ time. No way do I lose my NHS place over this.