Free The Strangers' Gallery by Paul Bowdring Page B

must.
    No doubt some would cast their vote for other orifices. The vagina, for example. What is more important than conception and birth? (What is the suicide rate for obstetricians? I wonder.) The vagina, of course, is no longer necessary for either. We have long had the Caesarean, and now egg and sperm can meet in Dr. Petri’s
dish
.

    â€œI knew the Dutch were economical, but this is a bit much,” Dr. Wins said to me when I came back for my checkup at two o’clock. He was chuckling to himself as he checked his instruments.
    Anton was really going to go through with it, to watch for it among his stools, as he put it. A lonely vigil, if ever there was one. Gold crowns were indeed reusable, Dr. Wins said, but in his twenty-five years of dental practice he had never come across this kind of recycling effort. He had, however, agreed to wait, and had fitted Anton’s tooth with a temporary cap.
    I apologized for the long gap between appointments, expressed surprise that it had been four years. He responded by explaining how four years can telescope into one, why time seems to go much faster as we get older. He didn’t look any older, but a few things had changed in those four years. Caution was now in the air, and his cheerful, boyish face looked a little more sombre. He was putting on rubber gloves and a mask.
    â€œIt’s simple arithmetic,” he said, clipping on my bib and adjusting the harsh examining light. “A year is 20 percent of a five-year-old’s life—even a summer seems to go on forever—but it’s only 2 percent of a fifty-year-old’s. It’s all relative, if you see what I mean.”
    â€œAbsolutely,” I said, finding a choice place for the irritating intensifier of choice these days, and surprising us both with my little joke. The tone of our conversations has always been earnest and straightforward, but the hilarity of Anton’s request seemed to have lightened us up.
    Actually, I’m not so sure that I do, I was about to say, but he was inside my mouth with the mirror and the explorer and I didn’t have time to revise my views. He is still in the habit of naming these instruments as he uses them, as if we are all children who need reassurance, have to be told what he is doing at every step. He always names the tooth he is working on, too. He once gave me the thirty-two-stop grand tour, including the eye teeth, the wisdom teeth, and a long stop for a stern little lecture at my very own sweet tooth. One feels very childlike in his big-handed, fatherly grasp, though no doubt this is something he’s hardly aware of. He has a dental assistant but still prefers to do all of what he calls “the mouth work” himself.
    Dr. Winston Giovannetti was of Italian and Newfoundland-Irish parentage, one of “the Placentia Bay Giovannettis,” as he liked to say when anyone inquired about his name, as if there were scores of Giovannettis around Placentia Bay, and in all the other bays, as if there’d been a wave of nineteenth-century Italian immigration to match the Irish one. But there
were
scores of soccer players, if not Giovannettis, in Placentia Bay, and not only in the small Burin Peninsula town of St. Lawrence, where Winston grew up, but in small towns all around the peninsula, which is shaped like a boot, appropriately enough. This, Winston claimed—he was a star soccer player himself—could be attributed, in no small part, to “the Italian factor.”
    I had once heard him counter a more probing question about his ancestry with the rhetorical riposte: “Correct me if I’m wrong; but didn’t an Italian discover this place?” Winston, however, had not been named after the discoverer of Newfoundland, Giovanni Caboto—Giovanni Giovannetti would have sounded a bit redundant, perhaps—but after Winston Churchill, who, in August 1941, a few years before Winston was born, had met with US president