5

The pain under the bridge on the top right-hand side of his mouth worsens and lengthens in duration but he keeps postponing seeing a dentist. Then, when he’s having an ice-cold beer on Thursday afternoon, the pain jabs like a bolt of electricity up from the bridge into his gum and up through his cheekbone, and threatens to blow open his right eye, and he cries with the pain. He rings Michelle and she recommends her dentist, Dr Megan Shibata.

He rings Dr Shibata’s receptionist and pleads for an emergency appointment on Friday morning. He takes some strong painkillers and is able to sleep until dawn, when the pain re-grips the whole right-hand side of his face and refuses to let him sleep.

His appointment is for 9 a.m. but he is in the clinic by 8.30, gripping a small pack of ice to the swollen right-hand side of his unshaven, ashen face.

‘I’ll see if Dr Shibata is in now,’ the nurse whispers after she settles him in to the dental chair and stretches it back until he is lying, head slightly raised, gazing up into the cream-colored ceiling.

‘What is wrong, sir?’ The nurse’s face comes into view above him: two glistening brown eyes above a white mask.

‘Got this awful pain!’ he says, pressing his fingers into the side of his face. ‘Up here.’ He opens his mouth and jabs his forefinger into the bridge. ‘Under the bridge.’ Hurry, hurry, hurry! he pleads to himself.

‘Professor Malaetau? I’m Megan Shibata’ The very American accent enuciates his name carefully. Her full face is in view, no mask yet – but because of his preoccupation with the pain, he doesn’t take note of her features.

‘This pain is bloody awful.’ He shows her the location of the pain.

On with her mask, and she says, ‘Now, let’s have a look. Open.’ She examines the area quickly. ‘We’ll have to take some X-rays …’

‘Just give me a shot of that stuff you use to numb a bloody sore tooth!’ He pauses. ‘Please. Anything!’

Dr Shibata talks to the nurse; he doesn’t understand what she is saying. ‘Okay, Professor, just open your mouth.’

God, he welcomes the needle as it slides – a thin slit of pain – down into his gum under the bridge and then up. Within seconds, the saving numbness starts closing round and squeezing the larger pain out of existence. Thank you, thank you, he wants to say to Dr Shibata. A short while later, as he runs his tongue over the area, he feels nothing there; no feeling whatsoever. Imagine your whole physical being and body numbed out of existence, out of all feeling, but your consciousness still knowing you’re alive and contemplating your being numbed out of existence. Imagine!

It is only then that he starts to see Dr Shibata and what is happening around him: the nurse with the soft hands taking X-rays – six of them, he counts – rushing out of the room every time; Dr Shibata returning after that, and standing behind him and discussing his X-rays with the nurse. Before he can ask, she brings the X-rays round and, raising the chair so he is sitting up, shows him each one.

‘See, the last tooth under the bridge has already had a root canal, so it can’t be that one. However, if you look at this one – the first tooth – see the roots? There doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with it though …’

‘So where’s the pain coming from?’

‘Probably the one with the roots still.’ She pauses. When he glances up at her, she is smiling. ‘I’m not much help, am I? Nerves have ways of sometimes sending us the wrong messages. But my guess is the tooth that still has roots.’

‘I thought this was all supposed to be scientific,’ he jokes.

‘Sometimes it’s all intuitive!’ she says. ‘You should know that. I mean you’re a professor of literature.We’ll take a few more X-rays of the suspect and see what he’s hiding.’

After the nurse takes the further X-rays, Dr Shibata examines his teeth one by one methodically, calling out things that the nurse notes down. ‘We’re just mapping your teeth, you can say,’ she tells him. ‘It’s your first time with us and we want a full record of your teeth.’

He wonders where the Shibata comes from; she doesn’t look Japanese at all. Perhaps the straight jet black hair, the high prominent cheekbones, the roundness of the face, the long trunk? Some Spanish or Polynesian or European mix – or all three in there somewhere? Such a fusion is typical of Hawai‘i. She is in her early forties. She has dark, heavy shoulders and hips. Her movements are measured and experienced and her hands knowing as they move over and in his mouth, and her blue-black eyes seem so focused on what she is doing she isn’t aware he is scrutinising her. He starts noticing that though she is keeping the usual professional distance in the way she touches and moves round him, she doesn’t mind – or doesn’t notice – that sometimes she brushes or bumps or presses against him. And he likes that trust.

Standing beside him, she examines the X-rays of the suspect tooth from different angles, and then, showing him the third X-ray – a close-up of the root canal – says, ‘Yes, I think the root is badly infected.’

‘Root canal job?’ He tries to joke, remembering how unpleasant his other root canal operations have been.

‘I’m afraid so.’ She pauses and he glances up. ‘Do you want the details?’ He nods. ‘I have to drill through the bridge and crown and down to clean out the root …’

‘No more details,’ he interrupts. ‘I suffer a vivid imagination that’ll perform the operation on me repeatedly between now and when you do it.’

After he has gargled and the nurse has cleaned his lips and taken off his bib, Dr Shibata says, ‘I’ll make a prescription for painkillers to keep the pain at bay tonight, then come back tomorrow and I’ll do my best to extract your pain, painlessly.’ No trace of local in her language and the way she talks.

He gets off the dental chair. As he stands up, she reaches over and, with a tissue, dries the thin streak of saliva on the right side of his mouth. He can’t feel it.

‘You’re not from here, are you?’ she asks as they go to the office to fix the time for his next day’s appointment.

‘New Zealand. I’ve been here for only a few months.’

‘Wow, Noo Zeelan’, eh. My friends tell me it’s a beautiful country.’

‘Yes, it’s very beautiful,’ he hears himself saying: he has always refused to describe New Zealand that way. When he looks at her and she is smiling openly again, he repeats, ‘You should visit – it is very beautiful.’

‘I’m not from here either,’ she says. ‘Shifted here from Las Vegas five years ago.’

Next day the root canal operation goes smoothly; the only objectionable pain he feels is the first injections of novocaine. The rest of if is a lot of constricted movements by her hands and instruments in his mouth. As the thin drill penetrates deeper and deeper into the root canal, he catches whiffs of decay, just briefly but enough to remind him, starkly, of the stench of the dead dog he and his father had once come across in a stand of flax in the park near their house.

Afterwards, when he’s gargled and then wiped his sweating face with a hot towel the nurse gave him, Dr Shibata asks if he is feeling all right.

‘Thank you,’ he replies through a numb mouth. ‘Thank you for saving me from the pain.’

She takes off her glasses and mask and peels off her surgical gloves. When she looks at him, he notices that her eyes are bloodshot with fatigue, the wrinkles under her eyes more pronounced. ‘It’s just a matter of concentration and skill.’ She pauses, smiling, and adds, ‘You should take better care of your teeth.’ He feels this is a reference to his life. ‘Your mouth and teeth tell me a lot about you.’ She reads him.

‘I’ll make appointments starting next week to come and have the rest of my dental problems fixed, okay?’ he says.

‘I’ll fix just your dental problems, Professor of Literature,’ she says over her shoulder. How strange, how insightfully strange, he thinks.

At dinner with Michelle that night at her house, she wants to know in detail about his operation. He details it but omits any mention of Dr Shibata’s last remark: it is a priceless secret between her and him, not to be shared with even Michelle.

‘She is very beautiful, isn’t she?’ Michelle says.

‘I was in pain, I didn’t notice that.’ Then, to distract her, he asks, ‘How come she’s got a Japanese name and she doesn’t look Asian at all?’

‘Ask her,’ she says.

‘I can’t do that, it’s too personal.’

‘Trust you men. Just ask her; you’d be surprised at what our beautiful dentist will discuss.’ He is sitting on the sofa. She sidles over, sits down in his lap, and wraps her arms round his neck. ‘Open your beautiful mouth, darling, and let me see Megan’s beautiful work.’ Looking at his teeth and gently running her forefinger over the bridge and the gum, which is still red from the injections, she whispers, ‘Is it sore?’ He shakes his head. ‘Here, let me heal it for you.’ She runs her tongue over his lips and then pushes it against the bridge and along his gum. When he starts to respond, she sucks gently on his lower lip. ‘Poor, darling. You really must get our beautiful Megan to heal the rest of you …’ The healing feel of her lips and mouth and breath spreads, like a reviving balm, across his whole face and down into his belly, and he recalls Megan’s expert and concerned hands and fingers around and in his mouth and down into the roots of his breath. Welcomes it, unconditionally.

On their third appointment, while Megan works on his teeth, she sits on the high stool beside him, her knees pressed against his side, her whole presence entering his every pore, her eyes (which he avoids) and face filling his sight, her soft scent – is it frangipani? – fingering the depths of his breath. So sexual, so like foreplay, but because the nurse is there they pretend nothing like that is happening.

He unfolds his arms and drops his right arm down the side of the dental chair. When it lands on her left thigh and she moves her leg aside, he lets his arm stretch down between her legs and against her inner thigh. She is wearing cotton trousers under her gown. He holds his hand still – she doesn’t move her leg away. When he moves the back of his hand ever so slightly against her thigh, there is still no indication she is aware of it, but he knows she is welcoming it.

After she has finished with his teeth – and they’re both finding it difficult to control their lust – he asks if he should come back later. She nods once, avoiding his eyes.

It is almost impossible for him, in his office, to subdue his desire, while he waits to see her, so he rushes back to her clinic and waits across the street in a café, sipping coffee until he sees the other shops closing and the nurse leaving. Quickly, he is back in her surgery and she is on her back on the dental chair, still avoiding his eyes, as he frantically unbuttons and unzips her clothes. He will recall it later as he being the dentist and she the patient, doing everything he wants, as he examines and kisses her mouth and then works down to her breasts and the rest of her body. All the time, he feels she is watching everything they’re doing.

Later, after three more such sessions on her dental chair during the week, he recognises that is her way of sex: oblique, never showing she is directly in the act, watching herself from outside herself and being aroused by that, and then coming in long thin surges that ignite her body and threaten to blow it up, but that she suppresses by wrapping her arms round her shoulders, shutting her eyes tightly, clenching her mouth and holding in the explosion, swallowing it back until it is a series of whimpers, barely audible moans and shudders. Afterwards she avoids talking about it. Not that she doesn’t discuss sex openly; she does, but, if it is about her and Daniel, she describes it as if she is describing other people. Strangely, Daniel finds her oblique way fascinating, intensely arousing.

Megan had shifted to Hawai‘i and the Mānoa from Las Vegas after her second marriage failed, buying a partnership in the two-dentist Mānoa Valley Clinic and a four-bedroom house at the head of the valley. Why Hawai‘i? he asks. Why not? Besides, her grandfather – that’s where she got the ‘Shibata’ – had migrated from the cane fields of the Big Island to Santa Cruz, where he’d played out the stereotype of the incredibly hard-working Asian fulfilling the American dream. He had worked his way up from dish-washer to maître d’ to owner of a small restaurant, the Pono Eatery, specialising in Hawaiian cuisine. That one restaurant, over two decades, three wives and twelve children, had blossomed into the Pono chain.

Megan’s father, the third son and the first in the family to graduate from business school, after serving in the Korean War, took over the management after his father collapsed and died of a stroke. He enjoyed managing the business immensely, but in keeping the company intact, profitable and functioning well he had to keep at bay his jealous, greedy, squabbling brothers and sisters and their spouses and children. That was an unrelenting demand.

Megan’s mother, the third daughter of a Wisconsin farming family, had fled her home at the age of fifteen and never revealed much to her two children about her life before she met Megan’s father at the age of nineteen, while she was waitressing in the Beverley Hills Pono Eatery.

Eric, Megan’s brother, was born a year after the two met, then Megan. Apart from the food, there was little else that was Japanese, Hawaiian or Asian in Megan’s and Eric’s upbringing. That was the way their mother wanted it, although it further antagonised her husband’s family, who branded her behind her back ‘that haole bitch from nowhere’.

She and Eric didn’t have a happy childhood, Megan tells Daniel. Her greedy, screwed-up relatives fucked up her parents by being a constant drain on their emotional, psychological strength. In turn, her parents took that out on each other, quarrelling incessantly, their arguments interspersed with long periods of accusing silence. So as not to aggravate that, Megan learned early not to make demands on them or attract their negative attention by revealing how she was truly feeling. Eric – gentle, gentle Eric, the only person she loved – couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do that.

At the age of thirteen Eric was diagnosed with bipolarism and put on medication that he hated taking because it turned him into a ‘fucking vegetable’ – his description. But when he didn’t take the medication, his behavior escalated bizzarely: for instance, at the annual family dinner to commemorate his grandfather’s life, he jumped onto the dinner table, stripped off his clothes and, lacerating his chest with his fork, yelled, repeatedly: ‘Ya should all go back to the cane fields, ya fuckin’ coolies!’ Megan had coaxed him off the table and, embracing him, steered him out of the room. Their aggrieved relatives had told her parents their crazy son had to be put away in an asylum.

Eventually, one night, after trying unsuccessfully to stop a quarrel between their parents, Eric fled from the house, screaming something about the moon falling, falling, falling. The police found his broken body on the footpath in front of a seventeen-storey building: apparently he’d leapt from the top of it.

After completing high school, to escape her grief and her parents and extended family, Megan enlisted in the army, though she had achieved excellent academic grades. She loved the demanding discipline of military life, escaping especially into mastering the weaponry. She was stationed in Alaska and then the Middle East – she refuses to give Daniel information about that – and later received military scholarships to medical school. She graduated as a dentist and married a successful property lawyer – such a corny story – but realised two weeks later, on Thanksgiving Day, when she observed him snoring on the divan after their heavy Thanksgiving dinner, that it had been a mistake. She tolerated the relationship for another year and then reenlisted without telling him – this time for Iraq.

She refused to work as a dentist and fought on the front lines, volunteering for the most dangerous missions. One of her friends even accused her of being suicidal.

Finally towards the end of her tour, she and her squad, while on a surveillance mission one night, found themselves trapped in a minefield. All her comrades were killed. ‘Why me?’ she asks Daniel. ‘I deliberately challenged death by being in the army and out in the field, but I was never wounded: not a scratch. I don’t believe in God or fate. Was it because I didn’t have the courage to kill myself like Eric?’

Two days after Megan’s discharge from the army, she found herself in Las Vegas marrying her former commanding officer, now working as the head of security for the biggest casino in Las Vegas.

Another failed marriage, then Hawai‘i.