Con Artists
Most everyone in the small town of Marshfield knew of the harmless rivalry between the dentist, Dr. Bowles, and the optometrist, Dr. Hayes. The two squabbled, not out of competition, really; they just didn’t like each other. No one knew why. In many ways, they were so similar. In the late sixties they both, upon graduating from prestigious programs, bought out the practices of retiring crackpots. They promptly flourished in their new home. They dressed impeccably outside of the office—collared shirt, slacks, and brogues, always. They appreciated great artists and foreign writers. They kept tight ships. They pampered their employees with lunches and gifts and vacation days. They were both in their mid-thirties, tall, gentle, neat to the point of particular, traditionally handsome, unmarried, and the most eligible bachelors in the entire county. The old women in town had abandoned any hope of setting them up with their daughters and granddaughters. You couldn’t get blood from a stone, and you couldn’t get a date out of the two doctors.
Each year, Bowles took an eye exam and bought a new pair of the most expensive wire-framed, panto-shaped glasses at Dr. Hayes’s office. Twice annually, Hayes endured Dr. Bowles’s routine cleanings. Their mutual distaste for one another was only heightened by the fact that Dr. Hayes treated his mouth like a garbage bin and Dr. Bowles was hopelessly, dramatically near-sighted. Neither could acclimate to the unfamiliar sensation of being the patient.
“How often do you floss?” Dr. Bowles asked, fingers deep in Hayes’ mouth, prodding a loose tooth, lingering on the canines. The supine Hayes, Bowles noticed, crossed his legs at the ankles like the women and the feminine boys.
“Wance erry dah,” Hayes struggled to say through the fingers. He suspected Bowles purposefully waited to ask his questions until he had his hands fully in Hayes’s mouth, the same way he suspected Bowles of purposefully bumping his gums with the polisher just to see him cringe.
“Once every day, huh? I must be looking in the wrong person’s mouth. My mistake. Janet? Am I in the wrong room? Is this not Mr. Hayes? Or maybe this gingivitis here is the one who is mistaken, not me? Maybe the gingivitis is the one who is lost? Should I ask it?” He poked Hayes’ gum. Blood leaked from the puncture point. He squirted a stream of water on the area and then placed the suction unit into Hayes’ mouth. “Lips together, please.”
“Fahk yohh.” Hayes hated the humiliation he felt when he sucked on that tube.
“Maybe if you’re a good boy.”
In their younger years, they pulled practical jokes, each prank edging closer toward absurdity. Dr. Bowles wore a gigantic, custom-made pin that said “Optometrists are Con Artists” to his 1976 exam. Later that same year, Dr. Hayes ate fifteen hot green onions out of his garden before his scheduled cleaning (the dental hygienist had to wear a surgical mask to survive his halitosis). Dr. Bowles paid five dollars to a local boy, a patient of both doctors, to belch in Dr. Hayes’s face when he leaned in with his flashlight. Dr. Hayes retaliated by changing the “DDS” on Bowles’s sign to “ASS” with spray-paint.
They sponsored two different little-league teams and only showed up to cheer at games when they were playing head-to-head.
“I should have been a dentist,” Dr. Hayes said. His optician assistant giggled in the corner. Hayes was staring into Bowles’s eyes through the Phoropter. His eyes were brown in the winter, greenish in the summer. “Talk about easy street. Plus, I would love to know what it’s like to make a killing by looking people dead in the eye and lying to them every day.”
“You’re the one with the easy job. One or two, one or two, one or two. A minimally-trained monkey could do your little song and dance.”
“Teeth are nothing but blunt tools for mastication. They’re just exposed bone. You’re a glorified shoe-shine. I work with the body’s most sophisticated piece of machinery, second only to the brain itself.”
“You got no idea what you’re talking about. The mouth isn’t just an organ; it’s its own ecosystem! You got two eyes to worry about, whereas I have to account for thirty-two teeth and the gums. I sniff out decay. I dodge biting children. People come to me with a problem, and I actually fix the issue. You run a never-ending Ponzi scheme.”
“If only you were an orthodontist, then maybe I could find a way to respect you.”
They never lunched or played racquetball together. If they met on the street they would nod and nothing more.
Once, in a lull, as Dr. Bowles waited for Dr. Hayes’s lower jaw to numb so they could fill a cavity in his back-right molar, Hayes asked from the dental chair, “Why do I get so many of these damn things? I’ve been really trying this past year, and I still wound up back here.”
“Honestly, they say it’s mostly genetics.”
Hayes ignored the answer. “I hated going to the dentist as a child. His name was Dr. Mensch.” He shuddered, head to toe. “The magazines in the lobby never changed. They were all from the forties, and they were all about sports or hunting. I hate sports, and I hate hunting. On the wall, there was this picture—a painting I mean, not a picture—a painting of a dentist’s waiting room. That alone was a little too Twilight-Zone for me. But in that painted waiting-room, there was this snaggle-toothed, buck-toothed, wonky-bite ginger boy sitting in a chair, waiting for his turn to see the doctor. And through the open doorway you could see the dentist preparing the examination room.” Hayes’s bottom lip tingled. His words were beginning to slur together. “I never could figure out the joke. Were we supposed to laugh at this poor boy because of his teeth? Teeth that, to no fault of his own, bent every way but straight? Or were we supposed to be laughing because of the dramatic irony: We know what the kid doesn’t. We know the pain and discomfort and humiliation he’s got waiting for him through that door? Either way, it’s cruel, if you ask me.”
Dr. Bowles nodded. “You’re right, John. No one should ever be mocked for something they can’t control.”
And as Dr. Bowles drilled, cleaned, dried, and filled the cavity, he debated within himself whether he should tell Dr. Hayes the reason he so loathed the optometrist’s office—that in elementary school, he and his mother made approximately five trips to the eye doctor each year, not because they enjoyed the man’s company but because the other, bigger boys at school would break his frames, bust them, smash them, twist them, sometimes beyond repair, and no matter how many times he taped them back together or his mother complained to the school or his father lovingly but shamefully showed him how to box in the basement where the neighbors couldn’t see, the beatings kept coming, and Bowles grew to hate the doctor and his compassionate smile. Not the boys. He never hated the boys. He actually loved the boys, knew that they must have rightly found something deplorable about his face and sought to snuff it out. Really, they were just trying to help him, pummeling his pouty lips and soft, betraying eyes and long eyelashes and round cheeks and petite nose into submission, into something more masculine and sharp and ugly—yet he couldn’t open his mouth, couldn’t match vulnerability for vulnerability, for his rationale chimed so faux compared to Hayes’s confessional. Bowles found that he couldn’t muster a response of any sort. The drill whined. Hayes swallowed without closing his mouth. The hygienist coughed into the sleeve of her scrubs. Thirty minutes later, the procedure was over, and Hayes left. Bowles rescheduled all of the afternoon appointments, sent the hygienists home early, and reclined himself in the examination chair with the lights off and the door shut.
The doctors would grow into old, dapper men. Bowles would make the switch to bifocals in his old age. Hayes, mouth more amalgam filling than bone, sick of the root canals and the crowns, would have his remaining teeth yanked and replaced with porcelain dentures. He would never marry. Kindness and service would be his only legacy. Bowles would settle down at the age of forty-two, marrying Ms. Anne Louise Bahr, the uncomely, beloved school librarian who recited Walt Whitman to the students. They would have no children of their own, bequeathing their small fortune to the school library upon their deaths.
The doctors’ funerals would be well-attended, their practices sold-off to younger, swaggering men.
Hayes, up until the very day he gasped his final breath alone in room 220 of the Shady Brook Retirement Home, was dogged by a recurring nightmare. He told no one, not a single soul. There was no way to explain it. Lying in Bowles’s chair for his filling that day, the light hovering above the dentist’s shoulder, his mouth numbed to any pain, his jaw tired, he’d opened his eyes in the middle of the torture and glimpsed his reflection in the small loupes on Bowles’s glasses. Only his mouth was lit, so his mouth was all he could see. It made him ill, the sight of only an open orifice teeming with foreign fingers and tools. In his nightmares, he was always a mouth, just a mouth, floating in a black void, no limbs, no body, utterly helpless as faceless strangers peeled back his lips and scrutinized his teeth. He was terrified, not that they would hurt him, but that they might find a disgusting, rotting crevice inside of him—a pocket of decay he’d prayed might, if neglected long enough, go away on its own.
David Brinson is a graduate of Boston University's MFA program, where he received the Saul Bellow Fiction Prize. He has previously taught at both Berklee College of Music and Boston University. His short stories have appeared in Breakwater Review and Glassworks. Readers can find more of his work at https://davidbrinson.wixsite.com/portfolio.