What I Learned Looking Into Mouths

I never once, in thirty-five years, believed in anything I couldn't see under a headlamp — and then I retired, stopped seeing anything under a headlamp at all, and found that the thing I'd apparently been searching for the whole time, in other people's mouths, was never the teeth. I want to try to say what it was instead, because I think I only worked it out by writing this list, in roughly the order I found the pieces.

**One.** Everybody lies about flossing — instantly, without much shame, the way you'd say "fine" when someone asks how you are. I stopped taking it personally around year four and started finding it oddly touching: the sheer universal commitment to this one small, low-stakes untruth, as if honesty about flossing were a kindness nobody could quite afford to offer.

**Two.** Fear makes people honest in ways nothing else does. Under gas, under simple chair-terror, patients have told me things they plainly didn't intend to say — a marriage in trouble, a business about to fail, once, memorably, a full confession of an affair, delivered to a man holding a suction tube by a woman who had never met him before and has, thank God, never mentioned it since. I came to think of the chair as a confessional with worse lighting and no absolution, only a filling.

**Three.** A mouth tells the truth a face has learned to hide. I once treated a well-dressed, cheerful man in his sixties with a single chipped incisor he'd carried, untouched, for what turned out to be over thirty years. Nineteen sixty-something, a car accident, he said, and then, almost offhand, reaching for his coat: it had also killed his brother. He had had thirty years and the means to fix one tooth. He had kept it broken on purpose, I think, though he'd never have used that word — a headstone he could carry in his own mouth, visiting it every time he ate.

**Four — and this is the one I have never told anyone, because it sounds like the beginning of a joke and isn't one.** I do not believe in God, or didn't, for most of my working life, in any shape my minister father would have recognised as belief. But I have held, quite literally, several thousand human skulls' worth of jaw in my two hands over thirty-five years, unconscious ones, frightened ones, dying ones, and at some point in my fifties I noticed I had started, privately, thinking of each one as briefly, genuinely sacred while it was in my hands — not because I had decided to believe anything, but because you cannot spend that many years holding the single most intimate, most defining part of a stranger's face, the part that speaks their name and eats their mother's cooking and, eventually, stops doing either, without some part of you concluding that whatever a soul is, it is at least partly a matter of attention, and that attention paid carefully enough to a stranger's mouth is not so very different, structurally, from a prayer said carefully enough for someone you'll never meet.

**Five.** People near the end ask for almost nothing ambitious. Mrs. Ainsley, eighty-nine, three weeks before residential care, thought for a long moment, hand flat on the armrest, and said: "Nothing that hurts. Nothing that takes long. I'd like to eat toast without thinking about it, for however long there is." Not a crown. Not whitening. Toast, without thinking about it. Thirty-five years of training in ambitious repair, and the truest thing anyone asked of me in that chair was smaller than anything I'd trained for. I gave it to her. It took forty minutes. I have thought about that sentence roughly once a week since.

**Six.** Somewhere around year twenty I noticed I could no longer look at a smiling stranger without some automatic part of my brain assessing their bite. A professional deformation I wouldn't wish on anyone and can't switch off.

**Seven.** 1979, our third date. Margaret laughed at something and I caught, for half a second, the way the light hit, that one lower incisor sat very slightly turned — an imperfection she has occasionally, briefly, been self-conscious about for forty-seven years since, and which I have never once wanted different by a single degree. I think it's the whole trade, condensed into one tooth: you spend a working life trained to notice flaws, and if you are lucky, you eventually notice that the noticing itself, done with enough attention, stops being the opposite of tenderness and becomes a form of it — becomes, I am prepared to say now, at sixty-six, the closest thing to a religious practice I ever managed.

**Eight, and last.** I retired eighteen months ago. Last week I checked Margaret's incisor — no pretext at all, just looking — and she asked what I was staring at. Nothing, love, I said. Just you. In forty-seven years of looking into that particular mouth, hunting for whatever I was actually hunting for, it was the first time the true answer and the whole answer were the same sentence, and I suppose that is as close to finding the thing as I am ever going to get.

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