Tooth for a tooth

My first year in Japan was the most transformational of my life. It was the year that my course changed permanently and whatever plan I had until that point, however I had thought I would work out my own American dream, drifted into a future that had none of the moorings I had depended on until then. It wasn't, I say all the time when recounting my path to this point in my life, the result of any clear planning or grand scheme. It just happened — a series of decisions that I made and which were made for me. Seventeen years later, gesturing to my friend who has come from Japan to see the life I’ve made in England, I’m here. There’s a fire in the wood burner in the front reception room of my home on the edge of Birmingham, with three kids and my partner. No one knows how this happened.

I expected the differences between my life in the US and Japan to be numerous, of course, but things came up that I hadn't expected. On some level, you expect the known unknowns, but then the colour of the egg yolk is different. Why does this feel off-putting and strange, why is this the thing that bothers you more than anything else. In the spring of my first year, I needed to go to a dentist, and without me knowing or understanding why, they drilled out a substantial part of my back tooth and replaced it with a metal silver filling that had to be made in a lab and which at the time shocked my American sensibilities and caused an embarrassing amount of shame. The whole experience was a complete loss of agency in a context where I couldn’t speak the language and suddenly something permanent had been done that I couldn't undo. This silver partial was now a part of my body, and I joked I was more machine now than man, masking how unsettling the whole experience had been, with a Japanese dentist who didn’t speak English well insisting on speaking to me in English. Then the next year in Niigata, the same thing happened in the other side of my mouth and I felt the same shame, diminished as it was as I had begun to reconcile myself to the Japanese world, one in which having pristine teeth was less important and one where there was no Christian god to sort things out for you.

That first filling came out on Sunday, when in Starbucks, my daughter gave me a sweet and it pulled out in my first chew, something I have been waiting to happen for the last several years, knowing these things in my mouth can’t last forever. It didn't hurt at all, but I felt the frustration which marks dental problems as a forty-one-year-old — I’m not so worried about the aesthetic implications as I am about the scheduling ones: when am I going to fit this in. I did manage to get to the dentist relatively quickly on Tuesday, but she upon seeing me looked shocked and asked repeatedly if I was okay saying that I looked terribly pale and jaundiced, like I was very ill. She asked how I felt and I turned to the mirror, feeling like I looked fine. She was adamant that there was some problem, promise me you'll go to the GP.

I did promise, but I didn't actually call the GP because this paleness was a known-known, something I have ignored to differing degrees over the years. In college, I had been sick for the winter term when my high school girlfriend and I broke up. In the previous months, I had been racked with guilt, reinforced by a men's accountability group where weekly I had to recount our relationship failings when I had been home for Christmas and slipped up, a euphemism for anything beyond the grey area of ‘just kissing’, which we had all agreed was not fine. I had a battery of inconclusive tests that resulted in being diagnosed with a benign disease: Gilbert's Syndrome, a slightly high bilirubin count that meant I was jaundiced at times. There was nothing to be done and nothing I really needed to do, just watch it, the doctor said, but I didn't know what that meant. I don't remember being jaundiced at all, but I'm not sure that I would have noticed because I also didn’t think much about my body beyond it being a general source of pain and shame and occasional pleasure, resulting in more shame. The diagnosis was something I immediately ignored, knowing that the illness was really all because of the stress and shame and sadness of a part of my life ending that I was not ready to end. What does the body matter if it is basically working.

The dentist looked at my tooth and said the silver filling couldn't be repaired and they needed to do a new silver filling and they could do it immediately. It would be seventy pounds. I agreed and asked if it was possible to do it in white and she said it would be more expensive. It would be, she checked, a hundred and thirty pounds, like this cost would be prohibitive, but I immediately agreed, and then went on my long explanation of my American vanity, and the ridiculous shame I'd felt when it had been done initially. She did the work and I looked at it, realising the filling had still left much of my tooth missing, and I missed the silver partial, like a scar that had come to define me, but what was I going to do. I thanked her and left, promising again to see the GP to discuss my paleness.

I am fundamentally conservative in that I understand the present through the past. I constantly long for some idea I have of how things were. I still dream about that February in 2001, before everything changed, before the whole world came apart both personally and then collectively. I started to lose my faith in a God who was intimately involved in every aspect of my life, but the guilt was gone at least for the moment: before pornography and other relationships and marriage, I was still pure, still basically just a kid who had been in love. I remember feeling a kind of peace, that despite what had happened, I didn't need to fight anymore, I could go back to the men’s accountability group with nothing to report for question two, the one we all cared about, because there was no way for me to slip up. It seems silly, staring at a middle-aged man in the mirror wondering if my skin is yellowing, like our white Ikea kitchen cabinets, like you can’t really tell one way or another.