My existing wife has no teeth.

As I sat on the white blanket of granular sands of Puerto Vallarta, my wife bled at the hands of a man who claimed to know about the evils associated with the artificial compounds that had been introduced into her mouth by American dentists since her childhood. Her head back, eyes wide open, I had watched her hands meld themselves to the hot steel arms of the makeshift dental chair as blood flowed in a complex system of tributaries that shared their source at the corners of her mouth. They developed into more circuitous and broken routes as the hot liquid surged down the sides of her pale throat and onto her sand-colored smock. All he’d given her for the pain was an herb-like compound and the smell of incense, a stick of it burned by the chair. I had not experienced the fragrance before; it was not one that she had burned at home.

Her eyes remained transfixed on me.

"Are you alright?" I asked.

Her eyeballs went up and down in an affirmative motion.

I didn’t want to ask about the pain. I didn’t need to.

No pain no gain, was a platitude she often used.

The front teeth came out first. The man, a burly native with a large, white tuft of hair protruding from cheeks and chin–I could say beard, but it was more than that, a semicircular thatch of bushy growth that defied civilized description–held each blood-colored tooth up before her for examination. Sometimes he would comment in a mixture of Spanish and English, but it was untranslatable to my ears and the pain my wife was in surely precluded her from comprehending his meaning. After the first excavation I asked her permission to leave. Her eyeballs granted it.

I had not wanted to go on this trip. I hated the heat; sticky perspiration invaded every crevice of my body as I sat out in the fixed, incandescent eye of the sun in my straw hat and loose-fitting, pure white button-down. The contracted aperture of my pupils distorted the color of my shorts as muddy. From my place in the sand I watched scattered tourists, mostly young American couples, tan themselves to the color of ocher with the aid of the local lotions. I felt my own treated skin cook. Bronzed Mexican boys played a game a Frisbee behind me. I watched young mothers guide their little ones into the water.

The boys and mothers reminded me of Jason, my son who was never far from my thoughts. Allison and I had already had two arguments about his latest trouble: a third drinking fine and an appointment to see the dean. Allison was angry at me because she felt I had never tamed his wildness, "You haven’t instilled any fear in him and he’s going to get hurt if he continues–" I rejected her arguments. So he had three fines for drinking, wasn’t that an aspect of college? To be safely sowing your wildness? The most recent fine was a hundred and fifty dollars and he needed cash to cover it. The dean was going to warn him about his scholarship, a partial scholarship he had obtained due to his outstanding performance for the track team. It was his first year at school and he had some drinking fines, and a fake ID I had inadvertently paid for via a cash withdrawal through the credit card I’d given him. But I insisted to Allison that I knew my son and he was smart enough to know when it was time to behave. The battle ended–but the argument was by no means over–and left me feeling guilty; it was easy for her to persuade me to go on this trip.

Her friend Martha had just come here a month before and was still raving about it. She had filled my wife’s head with the expressive beauty of the heated landscape. She had told her of the wisdom of the doctor and her healing experience, how he had removed unnatural elements from her mouth in the most natural fashion. I had listened to her, anxiety deepening with each passing glass of wine. At the end of the evening, I made sure to declare that if she wanted to do what Martha was advising, she would have to do it on her own. I went to bed knowing the matter was not closed, for she and Martha were still talking, still examining Martha’s lack of teeth.

Within two weeks after the visit, my wife had not only arranged for the trip but had arranged vacation time for me with my boss at Pup & Fluff, the pet-grooming store I worked for. I found the note, the airplane tickets, and the straw hat in one of the rooms that "breathed." It would be a great first anniversary present the note explained, suggesting that I use my imagination to derive more from the possibilities of the situation. The note concluded with the most appealing news about the trip: the local paper wanted me to do a story on the doctor and the operation. The one drawback would be that I would have to interview Martha as well as detail the oral gauntlet that my wife was suffering through.

I went to one of the rooms that had been designed to "embrace you" and considered the possibilities. After we had moved into the house, special decorators had come to arrange every room and I had been provided with literature describing floor plans that enabled you to realize the motif of your life. I responded by buying an eggshell mattress and signing the checks to pay for what I thought of as the various "mood" rooms. For a brief while Allison thought she had chosen the wrong style motif for our bedroom, a sparse airy layout that I thought of as open and cold and Asian and not a bit inviting. I told her not to fix it; I had had enough of the domestic artists. When the bill arrived I suffered a mental collapse and then a physical one. She suggested Prozac and then Viagra; I resisted all prescription medication. We both feared the wrath of my insurance company and preferred not to do anything except pay the monthly premium. Once the checks to the decorators cleared, I was fine and our lives went back to normal, prescription drug free.

Every morning I swallowed a regiment of thirteen brightly colored pills my wife had painstakingly organized for the betterment of my health. These had come with me to Puerto Vallarta and Allison had the doctor examining our domestically developed supplement package. I wasn’t too concerned about his findings, but having extra time with him could only help when it came time to write the article.

On the beach I whispered my ideas into a tape recorder, described the violence being perpetrated on my wife’s mouth, the doctor’s furry face, the heat of the place, and, of course, the picturesque landscape of the beach and the hotel. I recited my observations about my marriage and about my son, which were not for newspaper print; subscribers had no interest in them. I sought clarification in this hot, strange country that I had never desired to visit. The feel of the terrain, though physically foreign, was not entirely unfamiliar.

The doctor was inexplicably talkative when I arrived to pick up Allison. A female assistant was in the process of rubbing a cool cloth over her sweating face. The doctor had just started a fresh stick of incense and was feeding his caged parakeet. His garbled elocution imparted the comforting message that the operation was a success. He handed me a small bottle of pills. I looked at them. They were slim, gray pills with a rectangular oval shape; E147 was etched into the flat side of each. Painkillers.

Then he offered me a display tray, its transparent plastic cover was latched shut. I took the tray from him and looked at its surface, a series of spreadsheet-like cells with labels at the base of each square cell. My wife’s teeth were cleaned, organized, and labeled with exceeding care and accuracy. I thanked him and he provided me with a soft leather carrying case. Maybe she’d want to hang them on a wall.

Swollen-faced and psychologically traumatized from the experience, she could not talk on the way back to our room. I told her about the beach, the heat, and the article I was going to work on when we got back to the hotel. I didn’t talk about Jason; he would win none of her sympathy just then. I wondered how long it would take her face to shrink back to its normal size. I thought about oral sex, Martha’s comments.

Our room overlooked the beach. As the sun receded in the distance like a fleeing hair follicle, I watched calming waters deepen in color from blue to black. The sand cooled and a dog ran along the edge where the voluptuous curves of the ocean flirted with the tan grains of earth, keeping faithful to its age-old promise of imbuing it with life, bipeds, quadrupeds. Allison slowly drifted off into a medicated sleep.

Was she fulfilled?

I opened the hotel-provided, handmade writing desk and retrieved my notebook from my suitcase. The tape recorder repeated my whispers at a low volume and I transcribed my earlier thoughts with meticulous accuracy. I used gel pens with a fine tip, wrote small and enjoyed the labor of shaping the letters on the blue-lined, white surface. The double redline that served as the margin marker formed a two-colored permanent "L" on every page and guided my letters.

After completing the transcription I observed the impenetrable sleep that had overtaken my wife. Her slightly parted mouth revealed the extensive excavation. I marveled at the thought of her first meal. The nurse had informed me that she had received special instructions regarding the intake of food. Liquids would be first as the medicine would dehydrate her. I closed my notebook and capped my pen.

The lobby was quiet, the dinner crowd gone. At the hotel bar, I drank two double shots of Tequila and admired the strong white teeth that lined the mouths of two youthful prostitutes who were kind enough to offer their services. What was it Martha had said? "Wait until you experience oral after the operation." She even made a crude joke of her assertion: had she received the operation earlier in her life it probably would have given her first marriage a second chance.

When the prostitutes had gone, after finding other Americans, I returned to my notebook and uncapped my pen. Accompanied by a third double shot of Tequila, my imagination spilled ink on the page that detailed the experience of my solid, throbbing cock bathed in her saliva, pressed and massaged by slick, tender, pink flesh. I finished my drink and the description, tore it up and discarded it with the help of the bar tender who deposited it in his trashcan without a word or glance at the paper; shame stung my mind and guilt clutched my breast. After all the events of the day I was thinking about a blowjob her friend had prattled on about, affecting my associative functions and interfering with the serious role I had to play for my wife’s sake.

My wife had undergone the operation to improve her health. Surgery of this magnitude was serious and I wondered what she would need me to do. In the beginning I had resisted, asking why we couldn’t go to an American surgeon. My wife presented her argument that it was not the extraction that was special, but what followed that counted most: a paste that was a combination of various natural substances mixed together and cooked into a hot salve that would coat her gums and undo the ill effects of a lifetime of treatment received at the hands of American dentists and oral surgeons. I had missed the coating segment of the surgery. All I knew at this point was that my support of her decision and willingness to travel here were very important to her.

I went back to the room and viewed her sleeping body.

Her face had taken the shaped of an overripe bruised pear. The top portion of her head had remained normal, but the site of the surgery seemed to still be expanding, still experiencing and reacting to physical shock.

I knelt down beside the bed and lightly ran my index finger along her swollen cheek. She did not stir. I listened to the slight, but regular flow of her breathing. Her expression of serenity had at first seemed unnatural, even false, due to my knowledge of the drugs administered to her. Now the placid essence of her body seemed more accessible to me; it was over and she was going to be okay. I pressed my dry lips against her right temple and kissed her. I had been here before, had sacrificed and supported other causes for her and for another woman.

Returning to the writing desk, I edited my work and added a page of reflection. The anxiety expressed on the page found its way to the wastebasket before I bothered to edit it. The cooling night that embraced me on the terrace was more effective than any of the mood rooms in our home back in the States. With a whiskey and soda, I watched the blue deepen into a thick coat of black; some stars and constellations strived to give me ocular evidence of their existence, but clouds had moved in and had put the universe behind a veil of black. The rhythmic rustle of the waves below lulled me into a natural hypnosis of thought, an invitation to walk through the past.

Always just one layer beneath everything I did, anxiety crept into my mind. My reason for writing, or for wanting to be a writer, was to attempt to leave something behind more significant than the life I was leading. Working in dog grooming had not been one of the jobs I had pictured for myself as a youth growing up in Atlanta. My youth had been spent on onion farms, the Vidalia onion is as good a symbol of my home state as any and I took great pride in the work I did as a teen. After high school I ended up working in textiles and marrying my first wife. The textile job ended for me when the company closed its doors for good a little over ten years after I had started. Since then I had worked in retail sales at various malls, office cleaning for two private companies, printing at a Sir Speedy, photo developing at a K-Mart, paper hanging for a private contractor, and now dog grooming. My life had been a steady trek northward as I followed my first wife who had worked on the financial of healthcare: I had lived in Atlanta, D.C., Baltimore, and finally Philadelphia.

Freelance writing was a recent interest, an outgrowth of my existing wife being used as a display item at an art exhibit in a Philadelphia Gallery. Nude, decorated with a white sheet that hid nothing from the viewers, my wife served as a live model alongside human figures sculpted or formed in various mediums: marble, clay, plastic, wire, paper, steel, and even a mass of nails and screws joined by glue. Every figure was in the exact same pose; my wife was arbitrarily placed in the number three position in order to ensure that no special esteem was communicated about the uniqueness of human flesh. There were other live models in other poses accompanied by mirror images in other mediums. I was hired by the gallery curator to write about the weeklong exhibit, my observations of my wife and the exhibit, along with my feelings about her became a much-lauded article by the museum members. I had been invited to write about three more exhibits, one of which didn’t include my wife. Soon after I found myself giving the local paper copies of my clippings and asking to be a stringer. Now I was in Mexico, writing once again about Allison.

I observed the tranquility of Allison’s comatose body and decided to break the tab on the small liquor cabinet and refrigerator provided by the hotel to get myself a fresh drink. Sleep would not come to me tonight. The hours would drift by with the crunching sounds of the waves and I would find myself sitting before thirteen brightly colored pills, my daily supplement.

My first wife, Diane, no longer exists, at least officially. With little resistance I had granted an annulment to her a year and a half after we had separated. We no longer exist to each other. I am supposedly Presbyterian, but it has never been an important aspect of my life and I’m not even certain I was ever baptized. Our Catholic wedding that had to be said in Latin–something practically unheard of–along with other concessions I had made had come to naught. Jason, baptized a Catholic and now in a secular college, hated religion, all of them. A counselor had recently told me my lack of resistance to her demands about how the wedding was to be conducted was the first indication of a serious problem. Looking into the veil of the sky now and not being able to see the waves, I am tempted to think he is absolutely right.

Something that had seemed so minor in the beginning, sure we can have the mass in Latin, became perpetual contention; my wife was not a typical Catholic, but maybe a stereotypical one. Every week we attended the eight o’ clock Sunday mass, a big mistake if you wanted to have a social life on Saturday. Every Sunday I was surrounded by people who had individually collected more in Social Security than would ever be available to my whole generation. When Jason, my son, was old enough for school, Diane and I had a yearlong fight about Catholic school vs. public school because in our area the public schools were excellent and we really didn’t have the money. I took a second job cleaning offices and he went; and he hated every minute of it.

When we were married, Diane and I had sex infrequently. She practiced the rhythm method with surprisingly effective results; she had planned Jason. Every election we argued about the death penalty and abortion. Every election she went out to march. Every election I cancelled out her vote. I was a failure as a Catholic husband, and despite all the arguments and ill will in the house, my true failure was that I strayed with Allison after so many years of strain.

We met on a weeklong bicycle ride across Pennsylvania and New Jersey to support AIDS research. My wife had signed up for it through out parish, but had come down with the flu. I went as planned and through the process of natural selection had ended up partnered with Allison. Allison was there to put her limber body to use in between modeling jobs in Philadelphia. Love comes in strange forms at unexpected times, but it does come and it is best not to ignore it when it appears. Within two weeks after the charity ride I moved out, leaving most of my belongings with Diane. She promptly sold them and donated all the money to the church. A year and a half later she wanted to marry someone else, and I agreed to the annulment. It was the least I could do. Oddly enough I found that it didn’t do much to relieve my guilt, which I thought of as my Catholic guilt. Allison and I waited a little longer to get married–largely due to my feeling of guilt–but we eventually did. At the time it felt right.

Back at the writing desk, I turned to a new section of my notebook and started a letter to Jason to admonish him for his bad behavior. I started off with adjectives in mind that would have made Allison proud like "Disappointed," "Embarrassed," and "Foolish." She wanted him to get a job to pay for his indiscretions, and she wanted him to feel shame. But the letter I intended to write turned into retrospective to myself about my son. I remembered the feeling of knowing you had done something right and had prepared–albeit unknowingly–your son for the most unpredictable event–the character of my son proudly came to mind. Jason, a sixteen-year-old boy who would prove to be more of a man than his father ever was.

"What are you eating those for?"

"Your step mother," I said. "These are my supplements."

"Do you even know what you are agreeing to swallow?"

I shook my head and swallowed.

"Want some?" I offered. "This is actually shark cartilage."

"I’ll pass, pop," he said. "Today we are fresh water fishing."

This was our first trip together alone since my new marriage to Allison. He had been supportive of me; maybe all those years in a household of domestic tension had made him agreeable to the idea of his parents splitting up. Allison found him easy to get along with and he had already confided in me that he thought she was hot and wanted to know if I would have any problems with him asking to paint her in the nude. Yes, I did have a problem; he didn’t know how to paint. He did come to the exhibit in Philadelphia, but he hadn’t stayed long. Teasing his old man about nude stepmother proved to be more interesting than actually seeing her as a nude object in an art gallery. I hadn’t timed it, but memory informs that he was only in the gallery about ten minutes when he started asking me to take him to the Reading Market Terminal for lunch. After lunch he caught the train home. The jokes about his stepmother as nude model ceased.

We drove to the Myakka River State Park from our hotel in Sarasota. I had a friend who owned a fishing boat and we had gone fishing in the gulf for three days. When the rains came we visited Casey Key to view the homes of the really wealthy, toured the Ringling Art Museum and enjoyed watching the fish and sharks at the Mote aquarium. The conclusion to our vacation was nearing and, with the sun finally shining, we decided to try something different. Myakka had been recommended to us for fresh water fishing, canoeing, and the opportunity to see wild alligators.

The early afternoon proved quiet enough, but the fish we caught, mostly bass and catfish, were too small to justify keeping them. The trouble started when the skies darkened to a deep gray. Rain was not in the forecast, but the smell of the previous day’s storm was still in the air. We weren’t prepared for the jolt, and to this day I don’t know what was more shocking the hit or the shock that there was a hit. The canoe dipped and took on some water.

"Shit," my son said pulling his oar out of the thick mossy water.

A gator had bumped our boat and had dove beneath us. My son looked at me with searching eyes.

"What do we do?" he said.

We had seen them all day floating in upper Myakka Lake. They were along the banks, by the boat basin, under bridges where the visitor cars traveled, near the fishing piers. For the most part they seemed content, lazy and fairly serene, their jaw lines fixed in a permanent smile. I had seen signs that had warned us not to "molest" the alligators and had viewed crowds of people perfectly comfortable to be on the shore within twenty feet of the gators. I had not expected to be bumped. I had not expected aggression. I had not expected a twenty-five dollar canoe rental to put my limbs or even life in jeopardy. When the lizard resurfaced I was acutely reminded of his wildness, that this river was his terrain, his home. They were ill-tempered creatures despite the tranquility of the park; I should say that he could have been a female alligator, but I have always thought of the aggressive lizard as a male.

My son and I watched him with the intensity only produced by fear. He was long, fifteen feet, and he looked well fed, healthy. I could see no battle scars either on his face or on the scaly hide of his back. He drifted toward us. I started to lightly paddle on the opposite side of the boat hoping he would lose his interest while we drifted away from him. The park was silent except for the sound of our oars clapping against the water in a steady, fearful rhythm designed to mask our inner panic. Effortlessly, his body glided toward our canoe again, his tail lashing and his feet pushing at the water. He came up slightly out of the water and his jaws flapped open like the wings of a bird. The razors that lined his gums and fenced in his slab of tongue displayed themselves long enough to be etched in our minds for eternity. The creature dove straight down into the water without hesitation. Our canoe rocked and took on some more water. I could see my son was starting to panic and knew my nerves were no better. I feared capsizing. The gator resurfaced moments later.

"He must–must, be–be hunting," my son stuttered.

"Right," I said.

We started paddling and picking up speed, but he bumped us again and then dove.

"Dad!"

"What?"

"Do something," my son pleaded.

"Okay keep paddling," I said. "Just go with the flow of the water and nature and keep paddling. Everything will be fine."

"He’s going to keep challenging us!"

"Keep rowing," I replied.

But my son was in no mood to wait. When the lizard again came close to the canoe, my son didn’t hesitate. He pulled his oar out of the water and drove it perpendicular with all his weight right down onto the bridge of bone that ran between the alligator’s nose and eyes.

"What are–" I tried to say, but was cut off as I tried to steady the canoe. More water had seeped in and I was worried about capsizing. Large alligators drowned their victims and buried them in the muddy bottoms of their lakes and rivers. The creature would only feed on us later, after our flesh had rotted to a freshness date that was preferred by his appetite.

"Where is he?"

"I don’t know," Jason said.

The beast did not reemerge as we paddled back to the basin to return our canoe. My son stepped out of the canoe glad to be on dry land, but I recognized a new glimmer of confidence in his eyes. He had been right; the lizard had challenged us. I was wrong to instruct him to row and he was right to strike the creature. For the first time ever, I saw a heroic quality in my son and I felt a great pride in it. Sometimes it was necessary to strike out, to reject what was happening and to even do it violently.

We flew back to Philly and didn’t talk about the incident. My pride in him would only grow, his academic performance in school improved and he had earned a modest scholarship to college for his athleticism on the track team. He was determined to go to school and I wanted to do nothing but encourage that resolve. A little partying his first time away from the smothering of his mother was not something for which I should admonish him. He was more in control of himself than I was, though the societies we were in would not have recognized this fact. Life would have been different for me if I had resisted the arguments presented by my stepfather and had gone to college. I wrote a very different letter to him.

In his actions I see the opposite of myself. I have never asserted myself in the manner of my son. Even my relationship with Allison was passive; she acquired me. Walking through the historical points in my life, I see it beginning with the willingness to take a job at the textile factory which led to a life of odd jobs none of which satisfy me as much as writing. My next phase was my unwillingness to confront Diane and then agreeing with everything she, my nonexistent wife, wanted, up to and including the annulment. And then I recognize my complacent role in my relationship with Allison, reaffirmed daily by the pills that I take and the rooms in which I sit.

The sun is starting to break and spread out its rosy fingertips across the beach of Puerto Vallarta. Before the heat re-ignites itself across the sand, I will take my supplements and compounds and find out what Allison will have for breakfast and how she will eat it. I will take notes on her recovery. We will visit the doctor two more times. Soon we shall board a plane destined for Philadelphia, back to our home and the rooms that breathe. I will write my article and return to dog grooming. Allison will return to modeling, most likely renting her breasts, stomach, thighs, and ass while her face shrinks back to normal and abandons the shape of a bruised pear.

I get myself a fresh glass of water and lay on the table the thirteen pills I take every day and I wonder how I’ve let this go on for so long and how long this will all last.

Email Drew at drew@nyhangover.com