Michael Martone - Seeing Eye

She was not the most interesting thing to think about. So I would begin thinking about the women the other swimmers were thinking about.

I am worried about tooth dust. I can see it floating in the air, in the rays of sunlight coming through the window. It is fine and fluid. What will happen after years of breathing it? The mouth is a filthy place. But the dust. I can see it as I walk through it. Feel it eddying around me, closing in behind me. You can write your name in it on the tray; the instruments are grainy with it. It is getting thicker. When I use the highspeed drill, the patient gripping the armrests from the pitch, I can see little puffs of dust from the tooth.

It smells awful.

Worse than burning hair.

No one thought I would make it when I went back to school. I had done nothing for four years between the Olympics. I went up to Canada, but it was the last time I wanted to talk about swimming. The records wouldn’t hold. And they kept asking me, “Do you think your records will hold?” I went back home and flew my radio-controlled glider up and down the coast. I would spiral it up and stall it out, tip the nose over and bring it to me like a hunting hawk.

I watched videotapes with Suzy of all the races in Munich, and finally ran out of things to notice. My right elbow bent when it should be extended on the recovery stroke of the two-hundred fly. Suzy would watch Carson, and I would look past the TV at my poster on the wall.

Before a meet you shave down. Some guys do it quietly, others loudly in the shower. The chest, the tops of the feet, the insides of the thighs, the small of the back, even the crotch. Everything is shaved. Doc had boxes of blades and razors. There was a wall of mirrors, and the guys leaned over the sinks toward them, plucking eyebrows, earlobes, and nostrils, then giving in and shaving the eyebrows.

Some would use Neet. Some would use only a razor. It was like peeling off skin when you did it right. You felt faster, seamless, streamlined. The team from Tennessee shaved their heads and held up their feet to show us the soles with the nicks from where they’d shaved. Well, well. They dared us to touch their scalps. I walked over and poked a finger at someone’s bald temple.

“It’s in your head,” I said.

That is when I started my mustache.

I had a little comb I would use before taking my mark. But I still shaved everything else. I got used to my body that way. When I stopped racing, it was like becoming a man all over again. I grew old in a couple of weeks.

I have dark hair. Sometimes, still, I am surprised by the hand I see working in a mouth. This is my hand. I’ll watch Suzy bathing and shaving her legs, raising one out above the soap bubbles like a commercial. She lets me shave the other, knowing how good I am with a razor. Her skin is very soft. When we shower together, I make her lift both arms at the same time, and I shave both her underarms at once.

I cannot remember learning to swim. I like to think that my father threw me in someplace and, as he waited for me to come to the surface, turned to my mother and said, “We have a fish on our hands.” If I were a fish I would want to be the kind that has a migrating eye. The eye itself turns the body flat as it comes loose and wanders over the head to the other side of the face. I would think about that while swimming laps. Growing gills, webs, flukes. Evolving backwards. Or maybe the mouth would migrate to the side of the head so I wouldn’t have to turn to breathe. Better yet, a hole in the middle of the shoulder blades. No teeth at all.

While I swam, parts came loose and floated free. My nipples slid down my chest. My chin sheered away. My toenails shed like scales. There were fingers in my wake.

I was always thinking of something else. Of one more thing. When I talk to a patient in the chair, before an answer, the mouth is going open, and I can see the tongue still working back in the mouth. The patient makes funny sounds. The teeth, never quite right, float in the gums, washed forward like plastic bottles in the surf.

Suzy got the idea from a television commercial.

It was a floor wax commercial, but in it they machinegun the glass cockpit of a jet. You can see the white bullets bouncing off. The ingredient that protects the cockpit is in the floor wax. Suzy thought we could make a clear plastic wall out of the same stuff and embed the medals in it. That way you could be sitting in the breakfast area and look out to the living room to watch the television through the clear plastic wall. The medals, she said, would seem to float in the air. I looked into it since I couldn’t think of any other way to display them. All the time I was thinking about burglars machine-gunning the wall, the gold suspended in front of them. You could knock on the air in front of you. But they told me the plastic would turn green with age. And what would I do when I moved?

I started swimming every morning when I was five. I turned from the window and picked up my rolled towel to go with my father to the pool before dinner too. Outside my friends were walking away. My mother had turned them away at the door. He is going to the pool. He is going to the pool. Our parents would be on the decks sunning or in the empty stands reading summer books in the middle of winter. It was always summer. And the light was always reflected from below, aqua and turquoise. It was always summer. My hair was always wet or had those furrows the comb left after I combed it wet. And I thought I was lucky I wasn’t blond, I mean, so the chlorine wouldn’t tint and shine my hair. At college, there were no children. So I would walk off the campus into the neighborhoods or go to the playground and watch the children. There were lots of children in Bloomington. A teacher shooed me away once.

These were the children who had been the test groups for toothpastes. Crest was invented in Bloomington. The unmarked tubes, the new brush, the special tablets that stained the teeth where you missed. All of them brushing together in the school cafeteria after lunch. Those children had been the ones to rush in and say, “Mother, mother, only one cavity!”

We carved teeth in dent school from blocks of clay the size of sugar cubes. When I dream, I dream of two things — teeth that are as large as my head and drowning.

When Suzy yawns, I can see the fillings in her back teeth. I’ll tell her to hold it and take a look in the light the lamp on the end table puts out. She will go right on watching television. I can see it reflected in her glasses.

“When are you going to file my teeth again?” she asks.

She asks me about striped toothpaste and how they get the stripes in it to come out right.

I do recommend sugarless gum.

If you watch television in the right light you can see yourself watching in the glass. I think television is not so much like an eye as like a mouth. I look and look at it, and I don’t know why others see it looking back at them. It’s a mouth, all right. When we go out Suzy turns off the television and brushes her hair while looking at the green glass. Her long straight hair begins to float away from her, drawn by the static of the screen. I like to watch her.

Under the water, as I would go into my turn, I would see Doc’s face, green, in the window. There was a window in the pool wall so he could watch us underwater. Pushing off, you planted your feet on the glass. He watched us and took our pictures. Around the pool, on the walls, are still pictures of me swimming different strokes — the same strokes stopped at the same point or a series of one stroke instances apart, from all angles. My head coming out of the water as my arms pull on the fly, head-on. What am I looking at? Doc’s book was called The Science of Swimming . He developed interval training and hypoxic training. He defined the two-beat crawl stoke and the principles of fluid mechanics. He saw Bernoulli’s principle in my stroke. I developed my stroke on my own by trial and error. When I came to Indiana as a freshman, Doc asked me how I pulled my hands through a crawl. I told him: a straight-arm pull down the middle line of my body. When I saw the first movies, I saw myself using a zigzag pull with my elbows at ninety degrees. How did I develop such good mechanics when I didn’t even know how I swam? Doc said I was a motor genius, and he strapped lights on my fingers and toes that flashed as I swam and made light tracings of my stroke on film.