Imperfections (30 page)

I shifted my attention to Dr. Bella. Her slender fingers worked tweezers in one hand and a small eyedropper in the other. She was working with such focus yet her brow remained unfurrowed, her face remained an impassive kabuki mask. And, before her, she was building a rose. The tweezers delicately pinched a petal. The eyedropper dabbed what must have been glue, and painstakingly the two came together.

“It's real,” she said. Her voice was smooth and strong. “The petals are imported and I put them together. I build roses because nature can't seem to do it right.” Her eyes remained on the flower as she spoke. “She always has one petal with a cleft in the wrong place or veins that are too prominent or, mostly, just a few petals that are wilting so slightly—a minor discoloration and curling at the edge. So, I do it myself. I take beautifully flawed things apart and put them back together properly. I fix Mother Nature's mistakes.”

She looked up at me. Twenty seconds passed before she spoke.

“Richard Trench. I've seen your work. I'm a big fan.” Her teeth shone bleached white in the half-light. “Now, sit.”

I did as I was told. The strength of her presence left me with little choice really.

Her eyes roamed about, taking in every part of me yet settling on none. Even as she spoke, her eyes moved.

“You're lucky,” she said. “In the old days, I was forced to work my craft in a hospital. Now it's easy. You can come to the mall to have a procedure. In the old days, it was a stigma to have improvements made. Now, it's a badge of courage. People talk openly about the work they've had done. It's a statement of financial fecundity. It's bold. It's daring.” Her voice grew louder and more excited. “You can go on vacation to Costa del Sol for a month and come back twenty years younger. Why? How did this fabulous transformation happen?”
 

I opened my mouth and said, “Plastic surgery…” and was promptly silenced by a finger.

“My questions are not for answering. Not by you,” Dr. Bella said. “This is your consult. You are not to speak.” There was an awkward length of silence. “That's a horrible thing you said but I forgive you, you're new. There's no such thing as plastic surgery, there's only aesthetic activism.”

Dr. Bella leaned forward. Her chair creaked luxuriously and the sound took me back to breakfast.

Paige had shifted in her chair, it creaked. She slurped some coffee and said, “What if everyone was pretty? I mean, the same kind of outrageous pretty that these people are gunning for?” She slapped the newspaper with the back of her hand.

“Never thought of it,” I said.

“Well, if everyone were the same level of beautiful, you would need to become a more extreme vision to stand out,” she said. “In the end, we really have the ugly to thank for beauty. It's this thing called the contrast effect. If everything's the same and there's no gradation from one to the next, any kind of judgments—say beauty and ugliness—don't exist. There would be no thin or fat. The pretty war is not going to stop, it's going to escalate. We have been moving away from the beauty that can happen naturally and into something that only humans can make because we're pushed to make the differences between the two things, beauty and ugly, even greater so we can stand out even more.”

I looked at Dr. Bella. She leaned closer now and I wondered how old she really was.

“Some of the first procedures were restructuring the noses of syphilitics over one hundred years ago,” she said.

Could she have been there? I wondered.

“Their disease ate the cartilage of their noses, announcing them publicly. Their disease, their immoral sexual antics, were out in the open for all to see. Their faces betrayed them and they suffered economic and social harm because of it. They couldn't get jobs, they lost their friends. Their physical appearance hampered their lives and their livelihood. They were a sad, sad miserable lot. Aesthetic activism changed these patients' lives. It cured them by altering their displeasing forms into passable visages once more, allowing them to re-enter everyday society and lead happy, fruitful lives.”

“But they still had syphilis, right?”

Dr. Bella sighed. “If you insist on speaking,” she said, “please do so silently,” she tapped her temple with her finger, “in your head.”

Again, an awkward hush settled between us.

I thought back to Paige, the sunlight streaming through the nook window. Her housecoat was loose around her neck. She caught me staring at the swell of her breast and she smiled.

“Did you know,” Paige said, holding up a knife crusted with a peanut butter skid mark, “that hair transplants are the most common plastic surgery for men? There is this book, the International Statistical Classification of Diseases, in which hair loss is identified as a disease in section L65.0.” She smirked.

Since moving in with Paige, I noticed my hair was thinning. I tried to chalk it up to the penetrating nature of the harsh fluorescent tubes lighting Paige's bathroom, but the more I stared, preened and fluffed, the more I saw a larger volume of scalp. Each time I found one of my hairs resting on the sink or in the shower, I felt a little stab of loss. Every time I splashed water against the errant hair, I watched a tiny bit of me slither down the drain.

“Balding is linked to the secretion of androgen and dihydrotestosterone which is partially genetic and partially triggered by psychological stress. Your testicles secrete these hormones,” she read and smacked her lips.

I shot an accusing look at my lap. At the sight of the bulge in the fabric of my pyjamas, I suddenly and fully understood the meaning of “love/hate” relationship.

“Eunuchs castrated before puberty, they never go bald,” Paige read. “And in ancient times, a poultice of dates, dog paws and donkey hooves, fat and grease was cooked up and applied as a paste to stimulate hair growth.” She scrunched up her face.

I wondered what was in Rogaine and minoxidil. I thought to ask Dr. Bella.

Dr. Bella leaned back in her chair and finally spoke. “There's a disease, one that affects millions of people and one that I can cure… R46.1:
bizarre personal appearance
. If the body can't be corrected, the mind remains tormented. I can remould the body and remake the character. I can alleviate suffering. The new character that I forge is one driven by the ideology of the pursuit of happiness. I just have to cure the disease that genetics has wrought upon you.” Dr. Bella paused. “I'm going to start you on a bit of nose and eye work.”

The finality of her statement was shocking. It was as if personal choice had been removed from the equation.

“You would do well to start with many small prunings at an early age,” she said. “The body's more vibrant and vital. It can recover easily from insults, which will mean fewer procedures when you're older. It'll be quick. It'll be painless.”

Paige. I thought of Paige sitting in the sunlight this morning. It was so different than the darkness I sat in with Dr. Bella.

“In plastic surgery,” Paige read, “anesthesia complications are the prime cause of death.”

“It got Mila,” I said.

“I thought she died from bulimia.”

“Oh,” I said. “I don't really know.”

Paige mulled this over for a moment before focusing on the paper again.

“Here's a gruesome section,” Paige said. “It's about people who have been assaulted because they're beautiful. Katrina Spiros, she was twenty. Some guy splashed acid on her face, blinding her and scarring her for life.” Paige paused, her eyes travelling the lines of text as she took a sip of coffee. “Apparently, the guy was a student obsessed with her beauty. The cops went back through her fan mail and found hundreds of letters from him. Creepy shit, like pages with hair taped to them or stains on them. When her agent announced she was getting married, the guy flipped.” Paige shook her head. “Really,” she said with disappointment.

Having never understood the obsessive personality, I shook my head along with her. I ran my fingers through my hair in hopes to make it look thicker and I thought about how many sit-ups I would have to do to counter the toast and jam I had for breakfast. I thought about how I'd love to get rid of that half-moon of flesh just below my belly button. It had recently appeared and no number of sit-ups seemed to make it disappear.

“This is sick.” Paige's eyes traced a few more lines of print and then she said, “In 1986, this other guy, Steven Roth, he was a TV makeup artist, hired two guys to attack this model named Marla Hanson. They cornered her outside a West Side bar, held her and slowly carved up her face with a razor…”

“Fuck,” I grimaced.

“…for two minutes.” Paige finished with raised eyebrows. “You don't have any psycho fans do you?”

“None that I know of,” I replied.

CHAPTER 16

As With Life, You Knew How This Story Would End

It had been morning when Leonard knocked on the door. Paige and I were still in bed. Our limbs casually intertwined, we drifted awake to plant a soft kiss on a sleepy eyelid or cheek, only to drift away again. It was bright in the room; the spring sun wove through the cracks between the blinds. The air coming in the open bedroom window was alive with the whisper of traffic and fresh with birdsong.

I had answered the door wearing a towel.

“You're not supposed to see each other today,” Leonard said. He held a coffee in each hand. “It's bad luck. We have to get you away from here or we'll both face the wrath of Rachel because you've willingly cursed your marriage.” He handed me a paper cup and an elastic band-bound newspaper before brushing past into the hallway. “You got some gooby in the corner of your eye,” he said. “Get dressed.”

“Morning, Leonard.” Paige came from the bedroom wearing a nightshirt that went to her knees. She pointed at the coffee. “That for me?”

“Good morning, Paige.” Leonard pecked her on the cheek. He contemplated the coffee for a moment before handing it over.

Paige took Leonard to the kitchen while I went to shower and get dressed. Wearing my dress pants and a pressed white shirt, I grabbed the remainder of my tuxedo from the closet and hung it on the front doorknob on my way back to the kitchen.

Leonard and Paige were sitting in the breakfast nook and smirking about something when I joined them. I kissed Paige on the forehead before sitting down at the table. Sunlight streamed in the window and the room was filled with the warm smell of coffee.

“What are you two up to?” I asked.

“Leonard was showing me this picture of you, when you were kids.”

Paige handed me a small square, a picture of Leonard and me in a photo booth. It was the one taken at my tenth birthday party, the one where no kids showed up except Leonard.

I paused for a moment as I recalled the incident and then said, “That's not funny. That's a horrible memory.”

Leonard and Paige laughed.

“You both looked terrified. What kind of birthday was it?” Paige reached across the table and gave my forearm a reassuring rub.

I smiled for Paige's benefit, even though I was serious. It really wasn't funny.

“Hand me the paper,” I said and pointed.

“Really?” Paige raised an eyebrow and then passed the paper across. “He's been doing this for months,” she said to Leonard. “We actually got a subscription because he needs to read the obituaries every morning. I don't get it.”

“Hey,” Leonard said. “They're works of art.”

“Yeah, they're works of art.” I sided with him as I slid the rubber band from the paper. I flipped though the sections. “Just give me a second and we'll be out of here.”

“Looking for someone in particular?” Paige asked.

Leonard and I glanced at each other before I answered, “No. No one in particular.”

“Oh, you guys suck.” Paige shook her head. “You're such bad liars. What's with the look, did you guys kill someone? Are you waiting to see if the body was found or something?” Paige laughed.

I looked at Leonard and he looked at me.

“Man…” Leonard said. “After today she's your wife. You should tell her.”

I sighed, unsure how to explain that I was going to die this year. Paige's smile inched from her face, ticking the seconds by.

“You idiots didn't kill anyone, did you?” Paige asked.

“No,” I told her. “Leonard can predict the future by people dying.”

Leonard nodded solemnly.

“It's true,” he said.

“A few months back, the Pope and Prince Rainier died. Now, I'm watching for Tigger and Piglet to die, then it's my turn,” I said. “I'm sorry. I should have told you earlier. It's just that I love you and I wanted to protect you.”

Paige contemplated this for a moment.
 

“So you're going to die later this year?”

I nodded.