Autobiography of a Face (22 page)

Walking around these dark clubs, I felt the same strange power I used to feel among the parents at the pony parties. As long as I disengaged any expectations of being physically desired by anyone, I was able to indulge a fantasy of myself as an artist, as someone special, a face you remembered.

 

The summer after my sophomore year came to an end, the grotesque swelling came down, and I had a revision operation. Though I didn't feel particularly good about my image, I didn't feel bad about it either. This was a momentous step forward, and I decided to push myself one step further. I cut my hair. I knew it was the only way I would ever stop hiding behind it. Starting off with a long bob, I worked in small stages, every few weeks making it shorter and shorter. By the end of my junior year it was only a few inches long. During that year the free flap was slowly reabsorbed, as the last one had been. Once again I had nothing to show for the operation but the scarred donor site. Finally, the summer before my final year at college, I was scheduled for a bone graft.

The graft would be nonvascularized, meaning a lump of bone would be taken from my hip, ground up, and then, like clay, fashioned into the rough shape of a jaw. The effects of this operation were immediately apparent and remarkable, because bone doesn't swell. I remember limping out of bed to the bathroom and not believing my own eyes as I swung open the door. Could that really be me? For weeks afterward I kept putting my hand up and checking to make sure it was still there, an actual jaw. For the first time in memory, I actually looked forward to seeing myself in the mirror, seeing a face I liked.

What puzzled me was that I still didn't feel attractive, despite what all my friends were telling me. Wasn't my fear just supposed to fall away, wasn't someone supposed to fall in love with me, wasn't life supposed to
work
now? Where was all that relief and freedom that I thought came with beauty?

THE GENERAL PLOT OF LIFE IS SOMETIMES SHAPED
by the different ways genuine intelligence combines with equally genuine ignorance. I put all my effort into looking at the world as openly, unbiasedly, and honestly as possible, but I could not recognize my own self as a part of this world. I took great pains to infuse a sense of grace and meaning into everything I saw, but I could not apply those values to myself. Personally, I felt meaningless, or, more precisely, I felt I meant nothing to no one.

Even though I now possessed many rich friendships, had people who valued me, not having a lover meant I was ultimately unlovable. I didn't realize what a major step forward it was for me to begin to own my desires. But rather than finding affirmation in knowing my friends loved me, I turned it against myself: if so many people thought I was such a lovable person, the fact that I still wasn't able to get a lover proved I was too ugly. Whatever sense of inner worth I developed was eroded by the knowledge that I could only compensate for, but never overcome, the obstacle of my face.

I was consumed with self-pity, but try as I might I couldn't shake it. Because I had grown up denying myself any feeling that even hinted at self-pity, I now had to find a way to reshape it. Just as I had been comforted by the Christian pamphlets that came in the mail, I now read the Bible, though I could not find it within myself to believe. In the Old and New Testaments I recognized a certain movement of time, a cycle of mourning that began with expulsion and moved toward reconciliation. It was the dynamic of my own life, reaffirmed in a different language. I read various philosophers and imagined my soul, separate and clear of my heart and mind. At times I was so lonely I was amazed I didn't just expire right there on the spot, as if loneliness that strong were a divine thunderbolt that could strike me down at any moment, whether I was in bed, at a crowded dinner table, or at an empty roadside stop.

Not surprisingly, I saw sex as my salvation. If only I could get someone to have sex with me, it would mean that I was attractive, that someone could love me. I never doubted my own ability to love, only that the love would never be returned. The longing for someone and the fear that there would never be anyone intermingled to the point where I couldn't tell the difference. My longing itself, my neediness, transformed itself into a firm belief that my love would never be reciprocated. The major reason I was still a virgin when I graduated from college was obviously the lack of genuine opportunities combined with my crippling lack of self-esteem, but I persisted in seeing it as proof that I had lost out on the world of love only because of my looks.

 

All of this would change when I went to graduate school. Having long given up on the idea of going to medical school, I applied to MFA programs in poetry. If sex wasn't going to be my salvation, writing and poetry would be. But within two days of arriving at the University of Iowa, I met the man who would become my first lover. There was no doubt I was an easy mark. On the surface Jude was everything I imagined I wanted: an older, handsome writer who drove an antique sports car and had an unusual name and a quirky personality. He had lived a difficult, interesting life. On the whole he was, as he loved to hear me describe him, terribly dashing.

The relationship was a disaster. I never for a moment thought I was in love with Jude or that he was in love with me, but it was a highly charged sexual relationship. At last I had found a man who was attracted to me, and I allowed his attraction to define me. At his prompting, I began dressing more like "a woman," even though I still could not bring myself to use the personal pronoun and the word
woman
in the same sentence. At first I felt like an imposter, but as time wore on even I had to admit I had a sexy body. I went from looking like a boy to wearing miniskirts, garter belts, and high heels. Once I started dressing provocatively I couldn't stop. It was just as much a costume as dressing androgynously had been, and even though these new dresses hid none of my curves, I believed they hid my fear of being ugly. I thought I could use my body to distract people from my face. It made me feel worthy: I even got dressed up to go to the supermarket.

All of my parading around couldn't hide the fact that the bone graft was slowly going the way of the other grafts. I didn't really notice it until the day after Jude broke up with me. Looking in the mirror, I saw the telltale signs and felt a huge dread come over me. It had all been a lie. I had fooled Jude into thinking I was something other than what I was, and now reality was slowly, relentlessly manifesting itself again. This is when I began dressing in earnest slinkiness. I began spending two hours a day at the gym, imposing a killer regime on myself. My body was one thing I had control over. If I had put a tenth of the energy I spent obsessing over my face and my body into my work, I could have written
War and Peace
ten times over.

Bent on proving I was desirable, I started collecting lovers, having a series of short-term relationships that always ended, I was certain, because I wasn't beautiful enough. I became convinced that anyone who wanted to have a real relationship with me was automatically someone I didn't want. It was the classic Groucho Marx paradox: I didn't want to belong to any club that would have me as a member.

Dr. Baker and I decided to try another soft-tissue free flap. So much of the original irradiated tissue had been replaced with nonirradiated tissue that he felt there was a good chance this graft would stick. But a few months before the operation, I discovered that Medicaid would not pay my hospital bills. The accumulated reasons ranged from my not living in the state where the operation was to be performed to my being a full-time student with a teaching fellowship. I had to put off the operation until the following summer.

Dr. Baker suggested I go to the University of Iowa hospital for a consultation with the head of plastic surgery, who was an old friend of his. Perhaps there was a way for him to do the operation. Because Iowa's Medicaid system was on a first-come, first-serve funding basis, I could not apply for funding before the operation: I had to have it, submit the bills, and wait to see if there was enough left in the budget to pay for it. I wasn't very optimistic when I went for my appointment.

The surgeon was from the old school. Of course my free flaps had shrunk, he told me; they always did. He suggested sticking with the pedestal method that Dr. Conley had outlined for me so many years ago. He was very enthusiastic, explaining in far greater detail than Conley had about all the different incisions he'd make. He described how I could stay in the hospital for the six weeks when my hand was sewn to my stomach and then to my face; while my hand was sewn to my face he would rig up a special cast to hold everything in place. He even introduced me to a patient of his who was having a pedestal to rebuild his nose. This patient's nose had been shot off with a gun, and he was sporting a very complicated and uncomfortable-looking cast that was forcibly holding his wrist to his face. Connecting his wrist to the area of his nose was a pale tube of skin with a red row of sutures down the side. I felt totally repulsed, and ashamed of my repulsion.

After this patient had left, and not wanting to be rude, I calmly told the surgeon that I probably couldn't go through with the operations after all because of the money involved. "Oh, don't let that worry you. You wait right here." He disappeared for a long fifteen minutes, leaving me alone in the office. I decided this was as good a time as any to see if I could have an out-of-body experience. Having read only in passing about out-of-body experiences, and these mostly in supermarket tabloids, I thought you were supposed to follow an actual physical route, so I closed my eyes and tried imagining what the air duct over my head would look like if I were inside it.

Eventually the surgeon returned with a hospital financial officer, who outlined a payment plan for the three major operations and the minor follow-up, as well as the extended inpatient stays. When he had finished his calculations, he assured me that with payments of only a hundred dollars a month I could pay off the original bill and all the accumulated interest by the time I was forty-two. He was very affable, and I shook his hand, telling him I'd think about it.

I stayed calm until I reached the street, when I broke into a run and didn't stop until I got home, four miles away. There I started to hyperventilate. I was even more upset that my body should betray me now, just when I most needed it. There was no way I was going to put myself through those operations, let alone have the pleasure of paying them off just when I should be rightfully starting my midlife crisis along with everybody else.

There I was with my short skirts and sharp mind and list of lovers, trying so hard to convince myself that maybe all I really needed to do was learn how to treat myself better. I was on the verge of learning this, yet I was still so suspicious, so certain that only another's love could prove my worth absolutely. Forget all that now, though, because here was the ugly truth. I felt I had been shown a mirror of what my life really was, what I really was, and I did not want to look. I was someone whom doctors talked to about sewing her hand to her face. I was trying to believe there really wasn't all that much wrong with me, but here were my worst suspicions, confirmed.

Lying in my usual abject heap on the living-room carpet, a pose I often adopted in dire times, I mouthed the words "I'm tired. I don't want to do this anymore." For once I didn't adopt either a noble or a catastrophic interpretation of events. I'd been so hell-bent on accepting everything that happened, on trying to inject some grand scheme of meaning, that the thought of simply rejecting everything felt akin to heresy. It was reality, after all: I did have cancer once, I did have a disfigured face now, there was no denying these two things. I felt pulled in two different directions. I had tasted what it was like to feel loved, to feel whole, and I had liked that taste. But fear kept insisting that I needed someone else's longing to believe in that love. No matter how philosophical my ideals, I boiled every equation down to these simple terms: was I lovable or was I ugly?

 

As radical a decision as it was to simply
not
try to reach a conclusion, I knew that one way or another I would have an operation. This, I felt, was beyond my control. After a great deal of finagling, I managed to find funding for the next free flap from a charity through the New York University Center for Reconstructive Surgery. Dr. Baker did the operation that summer, and it was the usual story of hope and disappointment. I looked horrendous for a few months, then I looked better, and just as I was getting used to the new face, the graft started disappearing. I thought about trying another bone graft, but when I discovered that there was a limit to the number of times I could apply for funds, I decided to give it up. This was me, this was my face, like it or lump it.

I opted for a geographic cure, deciding to go live in Europe once school was finished. I took on extra jobs, worked around the clock, and in a few months saved two thousand dollars and bought a ticket to Berlin. An old college friend was living there, which seemed as good a reason as any to pick that destination.

 

West Berlin, the Wall still intact at the time, fueled every romantic notion I had about living the bohemian life. I lived in a flat heated by giant prewar porcelain stoves, with no proper bathroom. Each morning I bathed in the kitchen sink. I applied for jobs teaching English at various schools and went to Kreuzberg, a poor, rundown area near the Wall, for very cheap German lessons, along with a room full of Turkish immigrants. While waiting to hear about jobs, I spent my days sitting in cafes, trying to write the ultimate poem about beauty and truth while simultaneously plotting to get rich from writing the great transatlantic trashy novel.

Living in a country where I didn't speak the language suited me just fine. Everything was an adventure, including buying milk at the corner store. I developed the art of getting lost. Intending to ride one U-Bahn line, I'd often end up in a completely different part of town, with only my own wits and the help of strangers to get me back home. It was a safe kind of chaos, and at some point I understood that I was cultivating my "aloneness" in this strange place as a method for putting off loneliness.