Flavor of the Month (28 page)

“Ara, Mr. Sagarian, please, let me explain.” Lila’s voice was tight with panic.

“There is no need to explain. I understand completely. But I will not help you, for two reasons. One, you jeopardized a very old, very lucrative relationship I have with one of my major stars, and, two, you underestimated me.” Ara now held the handkerchief to his mouth as the drooling seemed to increase. “And for those reasons, Miss Kyle, consider yourself lucky that I’m only throwing you out of my office, and not out of the business.” Ara pressed a button on his desk, and his office door was opened immediately. “Miss Bradley, please escort Miss Kyle to the elevator. And, Miss Bradley, Miss Kyle will
not
be making any further appointments to see me. Our business together is finished.”

Ara Sagarian swung around in his chair and faced the window, picking up the phone as he did so.

Lila followed Miss Bradley, this time in silence. When they came to the elevator bank, the door opened to an elevator and Lila got in. “I’m so sorry, Miss Kyle,” Miss Bradley said. “I always loved your mother.” Then the door shut between them.

In the isolation of the swiftly moving elevator, Lila Kyle covered her face and cried.

If you have to pick a city to get lost in, you can’t do better than New York. Mary Jane found it surprisingly easy to disappear, to melt out of her previous life and turn into a ghost. She spent almost all of her time alone. Those days of endless walking, spending nothing, eating nothing, speaking to no one, with no place to go but the room that she could not bear to call “home,” seemed emptier than any life could sustain. But you have to make space if you want something new, she told herself, over and over. Since when is giving birth easy? Or being born?

And her memories kept her company. Memories of laughing with Neil, shopping with Molly, and hanging out with the troupe, and memories of Sam.

She couldn’t forget him. In fact, it seemed that the longer the separation, the more often she thought of him. How he had cast her for
Jack and Jill
, the rehearsals, the start of their affair. What he said, how he looked. Perhaps it was because she was so lonely, but his memory did not fade. It got stronger.

Starving herself, exercising, undergoing surgery and recuperation were lonely occupations almost beyond bearing. But Mary Jane learned from it. She learned that she could survive almost anything, and that she could accomplish almost anything she wanted, if she kept to a single goal: she didn’t think about meeting a man, making friends, getting a part, choosing what she would wear, buying a new book, or even eating a good meal. She focused only on the perfecting of her body, and the study of this new persona she hoped to become: a beautiful woman. And if the loneliness sometimes seemed almost to suffocate her with its blanket of New York isolation, at least, wrapped in it, she was safe from distraction.

By the third operation, she was more relaxed. She had seen the implants that would be inserted into her cheeks and chin. Dr. Moore showed her how they would be placed and where the incision scars would be hidden. She wasn’t as fearful before the surgery, but the bruising and swelling afterward were so horrendous that she swore off mirrors for the duration. It was too frightening.

And, of course, she had to be conscious. It helped the surgeon better understand how the skin draped over her face. Brewster Moore had told her that, and she knew it, but she hadn’t known how much it would bother her—seeing the gowned, masked faces, hearing the scraping of the bone as he worked on the ridge under her brows, hearing the drill that Dr. Moore used to cut away at her. But she was determined to move ahead with this plan, and she could see some signs of progress. She could easily wear size six now, and her breasts, though scarred, pointed up perkily under her blouse.

Well, she reminded herself, the oral surgery had been much worse.
That
wasn’t any goddamn discomfort, and she’d demanded Percodan and gotten it. Eight teeth pulled—four wisdom teeth, four of the perfectly healthy molars beside them—so that there was room in her mouth for the others to straighten out. “It’s not that your teeth are too big,” Dr. Kleinman told her, “it’s that your mouth is too small.”

“I wish my grandmother could hear you say that,” Mary Jane muttered, remembering all the times she’d been called a big mouth.

Her teeth had ached. Her jaw had been broken and realigned by Dr. Moore; then Kleinman, the master orthodontist, had begun his work. At least she hadn’t been able to eat for weeks, and she’d dropped another nine pounds. When she had nothing better to do, she could now count all her ribs when she held her breath.

So she’d pop a Percodan, crawl onto the lumpy cot in her hotel room, and stroke her ribs like a washboard until the pain let up and she fell into a sleep too drugged for “discomfort.”

But worse than the tooth pain had been the electrolysis. A Frenchwoman, Michelle, had worked over her hairline and eyebrows, following Dr. Moore’s template, burning out hair follicles with a tiny needle inserted into her forehead. It was agony, and the smell made her want to gag.

“Easier to raise your hairline than surgically build you more forehead,” Dr. Moore said. “And your hair
is
beautiful.” It was the first time he had complimented her, and she felt herself flush with pleasure.

“My grandmother called it ‘Indian hair.’ It’s so thick and heavy that I was ashamed of it.”

“Medically speaking, your grandmother sounds like an asshole,” Dr. Moore told her, and she had laughed despite the “discomfort.”

She liked him. She liked him very much. And throughout the long, painful, boring hospitalizations, during the examinations in his spare office, even in phone calls to her, he treated her…kindly. With compassion. As if she was as serious a patient as Raoul or Winthrop, or the little girl who’d had her face burned off in a car accident, or the teenager who’d been kept in the basement by his parents, or some of the other horrors who waited in his office, hoping for a human face, a face he could give them to end their shame and isolation.

Still, even the steeliest determination has to grapple with financial realities. After eleven “procedures,” Mary Jane had to face the fact that she was close to broke. She hadn’t worked in almost twenty-two months, the longest “vacation” in her life. Not that all the surgery had been a day at the beach. Brewster had called her lucky—he said all she needed was money and time. Well, she’d certainly run out of the latter because now her money was just about gone. The only asset she had left was the farm up in Scuderstown, but in the more than two years since her grandmother’s death it had been immersed in the legal tangle left by the old woman. Her grandmother had stubbornly left it to her son, Mary Jane’s father, although he had been
non compos mentis
and hooked to machines at the V.A. for more than thirty years. Mary Jane had counted on that money’s coming through by now. Leave it to Grandma to ruin my plans, even when she’s dead, Mary Jane thought.

Slater, the Albany lawyer, was still trying to clear probate, but it was taking a long time, and his fees would probably eat into what little the farm would bring. By the time the money came through, Mary Jane, like her grandma, would also be dead of old age.

She tried to live on even less, and sold the engagement ring she’d had from her mother. But the four hundred dollars she got for it wouldn’t last long. When she was down to her last thousand dollars, she had no choice—she went to Dr. Moore to tell him.

Mary Jane sat across from him, once more, in that austere office. “I have to stop the surgery for now,” she said. She tried not to let her lip tremble, or show any emotion. She remembered the breakdown she’d had in this same chair the first time they spoke. “I mean to go on. It will just have to wait for a while.”

“Why?” he asked.

“Personal reasons,” she said. She really liked Dr. Moore, and she’d come to understand the compassion that he contained behind his formality, but she didn’t want to discuss her problems with him.

“Well, I know this is a difficult thing that you are going through. Identity, self-worth, aesthetics, pain, anxiety, fear, scarring. It’s a great deal that you are asking of yourself. If there is any way that I or the team can provide more assistance…”

She could see his concern. That he had done wrong. God, he must think she was having second thoughts! “I’ve run out of money,” Mary Jane mumbled.

“What?”

“I’ve run out of money.” She said it more loudly, more angrily than she meant to. They were silent for a moment. Brewster Moore blinked.

“Is that all? Jesus, I thought you were having regrets or some kind of mental problem. It’s just the money?”

“
Just?
”

“Well, what I mean to say is that, as long as it’s only financial, I think we could work something out.”

“But I have to get a job. I’m really down to the bottom of my savings. And working isn’t going to make me enough to pay my rent
and
surgical fees. I’ll have to put everything off until my grandmother’s estate comes through. If it comes through.” Tears filled her eyes. She’d put her life on hold for so long. How much more delay and disappointment could she take?

But Dr. Moore seemed unfazed. “Didn’t you use to be a nurse?” he asked. “You could work for me now.”

“With Miss Hennessey? No thanks.” The nurse still gave her the creeps. And she felt the woman resented her growing relationship with Dr. Moore. Not that it was anything more than professional. Once or twice, Mary Jane wondered if she herself wished it
were
more. And if Nurse Hennessey had a yen for the doctor, too.

“Oh, she’s not so bad.”

“You say that because she worships you.”

“Well, it’s nice to have someone admire you, even if it’s only Miss Hennessey.” He laughed. “No, I was thinking perhaps you could work at the clinic with the children.”

“Raoul and the others?”

“Yes.”

She felt her stomach tighten. “I don’t think so.”

“I think you’d be good for them. I want them to see people who go through successful surgery. Of course, yours isn’t as extreme as theirs, but, as a role model, you’ll do. And they’d be good for you. Plus, I need the help and you need the rhinoplasty. A good exchange for everyone.”

“But it will still take a long time to save up the fees.”

“Tell you what. We continue with the procedures now, and you pay me out of your inheritance or future earnings. Meanwhile, if you’re a clinic employee, I think I can get the hospital to waive its fees.”

She felt tears come to her eyes again. He was being so kind. Was it just pity and charity on his part? Or professional pride in a project he wanted to see completed? She decided not to question it too deeply and simply be grateful.

And so they made the deal.

Now Mary Jane sat in a back booth at a Chinese restaurant, eating the dull steamed-vegetable dish before her. Even Buddha couldn’t delight in this, she thought. She pushed the plate aside. Brewster Moore had explained it clearly—“to keep this somewhat unnatural weight and the benefits of surgery, you can only eat two spare meals a day.” She was going in this afternoon for her first job at Brewster’s clinic, and she was nervous. She knew that there he dealt with the most severe types of facial deformity. What would those poor, freakish patients feel if they knew that she, normal as she was, was also going through a series of surgeries?

She looked down at her plate. Eating had always been her solution to anxiety, but no more. Now it was steamed vegetables and a little brown rice, even under stress.

The placemat had the Chinese horoscope on it. She was born under the sign of the Dog—“Generous and loyal, you have the ability to work well with others. Compatible with the Horse and Tiger. Your opposite is the Dragon. 1910, 1922, 1934, 1946, 1958, 1970, 1982, 1994.” She had been born in 1958. Well, she was generous and loyal, and she did work well with others—with Brewster, anyway, if not jealous Miss Hennessey. She looked up Sam’s birth year, 1952. Yes, there he was—a Dragon. So, the Chinese knew their relationship was doomed from the start. It said he was robust and passionate, his life filled with complexity. He was compatible with the Monkey.

Despite the long months, despite the separation, despite the pain of what she was going through alone, she still thought of him. His smile. His long, slow hands on her body. His laugh, and the way he shook his head over a joke. Despite everything, she still missed him as badly as she had the first day he left her. Did he ever miss her?

She wondered what year Crystal Plenum was born. Monkeys were 1944, 1956, 1968. Was the bitch two years older than she, or ten years younger? What surgery had
she
had? What lies did she tell?

Well, Mary Jane decided, even if she did change her age, she was going to stay a Dog, if not in looks, then in Chinese horoscopes. But she wouldn’t be a 1958 dog, she’d be a 1970 one. She thought she could pass for twelve years younger—the eye job and radical face lift seemed to have eliminated all wrinkles, and her skin’s elasticity was such that she didn’t have the stretched look that she had been afraid of.

It was the nose that still troubled her. She hated, as she always had, to look in the mirror. Now the fine cheekbones and the delicate chin that had emerged from under Brewster’s scalpel seemed to mock the pendulous nose that still hung in the center of her face. In a way, she was uglier than she had ever been. She avoided all mirrors. There was a wall of them on the other side of the restaurant, facing her banquette, but she kept her head averted.

Dr. Moore had insisted that the rhinoplasty come last, after all the other work had settled. She trusted him, but, despite the lithe body that now looked good in tight jeans, despite the more feminine brow, the cheekbones, the improved hairline, the dental work, and even the colored contact lenses, the face that she glanced away from was barely attractive. Could the rhinoplasty fix all that?

Well, she sighed, the work on the ward should give her a sense of proportion.

And by the end of the first week, she realized it had. Brewster had asked her to come on as night nurse. There were few medical requirements—she simply administered painkillers to those children out of recent surgery and comforted all the children who were too frightened or restless to sleep. Brewster said they needed conversation and attention as much as anything else. “And they need to be looked at. So many people avert their eyes. Look at them. Not to stare. Just give them the gift of being seen.”