Mimi (8 page)

None of us was particularly focused on chivalry at the time. Until Rosemary, my first love, my policy had been to dump (or be dumped) before anything got too serious (a strategy, come to think of it, that I immediately resumed,
post
-Rosemary). Three weeks was my standard contract, two months tops, sooner if there was any sign of sexual waning in either party. I developed a fine technique for keeping women at bay: always imply there’s something much more important than them going on, even if it’s just gloating over your mechanical pencils or attending yet another HMO meeting. What matters is that you
Keep the Supremacy
.

I had no trouble finding women (everybody likes a doctor), and I don’t think I ever hurt anyone—though I feel some chagrin over the girl I dropped because her
mother
got cancer (after I’d badgered the kid for months to go out with me and screwed her silly several times). A real operator.

But everything changed when I met Rosemary. She had the most beautiful curvy shape but didn’t know it: the girls all hated their bodies according to the requirements of our era (self-doubt from which my profession has infinitely benefited). Rosemary came over one night for a party my roommates were throwing and she never left. We talked and walked and ate and slept with each other for the next three years. This was the first time the whole male–female combo made sense to me. Sex had a purpose at last: pleasing Rosemary! I relished her softness, her smoothness, her curves, her verticals and horizontals. She made sense of New York for me,
its
verticals and horizontals, its highs and lows. Everything suddenly became sensual, the heat on the street, birds, shade, rain, reflections, strange liquors: for some reason, Rosemary and I took to ordering side-cars (the first to do so since the 1940s).

The essence of a thing runs through it: tomato leaves smell of tomato, coriander seeds smell of cilantro. Every mouse smells of mouse, every house of house. What I loved about Rosemary was her smell—not a
rosemary
smell, though that would have been apt. No, she was no plant, she was my honey. And yet—those eggs of hers! Rosemary had an obsession with eggs, real or fake, eggs of all shapes and sizes: ceramic eggs, china eggs, glass eggs, marble, wooden, paper, plastic, gold or silver eggs, eggs with scenic views inside, tiny eggs, enormous eggs, eggs that wouldn’t open, eggs that wouldn’t shut, furry eggs, flowery eggs, feathery eggs, eggs in glass cases, voodoo eggs, comical eggs with flashing lights and steam coming out, a big cloth egg she liked to take to
bed
with her, egg earrings, egg mobiles, egg-shaped place mats, egg-shaped egg timers! She collected every picture of an egg she could find. She even had a large ornamental egg covered in opals and rubies, and I
tolerated
it. But, really, what is the point of a jewel-encrusted egg?

My first patient on Groundhog Day was an egg-shaped woman. Or maybe she was groundhog-shaped. She was some kind of egg and groundhog hybrid, so fat it was impossible to detect any expression in her face.

“My little boy’s about to start school,” she told me, “and I’m worried he’ll be bullied.”

“Why would that be?”

“Because I’m fat,” she said flatly.

She
was
fat, but her reasoning seemed thin. I sensed there was more to this maternal concern than met the eye and, sure enough, when I examined her, I found badly healed burn scars that must have been causing her great discomfort. She’d put on all this weight
since
the burning incident, so the stretched skin was pulling at the scars and irritating them. After she got dressed, I sat her down and asked about the scarring. Without much hesitation, as if
bursting
to admit it all, as if all that fat was just layer on layer of smothered trauma and protest, she told me the ghastly thing that had happened to her. She’d been married to a guy who continually raped her, sometimes at gunpoint. When she became pregnant, he flipped completely and doused her with kerosene while she slept, setting the bed alight. Nice guy. Her little boy was born unharmed, but she was badly burned. And when she started divorce proceedings against her husband, the lawyer tried to rape her too!

So the whole thing about the kid, her anticipation of his being bullied, was really a side issue—the woman was sick of being mistreated
herself
. She needed a full-time shrink! Not my field. My training only equipped me to alleviate her physical symptoms. In recognition of what she’d been through, I offered to fix her scars for free. (My colleagues would grouse about it, but so what? I too could be compassionate.) But she didn’t care about the scars, she said, she was only interested in protecting her boy from ostracism. Reluctantly, I then suggested a gastric band (not something I could do but I could find a friend who would, and I’d gladly pay)—but she objected to this too.

“There isn’t time. He starts kindergarten in March.”

Lipo was what she wanted and lipo was what she insisted on getting. This too was outside my province. My patients are rich, and the rich are rarely fat these days. The
poor
are fat, and the middle classes are the ones you see jogging everywhere: the thinwardly mobile. But I gave her the name of a lipo guy and told her to come back afterward and we’d see to those scars. She said she’d think about it. Then, with the assistance of my cane (which Cheryl found so sexy), I limped out to the foyer with the woman to prevent any chance of her being bullied, mistreated or ostracized on her way out.

I’d forgotten the dreariness of our waiting room, despite our marketing advisor Andy’s extensive efforts to de-medicalize it. What we needed to establish, he’d informed us before the revamp, was a calm, clean,
cozy
atmosphere, so that as soon as they stepped inside the door, our prospective clients would get the feeling that plastic surgery’s no big deal. “It’s not like buying a house, or a car!” he said. “You’ve got to make it. . . fun. It could all be fun!” So the place had been done up to look like a kind of luxury holistic therapy center or relaxation and meditation spa, with minor elective procedures on offer—rather than the sadomasochistic, money-grubbing, life-endangering torture chamber it really was. Under Andy’s direction, an interior decor consultant installed thick creamy carpets to break any shaky patient’s fall (and muffle the whimpers), and indirect lighting that glowed kindly on post-operative abnormalities (as kindly as energy-saving bulbs
can
glow). We were also advised to position fresh flowers everywhere to mask the smell of piss and pus and disinfectant. Casual attire was the agreed look; no suits, no ties, no white coats, just a loose shirt and jeans, even a baseball cap. We all looked like we were on vacation, or still children! In fact, everything was done to alleviate fear
except
sparing people painful, invasive surgery. We even had classical music piped into the waiting room so the old trouts could listen to the “Trout Quintet.”

Today it was “Heiliger Dankgesang” though, the piece Beethoven wrote in response to a terrifying illness of his own (one of
my
choices), but the irony was lost on this crowd. Even if they’d wanted to, nobody could’ve heard the violins over the incredible din being produced by one family—various children, parents and a grandma. The main source of boisterousness was a little girl of about two and a half, who was racing around the room talking to herself. One of her arms was in a cast, but it didn’t stop her being feverishly active. The adults seemed united in trying to ignore her—but why didn’t one of them take this itchy kid out to a playground or something? They couldn’t
all
need cosmetic surgery.

The child was in a world of her own and her restlessness was troubling. It was
maniacal
. I watched as she approached the decorative column in the middle of the waiting room that our designer had persuaded us looked “Grecian” (though it seemed straight out of
Star Trek
—when they beam themselves onto some planet that
looks
beatific but proves to be an illusion, really just hot rocks and craters). The kid was no aesthete: she embraced this stupid plaster pillar passionately and started humping, grinding her hips against it in mock-ecstasy. She was doing a very professional-looking pole dance in our waiting room! She knew all the moves. Somehow, I didn’t think this was the kind of “fun” Andy had in mind.

The child kept looking behind her for approval—not from everybody, just her
dad
—she was looking his way the whole time she pumped and twirled. I caught the guy’s eye and could see it all immediately: he had made this tiny kid watch porn and act it out for him at home. He was the one who’d taught her this stuff. He looked guilty as hell, pretending not to notice what she was up to. You could tell this wasn’t his customary stance, since the kid seemed so surprised by his indifference to her porno efforts. She was obviously used to getting more of a rise out of him than this. And what was with the broken arm? Had he done that to her too perhaps, when she refused to play the game?

The next time I caught his eye, he’d governed his shame and stared back at me with defiance. I retreated to my office, shaking. I tried to calm myself by thinking of Bubbles. What was she doing right now? Probably sleeping on the window seat in the sun, dreaming of the bad old days with Styrofoam Santa, incarcerated in her bike igloo. I had tried to make up for all that by keeping her warm and well fed ever since, giving her a life of coziness and Fancy Feast (a life I kind of envied right now).

My reverie was interrupted by Cheryl bringing in my next patient, the pole-dancer’s
mother
, who sat down and didn’t say anything. This happens a lot. Patients seem to expect me to point out to
them
what their particular eyesore is: they’ve worried about it so much that, by the time they come see someone, they think it’s obvious (even if it’s penile dysfunction!).

“Well, what can I do for you today?” I prodded.

She shrugged.

“Is there something specific you came to see me about?”

“Well, look at them!”

“Um, at. . . what?” I asked.

She indicated her breasts. I waited. It really wasn’t my job to preemptively decide what the patient’s particular area of self-doubt was. Finally, she gathered herself and said, “They’re too big. My husband said so.” (Of course they’re too big for
him
, lady—the guy likes little girls!)

I dutifully did some measurements of her small, symmetrical breasts, as if studying the problem from a medical point of view, then announced authoritatively, “Your breasts are
not
too large. They’re perfectly in proportion to your body. Now, if they were causing you back pain, or—”

“My husband wants me to get something done,” she replied dully.

“No ethical practitioner would advise surgery under these circumstances,” I told her. This wasn’t strictly true. I did unnecessary boob-jobs all the time! Changing already acceptable breasts into breasts that were equally acceptable, but slightly different, was my forte. Nonetheless, I tried to weed out the ones who were just doing it because they hated themselves.

Now she seemed on the verge of tears, and gestured dismissively at her chest. “But I can’t. . .
keep. . .
looking at these things!” I offered her a Kleenex and let her cry. With that husband, she was entitled to it. Then she asked again, “But couldn’t you do something?”

I stuck to my guns about the surgery but finally asked, “Have you considered therapy?” Adding, “For your
husband
.”

She looked blank. “Oh, he doesn’t have time for that. . .
” (Don’t be so sure, you dope—he has time to train his own kid to be a geisha girl!)

I told her I’d need to consult one of my colleagues about her case, and got her to go back to the waiting room. The truth was, most of my colleagues would happily take on this breast reduction. Hell, they’d do a female circumcision on their own mothers if they were paid enough. Bit heavy on the scalpels, light on the scruples, I sometimes felt. I didn’t consult any of them. I went straight to the receptionists’ private office instead and told Cathy to call the cops. Cheryl got all excited.

“Why?
Why?!
”

“Don’t ask,” I told her, feeling that if I went into the whole thing right then, I might throw up. “Just get them over here and keep that family in the waiting room until they come.”

I limped back to my office, wishing I had a bucket of cold water to pour over my head. Boy, great to be back! But my next patient made me feel better—a young woman in a miniskirt and spaghetti-strap top, who strode in and started joking around.

“Nice office,” she remarked. “See you’re keeping the flower thing going in here.”

“Flowers!?”

I swiveled my chair around and found that somebody (Cheryl?) had shoved a whole basin-load of tiger lilies on the window sill behind me. I hadn’t even noticed before, but now the perfumed stink of them was dizzying. I turned back to the girl with a look of perplexity and she laughed. But what could her problem be, I wondered. She looked confident enough, though I thought she must be cold. Why do women have to display so much bare flesh these days, as if advertising constant sexual availability?