by Jonathan Vatner
A blankly cheerful nurse appeared at the glass door to the examination rooms. The folded violet paper gown in her hand looked like a cyclamen petal, silken and fragile. “You’re here for an antiaging consult?”
“A consult, yes,” Birdie said, clinging to the word for dear life. “I’m not sure I’m going to have anything done.”
Her neighbor Ardith had warned her about Dr. Rosen. “Every time I set foot in his ‘palace of beauty,’” she’d said, freighting every other word with exasperation, “I spend five thousand without blinking!” Maybe Birdie would allow herself one indulgence—a squirt of something to fill out her lips or crow’s feet, perhaps. She wouldn’t go further than that. She wouldn’t lose her head.
The nurse touched Birdie on the upper arm. “Dr. Rosen is very good, Ms. Hirsch.” She ushered her into a cramped, icy examining room and handed her the gown. “Take everything off and put this on, open toward the front.”
Birdie found it admirable that medical procedure was followed in a beauty clinic, but she wasn’t taking off her clothes. “Oh—I’m just here for my face.”
The nurse closed the door behind her with an emphatic click.
Birdie tossed the gown on the examining table and sat on an acrylic chair in the corner. She had gotten a cut and color the day before and applied a stem-cell serum that morning. Now that she thought about it, all this primping probably had more to do with Ardith’s other warning about the doctor: “He’s a shameless flirt.”
* * *
Dr. Rosen was a soft man in his fifties with a sweet, bland face. The absence of a wedding ring excited her in a small way. George hadn’t worn his since gaining twenty pounds over the summer. He refused to resize it and didn’t want her meddling, so she measured his finger with a string while he was sleeping and took the ring to a jeweler. Resenting her for fixing it, he wouldn’t wear it. Now, whenever she saw his fat, naked hand, she seethed.
“Sorry to keep you waiting, Marie,” Dr. Rosen said, descending onto a low stool without breaking his gaze. He positioned an orange plastic clipboard on his knee.
“Oh, it’s Birdie. You can call me Birdie.” George had given her the nickname when they’d first met. Now it was hard to feel that “Marie” was really her.
“Got it. Birdie. What brings you here today?”
“I’m really just here for a consultation—I’m not sure if I want to have anything done….”
He smiled, warmly or smarmily she couldn’t decide. “You look stunning.”
She crossed her legs the other way and smoothed her skirt. “Thank you, but I was told you could make me look better.”
He studied her. “You have a natural expressiveness, and your skin is radiant. I can make you look younger, but I can’t make you more beautiful.”
It sounded like flirting. Was he going to erode her defenses with flattery, then spring thousands of dollars’ worth of treatments on her? “Maybe I wouldn’t mind looking younger,” she said. “Everyone in my building gets Botox.”
“What building is that?” he asked, marking something on his clipboard.
“The Chelmsford Arms, on Eighty-eighth and Madison?”
He laughed. “Your neighbors have been very good to me.”
“Ardith Delano-Roux said you were the best.”
He cocked his head. “Do you know you remind me of my first girlfriend?”
“I did know that,” she said, feeling her crow’s feet articulate themselves as she laughed at her little joke.
“I thought I was going to marry her. She broke up with me the night before our high school graduation.”
“I’m sorry to hear that” didn’t seem appropriate for such ancient history.
“Anyway,” he continued, “I wouldn’t recommend Botox for you. Botox is really meant for the forehead. It can make crow’s feet look like gills. But I have a great laser resurfacing treatment for you. It’ll tighten up your face much more naturally than a facelift.”
“Resurfacing” sounded like something one might do to a driveway. Maybe because he’d complimented her so thoroughly, she was disappointed that he recommended any treatment at all—though of course he’d be insane not to. And yet his reticence with Botox felt like a different kind of rejection.
“Let’s not do anything today. Read this, think about it, and if you’re interested, make another appointment.” He opened a drawer and selected a pamphlet on which a woman named Linda R., fifty-four (actual patient, photo not retouched) said, “Look as young as you feel!”
“I’m booked solid through the first of the year,” he continued, “but tell my secretary you’re a priority patient.” As he gave her the pamphlet, he took her hand. “When was your last skin-cancer screening?” he asked, gliding the fingers of his other hand down her forearm.
“Oh, I don’t have skin cancer,” she said, hearing how stupid she sounded. It had been a few years since her last screening. “I mean, no one in my family has ever had it.”
“You do have beauty marks that need to be checked. I have time now, if you like.”
Considering that she had waited a month for the appointment, it seemed fishy that he suddenly had time for an inspection of her nude body.
He left her alone in the examining room, the fluorescents buzzing. She undressed, keeping her jewelry on, and slid her arms into the paper gown, then lay on the table and waited. Her toes began to hurt from the cold. Maybe Dr. Rosen was seeing another patient at the same time. Maybe that was how he could fit in a spur-of-the-moment cancer check. Ardith had said he was extremely busy. George had been busy, too, back when he was working. She’d always hated those long hours, but in retrospect, she preferred that to her current plight, laboring over meals that he as often as not gulped down in bed, or cleaning up dishes and take-out containers from the floor of his room while the TV yammered on. Perhaps she could have borne the unhappiness with a martyr’s resignation had she seen it coming, had she and George not been perfectly entwined for the first thirty-nine years of their marriage.
But being forced to retire at sixty-two had changed him. It was more than just depression. His spotless pride, which she had always found irresistible, dismantled him, and now she couldn’t look at him without being suffocated by his self-loathing. She’d known his stubbornness, his entitlement and his temper from the beginning, but only when he lost his will to live did they coalesce into a personality that was easy to despise.
The door swung open and closed. Dr. Rosen didn’t apologize, didn’t say anything, just nudged the gown open and touched her clavicle with his ungloved fingers. Her skin tingled with relief. She hadn’t been touched so tenderly in months. He ran a tickly stick through her hair, a few inches at a time, to inspect her scalp. As he moved down her arm, pausing at each mole, she squinted up at him, the light stinging her eyes. He nudged the gown open farther, exposing a nipple. She closed her eyes and absorbed his masculine gaze and the warmth of his hip, pressing into her arm.
“Susan,” he said. “That was her name. I think she ruined me for love.”
His fingers touched her lower rib cage, and she imagined him taking a breast into his mouth. She did not allow her pelvis to rock. Then he tugged the gown closed and examined her legs. She shivered as the cold traveled up her limbs and warmth spread inside her lower abdomen. She rolled onto her belly when he told her to; leaving her robe atop her like a blanket, she soaked in the caress of her arms on her bare torso. He uncovered one section at a time, touching and looking, looking and touching. Doctors never studied her so closely. As his fingers reached her thigh, then her buttock, she became aware of her wedding band. Could he be looking at it, wishing she weren’t married? She closed her hand into a fist.
“She became a painter and moved to California,” he said. “After my divorce, I found her on Facebook. She married one guy and stuck with him, twenty-five years next May. She invited me to visit, but I don’t think I could.”
He was taking a long time with one spot at her waist. The cold air settled on her buttocks, and she wondered how far the gown was open. She spread her legs a bit. She saw him select a handheld microscope that resembled a high-end camera lens. He rubbed some oil on the spot and peered at it through the microscope. Was he really still studying her for medical reasons?
“You really look just like her,” he said, rubbing in tiny circles.
She wanted to tell him that her wedding ring didn’t mean anything anymore, that if he wanted her to be his Susan, she would. A respectable doctor would never make advances on a patient; it was up to the patient to take the first step. He was flirting with her, wasn’t he? It was impossible to tell.
“I’m probably going to leave my husband,” she said. She’d never spoken those words before, never even thought them. Her bond with George had been a fortress, even without children to hold them together, and now it seemed as flimsy as her paper gown. But now that she’d said it, she realized how much she wanted to be free. It excited her, the idea that she needn’t live in his gloomy shadow, that her happy past didn’t demand of her an unhappy future.
Dr. Rosen took his hand away. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said after a pause.
She cringed at her stupidity. “No, it’s a good thing. I needed to tell someone. I thought….”
He pressed hard into her lower back. “I don’t like the look of this mole. I’m going to take a biopsy. It’ll sting a bit.”
Her breath caught as the novocaine burned small and deep, like punishment for her confession. Then she felt another burn, more muted, then a third. Then he was fiddling with the spot.
“What are you doing?” she asked, her voice lost in her throat.
“Scraping off some of the mole to have it tested.”
It scared her that he could cut her without causing pain, that a piece of her body, even something possibly malignant, could be taken from her without her feeling it. Sadness blanketed her, and she wanted to go home. Not home to George, home to Montreal, where she and George first fell in love.
“I’ll call in two days with the results,” he said. “You can get dressed now.”
When, two days later, he told her over the phone that he had found a precancerous mole, that it was nothing to worry about but would require scooping a teaspoon of flesh out of her lower back, her first thought, before throbs of anxiety and relief collided in her heart, was that she wished this pompous jerk hadn’t been the first to know that she was going to leave George.
But as she sat on the examining table, clutching the ruined gown to her chest like a bib, feeling foolish for leaving her jewelry on, she only felt that she had been inappropriate, that she had revealed too much of her desire.
He rested his fingers on the door lever, and she noticed a pimple on the side of his neck. It gave her a small satisfaction.
“Yes, when we see potentially concerning beauty marks, we don’t like to wait,” he said. “It was a pleasure meeting you, Ms. Hirsch.” And, without shaking her hand or touching her at all, he strode out the door and shut it behind him.
Jonathan Vatner is the author of Carnegie Hill, a novel from which “Palace of Beauty” is an excerpt. It is available today from Thomas Dunne Books, an imprint of St. Martin’s Press. He has written for The New York Times, O, The Oprah MagazinePoets & Writers, and his short stories have been published in West Branch Wired, Confrontation, and the Best Gay Stories anthology.