tell me that life is worth living. Please tell me that all the hassle of getting up, getting dressed, is worth the trouble. I don’t want to believe that life is only a joke. I don’t think parents ought to tell that to their children. Odd that I am still expecting them to be parents.
“You still look very young,” my mother says.
“There’s a reason for that,” I say.
“Good genes,” my mother says.
“Good genes and a face-lift.”
“I don’t believe you’ve had a face-lift,” my mother says.
“Have it your way,” I say.
Before I started to watch my parents fade away, the scariest thing I ever did was plastic surgery. A female ritual like childbirth. It stacks up there with all the other female rituals—genital mutilation, foot binding, whalebone corsets, Spanx. I know men do plastic surgery too now—voluntarily—but it’s different for men. Women feel they have no choice. Age still equals abandonment for women. A man can look like he’s a hundred, be impotent and night blind, and still find a younger woman who never got over her daddy. But a woman is lucky to be able to go to the movies or bingo with another old bag. I considered plastic surgery as mandatory as leg waxing.
First I sent the doctor a check so large I would not be able to back out. Then I spent five months in utter terror. (The last month was the worst.) Then I got on a plane and flew to Los Angeles.
Arrived in the midst of mudslides and heavy weather. (This was two winters before the century turned.) Took a room surrounded by fog in a skyscraper hotel. The floaty fiftieth floor. (Maybe an earthquake would intervene and I wouldn’t have to go through with it.) The next morning, early, after disinfectant ablutions, sans breakfast, I limo’ed to the clinic. My darling friend Isadora Wing came with me to give moral support. She waited for me.
The doctor’s office was decorated in ice-cream colors and all the nurses had perfect Mona Lisa faces done by him. They smiled their half-moon smiles. They reassured me.
I was taken into a rose-colored room with soft lights and told to undress. I was given elastic stockings, paper slippers, a grasshopper-green gown, green cap. I had already prepared by scrubbing myself, my hair, even my shadow, with doctor-proffered potions. I garbed myself in these ceremonial clothes and lay back on a reclining chair, a sort of airplane seat for traveling through time. The anesthesiologist and surgeon arrived, also in grasshopper green.
I remember looking into the anesthesiologist’s soft brown eyes and thinking, I wonder if he’s a drug addict. . . . We talked about the methods by which unconsciousness would be achieved. He seemed to know plenty about them. Almost imperceptibly, a needle was inserted into one of the veins that branched over my hand. The colorless liquid carried me away like a euthanized dog.
I had picked my doctor because I had seen his work—or rather because I saw that his work was invisible. Most New York plastic surgeons specialize in the windswept look—Gone With the Wind face-lifts, I call them. You see them on the frozen tundra of the Upper East Side. Bone-thin women whose cheeks adhere to their cheekbones as if they were extremely well-preserved mummies. My doctor, born a Brazilian with a noble German name (my husband joked that his father must have been the dentist at Auschwitz before hurriedly leaving for the Southern Hemisphere with bags of melted gold fillings), was famed for his tiny, invisible stitches. He was an artist, not a carpenter. He could look at the sagging skin around your eyes and see how to excise just enough, not too much. He could make tiny, imperceptible cheek-tucks that erased the lines of worry and age. He could raise your forehead back into your twenties. He smiled sweetly as anyone would smile anticipating gargantuan fees. This was a hundred-thousand-dollar three-procedure day for him. I drifted off to the Land of Nod.
Time collapsed on itself and died. I didn’t. (But if I had, I would never have known, would I?) I woke up in a back room of the clinic with a nurse asking me how I felt. Parched. Trussed as a Christmas turkey. With a pounding headache. All over my head.
“Do you want to use the bathroom?”
“May I?”
“I don’t see why not.” She took my arm.
I lurched toward the bathroom, used the toilet but avoided the mirrors. I felt as if I had died and been embalmed. Now I felt mummified—as if my whole brain had been scooped out through my nose, as if the embalmers had also carved out my soul. Shuffled back to bed. Or the cot that served as a bed.
“How do I look?”
“Not bad, considering,” said the nurse. “Are you hungry?”
“I think so.”
“A good sign.”
The tepid instant oatmeal tasted better than any breakfast I had ever had.
I thought to myself: I’m eating. I must be alive.
The next days—ice packs, immobility, a sense of suspended animation—were grim. The anesthesia lingered like a nightmare. I couldn’t stay in. I couldn’t go out. I couldn’t read. All I could do was watch the Olympics on TV. I am convinced that long hours of TV-watching actually lower your IQ. Television isn’t about content. It’s about flickering light keeping you company in an empty room.
I recovered to the tune of double axel and triple Lutz. The figure skaters might as well have been skating on my face, given the way I felt. There was nothing to do but stare at the TV and change my ice packs. I ordered consommé and ice cream from room service. I had dreams in which I saw my skin (complete with muscles and blood vessels) being pulled back from my skull. One night, I was awakened in the hotel by fire alarms and a recording announcing, “There appears to be a fire alarm activated. Please stand by for further instructions.” This was repeated for two hours at intervals of seven minutes while I madly called the front desk, getting a busy signal. When I finally got through to him, the concierge pronounced a false alarm. But it was all worth it. After all the bruises were gone, I noticed an uptick in passes made at me.
If life is nothing but a joke, why did I bother with the face-lift?
“I can’t believe you’ve had a face-lift,” my mother insists. “You’re too smart to have had a face-lift.”
“Apparently not,” I say.
“And has it given you a new lease on life?” my mother ironically asks.
“What do you think, Mrs. Wonderman?”
“Don’t Mrs. Wonderman me,” my mother says. It was an old family line. My father would use it ironically when he was most furious with my mother. Their marriage was tight but occasionally cantankerous, not unlike my marriage to Asher. How did I get here? How did I get to be Vanessa Wonderman? And what did Vanessa Wonderman want? Love, sex, immortality—all the things we can never have. What is the arc of the plot of one’s life? I want! I want!
But what did I want? I wanted sex to prove that I would never die.
3
Wondermans Rampant
The only “ism” Hollywood believes in is plagiarism.
—Dorothy Parker
In
