Flavor of the Month

by Olivia Goldsmith

  Well, it was Aunt Robbie who had suggested George Getz. Robbie’s opinion about acting teachers was well known. He felt that either you could act or you couldn’t. If you couldn’t, no one could teach you how; if you could, all you needed was someone to show you a few of the tricks to develop your craft, and George, he felt, was at least capable of that. Plus, he was still plugged in to a few of the older producers and directors.

  Now George looked up, calling the class to order by letting his eyes drift over the faces in the room. Lila could feel the tension in the stillness. Everyone was here to learn from this man, but they all knew that there was a high price to pay, besides the tuition. George rarely praised anyone’s efforts, and took great delight in humiliating the youngsters’ least competent attempts.

  “Everyone, spread out on the floor…get rid of the cushions…make sure you have a large space around you…This is going to be a group effort. Bring your focus within, close your eyes, do your breathing exercises.” The class responded to his instruction, the only sound the hypnotic breathing of the group. Personally, Lila thought it was a load of crap. “Now sit up, keeping the eyes closed. Bring your legs to your chest, hugging them. Breathe. Breathe. Now, focus. I want you to convince me that you are vanilla ice cream melting in the sun. I want you to be vanilla ice cream melting in the sun. Forget about time. I will tell you when to stop. Begin.”

  Lila slowed her breathing. What an absolute pile of dog shit! Lila supposed that good acting came from the ability to visualize and then represent an intense inner experience of a character, but ice cream? Anyway, she wasn’t planning to be an actress. She was planning to be a star.

  The silence was broken by George’s voice. “Corey,” he said, “continue with the exercise, but don’t open your eyes. Class, open your eyes and look at Corey.”

  Lila did, then sighed. She knew what was coming, and resented the ridiculous interruption just to satisfy George’s egotistical rants.

  “What do you see, class? Keep studying Corey. Do you see vanilla ice cream melting in the sun? NO!” he suddenly shouted. The class jumped. “He looks like a mound of mashed potatoes. And mashed potatoes don’t melt, do they, Corey?”

  Corey opened his eyes and gave George an apologetic smile; then his face colored as he saw the entire class looking at him.

  “So that, boys and girls, is an example of how it’s not done.” George looked around. The others looked away, but Lila boldly returned his stare. “Ah, Lila, would you come up to the front? I want you to demonstrate how you did it. Watch her,” George said, and stepped back.

  Lila had become used to being singled out by George in this way. But what the hell was this ice-cream-cone dreck? Instinctively, Lila knew how to center attention on herself. She pushed conscious thought from her mind, and slipped easily into the mood. As a sop to George, she relaxed, first her neck, then her shoulders, then her arms. All eyes were riveted on her. And she could keep them there by force of will. Moments passed; then she became aware of George’s voice breaking the silence. “That’s vanilla ice cream melting in the sun,” he said, turning to the class, then turned to her once again. “Lila, have you worked on Portia’s soliloquy yet?”

  “Of course, George.” It had been their assignment last week.

  “Then do it for us now, if you will, Lila. I have need of some real acting today.” George leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes. Lila’s classmates shifted their positions to get comfortable, as if another body angle could make their envy stop hurting.

  Lila rose, ran the first couple of lines in her head, and then flipped the internal switch on, the switch that made her a magnet for the eyes. She hadn’t understood much of the monologue, but Robbie had coached her, and the direction was etched into her brain. She had performed the scene for Ken, and he’d loved it. Now, without hesitation, Lila became a Shakespearean heroine, the strange words and their melody welling up out of her. She was a good mimic and remembered where Robbie had dipped his voice and caught his breath. But it was her energy that mattered. She turned it on, a lantern of glowing energy. For a moment, she noticed the faces of some of the people in the audience. They were mouthing her lines, eyes turned up to her in envy and adoration. In that instant, Lila loved them all, these desperate, sad, pretty, lost little people, and poured out that love in every word and gesture. She wanted to give them a piece of herself, to give them something they did not have, could not have, would never have, so she reached across the open space and drew them into her heart. She spoke the words not to the group, but to each individual. Admiration was good, but only when she was safely up onstage.

  When at last the final lines came, the room was silent. Then, as she came out of character, they burst into applause and shouts. Lila smiled dryly, bowed deeply once, then returned to her seat, avoiding the eyes of her classmates. The good feeling ended. She felt almost empty—no, dead—inside. Bandie, sitting beside her, reached over and patted Lila’s hand in congratulations. Lila snatched back her hand and touched her throat to hold back the disgust that bubbled up in her mouth like bile. Contempt popped up goose bumps on her forearms.

  George praised her. “Only four months with me, and see how she’s applied herself. You should all learn from her example. That’s the Getz method.” After his plug, he moved to another topic, his voice droning on. She looked at the class out of the corners of her eyes while they now paid rapt attention to George. As if they could learn to be what she was. She almost laughed. They were all beautiful, she thought, but she knew that she was the best in the room. She also knew that looks alone would not make her a star. Nor her connections through Theresa, if she could somehow manage to use them, nor Aunt Robbie, nor poor George. And talent wasn’t enough. Deep, deep inside, Lila knew she had something special, something that drew the attention, the interest of others. But that something had to be showcased. Sitting in this class week after week was not going to do it, either. Half the room hoped that Sy Ortis would suddenly walk in the door one day and discover them. Well, she had news for them: he wouldn’t. So now the only thing she had to figure out was the same trick these lamebrains were working on.

  How to make it happen.

  17

  Mary Jane left her grandmother’s the next day, and stopped at Mr. Slater’s, an Elmira lawyer, to discuss selling the house and its contents. She had her grandmother’s will—she’d been left the house, but in trust for her father. Her father, the man whose drunken driving had killed Mary Jane’s mother and turned himself into a vegetable! She told Slater to probate the will and sell the place off as soon as possible. Then she drove across the state line, into Massachusetts, and called in the bearer bonds. Finally, she began the long drive back to New York. How could $67,411 (all of it undeclared and tax-free) make her life worth living?

  What did she want? It wasn’t enough money to buy a house in the Hamptons, or even a co-op in New York. It couldn’t buy her a business, and anyway, she didn’t want one. She could use the money to live on, but what would happen when it ran out? Back to Elmira, the Chivas, and a handful of pills?

  In her whole life, it seemed to Mary Jane, she had wanted only two things: Sam, and a career as an actress. Well, the money wouldn’t bring Sam back. And it wouldn’t buy her a theater. She kept on driving down the Thru way, the radio playing some stupid seventies disco music. She stopped for coffee at a disgusting roadside rest stop, sat down at a table, and thought some more. And then it came to her. What she wanted, what she truly wanted and needed.

  She needed to be beautiful.

  Why hadn’t she thought of it before? She had the talent to succeed as an actress—her reviews for Jack and Jill proved that—and she had the love to succeed with a man. After all, despite her looks, Sam had wanted her. It was only her outer self, her mortal coil, that offended, that limited her, that ruined her. She had tried to kill it, but with it would have gone all the rest—her talent, her ability to befriend, to love.

  As she sat at the orange Formica tab
le, while the cars flew by on the Thruway, she felt her hands on the Styrofoam coffee cup begin to tremble.

  Why couldn’t she use the sixty-seven thousand dollars that lay in the bag beside her to buy a new face and body? Become a new person, at least on the outside? Throughout all of history, men had had the money and could buy women’s beauty. A Nell Gwyn could move up from the streets and trade beauty for wealth. Now, for the first time, a woman could buy beauty for herself. She, Mary Jane Moran, had the money to buy a new face, perhaps even a streamlined, perfect body. She knew the technology was there. It could be done.

  She felt the trembling move from her hands up her arms to her whole body. She tried to breathe deeply, and hoped no one would notice, but the fat, distracted mother with three cranky children at the next table, and the old man with what looked like a wife with Alzheimer’s across the aisle, had other things to do. She pushed away the coffee cup and closed her eyes for a moment. Could this thing be done? Did she have the courage to do it?

  The trip to New York passed in a blur. She shut off the radio, put the pedal to the metal, and sank into a strange state, between fear and elation. She hadn’t been a nurse all those years for nothing. So, when she got back to New York, with the sixty-seven thousand dollars in cash, wrapped in plastic, stuffed into a canvas Channel 13 tote and hidden safely in the back of her closet, she began her research. She knew about Dr. Walden at Doctors Hospital, of course, and John Armstrong at Columbia Presbyterian. They were the Park Avenue plastic surgeons that the beau monde employed for the subtle but critically important nips and tucks they all required. They had great reputations, but Mary Jane required a lot more than that.

  She told no one about the money or her plan—if it was a plan. In fact, she didn’t see any of her friends. She’d have to do some research first: She called Nancy Norton, an old classmate, now a nurse at the Mount Sinai Burn Pavilion. After burns, major reconstruction was often necessary. She also spoke to Bobby Watkins, a black actor who moonlighted as an emergency-room nurse and saw lots of trauma cases—smashed up from accidents. She sat for hours in the library at Cornell Medical Center, poring through The Lancet, The Journal of the American Medical Association, and the specialized plastic-surgery bulletins. She cross-referenced all that with research in the AMA’s who’s who.

  It came down to four men: Robert Ducker of Miami, who had developed dozens of innovative techniques when he worked in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, on poor patients, who couldn’t afford to sue; William Reed, who practiced out in L.A. and was purported to be the best nose man in the business; John Collins, a Park Avenue type; and Brewster Moore, chief of plastic surgery at Cosmopolitan Hospital in New York. He’d been an army doctor, worked on Vietnam vets, and had been chief plastic surgeon at the hospital for close to a dozen years. But he was the only one without an extensive private practice. He was known in the medical profession as “the doctors’ doctor,” and the word was that he corrected the errors other plastic surgeons made.

  Mary Jane lay in bed—her bed, which was now so big, so empty, with Sam gone—and stared at the ceiling as she thought it out. Midnight kneaded her stomach, purring deeply with satisfaction, and she stroked him as her mind turned her plan over and over. Was it really possible to stop being plain old Mary Jane, her talent hidden under a bushel of body, and emerge as someone not just better-looking, not even just pretty, but beautiful? Was it possible that now, at thirty-four, she could belatedly join that sisterhood of women who turned men’s heads when they walked down the street, who entered a room and caused a stir, or even a momentary silence, who inspired lustful dreams, romantic fantasies, simply with a look, a smile, a toss of the head?

  What would it feel like not to always have to compensate for her looks, not to have to work against her formless cheeks, her big nose, her absent chin? Never again to see the wince when she walked into a casting call, met a director, was introduced to a man? What would it be like to play the ingenue, to be sought after by men, not to be invisible, as she so often felt, but to be undressed by their eyes, the way they did Bethanie and those other beauties?

  Was it possible? How much art and science would it take to sculpt her formless putty into a classically chiseled profile, to raise her pendulous breasts, thin her thunder thighs, flatten her wattled stomach, remake her into the image that men called beautiful? How much would it cost? How long would it take? How much would it hurt? Could it even be done?

  Her medical background gave her a basic understanding of the names and techniques for most of the procedures she’d need. But would a surgeon be willing to perform them all? And she knew that it had to be not just a surgeon but an artist, willing to work for months, maybe longer, willing to take her seriously, willing to undertake a transformation, a reconstruction, but on someone undamaged by burns or disease, functionally adequate but needing to be beautiful.

  They might think she was frivolous, or a nut. She knew she wasn’t the former, but she wasn’t sure about the latter. Maybe she was crazy. Still, she had decided. What else could promise so much possibility for the better? The money. Grandma’s money, wasn’t enough to fix her life in any other real way. Sure, she could pay off all her charge cards, take a trip with it, but then she’d come back to this life. And she wouldn’t live this life, the one she’d been dealt.

  Since she was in New York, she’d start by making appointments with both Collins and Moore. Her hands actually shook as she dialed the old rotary phone—probably the last one in Manhattan—she still had and made the appointments. It wasn’t easy. She had to use the name of a hospital administrator she knew to get an early appointment with Collins. First Collins, then Moore. Then she’d see.

  Dr. Collins’ office was in a very impressive building on Park Avenue at Sixty-fourth Street. The lobby was marble-floored in that patrician pattern of checkerboard black and white squares that ran diagonally. The floor shone so that it looked wet, and the brass buttons of the doorman were as shiny as the polished nameplate on the office door. Intimidated, Mary Jane walked in, ashamed of her lumpy down coat and her bulging black bag.

  The secretary-receptionist didn’t make her feel any more comfortable. The woman was thin, blonde, and beautiful, her hair done up in one of those complicated French braids that Mary Jane could never get her own hair to hold. She wondered if the woman had been worked on by Dr. Collins. If not, he was guilty of false advertising.

  She waited almost half an hour, filling in the usual forms. Her hands were shaking. At last, the woman led her down a long, thickly carpeted hall to Collins’ inner sanctum. He rose when she entered, seeming to take her in from top to toe.

  “Well, Miss Moran, how can I help you?”

  Mary Jane cleared her throat. “I’m an actress,” she said.

  “Really?” Did his voice rise at the end of the word, almost as if he didn’t believe her? Quickly she outlined some of her credits. “The problem is, I can’t get work. Because of how I look,” she told him. God, this was hard. She looked at him. His face was impassive; his eyes were attentive but cold. She couldn’t go on.

  “You were thinking of surgery?” he prompted.

  “Yes.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Thirty-four. Almost thirty-five,” she admitted.

  “What exactly did you have in mind?”

  “Everything. Whatever it would take!” she burst out.

  “I don’t understand. Rhinoplasty? Or…”

  “Whatever it would take to make me beautiful,” she cried.

  The man looked at her and sighed. “I am a doctor, Miss Moran, not a magician.”

  She spent two days in bed, and very nearly didn’t go to the appointment with Dr. Moore. But she decided, in the end, she could manage one more humiliation before killing herself.

  Dr. Moore’s nurse, Miss Hennessey, was one of those battle-axes that Mary Jane had seen in hospitals for years. A commuter from Queens, no doubt, and a real yenta. “The doctor doesn’t do body work. Exactly what are yo
u thinking of? Procedure-wise?” she had asked over the phone.

  “Seeing the doctor,” Mary Jane had told her, and it shut the woman up, even if it put a sour tone to her voice. When Mary Jane showed up at the office, the sourness had moved up to Miss Hennessey’s face. She silently ushered Mary Jane into the Spartan office. Brewster Moore was a small, dark man, no taller than five six. She noticed his hands—very small and soft-looking—before she sat down. His skin was pale but healthy, with a pink glow, set off by his black hair and dark-brown eyes. He was wearing a dark suit with a white shirt and blue tie. She’d never seen anyone who looked as clean as he did.

  She looked up at him, a slight man with a receding hairline and a cool, blank, professional manner.

  She sat before Dr. Moore, her eyes downcast, her hands dangling in her lap, feeling worse than she had felt at Dr. Collins’, more nervous than she’d ever been before any audition. Christ, what were the lines that would get her this part? What would win a surgeon’s empathy and compassion? If any surgeons had either.

  “How can I help you?” he asked, and, to her complete surprise and shame, she burst into tears.

  She cried for a long time, while he sat silently and still, except for pushing a box of tissues toward her. At last, after gasps and nose blows and eye wiping, she finally looked up, her shame washed away by her flood.

  “I’m an actress,” she said.

  He nodded, attentive. There was no wince, but no other expression, either.

  “I’m very good.” She reached into her coat pocket, took out a now crumpled résumé. “You have to believe that,” she added.

  He looked the résumé over, then looked back at her. “Many of my patients are very courageous, Miss Moran. It takes a lot to walk in these doors. Why don’t you tell me what you want?”

  So she did. Calmly. In as professional a manner as she could. She ended with the disappointment over Jack and Jill and Compromise. “So, you see, I need surgery. I need a lot of it. For my business. But I don’t know what’s possible, and I don’t know what it will cost.”