Imperfections

by Bradley Somer

  I also liked the way she had used my body. There was honesty there, too. She hadn’t slept with me because I was a model. She slept with me because it was a way for her to explore a different way to communicate. I liked her sex because it was as true as when she spoke.

  When I spoke, I was a show. When I fucked her, well, that word says it all. It was the pursuit of getting off. It was a fashion show. I had never thought of it in another way until that night. Paige’s bare feelings, her willing exposure of her emotions, regardless of the potential for rejection and pain, had changed that. I was ashamed that I never returned Paige’s honesty that it took me this long to realize.

  I needed to be that honest.

  I needed to foster the same explorer’s quality that endeared Paige to me, the childlike frankness that knew no bounds. I would be honest from then on, I resolved.

  “You’ve put on a little weight,” I said. “And it looks great on you. And…”

  My vision rocketed sideways and I swear I heard a popping sound from the cartilage between the vertebrae of my neck.

  “And?” Paige asked.

  I slowly swivelled my head back to centre. She looked at me expectantly.

  “And I love you… I always have,” I said. “Well, maybe not always, but for a long time anyway.”

  Then we kissed.

  Later that night, after the sales were done and the clients had gone, I stood in the bathroom, unable to sleep because Paige was snoring and sprawled out over most of the king-sized bed. I examined myself in the mirror, the bite marks recently delivered to my chest. I twisted my body to inspect the claw marks that ran diagonally from my shoulder to the line of my spine. I straightened up and smiled at my reflection. I had made it. I felt that thing that people feel when they find someone. Love.

  A bruise had risen on my cheek. I leaned closer to find the web of several tiny burst vessels on my cheekbone. I marvelled at perspective, how what I saw changed with it. From far away, a glowing, purple bruise. From up close, a nebula of colour detailed in pores and vessels. It changed everything.

  I spent the rest of the night in the bathroom examining my face and my body. I scrutinized my skin, my features, how they worked together to make a person, how they were beautiful as their own pieces. I looked at them from afar and then a mere fraction of an inch from the mirror. I stretched skin. I flexed and pinched.

  Models are necessarily introspective, self-critical and vain. The career requires detailed examination of the features of the face, the musculature of the arms, chest and stomach, the curve of the buttocks and the shape of the legs. All parts, every blemish, every mole, every angle of bone under skin, every ripple of tendon and muscle need inspection. It is the search to admire, to mend the imperfections.

  I think it’s in all of us, really. It is a necessary meditation. Those elements making up the molecules making up the cells making up our bodies, they are the same elements composing the trees and the air. They all started as particles, floating around, billions of years ago. They all remember each other, long to see each other again.

  What had Dr. Sloane said before I punched him? “We carry little pieces of the people we know, inside us. Some people leave bigger pieces behind and those tug to rejoin the universal flow.”

  I paused for a moment and smiled as Paige’s snoring reached a crescendo punctuated by a snort. She mumbled something and then all was quiet again. I turned my attention back to me.

  A highly developed sense of self-criticism, of vanity, is the quest to understand the intersection of oneself and the universe. It leads to the realization that the physical interaction between the two is one and the same. Me, picking at my face in the mirror, that is a meditation of the universe looking at itself, interacting with itself, learning about itself, remembering itself from billions of years ago.

  I found my pants on the floor, between the toilet and the tub. I rummaged through the pockets for my cellphone and called Chester. He sounded a sleepy grunt from the other end.

  “Chester, are you there?” I said quietly into the receiver. “I’ve been looking in the mirror for the past few hours and I think I get it.”

  “Trench?” He cleared his throat. “That you?”

  “I have come to terms with most of my imperfections. There are just a few that need to be fixed and my body will be free. My body and mind are so close to being united. They have been at war for so long. Get ready for the next phase, perfection.”

  “There’s this thing called ‘blind sight,’ Richard. Know what that is?”

  “Get ready for the next phase,” I spoke over Chester. “The evolution of beauty.”

  Chester didn’t stop speaking, so we wound up talking at the same time.

  “Your brain sees things that aren’t there,” Chester muttered. “Or they might be there but your eyes can’t see them.”

  “I’m going to give you a true beauty,” I said. “Something so true, you’ll be able to see my naked soul.”

  “Blind sight is said to be the depth of your conscious mind. You’re a wading pool right now, Richard. Are you listening to me?” Chester said.

  “Once I correct a few things,” I was saying, “I won’t be bound by any perceptions of imperfection, no more doubt or self-pity. My spirit and body will fuse, becoming the ultimate instrument of free expression. I will truly just exist.”

  “Oh, Richard, do you know what time it is? I’m going back to sleep. We can talk later.”

  Then Chester called me “quixotic” and hung up.

  I had no idea what that meant.

  And that’s how I wound up at Dr. Bella’s office in Burnt Timber Acres Mall, the largest strip mall on the coast, watching the woman who didn’t know what Gothic decor looked like, wander over to a mirror and pick at her face. The woman turned and looked at her fanny, lifted the cheeks a bit using both hands, and then let them fall, meaty and thick, with a sigh.

  Dr. Bella came highly recommended by Donna.

  “I absolutely love her,” Donna gushed. “I was looking for a plastic surgeon who understood my emotional needs, you know, and Dr. Bella was the answer. It’s like she can look through your skin and see the real you. And then make your looks match.”

  Paige didn’t know I was here. I told her I was going to a talent call for the Agency. When I actually got the surgeries, I would tell her I was off to a show in Tokyo for a week. Then I would hole up in some airport hotel and watch movies on-demand and eat room service while I healed.

  When I had poked Paige gently with the idea of me getting plastic surgery, I had brought it up in a sideways, “a friend of mine” kind of way. Paige’s response had been definite and negative. She thought plastic surgery was a solution to nothing.

  “I’ve seen enough of it, Richard,” she’d said. “I can’t look at a beautiful woman without wondering, without looking for the work she’s had done. Plastic surgeons are making a new species of plastic people when it’s really just sticking peacock feathers in a chicken’s ass. The genes don’t change, it’s just a mask.” She paused for a moment to inspect me. I thought she had seen through my clever ruse. “There’s no beauty in what’s not real. Fuck the plastic people and you still get beautifully ugly babies who’ll never grow up to look like their parents. They’ll have anomalous hairy patches and bumps on their heads that challenge their mother’s love. Plastic surgeons can mess around all they want—nature gets the last word.”

  The next morning, having coffee in the white sunlight of our apartment’s breakfast nook, she read to me from a “special section” in the paper about beauty and style. It was as if she was explaining to me why she was so opposed.

  “You know,” Paige said from behind the newspaper. She used a finger to fold one corner toward herself and looked at me over the edge. There were toast crumbs at the corner of her mouth. “This year, 2003, Defence spending in our fine United States will hit $115 billion.” Paige paused for effect. “That’s the same as the projected revenue of the cosmetics industry
.”

  All I could think was, does she know about my appointment to see Dr. Bella?

  “Richard Trench,” the receptionist called. “Dr. Bella is ready for your consultation.”

  I glanced once more at the woman inspecting herself in the mirror. She pinched her cheeks and pulled the flesh back toward her ears. She smiled a wind-tunnel smile and opened her eyes wide as if she had just been goosed. The combined efforts gave a deceptively youthful visage of innocent surprise. Deeper, in her eyes, she looked unhappy. She was trapped in an aging prison.

  Dr. Bella’s office was dimly lit and furnished in dark wood and heavy leather chairs. Chocolate brown, velvety drapes were drawn across the windows.

  The receptionist closed the door with a quiet click and it was only then I could hear violins playing from somewhere in the room.

  Dr. Bella sat in shadow, backlit by soft glow that diffused around the drapes. Her silhouette was thin and graceful. Her slender limbs worked at something on the desk in front of her, though I couldn’t tell what. My eyes were slow to adjust to the light.

  I stood, with my hands in my pockets, exactly where the receptionist had deposited me. Unsure what to do, and feeling like I had intruded into someone’s private residence, I waited. Dr. Bella gave me no acknowledgement and for a moment my mind tripped and wondered if I really was there—or was I indeed invisible and observing this woman’s private reverie without her knowing?

  As I stood, my eyes grew accustomed to the light. The violin strings emanated from a small stereo that sat on a bookcase lining one side of the room. The stereo sat next to a bust of some stern-looking patriarch, scowling over the room as if with great concern over the loss of his limbs and half his torso.

  I shifted my attention to Dr. Bella. Her slender fingers worked tweezers in one hand and a small eyedropper in the other. She was working with such focus yet her brow remained unfurrowed, her face remained an impassive kabuki mask. And, before her, she was building a rose. The tweezers delicately pinched a petal. The eyedropper dabbed what must have been glue, and painstakingly the two came together.

  “It’s real,” she said. Her voice was smooth and strong. “The petals are imported and I put them together. I build roses because nature can’t seem to do it right.” Her eyes remained on the flower as she spoke. “She always has one petal with a cleft in the wrong place or veins that are too prominent or, mostly, just a few petals that are wilting so slightly—a minor discoloration and curling at the edge. So, I do it myself. I take beautifully flawed things apart and put them back together properly. I fix Mother Nature’s mistakes.”

  She looked up at me. Twenty seconds passed before she spoke.

  “Richard Trench. I’ve seen your work. I’m a big fan.” Her teeth shone bleached white in the half-light. “Now, sit.”

  I did as I was told. The strength of her presence left me with little choice really.

  Her eyes roamed about, taking in every part of me yet settling on none. Even as she spoke, her eyes moved.

  “You’re lucky,” she said. “In the old days, I was forced to work my craft in a hospital. Now it’s easy. You can come to the mall to have a procedure. In the old days, it was a stigma to have improvements made. Now, it’s a badge of courage. People talk openly about the work they’ve had done. It’s a statement of financial fecundity. It’s bold. It’s daring.” Her voice grew louder and more excited. “You can go on vacation to Costa del Sol for a month and come back twenty years younger. Why? How did this fabulous transformation happen?”

  I opened my mouth and said, “Plastic surgery…” and was promptly silenced by a finger.

  “My questions are not for answering. Not by you,” Dr. Bella said. “This is your consult. You are not to speak.” There was an awkward length of silence. “That’s a horrible thing you said but I forgive you, you’re new. There’s no such thing as plastic surgery, there’s only aesthetic activism.”

  Dr. Bella leaned forward. Her chair creaked luxuriously and the sound took me back to breakfast.

  Paige had shifted in her chair, it creaked. She slurped some coffee and said, “What if everyone was pretty? I mean, the same kind of outrageous pretty that these people are gunning for?” She slapped the newspaper with the back of her hand.

  “Never thought of it,” I said.

  “Well, if everyone were the same level of beautiful, you would need to become a more extreme vision to stand out,” she said. “In the end, we really have the ugly to thank for beauty. It’s this thing called the contrast effect. If everything’s the same and there’s no gradation from one to the next, any kind of judgments—say beauty and ugliness—don’t exist. There would be no thin or fat. The pretty war is not going to stop, it’s going to escalate. We have been moving away from the beauty that can happen naturally and into something that only humans can make because we’re pushed to make the differences between the two things, beauty and ugly, even greater so we can stand out even more.”

  I looked at Dr. Bella. She leaned closer now and I wondered how old she really was.

  “Some of the first procedures were restructuring the noses of syphilitics over one hundred years ago,” she said.

  Could she have been there? I wondered.

  “Their disease ate the cartilage of their noses, announcing them publicly. Their disease, their immoral sexual antics, were out in the open for all to see. Their faces betrayed them and they suffered economic and social harm because of it. They couldn’t get jobs, they lost their friends. Their physical appearance hampered their lives and their livelihood. They were a sad, sad miserable lot. Aesthetic activism changed these patients’ lives. It cured them by altering their displeasing forms into passable visages once more, allowing them to re-enter everyday society and lead happy, fruitful lives.”

  “But they still had syphilis, right?”

  Dr. Bella sighed. “If you insist on speaking,” she said, “please do so silently,” she tapped her temple with her finger, “in your head.”

  Again, an awkward hush settled between us.

  I thought back to Paige, the sunlight streaming through the nook window. Her housecoat was loose around her neck. She caught me staring at the swell of her breast and she smiled.

  “Did you know,” Paige said, holding up a knife crusted with a peanut butter skid mark, “that hair transplants are the most common plastic surgery for men? There is this book, the International Statistical Classification of Diseases, in which hair loss is identified as a disease in section L65.0.” She smirked.

  Since moving in with Paige, I noticed my hair was thinning. I tried to chalk it up to the penetrating nature of the harsh fluorescent tubes lighting Paige’s bathroom, but the more I stared, preened and fluffed, the more I saw a larger volume of scalp. Each time I found one of my hairs resting on the sink or in the shower, I felt a little stab of loss. Every time I splashed water against the errant hair, I watched a tiny bit of me slither down the drain.

  “Balding is linked to the secretion of androgen and dihydrotestosterone which is partially genetic and partially triggered by psychological stress. Your testicles secrete these hormones,” she read and smacked her lips.

  I shot an accusing look at my lap. At the sight of the bulge in the fabric of my pyjamas, I suddenly and fully understood the meaning of “love/hate” relationship.

  “Eunuchs castrated before puberty, they never go bald,” Paige read. “And in ancient times, a poultice of dates, dog paws and donkey hooves, fat and grease was cooked up and applied as a paste to stimulate hair growth.” She scrunched up her face.

  I wondered what was in Rogaine and minoxidil. I thought to ask Dr. Bella.

  Dr. Bella leaned back in her chair and finally spoke. “There’s a disease, one that affects millions of people and one that I can cure… R46.1: bizarre personal appearance. If the body can’t be corrected, the mind remains tormented. I can remould the body and remake the character. I can alleviate suffering. The new character that I forge is one driven by the ideolo
gy of the pursuit of happiness. I just have to cure the disease that genetics has wrought upon you.” Dr. Bella paused. “I’m going to start you on a bit of nose and eye work.”

  The finality of her statement was shocking. It was as if personal choice had been removed from the equation.

  “You would do well to start with many small prunings at an early age,” she said. “The body’s more vibrant and vital. It can recover easily from insults, which will mean fewer procedures when you’re older. It’ll be quick. It’ll be painless.”

  Paige. I thought of Paige sitting in the sunlight this morning. It was so different than the darkness I sat in with Dr. Bella.

  “In plastic surgery,” Paige read, “anesthesia complications are the prime cause of death.”

  “It got Mila,” I said.

  “I thought she died from bulimia.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I don’t really know.”

  Paige mulled this over for a moment before focusing on the paper again.

  “Here’s a gruesome section,” Paige said. “It’s about people who have been assaulted because they’re beautiful. Katrina Spiros, she was twenty. Some guy splashed acid on her face, blinding her and scarring her for life.” Paige paused, her eyes travelling the lines of text as she took a sip of coffee. “Apparently, the guy was a student obsessed with her beauty. The cops went back through her fan mail and found hundreds of letters from him. Creepy shit, like pages with hair taped to them or stains on them. When her agent announced she was getting married, the guy flipped.” Paige shook her head. “Really,” she said with disappointment.

  Having never understood the obsessive personality, I shook my head along with her. I ran my fingers through my hair in hopes to make it look thicker and I thought about how many sit-ups I would have to do to counter the toast and jam I had for breakfast. I thought about how I’d love to get rid of that half-moon of flesh just below my belly button. It had recently appeared and no number of sit-ups seemed to make it disappear.

  “This is sick.” Paige’s eyes traced a few more lines of print and then she said, “In 1986, this other guy, Steven Roth, he was a TV makeup artist, hired two guys to attack this model named Marla Hanson. They cornered her outside a West Side bar, held her and slowly carved up her face with a razor…”