2
On the fourth of January, the sun came out, and Dr. Rudy Graveline smiled. The sun was very good for business. It baked and fried and pitted the facial flesh, and seeded the pores with vile microscopic cancers that would eventually sprout and require excision. Dr. Rudy Graveline was a plastic surgeon, and he dearly loved to see the sun.
He was in a fine mood, anyway, because it was January. In Florida, January is the heart of the winter tourist season and a bonanza time for cosmetic surgeons. Thousands of older men and women who flock down for the warm weather also use the occasion to improve their features. Tummy tucks, nose jobs, boob jobs, butt jobs, fat suctions, face lifts, you name it. And they always beg for an appointment in January, so that the scars will be healed by the time they go back North in the spring.
Dr. Rudy Graveline could not accommodate all the snowbirds, but he did his damnedest. All four surgical theaters at the Whispering Palms Spa were booked from dawn to dusk in January, February, and halfway into March. Most of the patients asked especially for Dr. Graveline, whose reputation greatly exceeded his talents. While Rudy usually farmed the cases out to the eight other plastic surgeons on staff, many patients got the impression that Dr. Graveline himself had performed their surgery. This is because Rudy would often come in and pat their wrinkled hands until they nodded off, blissfully, under the nitrous or IV Valium. At that point Rudy would turn them over to one of his younger and more competent protege’s.
Dr. Graveline saved himself for the richest patients. The regulars got cut on every winter, and Rudy counted on their business. He reassured his surgical hypochondriacs that there was nothing abnormal about having a fifth, sixth, or seventh blepharoplasty in as many years. Does it make you feel better about yourself? Rudy would ask them. Then it’s worth it, isn’t it? Of course it is.
Such a patient was Madeleine Margaret Wilhoit, age sixty-nine, of North Palm Beach. In the course of their acquaintance, there was scarcely a square inch of Madeleine’s substantial physique that Dr. Rudy Graveline had not altered. Whatever he did and whatever he charged, Madeleine was always delighted. And she always came back the next year for more. Though Madeleine’s face reminded Dr. Graveline in many ways of a camel, he was fond of her. She was the kind of steady patient that offshore trust funds are made of.
On January fourth, buoyed by the warm sunny drive to Whispering Palms, Rudy Graveline set about the task of repairing for the fifth, sixth, or seventh time (he couldn’t remember exactly) the upper eyelids of Madeleine Margaret Wilhoit. Given the dromedarian texture of the woman’s skin, the mission was doomed and Rudy knew it. Any cosmetic improvement would have to take place exclusively in Madeleine’s imagination, but Rudy (knowing she would be ecstatic) pressed on.
Midway through the operation, the telephone on the wall let out two beeps. With a gowned elbow the operating-room nurse deftly punched the intercom box and told the caller that Dr. Graveline was in the middle of surgery and not available.
“It’s fucking important, tell him,” said a sullen male voice, which Rudy instantly recognized.
He asked the nurse and the anesthetist to leave the operating room for a few minutes. When they were gone, he said to the phone box: “Go ahead. This is me.”
The phone call was made from a pay booth in Atlantic City, New Jersey, not that it would have mattered to Rudy. Jersey was all he knew, all he needed to know.
“You want the report?” the man asked.
“Of course.”
“It went lousy.”
Rudy sighed and stared down at the violet vectors he had inked around Madeleine’s eyes. “How lousy?” the surgeon said to the phone box.
“The ultimate fucking lousy.”
Rudy tried to imagine the face on the other end of the line, in New Jersey. In the old days he could guess a face by the voice on the phone. This particular voice sounded fat and lardy, with black curly eyebrows and mean dark eyes.