Face Time (10 page)

I
look good. I didn’t even have a glass of wine at Maysie’s last night, so my eyes aren’t the slightest bit puffy. My hair actually looks the same on both sides. I’ll be out of here in five minutes, no question. Mother satisfied, me off the hook. And armed with a do-not-pass-go from her precious doctor: I get out of surgery, free.

“So what do you think, Dr. Garth?” I’m swallowed up in a gargantuan barbershop chair with metal footrest, padded headrest and wide flat vinyl arms. There’s a massive floor-to-ceiling mirror right in my line of sight. I’m trying not to stare at myself too obviously, so I turn to the white-coated physician sitting at a mahogany side desk nearby. “Am I getting past my sell-by date?”

Dr. Garth looks up from examining the yes or no boxes on the medical history chart I painstakingly filled out. His French cuffs, each monogrammed MDGIII, peek out from under his starched lab coat. “Dr. Malcolm Duncan Garth, III” embroidered in blue, is stitched over the pocket. His carefully knotted and conservatively striped tie is held in place by the silver and black rubber tubing of the stethoscope draped around his neck. I’d bet that stethoscope is engraved with his name and birth order, too.

He puts a finger on the chart to mark his place, then tilts his metal-rimmed glasses up onto his forehead, peering at me, his latest specimen. “Sell? Buy?” he asks. He gives a sharp nod and his glasses fall back into place on his nose. “I’m afraid you’ve lost me, Ms. McNally.”

He smiles engagingly. In the outside world he’d be described as “skinny” and “the runt of the litter.” Inside the Center for Cosmetic Surgery, he’s the elegant and patrician king of the operating room. Power doctor. Protector of Beacon Hill’s best faces.

I try a flirty little gesture, crossing one leg over the other. My splurgy new red patent pumps signal I’m successful and professional. Reliable, but with a certain flair. A young flair. “Like at the grocery store? Time’s up?”

He gives an uncomprehending smile. He probably hasn’t been in a grocery store in, well, maybe not ever.

I try again. “When you pass the sell-by date, the product is too old.” I smile what I imagine is adorably. This is really going well. I’ll have time to do a quick check in with Mom after I bid adieu to Dr. G., then possibly Franklin and I can arrive at the nursing home in Swampscott earlier than we planned. Franklin thinks I’m at the dentist.

“Ah,” Dr. Garth says, looking at me from under one eyebrow. “Of course.”

I’m drawn to the mirror. I can’t help it. The lights in the examination room are soft. A few are even pink. I know that’s designed to boost and flatter skin tones, like looking through rose-colored glasses. It works.

I’m sure he’s going to tell me
Oh, no, Miss McNally. You’re here much too soon.
He’ll gesture me out of this contraption of a chair and wave me to the door. See you in five years, he’ll say. Maybe ten. You’re only forty-six. Right now, you look terrific.

And sure enough, Dr. Garth puts down his cigar-size pen and gets up from his swivel chair. I lean over to pick up my purse and tote bag from the floor beside me, anticipating our swift goodbye and my even swifter exit.

“What I’d like to do now, Ms. McNally,” he says, pulling a spindly three-legged stool in front of a blank white wall, “is have you take a seat here, please, if you will. And please remove your jacket, if you will.” He looks at me expectantly. I have no choice. Mom is going to owe me big.

I abandon my purse and my plans and climb down from my medical high chair, uncertain. As I drape my blazer over the back of the chair, Dr. Garth pulls a braided cord, lowering what looks like a navy-blue window shade. Except there’s no window.

He repositions the stool in front of the blue background and, again, points me to sit down. “Now, if you will face me for a moment…” Dr. Garth flips open a panel on the mahogany desk. A contraption like Mom’s old sewing machine rises up from its hidden storage cabinet underneath. It’s a camera. He fusses with some dials and switches, and looks through what must be a viewfinder. “What I’m doing to do—” he’s almost talking to himself “—is get a couple of baseline befores.”

Befores? Oh. Like before and after. “So you think,” I begin, “that—”

Dr. Garth rolls a metal cart in front of me. On it is a curving black apparatus that looks like a plant stand. “And if you’ll please put your chin in the positioner,” he instructs, “we can get underway.”

I drop my chin into the molded rubber gizmo. I suppose this is to keep my head in place for the dreaded befores. At this point, I don’t know if I’m more worried about the befores or the afters. Not to mention the “durings.”

With three snaps of brass-plated wall switches, he clicks off the soft-focus lighting and clatters open the window blinds. The morning sunshine blasts through. I sneak a sidelong glance in the once-reassuring mirror beside me. The sight startles me so much, I sit up, right out of my chin perch, and stare at the wrinkles and lines of the stranger in the mirror. Me. Instantly aged by lighting reality.

“Ms. McNally?” Dr. Garth gestures pointedly to the chin holder, and I obediently get back into position. I wince as a flashbulb pops, then again and again. Dr. Garth rolls the table around beside me, and positions me for what I assume is a profile.

“And once again,” he mutters. “Please hold still.” I stick out my chin, see another flash, hear the pop. “And that’s all we need.”

Dr. Garth rolls the cart away and stands in front of me, hands in his lab coat pockets. He surveys my face, pleasant but appraising. “We’ll just give you a little refreshment,” he says. He puts two fingers along my jaw, turning my face back and forth. He tugs up the skin at my jawline, then lets go. Again he lifts, then lets go. I feel like a piece of clay. Really old clay.

“Mini,” he says. “To reshape the line of the mandible. Two weeks’ recovery.” He uses a thumb and forefinger to pinch that rhinoceros-worthy fold of flesh under my chin. “This can also be removed. Mentoplasty,” he says. “Two weeks.”

I still haven’t said a word. I’m not sure what to say. I thought I’d be saying “no,” but now I’m beginning to wonder. Maysie’s right, I wear contacts. I can’t even imagine what my natural hair color would be. And if Dr. Garth’s waiting list is any indication, most women think this is no more a big deal than highlights and a blow-dry. With anesthesia.

“What would it look like?” I ask. Maybe Mom is right. Maybe Maysie is right. Maybe it’s face time. “After it’s all changed? Would I still look like the same me? Or a different me?” I get an even more alarming thought. “And what if I don’t do it—what’ll I look like then? And in how long?”

Dr. Garth shakes his head, as if he’s answered this one before. “Do it now, do it later. You can’t stop the aging process any other way,” he says. He goes around behind his desk, and begins to steer a sterling silver mouse across a thin foam pad bearing the black and red crest of Harvard Medical School. The motto says Veritas. Just what I need.

“If those befores I just took were entered into the system, I could show you on the computer,” he says, watching the monitor. “I’ve installed a state-of-the-art age progression software that manipulates photographs. It essentially speeds up time.” He looks up. “However, if you have a snapshot of yourself, I can scan it in right now,” he says. “Any size.”

Do I want to see me ten years from now? I do. I don’t. I do. I definitely do. I head for my tote bag, knowing the only photo I have is my station ID card. But how will I know if it really works? He could be running some sort of scam to stampede vulnerable baby boomers into clamoring for a surgical savior. Unless you waited a decade or two, you would never know if his software time machine was truly accurate.

Contemplating my misgivings and sniffing a possible story, I snap open my bag and dig to excavate my ID card. Though tethered to a black cord and clipped to my contraband mini-canister of pepper spray, it’s still buried itself somewhere in the black hole. I instantly see, however, the blue-and-gold binding of the 1986
Seagull
.

Now there’s an idea. And it may be the first good news of the morning.

I have a picture of Dorinda Keeler Sweeney. From twenty-five years ago. What’s even better, I pretty much know what she looks like now. Let’s just see if Dr. G’s fancy software is so much smoke and mirrors. My face can wait. It’s Dorie’s I’m interested in now.

I hold out the yearbook, open to the page of Dorie and her prom court. “How about the queen,” I say, pointing to the wide-eyed and wrinkle-free teenager. “Can you make her twenty years older?”

I pause, then bait the hook. “Or would that be too difficult?”

Dr. Garth takes the yearbook with both hands and turns it facedown onto a squat black and silver metal box beside his computer, adjusting the photo until he finds the correct place on the top. “This scanner is a V7200, with 6400 dpi optical resolution and 48-bit color,” he explains, as if I know what that means. “The scan feeds directly into my AP—age progression—program. It will create a stream of images as the face evolves through time.”

He pushes a button, and the scanner begins to whir. “Its wrinkling and aging algorithms are based on photographs of a population cohort of two thousand people,” he continues. “Once we download the photo, the AP morph will take just fifty-five seconds to generate the final product.”

“Fascinating,” I say. Skip the jargon, Doc, let’s just see if the thing works. “I’m so eager to see the results.”

“I
CAN
’
T LOOK AT IT NOW
, I’m trying to drive,” Franklin says.

Franklin had picked me up at the corner of Cambridge and Blossom streets, near the “dentist,” and as we head for Swampscott I’ve described how Mom’s plastic surgeon demonstrated his age progression software. So far, Franklin hasn’t questioned why I happened to be in Dr. Garth’s office. He may think it’s all part of Mom’s recuperation, since he knows I just paid her a quick visit. Fine with me. Franklin knows a lot about my life—hard to avoid since we share an office—but my personal consultation with Dr. Garth can stay private.

I stare again at the peculiarly haunting images generated by the AP computer. Dr. Garth had put the whole page on the scanner, so it’s not just Dorie, but her whole prom court that transformed through computer magic from eighteen-year-old high-schoolers to thirty-eight-year-old whatever-they-ares. They still have lithe and toned teenage bodies, wearing wannabe-sophisticated gowns and embarrassing tuxes, but now they’re unsettlingly stuck with middle-aged heads. Puffing jowls, receding hairlines, narrowing eyes, the early etchings of lines and wrinkles.

“It’s creepy,” I say. “But I have to tell you, this computer version of Dorie is right on the money. You’d recognize her from it. You’d think it was a real photograph, you know? I guess it really works.”

“Did he do you? Charlotte at sixty-six?” Franklin asks, making a woo-woo face. “Maybe you just don’t want to go there. Might be too scary.”

“Very funny,” I say. “Ve-ry funny. But since you’re being so unnecessarily mean to me, I guess it’s time to tell you I had him do a shot of you, too. I was going to save it as a surprise for Stephen. So he could see what he’s in for.” I pretend to rummage in my bag. “Want to see it?”

Ignoring me, Franklin turns his Passat into the parking lot in front of a yellow brick building, low and stubby and vintage 1950s. It’s as boxy as a file cabinet and just as interesting. A soldier-straight row of identical shrubs lines the extra-wide concrete path to the entrance. Instead of steps, two wheelchair ramps lead to the double framed glass front door. A stolid white sign announces Beachview in boldly painted black letters, although the nursing home where Dorinda Sweeney worked is nowhere near a beach.

We push a plate-sized silver button and the automatic doors swing apart, allowing us into an overbright lobby. It’s insistently cheery, so resolutely upbeat it instantly makes me sad. A massive arrangement of fake yellow gerbera daisies and white carnations sits on a lace-covered round table in the center of the room. Clusters of upholstered couches, chairs and love seats, empty, await absent visitors. Some decorator no doubt pitched them as “conversation areas,” but there’s not a person to be seen. I sniff, trying to identify the familiar yet unfamiliar fragrance. Disinfectant? Onion soup?

Franklin is already checking out what appears to be the reception desk, though there’s no one there to receive him. A phone and a guest book sit unattended on a curving wooden counter. The swivel chair behind it is empty.

He turns to me, questioning, and points to a doorway behind the counter. “Should we knock?” he whispers. “There’s no bell or call button.”

I dig into my tote bag, and pull out my cell phone, flipping it open and hitting redial. “I told her we’d be here at eleven,” I say, tucking the phone between my shoulder and my cheek, and checking my watch. From behind the door, we hear a phone ring and then someone answering.

“Beachview,” I hear it first, muffled, from somewhere out of sight, and then clearly in my ear.

“This is Charlie McNally,” I say. “I’m in the lobby? We had an appointment with Miss Soltisanto, and—”

The door behind the counter opens. A harried-looking woman in a thin beige cardigan, white blouse and a dowdy flowered cotton skirt bustles into the lobby. She seems to be carrying her entire office with her—legal pad tucked under her arm, pencil behind one ear, and eyeglasses on a chain layered on top of a necklace of jangling keys. Another brass key bounces from a plastic spring around her wrist as she offers me the hand that’s not holding her cordless phone. With that motion, the legal pad plops to the ground. “Amelia Soltisanto,” she introduces herself as she leans down to pick up the pad. “Administrator of—” She glances at the phone, a flashing green light signaling it’s still on. With a brisk gesture she clicks the cell to Off.

“Sorry,” she says, “Emergency with the water heater. Luckily, laundry time is over and we—” She holds up one finger, as if she’s just thought of something. She ducks behind the reception desk, picks up the phone and punches three buttons. “It’s me,” she says. “Plumber’s on the way. Twenty minutes.” She hangs up, uses her pencil to make some sort of notation on her legal pad, then turns her attention back to Franklin and me.