The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares (31 page)

It was fatigue. Caffeine, speed. The pressure of his work. The eyes of the others
. Dazed and not seeming to know where he was at first—in the corridor outside the OR—not wanting to ask what had happened, only if the patient was all right, if he’d completed the craniectomy satisfactorily and he had been assured yes, he had.

Nineteen years he’d been a cosmetic surgeon in Hazelton-on- Hudson, New York. Eight years since he’d moved his practice to prestigious Weirlands at the outskirts of town. As a suburban physician Dr. Brede avoided all surgeries involving pathologies and all surgeries except the most familiar and routine, and high paying—face-lifts were the most lucrative and the most reliable. The procedure was ghastly as a sadist’s fantasy and
horribly bloody when the facial skin-mask was “lifted” and “stretched”—“stapled” to the scalp—but no one had ever died of a face-lift—at least not one of Dr. Brede’s patients. One of these operations was very like another, as most human faces, attractive or otherwise, beneath the skin-mask, are very like one another.

Of course he knew—and he resented—that in the pantheon of physicians and surgeons Dr. Lucas Brede’s life’s-work was considered trivial, contemptible. And he himself trivial, contemptible. He knew, and tried not to know. He tried not to be bitter. Thinking
I would feel this way myself, about myself. If my life had gone otherwise
.

In this season of dark-pelting rains. Snow swirling like sticky clumps of mucus out of a sheet-metal sky. His 4:15 patient Mrs. Druidd in whose sallow sagging face he’d been injecting Formula X—slowly, carefully—wiping away blood with sterile gauze-pads—an itchy film of perspiration on his face—began to be restless, skittish. On her previous visit to Dr. Brede, just before Christmas, Mrs. Druidd had had a chemical peeling; now, follow-up injections to plump out lines and wrinkles in her face, much of this was routine except Dr. Brede was substituting his own Formula X for Restylane—a substitution that was entirely ethical, he believed, in the way that substituting generic drugs for pricey brand-name drugs was ethical—but the mild tranquilizer he’d given her didn’t seem to be effective, and with each injection she seemed to be feeling more pain. “Squeeze the the corn maiden and other nightmares
balls. Both balls”—Dr. Brede advised. His manner was calm, kindly. If he was deeply annoyed you would never have guessed so from his affable smile.

“Oh! That
hurts
.”

Mrs. Druidd had never spoken so petulantly to Dr. Brede—this was a surprise. Lucas saw to his alarm that there were deep bruises in the woman’s face, where he’d been injecting Formula X; collagen and Restylane caused bruising too, but nothing like this. And that weltlike mark on one side of the woman’s mouth, he knew wouldn’t fade readily.

Three to five days
was the usual estimate, for bruising following injections. Very likely it might be more than a week, this time.

Mrs. Druidd asked if this was something new he was injecting into her face—“It feels different. It stings and
burns
.”

Lucas hesitated just a moment before assuring her, this was the identical treatment she’d had numerous times in his office.

“I don’t remember it stinging so and
burning
. I’m afraid to see what I look like. . . .”

The woman was fifty-seven years old, what did she expect? A miracle? Even with the lurid bruising, the effect of Dr. Brede’s treatments over the past several years gave Mrs. Druidd the appearance of a woman of thirty-five, perhaps—if you didn’t look too closely at the small damp fanatic eyes.

Here was a rich man’s wife, or ex-wife. Dr. Brede had seen Mrs. Druidd’s photograph in the Hazelton paper, he was sure. Chairwoman of the Friends of the Hazelton Public Library. Chairwoman of the Hazelton Medical Clinic’s annual Spring
Fling. With her dramatic dark hair and flawless-seeming face Mrs. Druidd managed to hold her own with women of her daughter’s generation. Her sessions with Dr. Brede, that had more often the air of custom and ritual, usually went more smoothly.

Dr. Brede had no choice but to bring the hand mirror to Mrs. Druidd’s face. This was a part of the ritual; he could hardly avoid it. At first Mrs. Druidd drew in her breath sharply, as if she’d been slapped—then she touched her tender, wounded skin—unexpectedly she laughed—“Well! It felt worse than this! I suppose I deserve it—after all.” She paused, with a rueful sort of flirtatiousness. “How long will this awful bruising last, Doctor?”

Even now, the woman yearned to trust Dr. Brede. For women yearn to trust men—all women, all men. And Dr. Brede wanted to believe that certainly yes, he was a man worthy of a woman’s trust.

“The usual—three to five days. Unless you become anxious and stressed—stress will exacerbate the bruising, as you know.” “Yes—yes!—‘stress.’” Mrs. Druidd spoke as if repentant.

Chloe had brought in an ice pack for Mrs. Druidd to take away with her, for a minimum extra charge—standard procedure in Dr. Brede’s office and much appreciated by his patients.

Badly he wanted this pathetic woman to depart. He was tugging off his latex gloves impatiently—“Be sure to keep the ice pack on your face as much as possible. If you do—as you know—your face will heal much more quickly.” The latex gloves seemed to be sticking to his fingers, he tore them off in haste, as
if suffocating. As Mrs. Druidd left his office pressing the ice bag to her reddened and swollen face, walking as a dazed or drunken woman might walk, the sobering thought came to Dr. Brede
I will never see her again. She will never call.

His 5:15
P.M
. patient, his last of the day, Mrs. Drake, another of his long-term patients, proved even more difficult. There was an edgy querulousness about Mrs. Drake as she climbed up onto the examination table, lay back stiffly and allowed Chloe to position her; she failed to relax as Dr. Brede indicated, on her face, in Magic Marker ink, where the injections would be; instead of squeezing the rubber balls Dr. Brede gave her, to deflect pain, as Dr. Brede began the injections she sat up abruptly, touching her face—“That hurts! That
burns
! It doesn’t feel like last time.”

Calmly Lucas assured her that certainly it was the same solution—the identical solution—Botox—he’d given her in the past—“You must be more tense today. Tension heightens sensitivity to even mild discomfort.” He was holding the syringe with the two-inch needle in his hand, that trembled slightly—though Mrs. Drake was too distracted to notice.

“Doctor, are you blaming
me
?”

The woman spoke so aggressively, Lucas was taken by surprise. He’d been accustomed to the tractability of his female patients; it was like them to murmur apologetically for wincing with pain. But Irena Drake was the wife of a Dutchess County supreme court judge, a woman with a strident voice and accusing eyes. Her chestnut-colored hair was synthetically lightened and her skin that had once been luminous and creamy seemed to be
now drying out though she was only in her late forties. Lucas “lifted” Mrs. Drake’s face several years before and attended to it at three-month intervals; between patient and doctor there had arisen a quasi-flirtatious rapport, not so much sexual as social, or so Dr. Brede had imagined. Now Mrs. Drake was wincing with pain though he had hardly touched her.

It was Formula X he was using, having decided to dilute it just slightly after his experience with Mrs. Druidd. Lucas was certain that this liquid solution couldn’t possibly be causing a “burning” sensation—the hypersensitive woman had to be imagining it. But when he began to inject her forehead—where fine white wrinkles had formed unmistakably since Mrs. Drake’s last injection six months before—Lucas felt the needle slip, and strike bone—the hard bone just above the eye. Mrs. Drake screamed and shoved him away. “Dr. Brede! You did that on purpose!”

“I—I certainly did not.”

“You did! You did that to hurt me—to punish me!”

“Mrs. Drake—Irena!—why would I want to hurt you?—punish you? Please try to be calm—take a deep breath and release slowly. . . .”

“Have you been drinking, Dr. Brede?”

“Drinking? Of course not.”

He’d had only a twenty-minute break between patients, at 2
P.M
. Eating a late lunch at his desk, on the phone with his accountant who was preparing his New York State tax documents, he’d had just a double shot of Johnnie Walker he kept in
a cabinet in his office and he’d rinsed his mouth with Listerine afterward. He was certainly not drunk. Nowhere near drunk. This hysterical woman could not smell alcohol on his breath.

“Then you’re—drugged. You’re taking something. I’ve seen TV documentaries—doctors like you. You’ve hurt me—look at me.”

On Mrs. Drake’s furrowed forehead was a bright blotch like a birthmark. Where he’d been injecting, with enormous care, minuscule quantities of Formula X to plump out the wrinkles and to “freeze” the nerves, to prevent such unattractive furrowing. All this was routine procedure, or nearly—still it was troubling, the patient’s face was hot and swollen to the touch after only a few injections.

“Dr. Brede! I will report you to the county medical board—I will tell my husband.
He
will know what to do. I am leaving now, and
I am not paying for this treatment
.”

“But, Irena—I haven’t completed the injections. I haven’t half-completed the treatment. Chloe can put ice on your face and wait a few minutes before proceeding—”

“No. I’m finished. Let me out.”

“You can’t possibly want to leave without—”

“Yes. I do. I want to leave now.”

Like a child in a tantrum Mrs. Drake tore off the sheet of white paper covering her to the chin and threw it onto the floor. On this paper was a fine lacy pattern of blood-specks like overlapping cobwebs, of a kind Lucas had not noticed before.

“You signed a waiver, Mrs. Drake. Before coming into treatment, you signed a waiver with me.”

“‘Signed a waiver’! Of course I ‘signed a waiver’—doctors like you won’t treat patients otherwise. But would such a waiver stand up in court, if I can prove negligence? Malpractice? If I have photos taken of my injured face? I doubt it.”

“Your face—is not ‘injured.’ Swelling and bruising is perfectly normal as you must know. . . .”

Dr. Brede was stunned by the woman’s unprecedented hostility. In his nineteen years of practice no patient had ever spoken to him like this. Some change had occurred, almost overnight; he couldn’t think that it had exclusively to do with him but with the era itself—the plummeting economy, the ongoing wars, the malaise of a protracted winter. He thought
I will have to stop this madwoman. Someone must stop this madwoman
but the prospect of touching Mrs. Drake, trying to restrain her, was distasteful. If he tried to prevent her leaving—in order to speak to her reasonably—she would react by screaming, and Chloe would hear.

“Good-bye! I’m never coming back! And—
I am not paying
.”

Indignant Mrs. Drake left the examination room, kicking at the sheet of paper she’d thrown to the floor. Her harridan-face was luridly bruised as if she’d been tattooed by a whimsical and erratic tattooist.

“Dr. Brede?”—there was Chloe gazing at him with concerned eyes.

“It’s all right, Chloe. Mrs. Drake had to leave suddenly.”

“But—”

“I said it’s
all right
.”

“But—shall I send her a bill? Or—”

“No. Don’t send her a bill, please. Expunge her.”

It was both flattering to Lucas, and discomforting, that his nurse-receptionist behaved at times as if she were in love with him; Lucas was too gentlemanly to take advantage of her, though since his separation from his wife Chloe’s tender solicitude toward him was more marked. Now he would have turned away impatiently except Chloe dared to restrain him, as an older sister might—“Dr. Brede? Let me get this”—stooping to swipe at something on his trouser cuff with a tissue—a dark, damp stain? Blood? Then, as she straightened, Chloe noticed a similar, smaller stain on a cuff of Dr. Brede’s white shirt and this too she hurriedly swiped at with the tissue.

“A drop of something,” she murmured, frowning as if embarrassed, not quite meeting her employer’s eye, “—wet.”

To his wife he’d pleaded
Have faith in me!

“‘Trepanning’—you know what that is, Doctor?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“It’s a—controversial medical procedure, I think?”

“Not controversial. Not a ‘medical’ procedure.”

Ms. Steene was a stranger who’d called to make an “emergency appointment” with Dr. Brede for a consultation. He’d assumed that the woman wanted to discuss possible cosmetic treatments
to restore a look of youthfulness to her creased face, that appeared to be prematurely weathered; she was slender, if not markedly underweight, and wore sweatpants and a sweatshirt embossed with shiny green letters—
H
ARMONY
A
CRES
FOR
A
B
ETTER
W
ORLD
. On the form she’d filled out for Dr. Brede’s files she gave her age as fifty-six. Emphatically she’d crossed out the little boxes meant to designate sex and marital state as if in objection to such queries into her personal life.

With an air of correcting the uninformed physician Ms. Steene said reprovingly, “Not a
medical
procedure, Doctor. A
spiritual
procedure.”

How unexpected this was, and annoying. One of Dr. Brede’s long-term patients had also asked him about trepanning the other day, and Chloe reported calls to the office with similar inquiries. There must have been something about trepanning on television recently, on one of the morning or afternoon interview shows aimed at women viewers. Politely Dr. Brede said, “Trepanning is not a ‘spiritual’ procedure, any more than it’s a medical procedure, Ms. Steene. It’s medieval pseudoscience in which holes are drilled into the skull to reduce pressure or to allow ‘disease’ or evil spirits to escape. It’s a thoroughly discredited procedure that’s very dangerous—like exorcism.”

Stubbornly Ms. Steene said, “It isn’t ‘medieval,’ doctor. You can say that it predates the history of Homo sapiens—there is evidence that Neanderthal man practiced trepanning. Throughout the ancient world—in the East, in Egypt—trepanning has been practiced. In 1999 it was revived, in several parts of the
world simultaneously. There are no practitioners in this part of the country, however. I was wondering if—”