To my great joy, Mimi let me sit in on a few of her seminars for firemen. I proudly watched her spruce up their talks on salary scales and training plans into gems of piquancy, humor, and historical relevance (no prehistory though, I noticed—that she saved for me). In return, I made Mimi endure an entire Friday evening with my partner, Henry, one of the original co-founders of the practice, and the twenty-ninth-best earlobe man in the business. He and I had had our differences—we once had a fistfight in a bar over medical ethics (I was in favor of them). But I now tentatively regarded him as a harmless roué and buffoon. All he could talk about was women and female beauty. The guy sure loved his job! It gave him a chance to look at women all day, and to credit himself with making them more beautiful, though that was a pretty dubious boast. His wife didn’t seem to mind his locker-room chatter about all the beautiful women he’d ever seen or helped, or the ones he couldn’t help because they sadly hadn’t asked for help—but Mimi got a bellyful that night, and finally suggested Henry check out a few other things women might have done besides being beautiful.
“But what?” he chortled. “Where are the female composers and artists, the female scientists and philosophers?”
“They’re around, they’re just ignored!” Mimi replied.
“Oh no,” Henry cried, with a boisterousness I thought ill-advised. “You’re not one of those feminists, are you?”
“You’re not one of those misogynists, are you?” she replied.
He glanced my way, pityingly, and I could have clobbered him, given him a good punch on that double chin of his (formed from years of looking down on people) that no surgeon had yet been able to correct. He revved up the charm. “Tell me, my dear, what do you have against us poor men? We really try our best, you know—”
Without a pause, Mimi replied, “War, racism, injustice, destruction, tyranny, feudalism, monarchies, mercenaries, pirates, despots, the slave trade, the Ku Klux Klan, global warming, capitalism, corrupt bankers, wife-beating, the Freemasons, monotheism, radioactive waste, ugly architecture, animal extinctions, toga parties, pubic hair removal, sniper rifles that can shoot people a mile away, and failure to do the dishes.”
“Ah, war,” mused Henry, caressing his double chin protectively, as if sensing it was in some kind of danger. “But isn’t that a small price to pay for getting things done?”
Mimi yelped. “Women are the ones who get stuff done! Not least, raising children. Do you know how much work it takes to get a single person up and running, from birth to adulthood? And then to have to watch them get raped, exploited. . . killed! Every person men murder is some poor woman’s child!” She was magnificent.
“Oh, my dear, I see you take the little view. Are you a mother?”
I stood up. “When you’re goofy, Henry, you’re goofy,” I told him. “But when you’re idiotic and goofy, it’s offensive.” And I swept Mimi out of there before he could think up a riposte.
When we got outside, she flung herself at me, kissing me passionately in the cold night air. “You’re a hero!” she claimed.
“Hey, maybe I should have made you meet Henry sooner!” I joked.
We kept kissing along the street as we walked back to my apartment.
“‘People don’t do this in New York,’” I said, quoting Bette Davis in Deception (when she and Paul Henreid embrace all the way back to her apartment).
“But we do,” murmured Mimi, with just the right intonation: she even got my movie references! What a doll.
A little further on, she erupted. “What is with that guy?”
“Henry?”
“He seems to think he’s some kind of woman-worshipper. Goes on and on about women all evening, like he’s really into us or something. But the truth is, he spends his whole life callously comparing women’s looks. That’s all he does! He’s like the President of Female Attractiveness or something! I bet he keeps a chart.”
“I think I saw it floating around the office. They take bets.”
“He talked about beauty all goddam night! It’s so. . . annoying! And insulting. ’Cause, either he thinks I’m beautiful, and therefore the subject of female beauty must be endlessly fascinating to me, which it ain’t, or he doesn’t think I’m beautiful, and thinks I oughta try harder, which I won’t. But just who does he think he is? Does he really think we’re here to please him?! That doofus?”
A small “shaddap!” came from an upper window.
“It’s. . . a sort of hobby with him,” was all I could offer as an explanation.
“That guy,” she resumed, “makes millions persuading women they’ll be more fuckworthy after he’s sliced off some bit of them or added something. But everybody’s fuckworthy! We’d all fuck anybody in an emergency. . . ”
“TAKE IT SOME PLACE ELSE, LADY!”
Mimi was not so easily silenced. “WE’RE ALL FUCKWORTHY!” she yelled back. I hurried her away before something fell on our heads, but after a few blocks we slowed down and she said more soberly, “All this pressure on women to be beautiful. It’s just plain mean.”
“I know. And because of it, men have to spend their whole lives reassuring women that they’re beautiful!”
“Yeah, life is tough all over,” she laughed.
“You’re beautiful, Mimi.”
“So are you, and let that be the end of it!”
I was intrigued by Mimi’s complete lack of faith in the value of plastic surgery. I was beginning to agree with her. Some “specialism” this was, working with a prick like Henry all day, and poking around remodelling healthy tissue for a living. What good was it? But then I remembered my successes, the sad sacks who had really needed my help.
“The trouble is,” I said to Mimi as we tottered, entwined, towards home, “people are always trying to surpass each other in the youth and beauty stakes.”
“Nobody surpasses anybody,” said Mimi firmly. “We all die in the end.”
I loved that gal. I would give anything to be with her forever, give her anything. So later, sitting on the window seat together, drinking martinis (much better than the ones at Henry’s bar), I gave her my biggest secret, something I hadn’t told anyone since drunken days in my twenties: the real reason why I’d gone into plastic surgery. The fire.
We all love a hero, bad boys made good, ogres with a heart of gold, righteous spies (007), triumphant sportsmen, politicians unexpectedly proven honest, brave, sincere and humane, teenagers who jump off the Golden Gate Bridge and survive, composers “on the verge of international fame.” Every war produces its ersatz heroes, a whole new jerk circle of the gallant and the good. But if you want real heroes, you need look no further than beetles, the most successful species on earth. Want to rise and prosper? Get yourself a hard undercarriage, enclosable wings, and a carapace.
Apart from my father’s claim to have gone over Niagara Falls in a barrel (something I believed for a while, even though I knew him to be a guy who had a hard time just getting out of Virtue and Chewing Gum), ours was not a family that displayed a lot of heroism. Our ancestors kept violent ends to a minimum. We had an uncle who could take his glass eye out at the dinner table. Some other ancient figurehead could only talk by holding an electrode to his throat (following cancer treatment), and there was a distant cousin who made balloon animals. But we hardly ever saw those guys. My dad must have alienated them like everyone else in the world, accused them of stealing a spoon or something. We were the classic American nuclear family, enacting our own private annihilation, with a dad who could not be figured out, and a mom whose bottled-up woe, like her tomatoes, we consumed daily.
All the neighbors were hypochondriacs, but one day Mom blew their angina, fainting fits, uterine prolapses, dandruff, and cyst scares right out of the water by coming down with a real disease: scoliosis. She had to have a metal rod inserted in her spine and spend a year in a cast.
I sat with her in the hospital after her operation, doing crossword puzzles and handing her the back-scratcher Dad had bought her—a long stick with a tiny hand carved on the end of it (a maniac’s hand!), with which she could get at itches inside the cast. Then Dad and I would drive home, picking up a few hot dogs on the way. These he chased down with some highballs in the den, and a lot of yelling. Bee had reached puberty, and the guy couldn’t stand it: the makeup, the phone calls, the hair-curling, the hair-straightening, the clothes, the colored pantyhose (for some unknown reason, he felt all pantyhose should be black), her cleavage, her bralessness, her “sloth,” her selfishness, her ingratitude, her incorrigibility. . . Everything about Bee irked him. And then she had the nerve to get involved with Cliff—how dare she kiss boys while her mother was sick in the hospital? When Dad came home from work one day to find Bee and Cliff making out in the dark in the living room, with Lord of the Flies on TV, he flipped.
“Take a chill pill,” Bee told him after he’d banished Cliff and ordered her to her room. She slammed the door and played her Laura Nyro records really loud.
Mom eventually returned, in a body cast that stretched from her neck to her ass, like the most unflattering girdle, and lay helpless on her high Victorian bed for months, eating ice cream and homemade strawberry compote. She had to eat it: if she gained or lost five pounds she’d have to go back to the hospital to get a new cast put on. She’d worked out exactly how much ice cream she had to eat to retain her original plumpitude. Bee’s services were now required, not just cooking and cleaning but helping Mom in unimaginable ways in the bathroom—while all I had to do was try to prevent anyone at school finding out what was going on. I was embarrassed by this mom in her carapace, and my drunken dad, always exploding. I was eleven: embarrassment was a guiding force!
Mom was almost ready to have the cast removed when Dad stomped in one day, announcing he’d quit his job at the gum company. Goodbye, golden pension. Mom cried, and Bee huddled over the phone in the den, talking to Cliff. I just hid in my bed. O the brown and the yellow ale—the shit and piss of family life! When I got to sleep, I dreamed about the balletic wrists of river weeds, waving goodbye all day and night to the river as it passes over them. On the surface of the Chevron, stuff sometimes got jammed up, but underneath there was constant flow, miles and miles and miles of it. Water is so determined.
I was dreaming about the guys, Gus, Chester, me, and Pete, wandering along the riverbank searching for older boys, hoping to cadge a cigarette—a favorite activity at the time. We didn’t just smoke them, we used them to singe holes in Styrofoam cups—pretty sophisticated, huh?—creating melted Styrofoam dot-to-dots that spelled out our names, or dirty words, or porno diagrams. But in my dream we couldn’t find any boys with cigarettes. Instead, we heard something approaching us through the bushes—a maniac? No, a lion! He made a terrible rumbling sound as he sprang into the tree above our heads. The other guys fled along the bank, but I thought I’d be safer in the river, and dove down deep. I knew I was safe down there and somehow managed to breathe for a while underwater, before I woke up, choking. I couldn’t see a thing, not even my night-light, because the room was full of smoke! I scrambled to the door, but when I opened it something huge and angry lunged at me: more smoke, combined with ferocious heat. I had to face it though, to get to the rest of my family. Once I was in the hall, through the smoke I could see the glow of a blazing fire in the kitchen.
Of the four elements, only two seem threatening: those two sworn enemies, fire and water. Water can engulf you, quickly, drown you; and fire is a lion, indifferent and uncontrollable. There’s no negotiating with it, no telling where it wants to go or what it will do. Fire is a realm unto itself, unearthly, ornery, and ignorant as hell. Fire has no idea you’re in its way, it can’t see you (not that it would care). You and your slippers and your mother and the roof are all equally palatable, and fire will burn right through you in its brainless effort to survive. But it’s not alive, has no will, no stake in whether it burns or not. It has nothing to gain, no progeny to look out for, no pension to protect, no interests, no plans, no needs, no worries. It feels no hope, no pain, and no despair. Fire isn’t maddened, it only seems so. It’s more like a virus. But it’s hard to believe it’s not out to get you, hard not to sense its rampant joy in its own finite life, and its triumph over earth and air and water, by coming into being at all. Hard to believe, in the midst of it, that a fire doesn’t get off on itself, sadistically. And—it’s not a great thing to meet in your hallway.
TV and comic strips had provided me with all the exclamations necessary for a rich and full life: Ahoy there! Timber! Geronimo! Eureka! Kerpow! Kerplunk! AK AK AK! AIEEEE! Boom! Hey, watch it, buster! Arrgh! Boing! Hiyo, Silver! Kiss my ass! Why I oughta. . . And FIRE! I duly yelled “Fire!” again and again, but my family wasn’t buying it. They must not have watched the same TV shows. Maybe no one had actually cried “Fire!” for a hundred years, for all I knew, and it was the equivalent of yelling “Blackguard!” “Brigand!” and “Gadzooks!” (Even in the middle of a disaster, I was worried about being a corny goofball.)
Giving up on that idea, I banged desperately on Bee’s door. She sleepily opened it, making the fire in the kitchen brighten and a cloud of smoke rush at us. We ran the other way, towards Mom and Dad’s room—where we knocked, we were so well trained! There was no response, so we defied taboo and entered. Drugged to help her sleep inside her itchy cast, Mom was sound asleep in the center of that tall bed of hers (the bed Bee and I always secretly coveted and jumped on when nobody was around). Dad wasn’t there, so Bee and I just started tugging at Mom to wake her up. Smoke was coming in, so Bee kicked the door shut with her foot, making windows burst elsewhere in the house. This sound was what finally woke Mom, who started to scream. We screamed too, when we realized she wasn’t capable of doing anything for us! She couldn’t even get off the bed without help. Working from both sides, Bee and I had to slide our panic-stricken mother out of bed and drag her over towards the window. She didn’t seem able to move.
Bee jumped down onto the lawn below, and braced herself to break Mom’s fall (we’d been trained to be very respectful of that expensive plaster cast). I got Mom onto the window ledge. She sat down okay, but when I tried to swivel her around so her feet were sticking out the window, she said she wasn’t going.
“Come on, Mom, it’s not that far down. You’ll be okay.”
But it wasn’t fear of the drop, or hurting herself. It was a stubborn, deranged refusal to leave the house she’d tended for so long. “I love this house!” she cried. Okay, she’d spent half her life fixing the place up, keeping it shipshape, but now it was time to disembark. “I can’t leave!” she yelled. “I love this house!”
This was hysterical behavior. I knew from TV and the movies that when women get hysterical you have to slap ’em! But I didn’t dare slap my mom, so I just kept prodding at her, nudging her further and further out the window. She was so upset, she barely noticed what I was doing, and finally Bee grabbed hold of one of Mom’s feet and tugged. Mom was still wailing, “I love this house!” when she wobbled a bit, overbalanced, and fell, landing on Bee. Making me the last to leave the sinking ship, a role honored in song and story: I reached the ground a hero.
Or so my dad said, when we got far enough from the house to be able to speak over the roar. For some reason, Dad had been outside when the fire started, so he ran to a neighbor’s house to call the Fire Department. Then he’d watched helplessly from afar—it was too hot to get near the house, and the neighbors forced him to wait and let the firemen handle it—they were professionals, they would know best how to get us out. So now he just kept clapping me on the back, while Mom peered at the smoke pawing at her dream house, and started to keen. She sounded like a very tired hyena.
Not everything is lost in a fire. The firemen threw all our furniture out onto the front lawn and doused it with water and foam, so later we found whole drawers of intact, if damp, stuff: clothes and board games and Christmas ornaments, books, papers, schoolwork and prehistoric family heirlooms nobody wanted. I didn’t care, I just watched the firemen, whose heroism I now connected with my own. It was a thrill just to be up so late! But nobody could send me to bed: no bed!
Later, it was decided that the fire had started in the kitchen and was therefore somehow Mom’s fault—she’d recently resumed a few of her kitchen duties. Women are the bearers of fire, after all. They’re always fooling with it: ironing things and boiling things and baking things and burning things. But the actual cause didn’t matter anyway, except to the fire inspectors—the insurance company paid for a whole new house to be built. Mom insisted on the new one being exactly like the old one, right down to the tricky window catches, the one and only bathroom, the thin walls, cramped bedrooms, lack of porch, and every other inconvenient detail. The only outright changes she allowed were a few more closets, a slightly bigger fridge, and insulation in the attic so that I could have it as my teenage lair, in tribute to my bravery and strength of mind in an emergency (Bee’s bravery went wholly unrewarded).
While the new house was built, we all got to live in one room in a motel—not a log cabin this time, just a dump where we ate hot dogs every night, and Mom resented the maid service for depriving her of her usual housework routine. We slept in two big double beds, Mom and Bee in one, Dad and me in the other. For six months! No sign of Cliff now (his parents had zipped him off to a prep school, just to get him away from Bee, or so she said). Dad never spoke, just drove us over once in a while to see how things were shaping up with the charred remains of what was once 39 Cranberry Avenue.
My standing at school went up briefly, when news spread of my heroism. Until then my popularity had largely depended on the free samples of gum my father loaded me up with for “product-testing” purposes. He was trying to turn America into a nation of ruminants (I guess it worked!). I was supposed to get kids’ responses to the jingles while they ate the gum: Catch the Chattanooga chew-chew, all the way to Virtue! Or, It’s bad to be glum! Try Virtue Gum! And if you think I wasn’t regularly beaten up by kids chanting, Every monkey in the zoo knows I love Virtue! you’re nuts. Did my dad want to get me killed?
Pete and I became engrossed in firemen and especially fire engines, studying them intently, from the Button & Blake sixteen-man hand-pumper of 1857, to the “Type 7” double-tank combination engine of 1911. Also the Firecracker, an old engine with a hydraulic platform that had a telescopic upper boom capable of reaching seventy-five feet! That sort of stuff killed us. We loved every aspect of firefighting: the siphons, the stowage, the hooks and the ladders, the pumps, the hose reels, fire poles, foam, dousing techniques, tenders, the different divisions, uniforms, fire stations, and old photographs of fire crews all lined up in front of their apparatus. We even liked the “inevitable crowd of onlookers” who gather at every fire as if it’s their civic duty to gloat. (This is how Cary Grant manages to steal the pickup truck in North by Northwest—everybody’s looking the other way, staring at the exploding tanker. People can’t resist a fire!) Pete and I had a problem with the Dalmatians though: we felt they could be asked to do a bit more, at least attend fires and pull a hose or something.
Mom redecorated our new house with a whole new bunch of knickknacks to be dusted, and Bee got fat, conspicuously unheroic, wearing an old coat all day and night, smoking dope, and tearing her hair out. The manic playing of Bach partitas on the violin shook the house, and her graffiti sideline shook the town. Nobody in Virtue and Chewing Gum suspected a girl was behind all the Day-Glo BH’s all over the place, but they should have, the letters looked so much like bulbous female breasts and buttocks.
There were complaints in the local paper, the Daily Virtue, about the town being terrorized (or territorized) by this BH character, and about a million janitors scrubbed away at the emblems with ineffectual brushes and corrosives, while Bee sat in the woods, glowering. I told her it’s bad to be glum, try Virtue gum—and she swatted me like a fly for about five years.
“And that’s how I got into plastic surgery,” I explained to Mimi, who by now was lying on her stomach on the window seat, looking up at me, with Bubbles nestled in the small of her back. “I started out as a burns specialist, treating kids who’d disfigured themselves with fireworks, and firemen caught in back-flashes, or girls who’d had acid thrown at them by spurned lovers, and plenty of car-crash victims. Then I moved into facial-trauma cases: beatings and knifings. From there it was but a small step to reconstructive surgery after mastectomies. But the practice just kept going upmarket, everybody trying to make their pile. . . and now all I get are women who want to give their husbands new tits for Christmas! Women who want to be babes, and men who want the Berlusconi makeover, so they can date babes. I know it’s all nonsense, but I don’t know what to do about it. . . ” But by then Mimi had dislodged Bubs and was holding my head against her soft, warm, original-edition belly.