It’s Monday midday in Santa Monica, and Melody Howell Forvath, writer of novels of international intrigue, doesn’t give a goddamn what anyone thinks. She’s going ahead with the party. Melody Howell Forvath hasn’t given a good goddamn for many years, except about the state of her pool, the newest restaurant in her neighborhood, and the best beaches within driving distance. And this is because she has paid her dues with novels of international intrigue. She’s published twenty-seven, the first twelve she wrote herself, up until Double Dutch (1973), the one about the twin spies operating as prostitutes in an Amsterdam brothel. They broke open a heroin case, et cetera. Then, beginning with Envoy of Desire (1975), she hired a string of well-educated and presentable graduates of Smith and Wellesley to write the books according to her instructions. Here’s how she works. Melody goes to the magazine store and plucks from a well-thumbed Travel & Leisure a few promising locales. Then she sits down with whoever is the ghostwriter, and they hash out a thrilling story that features adultery, champagne, a hail of bullets, and a sexually independent woman. That’s her stipulation, that the novels have sexually independent women in them. She’s certainly not writing these books for men, who only care about how big the warheads are.
In truth, Melody Forvath’s job is the job of advance woman for a corporation called Melody Howell Forvath. After she goes over the proofs, her only genuine responsibility is to undertake the book tour, something she rather likes. She goes to the good hotels, the Ritz in Boston, the Carlyle Hotel of Manhattan. She greets bookstore owners and employees, the names of whom she carries with her in a leather book. After each event, on the plane, she writes postcards thanking every local benefactor.
From modest beginnings in Kansas City, Melody Forvath has become a writer any publisher would love to have on her list and a hostess of renown in the Los Angeles area. She has lots of friends, and there are still others who’d like to be her friends, and that’s why she’s the logical person to mount the gathering being thrown today on behalf of Iveshka Maevka, MD, whose practice has been a great comfort to her now that her profile is not the promotional tool that it might once have been. As you know, it’s tough for a woman of a certain age. Melody Forvath made the acquaintance of Iveshka Maevka, MD, through her daughter, Ellie, who works as a buyer for a stylish boutique in town. Iveshka Maevka is a swashbuckler who wears double-breasted suits and surgical gloves, and he is up-to-date on the latest techniques, and he is eager to live a life of opportunity here in his adopted land. Melody Forvath wants to make sure Dr. Maevka, in his new line of business, receives the social introductions he needs. To this end, she has written a few words on one of those pink sticky pads.
Dr. Maevka has followed the progress of this medication through the Food and Drug Administration. He argues forcefully that a substance that is basically a toxin can nonetheless be a boon to modern medicine, though he recognizes that this medication, or its raw material, is still going to cause the occasional health emergency, when foods are not protected properly or when canned goods are spoiled, things of that nature.
As Melody Forvath understands it, eye twitches, excessive perspiration, and spasticity were among the first applications for the medication. (And before you make fun of people with twitches, let’s just point out that Melody Forvath has known a friend or two with these kinds of problems, and they are no picnic.) From there the cosmetic uses became obvious. She’s eager to get this part of medical history into her next book, if possible. Maybe a detective who is also some kind of dermatologist. A glamorous dermatologist.
From the treatment of excessive perspiration, the medication soon became widely available as a treatment for some of the humbling signs of advancing years, namely the wrinkles that appear around the eyes or the forehead.
This is what Dr. Maevka has told her, during their one-on-one treatment sessions. Dr. Maevka has long been known as an expert in surgeries that tighten the face or hoist a sagging buttock, also in the removal of unwanted liver spots using laser beams. Melody Forvath has, in fact, suffered the attentions of his blade. But no longer. She doesn’t want her husband to have to see her with the bandages and wearing the hooded sweatshirts. Dr. Maevka is the first to admit that the medication in question is less invasive, and already there are many actresses, some as young as their late twenties, who are worried about lines on their forehead. They are all getting the treatments. It’s no big drama anymore, it’s just a step that a lot of women will be taking. Women are always ahead of men on these kinds of things. Later, men will get the bug, and the men will do it in secret, so that no golfing partner ever finds out.
The hors d’oeuvres are little dainty sandwiches for people who like to eat when they’re nervous, and then there will be iced tea, fruity and minty, with fresh leaves drifting lazily in pitchers from Steuben. Dr. Maevka is willing to prescribe tranquilizers for people who are hesitant, but he’s hoping that there’s not going to be a lot of drinking, because that just isn’t medically sound. When you have a lot of drinking at a party, then people get sloppy. He’d rather sell the reputation of the medicine among the sober and alert, because with anything that causes paralysis, there’s bound to be misunderstanding.
Wouldn’t you like to know the names on the guest list? She’s not so indiscreet as to give away information like that. People in this neighborhood depend on their anonymity. She will admit, however, that the wife of one of the major studio heads will be there, also the wives of several hot-shot entertainment lawyers and a few screenwriters.
Melody has these parties because it’s a nice way to give back to the community. In fact, she says this to one of the cater-waiters, an attractive young girl who is almost certainly an actress. She says, “I really like to have parties like this occasionally because it’s a good way to give back to the community.” She asks the cater-waiter to hold out her hand, and she notices that the nails of the cater-waiter are lacquered maroon, a shade Melody also favors, Bordeaux or maybe California Bing. The girl places a Tiffany platter of canapés on a nearby table and she takes from Melody the item that is being offered, which is a lilac-scented eye pillow. Just like the ones that will serve as party favors this afternoon.
Melody asks, “Do you think it’s too much?”
The gap-toothed cater-waiter, bless her heart, knows exactly what an eye pillow is for. She leans back and sets the eye pillow across the bridge of her pretty little nose and she takes pause. The sound of industry is so reassuring around a house, the mustering of hospitality, the caterers layering saucissons onto little sandwiches, the stirring of aromatics into the iced tea, the preparation of the smart little bags with the favors in them, including cleansing lotions admixed by Dr. Maevka himself, as well as the lilac-scented eye pillows, selected by the hostess. The cater-waiter lingers in the center of the room with the eye pillow across the bridge of her lightly freckled nose.
She says, “I can definitely feel a nap coming on.”
“Then you keep that one for yourself, sweetheart. For when the party’s over.”
The cater-waiter smiles and curtsies, both earnest and playful. But there’s no time for playacting because now there’s the chiming of the front door and the party is begun! Melody Howell Forvath would continue in a discursive vein on her thoughts about botulinum toxin and the history of cosmetic surgery in California, or partygoing in general, but she barely has time to complete a sentence because each close personal friend is now immediately followed by another. Here, for example, is Darlene, with whom she plays tennis, Darlene who always makes a questionable call or two but has perfect ground strokes; and here is Lois Maiser’s ex-sister-in-law, she comes on like a freight train, and before Melody even has time to ask her about her son the skateboard champion, she starts in with the doubts she’s having. “Doesn’t the toxin cause dystonia?” Melody pretends not to hear, sweeps out of the foyer, grabs the cater-waiter, points her in the direction of the office, “Look up something for me: dystonia.” In record time, the cater-waiter, who certainly does resemble the celebrated gap-toothed Wife of Bath, comes trotting out of the office, the planes of her cheeks faintly flushed. Fewer than half a dozen guests have slipped past her when the answer comes: “Involuntary contractions of the musculature.” She says it to Lois’s sister-in-law with the forgettable name. How horrible to forget the name of someone she knows so well. Then, abruptly, it comes back to her. “Actually, Janet, dystonia is what it’s used to treat, but you can ask these questions of Dr. Maevka, whom you’re really going to like, sweetie. He’s a dish.”
They’re here, the women of Santa Monica, for the Forvath party. Melody greets each in turn, holding her long-stemmed rose, white with an elegant scent. She smiles sweetly, she welcomes each, one by one, into her living room. She can see the gap-toothed cater-waiter again, who with a sweep of the arm is sending forth the guests, until the Forvath sitting room is like a wild-animal display—one of those drive-thru ones—of the most powerful women in the Los Angeles area. Diana Collins, the lawyer; there’s Kennedy McCord, the children’s book writer; Sherry Horst, the psychoanalyst; Ellen Evans, the publicist. That interior decorator, Leni Jankovich. Dozens of others. The only person missing is Lois Maiser herself, who’s all broken up about her husband’s trading down for some young thing. In fact, ever since, Lois has taken to Dr. Maevka with a vengeance. She’s already an initiate. And yet Melody Forvath doesn’t know if it’s the best thing that Lois isn’t here. Lois risks finding out about the party through some other channel. Through loose talk. You know how people are. Lois’s depression verges on the morbid, and Melody has heard tales of Lois not getting out of bed for days at a time and giving away personal possessions. Melody doesn’t know what to do about it yet, but she will do something. She’ll take Lois to a desert spa, in Scottsdale or Taos. Or to a wine tasting with that fabulous wine consultant, what’s his name. In the meantime, however, Melody Howell Forvath follows a guest into the living room and slips her ornamental rose into the vase by the Plexiglas lectern. She takes out her notes, on the sticky pink things, and she holds these notes up to the girls as though some secret is held here.
“I had all these wonderful remarks I was going to make because of course I’m a writer and so I’m maybe a little too fond of the sound of my own voice! But seriously I think it’s fair to say that you’re not here for me but for the man of the hour. So why don’t we invite him in right now, girls?”
He’s Dr. Iveshka Maekva, from San Diego, by way of St. Petersburg. He’s elegant and stylish, in a charcoal gray pinstripe but with some of those rakish details that younger designers bring to things, a robin’s-egg tie with red tennis rackets on it. His hair, though thinning on the top, has an effect more virile than vulnerable, and it’s swept straight back and oiled with something French. There are curls behind his ears. He wears tortoiseshell glasses, which somehow give him an Omar Sharif gravity. If Dr. Zhivago were a dermatologist and cosmetic surgeon, this is what he’d look like, and his accent would seduce whole blocks of Santa Monica wives.
He seizes the microphone roughly and adjusts it. The amplifier crackles to life. “You will want to be knowing about the positive benefits of this treatment. And so now I would like to enumerate these benefits. First, I can promise that you will lose many if not all of the lines around the eyes and in the area of the forehead. This is the first of my promises to you.” And now Dr. Maekva has parted company with the lectern. He has moved forward to the edge of the sofa where Kennedy McCord is sitting. Immediately, as if he were the sea breaking upon the sand, he is caressing, in the most methodical way, the top of Kennedy’s forehead, where even her close friends would agree there has been some grooving, owing to the grimacing and the impatience with which Kennedy daily struggles. “I can promise relief from repetitive stresses acting upon these muscles here. I can promise that for about three months after this treatment, these lines will completely disappear. I can promise that the muscle tension here will completely evaporate. Here your skin will again resemble the smooth, unlined skin of a young woman in the bloom of youth. Or perhaps even better than a woman in her youth. Perhaps you will have the skin of a little child.” He takes Kennedy’s hand briefly and then sets it back in her lap, and then he pauses briefly to straighten a cuff link before moving toward Sherry Horst, possibly the most impervious of the RSVPs. Sherry Horst, who never met a salesman or a politician she didn’t dislike.
“You will be wanting to know the costs of such a magical cure. And there are costs. Beyond the monetary investment, of course. I can promise, in a spirit of full disclosure, that you will have slightly diminished sensation in the particular area of the treatment. We are paralyzing the muscle groups, after all. Certain kinds of facial expression will be difficult, if not impossible, during the effective period of the treatment, as there is paralysis. A quizzical expression, for example, out of the question. The result is a kind of appearance that skeptics would perhaps call masking, but others would simply call beautiful.”
Now Dr. Maevka uses his most calculating bit of persuasion, which, the way Melody Howell Forvath sees it, is really more like a Las Vegas spectacle. From his briefcase, Dr. Maevka removes a rolled-up reproduction of the painting by Leonardo da Vinci known as the Mona Lisa.
He unrolls it.
“I would ask you to look at Leonardo’s definition of beauty, which is inscrutable, which is dignified, which is not a pandering beauty, not an immature beauty, but which is rather the beauty of wisdom and understanding. This beauty will be yours for the duration of the treatment.
“There are minor side effects, of course. How could it be otherwise? But these are mainly owing to the injection and to the inert materials contained in the injection, and these minor side effects will include for some of you respiratory infection, flu, headache. Transient effects, I think you will agree, and nothing compared to the restoration of your radiance. You will be beautiful, you will be good at poker, and you will smile like a Renaissance masterpiece.”
A sigh of acclamation sweeps through the Forvath sitting room. Melody thinks she sees it even in the face of the gap-toothed Wife of Bath standing like statuary at the door. Dr. Maevka has the audience in the palm of his hand, and because of this, he now lifts from his bag the rubber gloves of his trade, and he snaps these onto his wrists as if this were part of the Hippocratic oath, after which he produces the last hurdle to be surmounted today, the needle required for the application of the toxin. “As you know, the needle used for the treatments is slightly larger than those used for injections you may have had in the past, and I think it’s important that you have an opportunity to see the tool that is to be used. I disclose it now. Nothing to be afraid of, of course. If you contracted rabies, for example, you would be in a much worse position. In fact, in that case we would have to inject you in the abdomen.”
Kennedy asks if there is any pain associated with the injection.
“Of course, there is the injection itself, which is a pinch of nothing, and then, because we use distilled saline to preserve the toxin, there is some minor stinging, but beyond this there is no real pain associated with the injection itself. Any other questions?”
“Is there any danger of infection from the toxin?”
“A good question. Most of you will know that the toxin is commonly found in . . . I believe in the United States that the prejudice is for mushroom soup. Because we are giving very minute injections in very localized regions, however, we are not spreading the toxin throughout the body, like mushroom soup would spread it, if ingested. It will stay where it is injected and it will perform its magic there. The answer, therefore, is that notwithstanding the seriousness of the toxin itself, these are very focused injections in particular locations, and there is no worry about toxin escaping into the body as a whole and causing trouble. No worry at all on this point. If these are all the questions, I suppose I might ask for a volunteer?”
Well, it’s her party. It’s Melody’s party, and she has gathered her friends here, and she has put her credibility on the line, her literary celebrity, and there’s really no option but that she should be the first, the first to have the injection or the series of injections. The first to be in the strong, masculine hands of Dr. Iveshka Maevka as he passes this milestone in his practice, his first Santa Monica Botox party. The occasion is momentous in so many ways. Melody raises her hand, and there’s nervous laughter in the room as her friends realize how brave Melody is and how sweet for bringing them all together like this.
“It’s material for the next book,” she says, “so don’t worry!” Everyone laughs. “And I’m even writing off the catering bill!”
Dr. Maevka gestures toward the daybed situated strategically by the enormous potted fern. From here, Melody can see the ripples on the surface of the pool through the French doors. She can hear birds twittering in the palms. Was any afternoon more deluxe? She sits up straight, since her posture is never less than good, and she looks up at Dr. Maevka as though it’s a conversion experience that is promised in this moment, and before she knows it, the injection is upon her, a slight pinch. She’s conscious of the fact that she feels nothing, really, in the spot of the injection. The pressure being relieved as the needle is withdrawn, nothing more. When you get right down to it, how few things there are that really deliver on the promise of eliminating sensation. How many hedonistic pleasures are about acuteness of perception, roller coasters and white-water rafting and casinos, but how precious and few are genuine moments of relief, as when one is in bed, and the light is extinguished, and the oncoming dreams are confused with the afternoon’s appointments. Then there’s a sharp sting of an additional injection, two more, right above her eyebrows, as if she’s having her third eye drained, and the sting narrows, intensifies, and Melody swallows in the sting, the chemical aftertaste, and the light opens up, and it contains people, and stillness, and faint chlorine fumes.
Sherry Horst. That’s Sherry’s ring, that awesome rock with its many facets, glimmering above the heads of the other women. Her hand aloft. This is amazing in itself because Sherry is never early out of the gate on anything. She’s fond of lawsuits, since that’s what her husband, that poorly dressed oaf with the worst teeth in Los Angeles, does for his livelihood. Dr. Maevka has certainly sold his product well—through the inexorable cheer that makes his practice so profitable—if he has sold Sherry Horst. Melody makes a mental note to be sure she has the number of Sherry’s platinum card.
“Does it hurt?” Sherry asks Melody, as the doctor with his impressive needle approaches, an attractive nurse trailing behind him submissively.
“Of course not.” Although Melody does feel a little as if she’s been attacked by hornets. She hopes it’s nothing serious.
The doctor again performs his clinical benedictions. Four or five aging women in sequence, all of them speaking of nothing but boutique sales in town and what certain movies have grossed and who is pandering to the tabloids, as needles plunge into their faces. They are thirsty for good news, these friends of Melody’s. Because what has this nation told them, here in the new millennium? This nation has told these women to get out of the way. It has told these women that if they are not wearing blue jeans with their, what’s that word, with their booties hanging out of them, then they are not real women. It has told them that if they do not have a ring hanging out of their navels they are not women. It has told them that they are the leftovers of domesticity, they are the residue, they are what child rearing leaves as its waste product, they are what the nineteen-sixties and -seventies left in their wake. They are decades of ill-considered license. They are the end stage of bed-hopping and jet travel to the Caribbean and experimentation with pot and Dubonnet and low-tar cigarettes. They are what America once said it wanted. And so the least that capitalism can do is to give these women a way to feel a little dignity now while the sluts in the low-riders get themselves compromised and go through it all, the day care and the nannies and the private schools. It’s no wonder, when you think this way about it, because of all the sorrow and all the paradox, that at this moment there is a commotion at the front door, an overheard sort of commotion. It’s almost a beautiful sound at first, commotion on expensive tile work, or maybe it’s just the side effects of the treatment, the hornets careening around the room, maybe the hornets lead to increased echo. It takes a minute for Melody to grasp that her name is being bandied about in the commotion. Sluggishly, she rises from the daybed, looks back toward the foyer.
Ohmygod. It’s Lois Maiser. A crisis. It’s a genuine crisis! And she knows! Lois knows she wasn’t invited! She wasn’t invited to the party, and all of her friends were invited, and now Lois is here, and all these other people are here, and they all RSVP’d! How could Melody have been such a horse’s ass, how could Melody have willfully overlooked the possibility that such a moment was lying in wait for her? The sense that propriety has failed is in the room and it’s as certain as billowing curtains and sunlight and peppermint tea and chlorinated-water vapor. The women look down at the expensive Italian tile beneath them, as if by studying the tile they will at least not make the situation worse. It’s just like one of those movies, one of those insipid television movies where a fellow shows up who would never be there at all, in order to have the dramatic confrontation! My God. Actually, it’s like Reign of Frogs, that novel she once wrote about a counterespionage agent who is incarcerated in a Chinese psychiatric hospital and forcibly medicated, only to find her own husband is being held in the same ward. What a coincidence!
“Lois, I . . . Come in, sweetheart. Come on in.”
In truth, Lois’s face just now resembles nothing so much as an African mask. Well, it’s an African mask with a perm and blond highlights, but it’s still a mask, the kind of mask that you see on a shelf in an expensive psychiatrist’s office, which is of course where Lois has spent a lot of time recently. Her serotonin levels are like the roller coaster on the Santa Monica pier, first up and then down, down, down. And one of her side effects must be ravenous hunger, because Lois has packed on a good twenty pounds, and without replacing her wardrobe.
“Melody,” Lois starts slowly, without the hysteria to which she resorted to get in the front door, “I’m really sorry to show up this way —”
“Oh, it’s nothing, honey. Come, sit.”
“It’s not like I’m here to break up the party. That’s not why I’m here. It looks like a lovely party, and I’m hoping that I get invited next time, and that I’m not too late to get one of these lovely eye pillows . . .”
Melody Howell Forvath might laugh were it not beginning to dawn on her that Lois is not here to make a complaint about the hostess, nor about the fact that she wasn’t invited. No, there’s something far more terrifying going on, something far more inimical to partygoing merriment. Lois means to make a complaint against Dr. Maevka. Melody can see the recognition dawning in him now, the recognition of Lois. Lois as the accretion of bad luck. Dr. Maevka’s lantern jaw is set in a hard way, as though he’s a tight end who is going to have to fight his way over linebackers.
“Listen up, everyone,” Lois is saying, holding one of the lavender eye pillows in a clenched fist. “I think most of you know me here, and so I think I’m not without credibility. You know it’s me, someone from your own community, who’s about to say what I’m going to say. And what I’m going to say is that the procedure you’re undertaking today —”
Is that a blob of spittle yo-yoing from Lois’s mouth, detaching, heading for the marble floor in fancy filmic slow motion? It certainly looks like a little dollop of some foamy something. Spittle, in all likelihood. Detaching. Catching some California sunlight before striking the tile with a gentle plop. Melody is sure that it is. Melody even whispers, “Is that drool?” to herself and notices Diana Collins nodding. Diana sees it, too. It’s drool, proceeding in a steady trickle from Lois’s mouth, the mouth set in that African mask of a face. And Melody begins to understand. It’s not that Lois is depressed over her husband! It’s not that Lois is hiding out because of the little tart her husband ran off with, though this would be a perfectly good reason to hide out. Instead, Lois has been concealed in her Laguna Beach mansion because of ineffective cosmetic treatments!
“Botulinum is dangerous, you guys, that’s what I’m telling you, and there’s a lot that can go wrong with it. I didn’t want to interrupt the party, I didn’t want to ruin the party, but I thought you should see what can happen before you get seduced by the story someone’s telling you about the miracle.”
It’s unmistakable. Lois is drooping. She has the telltale eye droop. It’s the left eye, teardrop shaped and drooping, and the edge of her mouth is drooping, almost as if she’s had a stroke. An entire side of her face has somehow been, well, smooshed. She has had some reaction on the left side and she looks like that actor, what’s his name, the one that won’t stop making public appearances even though he can no longer talk. Melody would be the first to admit that Lois has no lines in her paralyzed, drooping face, that’s true. Her paralyzed face is without lines, and if it weren’t for the cascading saliva, she would look pretty good. Melody wonders whether available men in California would have trouble making sweet love to a sexually independent woman who drools.
“I’d be remiss if I didn’t say that I got my injections from the very office that is here today making the house calls. I just thought you should know.”
“Just a moment! Mrs. Maiser, I object!” Dr. Maevka shouts, and now it’s really a carnival. He pulls a surgical glove from one hand, a punctuation mark, and thrusts it to the floor, where he stamps on the glove as though he were challenging Lois to a duel with Russian eighteenth-century pistols. “Mrs. Maiser! I will not stand by while you calumniate my professional practice.”
Lois’s voice is beginning to rise, to ascend to its more shrill register. “I have brought myself here as a cautionary tale, and people are free to make whatever conclusions they want to make!”
In the voluptuousness that is the sun and its reflection and the westward retreat of daylight over the swimming pool, the women begin to sneak out of the house of Melody Howell Forvath, without making even abbreviated good-byes. It’s stealthy at first and then more like a stampede. And Melody, a little light-headed, as if the hornets have got the best of her, doesn’t know what to think. Friends clutch at her hand as they sneak toward the door. Diane Collins clasps Melody’s hand between her own and she says nothing, because Melody has the stuff in her now, as if it’s her secret, her postmenopausal fetus, the botulinum toxin, slayer of American mushroom soup eaters. She doesn’t know who to be angry with first, so she puts ire aside, for now, and she goes and stands with the Wife of Bath, who is stooping before a sculpture of a water nymph. The Wife of Bath is cleaning away a dollop of lobster salad that somehow landed there.
“There’s a phone call for you,” the Wife of Bath says. “In the kitchen.”
She holds up the offending lobster salad clotting a lavender cocktail napkin. Nearby, Lois and Maevka are referring each other to their lawyers in apoplectic whispers.
Melody leaves her own party behind as though it never happened. There’s no other conclusion but that it was a disaster as a party, a blot on the escutcheon of Melody Forvath. She has no intention of lingering. Maybe she, too, should sue Maevka, that quack, who claims to have a license to practice in California and who probably has no such thing. Melody leaves it all behind, for the kitchen, where the portable phone is handed to her as if it were a baton. Her office is beyond, and she hasn’t visited her office in days, but now she takes a long slow stroll in its direction. Vic Freese’s voice reverberates in her poisoned head. He has a weak voice, a loser’s voice, as if he was never taught to breathe properly. He’s the television agent, or at least she thinks he’s the television agent, and television agents share most of their genetic material with cockroaches, that Ceylonese subspecies that hisses loud enough to scare dogs. Melody much prefers her American literary agent, though sometimes her British literary agent is nice, and also his Italian co-agent, who is very sexy, and then there’s also the French agent with that beautiful accent. They all send her gifts at Christmas.
“Melody, didn’t you once write a big fat novel called The Diviners?” Vic Freese asks.
“Do you remember what it’s about?”