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 —”