Skin Deep

by Gary Braver

  “Times have changed.”

  “Yeah, for the worse. I look at a girl like that and wonder what she was thinking when she looked in the mirror.”

  “Probably, ‘This is how I feel like expressing myself.’”

  “Yeah, ‘I’m hot. Fuck me.’”

  “I was thinking more like, ‘I’m cute. Desire me.’”

  “Maybe it’s because you don’t have a daughter.”

  “Maybe. But I still don’t think girls consider if boys will be turned-on or not. I think they dress because of what they see on other girls or TV. It’s personal theater.”

  “Okay, ‘I’m a ho in a hip-hop video.’”

  “I didn’t say it was intelligent theater.”

  Behind Neil’s protest was more than a conservative Catholic upbringing. Before joining homicide, he had worked in anticrime initiatives that targeted prostitution in the theater district and nearby Bay Village and Chinatown. Hundreds of arrests of hookers and would-be customers, many drug-related, had been made, but Neil hated the assignment. He couldn’t wait to transfer out. After roughing up a few suspects, he was transferred to homicide.

  “The thing is it scares me.”

  “What does?”

  “All the shit out there—in the media, movies, online—and what it’s doing to Lily. Over the last year she’s developed a woman’s breasts. I don’t know, maybe I’m supposed to be happy for her: ‘Hey, my kid’s really stacked.’ Maybe she’s taking birth control pills, because that’s what sometimes happens—they get overdeveloped. I think she’s getting them from friends because I know it’s not her pediatrician.”

  “You’re worried about her being sexually active.”

  “Yeah, but it’s not just that. She’s aware how she looks, and she’s beginning to flaunt herself. Her clothes are too revealing and I have to talk to her. But sometimes she slips out of the house looking like that chick. Or worse. Also guys are calling her all the time. And some of them are older—in their twenties. It scares me where it can lead.”

  They were silent some more as Steve could sense Neil struggling with something.

  Then he said, “I think she’s sending stuff over the Internet to guys.”

  “What kind of stuff?”

  “Photos of herself.”

  “You know that for a fact?”

  “Yeah,” Neil said, and did not elaborate. “It’s how she hooks up. It’s what kids are doing today—making their own kiddie porn.”

  “I once got in trouble for sending a love note to a girl in my class. For a month I got razzed. Not to mention how dear ole mom reacted.”

  “Well, the sexual market’s gotten younger and meaner, and if you ask me it’s the Lindsay Lohans and Paris Hiltons who’re to blame, teaching kids that all that counts is how hot you are. It scares the shit out of me.”

  The light changed, and the college women began to cross the street as Neil trailed them with his gaze. As he pulled away, the woman with the auburn hair turned and looked back in their direction, as her friend pointed out some building. And in that microsecond Steve almost caught whatever recollection was trying to land, skittering just beyond the veil.

  Something that set his chest pounding all the way back to headquarters.

  8

  “Look, there are dozens of good plastic docs in this town, but Carl says he’s the best: ‘Cosmetic surgeon of the rich and the wrinkled.’”

  Dana had met Lanie at a bistro on Newbury Street, Boston’s Rodeo Drive. The curb was lined with Porsches, Mercedes, and BMWs and behind them were designer clothiers, designer hair salons, designer florists, designer galleries, and designer people sporting big shiny shopping bags with names like Armani, Chanel, DKNY, and Rodier of Paris. Because it was a warm spring day, they sat outside at faux Parisian marble café tables under red Cinzano umbrellas.

  Lanie Walker, an administrator at GEM Pharmaceuticals, was ten years older than Dana and married to a pediatrician. Because the tables were packed closely to each other, she lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Aaron Monks. You can’t do better than him.”

  “I think I’ve heard of him.”

  “Of course you’ve heard of him. He’s on all the morning talk shows. Boston Magazine listed him in the top twenty-five most eligible bachelors in town. In fact, today’s Globe has a story about his getting an award Saturday night at the Westin Hotel for inventing some transplant procedures.”

  “I’m just thinking of a lid lift, maybe a nose job if I can afford it.”

  “Then start at the top. I think he’s done everybody who’s anybody in Boston, not to mention a lot of movie people who don’t want to be outed by the Hollywood paparazzi.”

  “Yeah, and I’ll probably be sixty-five before I can get an appointment.”

  “Use my name.”

  The waitress came to take their orders, and they each asked for a glass of Chardonnay. Dana ordered a Caesar salad topped with grilled shrimp, and Lanie ordered a grilled fillet of arctic char. “Isn’t that an endangered species?” Dana asked.

  “Probably, because this is Newbury Street not Harvard Square.”

  They were surrounded by young suburbanites in town for lunch and people-gazing, young professionals off from work, and chain-smoking Euro college kids, most dressed in tight black. “Ever notice that the older you get the more you’re aware of all the twenty-somethings inhabiting the world?”

  “Yeah, and I hate them.” The waitress returned with their drinks. “To makeovers,” Lanie said, raising her glass.

  “But I haven’t decided anything.”

  “You will.”

  Dana took a sip of wine then removed her sunglasses and surreptitiously pulled up her eyelids. “What do you think?”

  Lanie lowered her own sunglasses. “You just took ten years off your face. Go for it.”

  “And the nose?”

  Lanie whispered, “You want the God’s honest truth?”

  “Maybe not.”

  “Well, that’s all I see. You’ve got a beautiful face and this distraction in the middle of it. Sorry, but it doesn’t belong on your face. Period. Get rid of it and you’ll be drop-dead gorgeous.”

  Lanie’s brutal honesty was part of her carpe diem charm. Unlike Dana, she was not conflicted over cosmetic augmentation. Over the last eight years she had had a brow lift, upper and lower lid lifts, and a lower face-lift that tightened her jawline. She also had regular Botox treatments and microabrasion therapy, giving her skin a fresh suppleness.

  “I’m thinking of getting lipo on my belly.”

  Lipo, not liposuction. Already the procedures had nickname familiarity. “You think you really need it?”

  Lanie dropped her hands below table level and grabbed a handful of flesh. “At least two inches.”

  Dana’s head filled with TV images of masked doctors ramming large suction tubes into women’s bellies. It looked so violent. “Didn’t you just get an elliptical machine?”

  “That was Carl’s idea. I hate the thing. In five minutes I’m exhausted.”

  “What about your treadmill?”

  “Terminal boredom. Look, I’m not like you. I hate jogging, I hate working out. I admit I’m weak, going for the quick fix and all. But, screw it.” Then she leaned forward again. “I bet you half the women at this place—and maybe some men—have had cosmetic work, including the Euro and Latin club kids. In fact, where they come from they start in their teens—nose jobs, boob jobs, butt jobs, tummy tucks, lipo, you name it. It’s like going to the hair salon for them.”

  “That’s insane.”

  “I agree, but it’s happening. Look, for four thousand bucks you get a simple lid lift. Another six or seven you get the nose you’ve always wanted. If you have the money, it’s a no-brainer, because you’ll be happy. Even if you don’t have it. Get a loan. You owe it to yourself. And do it now while you’re still young, while your skin is still elastic.”

  “Young enough for preventive surgery but too old to get a job. T
here is a God, and She doesn’t own a mirror.”

  “It’s not just the job thing. I think you have a moral obligation to yourself.”

  “You’re making aging sound like a sin.”

  “Well, if you can do something about it and don’t, it is a sin. The point is you want to be as youthfully attractive as possible, right? Right! You don’t like your nose, right? Right! So you owe it to yourself…and others.”

  “What others?”

  “Look, I don’t have a crystal ball, but if things don’t work out with Steve, you’ll be entering a new phase of your life.” She leaned close again. “Look at these gorgeous hunks.” She put her knuckles in her mouth and moaned. “Check out the kid in black to your left.”

  Casually Dana looked left to a table of three young men and a woman. The male in a loose black shirt opened at the neck had thick shiny black hair pushed back and a tanned Adonis face. Perhaps he saw Dana out of the corner of his eye because he smiled. Dana smiled back, having difficulty thinking that she had a moral obligation to get a lid lift for him.

  “Look what’s out there for you.”

  “Yeah, me and Demi Moore.”

  “You know what I’m saying. You’d be jump-starting your life with a new you and all sorts of possibilities.”

  “We’re only separated, not divorced.”

  The waitress came with their lunch.

  Through the window Dana saw a print of a painting she recognized as Renoir’s Nude on a Couch. “Some things never change,” she said, and she nodded to the painting.

  Lanie squinted. “What never changes?”

  “Women never stop posing and men never stop re-creating them.”

  “I guess.”

  “Instead of a couch, today it’s an operating table. Instead of a paintbrush, he uses a scalpel. Meanwhile, the woman is nothing more than material to be refashioned.”

  “Aren’t we getting a little deep?”

  “Nothing deep about it. It’s the same old, same old sexist pressure on women to look good.”

  “And it’s not going to change, sweetie. We live in a culture that reveres youth. You’re not old, but you don’t look young enough for the job. And that’s what you want. So get real, kiddo, and do something about it.”

  Dana nodded. “I wonder if anybody knows her name?”

  “Who?”

  “The model in that painting. She’s just another nude woman on a couch, but the artist is world-famous. And today they’re plastic surgeons on TV.”

  “I see your point, I think.”

  After a few minutes, Lanie said, “I saw Steve’s name in the paper—the murder of some health club instructor. You see the photo of her? She was a knockout. They have any suspects yet?”

  “I’m not sure. He doesn’t talk about his cases.”

  Lanie took a sip of wine. “So what’s happening with you two?”

  “I don’t know. I just want to be on my own for a while. It’s a trial separation.”

  “There’s no such thing. And you’re only fooling yourselves if you think so. I’ve known two dozen people who had trial separations, and each one ended in divorce.”

  “We’ll see. But I need time to reassess things.”

  “Do you love him?”

  “That’s not the issue.”

  “It’s the bottom line. If you don’t love him, then get out and get on with your life. There’s too much you’re missing.”

  Yes, Dana still loved Steve. And she still had a sexual yen for him. But even before his infidelity, they had begun pulling apart. He was content to remain just the two of them, a streamlined childless couple for the rest of their days. And she wanted kids.

  But there was more. Because of the stress of the job, the mounting pressures due to the increased crime rate, and their squabbling over his commitment problems, Steve had taken to alcohol, made worse because he also took antidepressants.

  In his adolescence, he had been diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder that apparently grew out of the guilt he had carried over his parents’ unhappy marriage and their untimely deaths. He spoke very little about his childhood; eventually he had outgrown the disorder. But he still had little rituals. If stress built up, he’d take to cleaning the cellar, rearranging all the tools at the workbench, straightening out his office upstairs, squaring books on the shelves, lining up knickknacks. And he’d do it repeatedly, and in the same fashion, worried that if he didn’t follow the rituals something bad would happen.

  The problem was not the rituals and annoying repetitions. It was his drinking on top of the meds. One night he had come home stressed-out. They had a fight over something, and in a fit of rage Steve smashed a lamp against the wall. What scared her was not just the violence, but that he had completely blacked out at the time, recalling none of it. Only later did she discover that he had taken a double dosage of the antianxiety medication Ativan on top of several drinks—a forbidden combination.

  Perhaps they should have consulted a marriage counselor. Perhaps they should have worked on it before it had reached critical mass. But they were separated now, and she was beginning to enjoy her freedom, her own space, her sense of renewal, corny as that sounded.

  “How are you and Carl doing?”

  “The same. It’s more of a habit than a marriage, but it works.”

  They finished eating and paid the check. In leaving, Dana shuffled around the tables and glanced at the kid in the black shirt. He was gorgeous—lean tan face, large black eyes, thick shiny hair, cupid-bow lips. He looked up at her and smiled as she moved by. “Goodbye,” he said with a slightly foreign lilt.

  She felt a gurgling sensation in her chest. “Goodbye,” she said, trying to make a cool and graceful departure.

  When she got home, Dana called Dr. Aaron Monks’s office to make an appointment. Because of his busy schedule, the secretary said that the doctor could see her in two weeks. When Dana said that she was really hoping to have the procedures done before returning to school in September, the secretary said she’d see what she could do.

  An hour later she called back to say that because of a last-minute cancellation, the doctor had an opening the first thing tomorrow morning if she wanted to book it. Dana did.

  9

  Located on Route 128 near Gloucester, the Kingsbury Club was a large mausoleum-like structure in white stone with dark glass and cubistic turrets and a lot of low greenery. Steve had arrived early for his appointment with the athletic director, so he sat in the car and reviewed the Farina reports, hoping in part to snatch whatever kept teasing him since Ottoman’s office.

  He reviewed the photographs, but nothing came. One series of shots was of Terry with her sister, photo-lab-dated five years ago. In them, she had short brown hair and was heavier, only vaguely looking like the woman he remembered. The other images from the crime scene made his mind slump. Her golden red hair looked obscenely radiant against an engorged face the color of night.

  But this time the image caused a quickening in his veins that he recognized. Someone had done this to her. Someone so driven by hatred and rage that he could squeeze the life out of this woman while champagne still bubbled in her glass. Someone who was out there walking the streets, breathing air, feeling the sun on his face, while Terry Farina lay bone-sawed in a refrigerator in the city morgue. It was an awareness that made Steve hum to get the dirtbag who did that to her.

  “Did you ever kill anyone?”

  It was the first question she had asked when he told her he was in homicide. They had met during a break in the café downstairs in Shillman Hall, their classroom building. He was behind her in the coffee line. She was taking a child psych course, he was doing his Criminology class next door.

  Yeah, he had.

  “What was it like?”

  He didn’t want to talk about it.

  “Were you scared?”

  He didn’t remember. It had happened in a fog. He changed the subject.

  She had said she liked her job as a
fitness trainer, especially the aerobics class because it kept her in shape. But she wanted to move on and had gotten accepted to Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology, which was why she was taking refresher courses. The older photos reminded him that when they had first met her hair was brown and cut shoulder-length with wispy bangs the way Dana wore her hair. And how she had resembled Dana.

  As arranged, he met Alice Dion, the Kingsbury fitness director, and Bob Janger, the owner, in the lobby, a bright open area behind which stretched a bank of windows onto the main workout area. Dion was in her forties, with short black hair and a tan. She had a solid athletic build that spoke favorably of the dozens of machines on the other side of the glass. Janger, who reminded Steve of the actor Stanley Tucci, was a neat muscular guy with a shaved head and a shadow of where his hair used to be. He wore a blue club shirt and chinos, looking every bit like the owner of an upscale fitness club. They brought Steve to Dion’s office, a small cubicle with a desk and computer. With their permission, Steve tape-recorded their exchange.

  “This is a terrible loss,” Janger said. “She’d been with us for three years, and she was terrific. Smart, motivated, and dedicated to her clients, and they loved her. She was one of our best trainers.”

  Dion nodded in agreement. “I still can’t believe it. She was very professional and a really fun person.” Her eyes filled up.

  “Can you think of anyone who’d want to harm her?”

  “No, not a soul,” Dion said.

  Janger shook his head. “No one.”

  “Do you know if she was personally close to any of the club members, maybe even dating any?”

  “Actually,” said Janger, “we have a hard-and-fast rule that the staff cannot become involved with club members. We had a problem in our first year, and since then it’s been written in stone: no dating clientele.”

  “To what consequence?”

  “They’d be fired, no questions asked.”

  “Seems like an effective deterrent.”

  “So far so good.”

  “Do you know if she was seeing anyone?”