Skin Deep

by Gary Braver

  They drove to a waterfront restaurant whose décor boasted an elegant nautical theme. They were led to a table by a corner window with a view of the harbor. Aaron ordered a bottle of champagne. “You’re so beautiful that I feel invisible next to you.”

  “You’re too kind.”

  “Really, your skin is perfectly smooth and bilaterally symmetrical. In fact, you’re one of the few women I’ve known whose face is a perfect phi.”

  “A perfect phi?”

  “The so-called golden ratio or divine proportion—the mathematical proportions found to recur in all things deemed beautiful like flowers and seashells, also music, paintings, and architecture. In the human face, it’s the various ratios between the width of the cheeks and the length of the face, the width of the nose and the width of the mouth, the width of the nose and the width of the cheek, et cetera. But it’s a constant: out to one to one point six one eight. Philosophers say it’s the ideal that beauty aspires to. The closer a face fits that ratio, the more attractive the face. And you’ve got it.”

  “Well, if that’s so, you’re the one who deserves the credit.”

  When the champagne came, he raised his glass to hers. “To the new Dana.”

  “Thank you.”

  “So, are you enjoying the change?”

  “I’m still getting used to it.”

  “But no conflict between the physical transformation and your inner self?”

  “No, but it still feels like a stranger’s face.”

  He nodded. “In time you’ll grow into it.”

  Their meals came and they chatted pleasantly while Dana worked up the nerve to ask a question that had been with her since the first day. “I have a personal question, if you don’t mind.”

  He smiled in anticipation.

  “For a lack of a better term, most of your professional life is dedicated to human vanity—to people dissatisfied with their physical appearance.”

  “You mean,” he interjected, “how come I haven’t had plastic surgery myself. Right? The rough skin, the mole, the crow’s-feet, the scar, et cetera, et cetera.”

  Her face flushed and she started to formulate an apology, but he made a wave of dismissal.

  “A perfectly natural question and one I’ve heard before. I’ll give you the answer I give to all patients conflicted about aesthetic enhancement.” He tapped the side of his head with his finger. “The need is more on the inside than it is on the outside. Frankly, I’m not at a place where I feel ready for cosmetic surgery. Yes, I have all the signs of aging. My own eyelids droop and the chin is beginning to sag. And there’s the pocked skin and the mole. But I’ve not felt the compulsion. And should I reach that point someday, then I’ll have something done.” He picked up a spoon and examined his reflection. “And probably sooner than later.” He chuckled.

  “Hardly.”

  Back in the spring he had received a humanitarian award for helping develop new procedures for attaching a new facial “flap” to recipients’ nerves and blood vessels, as well as pharmaceutical strategies for reducing the risks of rejection and infection and, thus, a lifetime of immunosuppressant drugs to fight rejection. According to the media, the success rate was so high that candidates with serious disfigurements had lined up as recipients of new faces from cadavers at his clinic and others where his procedures had been instituted. “You must get great satisfaction from your humanitarian work.”

  “Yes, very. And it wasn’t simply the medical issues we had to surmount but ethical ones. Some people had argued, perhaps rightfully so, that a facial disfigurement was not life-threatening and therefore wasn’t worth a lifetime on immunosuppressant drugs. For organ transplants—liver, heart, kidneys—yes, but not for faces. But, of course, disfigured patients are tormented by depression and shame. And that’s the justification. We’re seeing people returning to their normal lives, being able to smile again, raise their eyebrows, move their facial muscles, and regain full mobility and sensation. Yes, it’s very satisfying.”

  “Do you ever get patients worrying that they may look like the faces of the donors?”

  “You mean like in that movie Face/Off?” He shook his head. “The underlying bone structure remains the same. Unless the two are very similar, that’s not possible.”

  “Like the Elvis impersonator.”

  “Yes, but we still had to make fat injections to get the chin right. But he did come out looking like a double. The important thing is that the procedure touches upon fundamental human aspects of identity. People identify with their appearance. They become how they look.”

  “They change inside.”

  “Yes. I see it all the time. There’s no need for someone to be tormented by their appearance especially when something can be done. And that’s what you’re beginning to experience. At least, I hope.”

  They were quiet for a while as Dana’s mind tripped over the possibilities. She had a new face, but did not feel any differently inside. Not yet. And she wondered if she ever would.

  “Since we’re asking personal questions,” Aaron said. “I have one for you.”

  “Okay.”

  “Your marriage.”

  “What about it?”

  “Well, that’s actually my question. If I may be so blunt, you’ve been separated for several months. I’m just wondering if and when you’re taking the next logical step?”

  “Well, I don’t quite know just yet. I’m still working that out.”

  He nodded and took a sip of his champagne. “Well, as you know I’m leaving for the islands next week and will be having some guests over this weekend at the summer place as a kind of farewell party. Until I return, that is. A way to say adieu to the summer. I’m just wondering if you’d like to join us.”

  “I’d love to.”

  “Wonderful,” he said as he raised his glass to her.

  She wasn’t clear on what they were toasting, but she clicked his champagne glass. “Where is your summer place?”

  “The Cape. We’ll go by boat if that is all right.”

  He was being mysterious again, understating matters. He probably lived in a mansion in Wellfleet or Osterville. It was probably because of his celebrity status and the fact that Boston Magazine had listed him as one of the top twenty-five most eligible bachelors in Boston that he maintained a self-protective mystery about himself. “Sounds like fun.”

  “It will be. But I have one request: that you not let others know, including friends. People talk, and if it gets out the newshounds will be all over us. And I want to spare us both from that.”

  “Mum’s the word.”

  Then he took another sip of his drink, his eyes fixed on her face. He put the drink down and moved his face closer to hers.

  “What?” she said, feeling a silly smile spread on her face as if he were about to share a secret.

  “In the light your hair has auburn highlights. Given your lovely coloring, and your glorious new face, have you ever considered becoming a redhead?”

  79

  James Bowers was a forensic anthropologist who worked at the Peabody Museum at Harvard. He was a tall man with a long, thin, tanned face and salt-and-pepper hair. Dressed in jeans and a polo shirt he looked more like someone who was going to spend his day on a golf course than in trays of bones. Steve found him in a lab with benches and rows of chemical containers. Two complete human skeletons hung from stands, and students were working, some examining specimens through microscopes. The back wall had green chalkboards with notes and diagrams on them.

  “You said you’d been hired to reconstruct the remains of the Essex River case.”

  “Yeah, about ten years ago. She’d been found off of Hogg Island.” Bowers led Steve to the rear of the lab, passing a student at a table reconstructing a face with modeling clay. There were pegs looking like baby fingertips sticking out of the base at various lengths.

  Bowers explained that reconstruction began with a plaster copy of the skull to which a couple of dozen pegs were att
ached at key points and cut to various thicknesses to aid the sculptor’s filling in of the clay for the flesh, guided by charts on thickness samples. “The hardest are the eyes, which are almost entirely tissue. The same with the ears, nose, and lips, because their size and shape is impossible to determine.”

  “So, all you can really recapture is the general facial structure.”

  “Exactly. The rest is guesswork.”

  “But you guys sometimes are dead-on in identifying people.”

  “Only because the guesswork was dead-on. It’s as much luck as science.”

  They sat at a free bench. On it sat two skulls and some line illustrations of facial types drawn according to three generic face templates: ectomorph, ectomesomorph, and endomorph. Steve picked one up and held it to his face. “What do you think?”

  Bowers smiled and pretended to study Steve’s facial proportions for a moment.

  “My wife would say Neanderthal.”

  Bowers laughed. “Close.” He glanced at the different charts and held up one then another. “You have more of a triangular than rectangular face with wide cheekbones and a narrow slightly pointed chin. I’d say you are the classic ectomorph.”

  “Is that good?”

  “You’ll be happy to know that it’s one of the most idealized male face types—the kind you almost always see in pencil drawings in men’s fashion ads and on mannequins. Also found on most movie and music idols.”

  “I can’t wait to tell her,” he said. “Okay, the Essex case…”

  “Yes, that was particularly difficult since skeletal remains in salt water tend to disintegrate. They were found by sport divers, but when police divers were called, they retrieved more bones, including part of the rib cage and vertebrae. A woman’s stocking was found enmeshed with the remains, which had settled in an underwater gulley. Fortunately, most of the skull was intact, so that we could determine the gender, race, and approximate age.”

  “How do you do that?”

  “Well, males usually have a more prominent browridge, eye sockets, and jaw.”

  “What about race?”

  He held up a skull. “We can pretty much determine racial group by the size and shape of the nose holes. This is a Caucasian, which you can see is triangular. African-Americans or, technically, the Negroid’s is square, and Mongoloids’ are diamond-shaped.

  “As for age, we look at the teeth, bones, and joints. The smoother the skull, the older the individual. In this case, the victim was between thirty-five and forty.”

  “How were you able to determine how she died?”

  “Well, that was a stroke of luck. The skull told us how she hadn’t died. There were no signs of trauma—bullet holes or marks from a knife blade or axe or such. In a mass of debris surrounding her skull and jawbone, we found the hyoid bone from her throat, which was fractured, leading us to conclude that she’d been strangled.”

  “That must be a small bone.”

  “It is, and luckily it had gotten enmeshed with enough tissue and biomass to be preserved.”

  “The report also says that the ligature was preserved also.”

  “Yes. After the skull was found, divers found a length of a nylon-Lycra compound attached to the vertebrae. Because of the synthetics, it didn’t decompose and was identified as a woman’s black stocking that had been knotted into a small noose a third smaller than the circumference of the average neck size of a woman. The suspicion was that she had been dumped into the water after being strangled. No other article of clothing was found, so investigators theorized that she was possibly naked when she was murdered.”

  “She’s still not been identified, but we’re reopening the case.”

  “Glad to hear that. I’m sure her loved ones still anguish over her disappearance.”

  “No doubt. The case file had photographs of the skeletal remains and various police reports. What seems to be missing is a digital reconstruction, which I understand you made.”

  “Yes. Probably just a clerical error.”

  “Do you still have one someplace?”

  “I’m sure.”

  He led Steve to the small office in the rear of the lab. The space was small and shelves were stacked with papers, books, and journals. Boxes of more papers were stacked on the floor.

  “Please forgive the mess. We’re in the process of moving to a new location.” Bowers moved to a computer behind the desk. “It’s been some years, so give me a moment.”

  Steve stood and watched as Bowers ran his fingers across the keyboard. A minute later he muttered, “Ah-ha.” He clicked and tapped keys. “Here we are.” He swiveled his monitor toward Steve. “In case you’re interested, she was an ectomesomorph—the so-called heart-shaped face, wide at the cheeks and an angled jaw that might be delicately pointed or slightly rounded at the base. There’s no way of telling exactly, given the limitations, but this is what we came up with.”

  Steve felt as if he had stuck his finger into an electric light socket. On the screen was a three-dimensional head of Dana.

  80

  Diane Hewson.

  The name still ignited sparks in his brain. She came in hoping to remove years from her face with a brow lift. While not perfect, her face was attractive. But as that first consultation progressed, he had all he could do to contain his distraction from the possibilities.

  As she spoke, the muscular changes in her face flickered across the template at the core of his brain, making coincidences that nearly took his breath away. He tried to concentrate on her words, keeping his own face neutral, but in his mind he was making corrections until he was certain that the dead could rise. That Jesus answered prayers.

  She was about to turn forty and a brow lift would be a present to herself. A favorite aunt had recently died and left her money so she could afford the indulgence. She had come to him because she had caught a television interview on the new Botox treatments that were becoming the rage.

  As his mind tripped over the necessary procedures, another sensation began to distract him—a sensation that, like the venom of a bee sting, starts off as sharp pain and then subsides into a strangely satisfying itch.

  So as not to overwhelm her with other options, he explained what a brow lift could accomplish and showed her before-and-after images of women who had elected to do the procedure. Naturally, she was impressed at the improvements—the elimination of droopy eyebrows, forehead lines, and frown creases—all of which took years off the faces.

  During a second appointment he raised speculations of other procedures, showing computer afterimages of her with a brow lift, upper lip enhancement, and chin implants because her own was too short. He even showed her what rhinoplasty would do, gently turning up the sales pitch on the benefits of enhanced facial aesthetics. He studied her as she considered the potential, eyes lighting up at the makeover image on the monitor—an image that sent heat pulses through his body. It was Lila who stared back at them.

  She joked that the software was the computer equivalent of Mr. Potato Head for cosmetic surgeons. He liked that and chuckled.

  “This could invite women to ask for a famous face,” she said. “You know, turn me into Julia Roberts or Christie Brinkley.”

  He smiled and said he often got famous face requests. And thought how the face on the monitor was famous, though only to him. A face to die for.

  “And what would all of this cost?”

  He had to bite his tongue from saying he’d do it pro bono. She had come in for a three-thousand-dollar procedure and was now considering ten thousand in extras. Were he to offer a large discount, she’d wonder why. So he itemized each procedure on the high side then explained, “If you had it done in one session, you would save on having to set different surgical teams, anesthesia, OR costs. I think it could be done for around five thousand.”

  “My, my, that’s very enticing.”

  You have no idea, he thought.

  “What exactly would you do?” she asked, staring at the monitor image
.

  He explained that she would be under general anesthesia and that the total operation would take between three and four hours. “Brow lift incisions would be done in layers with deep subcuticular stitches that would eventually be absorbed by the body. At the same time, we’d plump up the upper lip with injections of collagen.” He went on to explain the reconstruction of her nose. “For the chin, we would insert silicone implants through a small incision under the chin. After three or four weeks, bruising would be gone and most of the visible swelling.”

  Then he tipped his head toward the image on the monitor. “And the results, I think you’d agree, would be”—he had to tame his wording—“very satisfying, I believe.”

  The expression on Diane Hewson’s face told him that she liked what she heard and saw, but she said that she wanted to think it over. The next day she called to say she would have all the procedures done but the chin implant. She just didn’t think she needed that. He wanted to tell her that she was dead wrong, but tempered his reaction by explaining that it was a short and common procedure that would bring balance to her face and eliminate any appearance of a fleshy neck. But she refused. He buried his disappointment by saying the timing was perfect because he could take her the following Tuesday because he had just gotten a cancellation. She said fine, and when he got off the phone he was trembling.

  She had come in looking like Lila’s homely older sister and in a month could pass for her double with a too-short chin.

  The operation went well, and she rigorously followed recovery procedures. She kept her head elevated for forty-eight hours; she changed the dressing regularly. She took care not to bump herself or do strenuous maneuvers, and not to expose herself to the sun. She used frozen peas as a compress for the swelling.

  Over the next month he saw her at various stages of her recovery. And in spite of her weak chin, the resemblance began to take form in his brain.