Thin, Rich, Pretty

by Harbison, Beth

  “So it’s going to look exactly the way it did in the three-D model you did beforehand?”

  He shook his head and clicked his tongue against his teeth. “Even better.”

  Her heart leapt. Even better! He was looking at her right now, apparently looking as if she’d been hit by a truck, and he believed that the results would be even better than the ideal he’d done on the computer beforehand.

  A surge of energy flowed through her.

  She couldn’t wait to go on an audition.

  “You must be very careful, Nicola. You will be surprised how many times in the course of a normal day you might touch your nose. It’s of the utmost importance”—he looked into her eyes—“I cannot stress it too much, that you are careful. Don’t overexert yourself. Don’t participate in any contact sports.”

  “No problem.” She was already planning to lie around reading scripts and sipping milk shakes to try to add some curves to her coltish figure.

  “Then you’re ready to go. I’ll see you back here in two weeks to check the progress. But first”—he reached into a drawer and took out the sort of hand mirror a hair stylist might use—“I want you to take a look and let me address any questions you might have before you leave.”

  She took the mirror and turned it to face her.

  Despite all the warnings, she must have been expecting to see an improved version of herself rather than the black, blue, and yellow impressionist flower that bloomed in the center of her face. With the white bandages on, even the black eyes had been obscured, but now she could see all the bruises in all their glory.

  And her nose looked like Marcia Brady’s had, right after she got hit in the face by a football.

  “Questions?” Dr. Bernstein prodded. He obviously expected her to ask when she would stop looking so scary, but he probably didn’t want to bring it up first, on the off chance that she wasn’t thinking that.

  She forced herself to look away from the mirror and at the doctor. She had to ask. “Are you sure this is normal?”

  He laughed outright, breaking the tension somewhat. “Nine times out of ten, that is the first question, and I do understand why, but yes, Nicola, this is absolutely normal. It wouldn’t be possible to perform such an operation without bruising and fairly substantial swelling. It’s ironic that you look worse before you look better, but that’s just the process.”

  “Yes, but . . .” Logic told her he was right. In fact, all the Googling she did on rhinoplasty before having the procedure had told her to expect this. However, looking at the mess that was her face, she couldn’t help but wonder if this was more extreme than what most people got. After all, she’d never heard phrases like frightening children used in connection with a nose job.

  Then again, her case might have been more extreme than most people’s to begin with. She was realistic about that. It wasn’t that her nose was so big really, but it had a bump in it that made it harsh, and it was crooked enough to look like maybe she’d been in a fight when she was younger. So Dr. Bernstein had been dealing with a lot.

  “Even the swelling”—she pointed to the bridge of her nose—“here? And this much? It’s normal?”

  “One hundred percent.” He smiled, and she took a moment to wonder who his dentist was.

  Surely a plastic surgeon who cared that much about his own looks cared as much about his reputation with other people’s looks.

  “I’ve been doing this for over two decades now,” he said, “and I can see already how good this is going to look.”

  Nicola looked back in the mirror. It was hard to imagine, but she had to believe it. “So—”

  The speaker on the wall buzzed, and the receptionist’s voice came through. “Dr. Bernstein? Tammy Morgan is on line one, and she says it’s urgent that she speak with you.”

  Dr. Bernstein’s face reddened. “I’ve told her not to reveal my clients’ names,” he muttered to Nicola. Tammy Morgan was the latest Disney-teen-queen-cum-hot-starlet, and there had been a lot of speculation in the tabloids lately about whether or not she’d had some work done. “Please don’t repeat that.”

  “Sure.” Nicola waved him off. She was glad to hear he had such high-profile clients. It only strengthened her conviction that she’d made the right choice in doctors.

  “All right, then.” He stepped back and assessed his work with obvious pleasure. “If you don’t have any further questions, think you’re ready to go home and begin healing?”

  “I’m ready!”

  “Remember, a liquid diet for the first couple of days and no alcohol whatsoever.”

  She nodded. “Does that thin the blood too much or something?”

  “No, it makes people clumsy,” he said with a completely straight face. “We can’t afford to have you tripping and falling into a Dumpster and ruining your nose.”

  That was pretty specific. Tripping and falling into a Dumpster. She wondered who had done that.

  “I promise you I won’t,” she said, getting up to leave. She was eager to go home and take her time examining her new face but also apprehensive about leaving the only person who could really reassure her that everything was going normally.

  Staying wasn’t an option, though.

  She gathered her things, gave a brave smile—which tugged on her nose a little and hurt—and said, “See you in two weeks!”

  One thing Nicola was not excited about was telling Holly what she’d done.

  Holly had never been judgmental about anything Nicola had done; it wasn’t that. But ever since they were children, and right up to—and beyond—Nicola getting the role in Duet, Holly had been a cheerleader for Nicola.

  Exactly the way Nicola was.

  When she’d had trouble at camp with girls who made fun of her, Holly was right there to boost her spirits and tell her that they were just jealous of what a nice and happy person Nicola was.

  When Terese Ordman asked Billy Ryder to the prom right when it was obvious that he was about to ask Nicola, Holly comforted her by pointing out that Terese had seen what Nicola was unable to—that Billy had the hots for her and the cheerleader couldn’t stand being shown up by the studious girl.

  And when Nicola had endured one painful rejection after another after moving to L.A., it was Holly who had staunchly supported her, assuring her that someday someone would see her unique beauty and she would make a fortune.

  Well, Holly had been right about that. But what she hadn’t realized—actually what Nicola hadn’t realized at the time, either—was how fleeting that success and appreciation would be. Before she knew it, Nicola was right back at the bottom of the heap, and now, instead of being just “homely,” she was now “homely” and “getting long in the tooth.”

  It was a terrible combination.

  So she’d sincerely felt she had little option but to fix the thing casting directors were saying was “wrong” with her. She needed to do it for her work, for her livelihood.

  She honestly felt like she’d had no choice.

  But.

  There was undeniably a certain shame in it because she knew that, in a big way, she’d given in. She didn’t change her look because she was passionate about looking this way. Nor was she particularly passionate about looking different from the way she had before.

  She’d given in to society’s view of what a woman’s appearance should be, and she’d tried to become it. In order to get money, she’d changed herself. Wasn’t that almost prostitution?

  Would Holly see it that way?

  Probably not. Holly wasn’t like that. But Nicola knew that Holly would be disappointed in her for giving up something so integral to her self as her very appearance.

  And, worse, she knew that a small part of her was disappointed in herself for the same reason.

  Nicola sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the full-length mirror, examining her image.

  It had been two weeks since she got the bandages off, and the worst of the bruising was gone and the swelling was down qu
ite a bit. With the careful application of some concealer and a topcoat of powder foundation, no one would be able to tell anything was amiss at all.

  Dr. Bernstein had been right: Her nose was coming along just perfectly. It was surprisingly exciting. She was already just a little bit of swelling away from the look she’d been going for. It was an incredible feeling to change this way. Yes, it was also disconcerting to have a new face every time she looked in the mirror, but if it led to her getting work, it would be worth it.

  That she wanted to keep working was a given. It fulfilled her in a way that nothing else did, nothing else could.

  But the truth was, she wanted to know what it was like to be perceived as pretty for once in her life. She’d been called ugly plenty of times, particularly as an adolescent, she’d been called average, and she’d been called unique, but just plain pretty? Never.

  All her life, she’d wondered what it felt like for beautiful people to walk around like that, being admired, being noticed, being envied.

  Now maybe she’d get a small taste of what it was like.

  She could hardly wait until the last of the swelling went down.

  A week later, she wished the swelling would stop going down.

  She didn’t know if she’d overiced or if the homeopathic arnica root gel was so effective it had diminished actual flesh, but Nicola’s nose had turned to a straight, sharp little blade.

  On another face, it would have been great. In fact, on Michelle Pfeiffer’s face, it was great. But to Nicola’s eye, it looked . . . fake.

  Well, maybe not fake, but it didn’t look like her anymore. At all. When she looked in the mirror, someone else was looking back at her. At first, it had been a kick. But slowly it had gotten . . . disconcerting.

  Disturbing.

  It turned out the rest of her face was pretty symmetrical. Her blue eyes were even and well set, if not striking. Her brows were straight. Her mouth was Goldilocks medium: not too big, not too small, with even teeth and a nice-enough smile. Her chin was just a chin—not jutting, but lacking the charm of, say, a gentle cleft.

  All her uniqueness had been in the shape of her nose.

  It’s probably your imagination, Holly wrote to her in an e-mail after Nicola had finally told her about the surgery. I had a mole removed from my cheek once, and the difference seemed huge to me, but of course, no one else even noticed.

  Nicola tried to agree, but privately she worried that she might have made an enormous mistake.

  There was a benefit for ovarian cancer at Iota on Friday night, and Nicola had decided that was as good a time as any to reveal her new self to the world.

  On Friday afternoon, Nicola had a professional makeup artist come to her house to do her makeup for the evening. Also, she’d purchased a flowing Stella McCartney gown—in stark contrast to her usual tailored style—to complete her new look.

  She was ready by four o’clock, which gave her a couple of hours to stop and visit with her grandmother, which was test number one in the New Nicola Project.

  Nicola’s grandmother lived in a beautiful Dutch Colonial house on a tiny curve of road just on the outskirts of Beverly Hills. Her second husband had been Barney Klotz, a Hollywood bigwig—well, medium wig—back in the forties and fifties. The house had been in his family since it was built in the twenties. Cary Grant and Randolph Scott had rented the pool house for a few months when they were just starting out in the business.

  Nicola’s grandmother—everyone called her Vivi, including Nicola—met Barney when Nicola’s grandfather had died in the late sixties. The story was that he stopped her on the street in New York and told her she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen and that she could marry him right then and there or hold out while he pursued her.

  “But make no mistake,” he’d said, according to Vivi. “You will be my wife.”

  So, to the horror of everyone in the family, Vivi married him two days later.

  And somehow, the one, single impulsive act—the only one anyone in the Kestle family had ever made, it seemed—had worked out. The marriage lasted until he died in 1988, and since then, Vivi had been living on her own, going to parties and events almost every day of the week and hanging out with cronies who knew virtually every golden age star by their real names.

  Nicola loved going to Vivi’s. When she’d first moved to L.A., she herself lived in the pool house, and she would have been happy to stay there forever, except that it would have proved her parents’ point that acting was a “pipe dream” and that she needed to go back to school to get a “practical degree” in order to get a “real job.”

  So she’d moved to a tiny apartment in West L.A. and allowed Vivi to secretly give her grocery store gift cards until Duet provided her big break.

  Still, going to Vivi’s always felt like going home, and never had Nicola needed to feel that more than she did now. Normally she would have let herself in, but she wanted to see Vivi’s face, to gauge her honest reaction, as soon as she saw Nicola.

  Nicola could hear Vivi’s voice as she approached the door, apparently on the phone. “. . . must run, darling, my Nicola has come to see me. Ta!”

  The door swung open, and Vivi stood there in a whooshing blue satin muumuu that matched her ice blue eyes. Her silver hair was cropped short and made her tanned skin seem even darker. Her small bow lips, always smiling, formed an O.

  A long moment passed before she said, “Yes?”

  This was not the reaction Nicola had expected. “So . . . ,” she prompted, taking a step forward, “what do you think?”

  Vivi stepped back and closed the door a fraction. “I’m sorry?”

  “Of my nose! Come on, Vivi, what do you think? Is it that bad?”

  “I don’t—” Realization dawned in Vivi’s clear eyes, followed by a moment of warmth that was quickly obscured by—clearly—embarrassment.

  She hadn’t even recognized Nicola.

  “Come in,” Vivi effused. “Darling, come in, let me look at you.”

  But she had been looking at Nicola—and she hadn’t even known who she was seeing.

  Nicola had spent days telling herself that she was being oversensitive to the change, that other people might not notice it at all, or might—ideally—just think she looked wonderful but be unsure as to what was different.

  All she had changed was her nose.

  How was it that that seemed to have changed her entire face?

  Nicola followed her grandmother out to the lanai, where she had set tea and those Pepperidge Farm butter cookies she kept on hand for every imaginable occasion.

  When Vivi turned back to look at her, her expression was still clearly troubled, though she was trying to mask that. “Well. How do you feel?”

  Nicola sat down heavily. “Like a pod person.” The truth came spilling out. No more trying to jolly herself along or pretend everything was hunky-dory. “I feel like I’m playing dress up.”

  Vivi frowned. “Darling, you look beautiful.”

  “Thanks.” Her voice was limp. So were her spirits. “I look different.”

  “That’s . . . true.”

  “Too different.”

  Vivi pursed her lips for a moment, then shrugged and said, “Too different for what?”

  Too different to keep living my own life, Nicola thought with a touch of hysteria. She felt like she was standing on the edge of a really big, irretrievable emotion. It was all she could do just to maintain her composure, to keep calm.

  “Too different . . .” She couldn’t finish. Instead, she cried.

  “Oh, darling, darling.” Vivi’s arms were around her almost immediately, the drape of her sleeve like a shawl across Nicola’s uncharacteristically bare arm. “You do look beautiful. You do. Anyone would say it. Someone who saw you walking down the street would say, Look at that beautiful girl. But it’s not familiar to you yet.”

  “That’s for sure.” Nicola sniffled. “How can it ever be? It’s not me! And I’ll never be me again!”
>
  Vivi drew back and held Nicola’s arms hard within her narrow clutch. “Listen to me, Nicola Dean Kestle.” She looked hard into Nicola’s eyes, and her mouth was a thin line as she spoke. “Don’t you ever say that again. No one in our family is foolish enough to think who we are has anything to do with what we look like. If you truly believe that you is contingent on how you look, then you are not the girl I believed you were.”

  “But—”

  “But nothing!” Vivi could be fierce when she had an idea. “If someone were disfigured in an accident and said to you that they were no longer who they thought they were, would you listen to that nonsense?”

  Nicola’s other grandmother, Grandma Parker, would have been knocking wood and God forbidding at this point.

  “No,” Nicola admitted. “I’d be saying the same thing you are.”

  Vivi released her grip. “There you go. And you didn’t even have the misfortune of disfigurement. You look like a soap opera star.”

  And that hit the nail on the head: a soap star. The kind of face that would fit into the Barbie-and-Ken world of soaps.

  Nicola no longer had a face that felt expressive, that communicated something about her before she even spoke. She was going to have to work that much harder to get half as far. And she knew that was the truth, even though she knew Vivi was right, at least in part, about the fact that this wasn’t due to a tragedy.

  Tragic stupidity, maybe.

  Tragic vanity.

  But not random tragedy.

  At least she had that on her side.

  There was no way she could go to the benefit at Iota tonight. She wasn’t ready to get the world’s reaction all at once. She had to start with Mike.

  Then she’d go from there.

  5

  Camp Catoctin, Pennsylvania

  Twenty Years Ago

  Talk about stupid.

  Lexi had tried to stop dumb Nicola from actually marching into the dance with that ridiculous makeup on—it was only supposed to be a little joke!—but Nicola totally totally ignored her. She even sped up to get away from her.