“No need to look at me like that!” she yelled back. “Everyone’s doing it. And you, you have a professional reason. Guy wants to be a fancy chauffeur, he goes and buys a fancy car. It’s no different with you!”
But at that stage I gave the idea no further thought, even if I was beginning to accept this notion that I was “loser ugly.” For one thing, I didn’t have the money. In fact, the very moment Helen was talking about fancy chauffeurs, we were nine and a half thousand dollars in debt. This was characteristic of Helen. A fine person in many ways, but this ability to forget completely the true state of our finances and start dreaming up major new spending opportunities, this was very Helen.
Money aside, I didn’t like the idea of someone cutting me up. I’m not so good with that kind of thing. One time, early in my relationship with Helen, she invited me to go running with her. It was a crisp winter’s morning, and I’ve never been much of a jogger, but I was taken by her and anxious to impress. So there we were running around the park, and I was doing fine keeping up with her, when suddenly my shoe hit something very hard jutting out of the ground. I could feel a pain in my foot, which wasn’t so bad, but when I took off my sneaker and sock, and saw the nail on my big toe rearing up from the flesh like it was doing a Hitler-style salute, I got nauseous and fainted. That’s the way I am. So you can see, I wasn’t wild about face surgery.
Then, naturally, there was the principle of the thing. Okay, I’ve told you before, I’m no stickler for artistic integrity. I play every kind of bubble-gum for the pay. But this proposition was of another order, and I did have some pride left. Bradley was right about one thing: I was twice as talented as most other people in this town. But it seemed that didn’t count for much these days. Because it has to do with image, marketability, being in magazines and on TV shows, about parties and who you ate lunch with. It all made me sick. I was a musician, why should I have to join in this game? Why couldn’t I just play my music the best way I knew, and keep getting better, if only in my cubicle, and maybe some day, just maybe, genuine music lovers would hear me and appreciate what I was doing. What did I want with a plastic surgeon?
At first Helen seemed to see it my way, and the topic didn’t come up again for some time. That is, not until she phoned from Seattle to say she was leaving me and moving in with Chris Prendergast, a guy she’d known since high school and who now owned a string of successful diners across Washington. I’d met this Prendergast a few times over the years-he’d even come to dinner once-but I’d never suspected a thing. “All that sound-proofing in that cupboard of yours,” Bradley said at the time. “It works both ways.” I suppose he had a point.
But I don’t want to dwell on Helen and Prendergast except to explain their part in getting me where I am now. Maybe you’re thinking I drove up the coast, confronted the happy couple, and plastic surgery became necessary following a manly altercation with my rival. Romantic, but no, that’s not the way it happened.
What happened was that a few weeks after her phone call, Helen came back to the apartment to organise moving out her belongings. She looked sad walking around the place-where, after all, we’d had some happy times. I kept thinking she was about to cry, but she didn’t, and just went on putting all her things into neat piles. Someone would be along to pick them up in a day or two, she said. Then as I was on my way to my cubicle, tenor in hand, she looked up and said quietly:
“Steve, please. Don’t go into that place again. We need to talk.”
“Talk about what?”
“Steve, for God’s sake.”
So I put the sax back in its case and we went into our little kitchen and sat down at the table facing one another. Then she put it to me.
There was no going back on her decision. She was happy with Prendergast, for whom she’d carried a torch since school. But she felt bad about leaving me, especially at a time when my career wasn’t going so good. So she’d thought things over and talked with her new guy, and he too had felt bad about me. Apparently, what he’d said was: “It’s just too bad Steve has to pay the price for all our happiness.” So here was the deal. Prendergast was willing to pay for me to have my face fixed by the best surgeon in town. “It’s true,” she said, when I looked back at her blankly. “He means it. No expense spared. All the hospital bills, recuperation, everything. The best surgeon in town.” Once my face was fixed, there’d be nothing holding me back, she said. I’d go right to the top, how could I fail, with the kind of talent I had?
“Steve, why are you looking at me like that? This is a great offer. And God knows if he’ll still be willing in six months. Say yes right now and do yourself a big favor. It’s just a few weeks of discomfort, then whoosh! Jupiter and beyond!”
Fifteen minutes later, on her way out, she said in much sterner tones: “So what is it you’re saying? That you’re happy playing in that little closet for the rest of your life? That you just love being this big a loser?” And with that, she left.
The next day I went into Bradley’s office to see if he had anything for me, and I happened to mention what had occurred, expecting us to laugh about it. But he didn’t laugh at all.
“This guy’s rich? And he’s willing to get you a top surgeon? Maybe he’ll get you Crespo. Or even Boris.”
So now I had Bradley too, telling me how I had to take this opportunity, how if I didn’t I’d be a loser all my life. I left his office pretty angry, but he phoned later that same afternoon and kept on about it. If it was the call itself holding me back, he said, if it was the blow to my pride involved in picking up a phone and saying to Helen, yes, please, I want to do it, please get your boyfriend to sign that big check, if that’s what was holding me up, then he, Bradley, was happy to do all the negotiations on my behalf. I told him to go sit on a tall spike, and hung up. But then he called again an hour later. He told me he’d now figured it all out and I was a fool not to have done so myself.
“Helen’s got this carefully planned. Consider her position. She loves you. But looks-wise, well, you’re an embarrassment when you’re seen in public. You’re no turn-on. She wants you to do something about it, but you refuse. So what’s she to do? Well, her next move’s magnificent. Full of subtlety. As a professional manager I have to admire it. She goes off with this guy. Okay, maybe she’s always had the hots for him, but really, she doesn’t love him at all. She gets the guy to pay for your face. Once you’re healed up, she comes back, you’re good-looking, she’s hungry for your body, she can’t wait to be seen with you in restaurants…”
I stopped him here to point out that though over the years I’d become accustomed to the depths to which he could sink when persuading me to do something to his professional advantage, this latest ploy was somewhere so far down in the pits it was a place no light penetrated and where steaming horseshit would freeze in seconds. And on the subject of horseshit, I told him that while I understood how he, on account of his nature, couldn’t help shoveling the stuff all the time, it would still be sound strategy on his part to come up with the sort that had at least a chance of taking me in for a minute or two. Then I hung up on him again.
Over the next few weeks, work seemed scarcer than ever, and each time I called Bradley to see if he had anything, he’d say something like: “It’s hard to help a guy who won’t help himself.” In the end, I began considering the whole matter more pragmatically. I couldn’t get away from the fact that I needed to eat. And if going through with this meant that eventually a lot more people got to hear my music, was that such a bad result? And what about my plans to lead my own band one day? How was that ever going to happen?