Dr. Sheldon Rosenthal does a Facelift in LA, from the ‘Daily Mail’
He moved to a side room and scrubbed up, shouting insults about the basketball scores with a passing breast implant salesman, while Ann and Lesley tied a blue paper gown over his green one, added a paper hat patterned with purple flowers that was never designed with a six foot two inch seventeen stone plastic surgeon in mind, and began local injections around Jane’s right eye.
“OK, Jane, you’re out there on the Hawaiian Islands, out there doing your thing on the beach, right?”
“Right,” she said drowsily.
He silently held out a hand for a scalpel, made a fine incision along the top of the eyelid and, as ‘Besame Mucho’ piped down from the ceiling, he removed little worms of fat that had caused the hooded lids and laid them gently in half circles on Jane’s gowned chest like fishermens’ maggots. It was nine thirty and she would never look the same again.
You were seeing more of Jane now but less of the Doctor, just the tinted Dior glasses, the immovable gaze and the urgent blinking. Only his hand asked for instruments and Ann obliged. He began to sew the cuts with sutures – nylon for the top lids and black silk for the bottom, none thicker than a human hair, with hands moving faster than the eye could follow, braking in the last half inch for exact knot tension and now you saw why it took eleven years to reach this level and why the Silver Clouds, Chagalls, Picassos and Klimts.
The nasal whine of a drill broke his concentration; he slowly straightened and stared impatiently at the ceiling,
“My partner next door,” he winced. “A nose job – we’ll wait. How ya feelin’ Jane?”
“Fine…. juss fine.”
“You just keep those eyes closed, Honey, ya hear?”
“What a way to take a rest,” said a girl’s voice. You looked at Ann and Lesley and Debbie, but it wasn’t them – it was Jane, stretching out on her golden beach.
“That’s right,” said the Doctor. “Right now you’re out there on one of those little islands between Maui and Molokai and in a while you’ll be moving over to Tahiti to meet Marlon Brando and all those crazy folkies.”
The drilling finished, he started up again, chatting with the girls about the Bolivian cocaine industry, the price of gold, political scandals and the genealogy of his poodle.
“Poodle?,” said Debbie. “You don’t look the poodle type.”
He moved to the one possession he’d save in a fire, (his draft discharge, not the poodle), and the Clint Eastwood film showing on the Miami flight.
“Now that ape of his -”
But he’d frozen, the scalpel poised above an incision. Ann’s eyes flashed in panic from the Doctor to the electro-cardiograph to the digital blood pressure read-out and back to the Doctor as the telepathy broke down.
“‘How Long Has This Been Going On’,” said Dr. Rosenthal. The girls stared blankly. “Written about 1935,” he announced, returning to the incision. It was the first Muzak tune to fox him that morning and Ann gave a little sigh as the routine continued.