Tom Robbins - Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

The office was still there, all right, but it had changed. Whereas on Sissy's first visit there had been two or three tastefully framed prints on the wall, the place now looked more like an art gallery than a doctor's office. Everywhere there were reproductions of Picasso, Bonnard, Renoir, Braque, Utrillo, Dufy, Soutine, Gauguin, Degas, Rousseau, Gris, Matisse, Cézanne, Monet, Manet, Minet, Menet, Munet and others. Many were not framed, but were pinned to the walls in such close proximity that they frequently overlapped, bumping each other like fish in a school. It was as if a survey of modern French painting had gotten mixed up with an aquarium.

The receptionist was away from her desk, so Sissy stared at the tanks full of Gauguin guppies and Picasso triggerfish. Eventually, a woman came in from a rear cubicle to inform Sissy that the office was closed. Closed? Yes. Permanently. Dr. Dreyfus had retired the previous week and the woman was there putting things in order, referring patients to other plastic surgeons, closing the books and so forth.

“I'd be happy to refer you to someone else,” said the woman, who was short, juiceless and gray, like a village school principal's night on the town.

“Only Dr. Dreyfus will do,” Sissy pleaded.

“I'm sorry,” said the woman.

“But if he just retired last week, he could still do one more operation, couldn't he?”

“I'm afraid not,” said the woman. “Not a chance of it.”

“Is he ill or something?”

The woman didn't answer immediately. “That's a matter of opinion,” she sighed at last. “You're not from around Richmond, are you?”

Before Sissy could answer, the woman snapped, “Ma'am, you're wasting your time and mine. Dr. Dreyfus will not be performing any more surgery, and that's definite. Now, if you don't wish a referral, please excuse me. I've got to start taking those fool pictures down. Oh Lord.”

Like a bad habit, another taxi let Sissy fall into it. She gave the cabbie the address the telephone directory had given her. It was in the West End, in one of the better neighborhoods, although not the best. The best neighborhood in Richmond, as in Heaven, is reserved for those of the Christian persuasion.

Dr. Dreyfus himself answered the door. He hadn't changed much, and he remembered Sissy. Rather, he remembered certain parts of Sissy. If he hadn't, he wouldn't have let her in. He had been bothered by journalists, he explained. He didn't inquire why Sissy had called; he seemed to know. “I'm afraid I can't help you,” he said. “Please, child, don't be dismayed. We all have problems these days. But as the painter Van Gogh said, 'Mysteries remain, sorrow or melancholy remains, but the everlasting negative is balanced by the positive work which thus is achieved, after all.' I don't suppose that means very much to you. Here, you read this while I get out of my dressing robe and into my puttering clothes. Some other physician can help you. This will explain why I cannot.”

To his visitor he handed a clipping from a newsprint periodical. “There have been many other articles, but this one says it most objectively.” He left Sissy alone to read:

Frustrated artist blows med career through nose

As a boy in Paris, Felix Dreyfus had dreamed of becoming an artist. An older cousin who was a guide at the Louvre let him tag along on tours, where he acquired a precocious knowledge of art history. Alas, Felix's parents were philistines who constantly deflated the boy's artistic dreams, while grooming him for a career in medicine.

Young Dreyfus gave in, finishing med school with high marks. If his parents saw in his choice of plastic surgery as a medical specialty the remnants of the old artistic urge — plastic surgery is, after all, a rather sculptural, relatively creative discipline — they did not let on.

Emigrating to the U.S. in the Nazi years, Dr. Dreyfus developed a successful practice in Richmond, Va. There, he was fairly active as a patron of the arts, and accumulated an extensive collection of books on painters and sculptors. He married his nurse, and they led a quiet, comfortable life.

Then, last month, Dr. Dreyfus, 66, undertook to perform cosmetic surgery on a 14-year-old boy, Bernard Schwartz. A routine operation, it was to alter the size and shape of the boy's Semitic nose. Although he specialized in injuries to and deformities of the hands, Dr. Dreyfus had successfully completed many "nose jobs."

When the bandages were removed from Bernie Schwartz's proboscis, however, the boy's horrified parents were gaping at what has been called "the most scandalous incident of deliberate malpractice in the recent history of medicine."

Succumbing, maniacally, to his suppressed artistic drives, Dr. Felix Dreyfus, disdaining marble, clay and plaster to work in living flesh, had sculptured upon the face of little Bernie Schwartz the world's first Cubistic nose!

Bernie's new nose had six nostrils, two in front, two on each side, and three bridges, so that in either profile it looked as if you were seeing it frontally. According to the exuberant Dr. Dreyfus, Bernie's nose is "simultaneously viewed from several aspects, all the aspects overlapping, so that what we have is a nose in totality , and that totality manages to suggest motion, even when static; it shatters the classical idea of the face in which the nose is fixed and unchanging; it is a nose in a perpetual state of ultimate noseness, yet it is on the very verge of the abstract."

Dr. Dreyfus's enthusiasm may be short-lived. The Virginia Medical Board has suspended his license, and it is reported that the surgeon may be permitted to retire as an alternative to being barred permanently from practice. Bernie's parents, unconvinced by the creator's glowing aesthetic evaluation of his work, are suing Dr. Dreyfus for three million dollars. Moreover, the "masterpiece" is doomed. As soon as medically feasible, a team of plastic surgeons in Washington, D.C., will restore the world's first Cubistic nose to a realistic style that promises to please even devotees of Norman Rockwell. Meanwhile, Bernie Schwartz spends a lot of time indoors.

When Dr. Dreyfus returned, rather sheepishly, to the living room, Sissy rushed to embrace him. She was smiling for the first time in more than twenty-four hours. “Oh, Doctor!” she cried. “You've got to do it. You and nobody else should be allowed to take away my gift.”

91.

"AH THE THUMB," mused Dr. Dreyfus, yawning his small eyes so that they might take in the full length and breadth of Sissy's prodigious pucky-wucks. “The thumb, yes. The thumb the thumb the thumb the thumb the thumb the thumb. One of evolution's most ingenious inventions; a built-in tool sensitive to texture, contour and temperature: an alchemical lever; the secret key to technology; the link between the mind and art; a humanizing device. The marmoset and the lemur are thumbless; none of the New World monkeys has opposable thumbs; the spider monkey's thumbs are absent or reduced to a tiny tubercle; the thumbs of the potto are set at an angle of one hundred eighty degrees to the other digits, making them nonfunctional except as pinchers; the orangutan, which is humanlike to the extent that it is called the 'man of the woods,' has a thumb so tiny in relation to its extremely long curved fingers that its manipulation is only nominal; the thumb of the chimpanzee opposes the bent fingers in a clumsy action, and the gorilla lacks a grip precise enough to hold small objects; the baboon comes close — its thumbs are fully opposable and it has a good precision grip — but have you ever observed the thumb of the baboon, how flat and splay-headed and crudely shaped it is; no, there is but one true thumb on this planet and homo sapiens has got it."

Pause.

“And so you are demanding at last the privileges of thumb that nature has perversely denied you?”