Curtis Sittenfeld - American Wife

“I think I’ll pass, but I’ll be curious to hear what the doctor tells you,” I said. “I’ll bet you anything he turns you away for being far too youthful.”

That, it turned out, was Phase One. Phase Two was Jadey calling and saying, “I’m not supposed to tell you this, but Hank wants you to get a face-lift, so I’m supposed to suggest we go to Florida and get them together, like it’s my own idea, but then I thought about it, and I’m kind of intrigued.”

“ Hank wants me to get a face-lift?”

“I know it’s real manipulative—”

“And he called you?”

“Debbie called me.”

“I’ll call you back in a second,” I said, and when I’d hung up, I dialed the direct line to Charlie’s office. His secretary Marsha answered, saying, “He’s meeting with the Board of Regents right now, but I’d be happy to—”

“Please tell him it’s urgent,” I said.

When Charlie picked up, he said in a breathless voice, “Ella—” and I said, “No, she’s fine, nothing bad happened, except apparently, Hank is going around telling people I need a face-lift.”

“I warned him you wouldn’t like this.”

“You knew?”

“It’s for TV, Lindy, that’s all. You know I think you’re beautiful, but he has the idea that when we’re on more of a national stage—”

“Are you planning to have a face-lift?”

“I don’t have to tell you there’s a double standard. Listen, they should have been more straightforward with you—”

“They?”

“We—we should have. Hank’s logic is that if you want to do it, do it now. You can’t have that kind of surgery in the middle of a campaign.”

“Where is this coming from? Did Hank run a poll on my appearance?”

Charlie hesitated, and I said, “Is he there with you now?”

“He’s in with the Regents, which is where I should be. It’s your decision, Lindy. I’m sorry if you’re offended. You’re still the prettiest of all my wives.”

“This is incredibly insulting.”

“When I get home tonight, I’ll show you how attractive I find you. Now I’ve gotta go before I get a woody just thinking about it.”

I suppose I was offended not only because the thought of Charlie’s staff discussing my appearance—and finding it lacking—was humiliating but also because the suggestion reinforced my own self-doubt. Although I’d never been insecure about my looks, it hadn’t escaped my attention that the lines at the corners of my mouth and across my forehead were deeper, that the skin on my neck was not as smooth as it had once been, and that when I appeared on television, these flaws were more obvious than in person. Still, I hadn’t thought the situation required more than some experimenting with makeup.

For three days I fumed, on the fourth day I had my assistant Cheryl go buy a book about plastic surgery, and on the fifth day I went to see a doctor. He was not the one who performed the procedure; a month later, Jadey and I did go to a clinic in Naples, Florida, to a surgeon reputed to be the best in the field, and afterward, we stayed for two weeks at a secluded house overlooking a canal. Unfortunately, the setting was wasted on us because we weren’t supposed to swim or expose ourselves to the sun; Cheryl, who was thirty, had accompanied us, and we encouraged her to drive to the beach and even snorkel one afternoon. Meanwhile, Jadey and I lay around reading, watching television, complaining, and making fun of ourselves. We’d been instructed to keep our heads elevated—Jadey was more bandaged than I was, though we were both simultaneously numb and tender, and my face became quite puffy—and six days after the procedure, we went to have the stitches removed from the incisions at our hairlines (before the operation, a nurse had complimented me on how beautifully my haircut would hide any mild scarring). Jadey and I made a pact to never tell anyone—our husbands knew, and Cheryl, but we’d say nothing to our other sisters-in-law or to Priscilla or our children. It was thinking of Ella, actually, that gave me pause: What a negative role model I would be if she knew, how vain and unaccepting of the aging process. Conveniently, however, she was away at Princeton, and the story we told everyone else in Madison and Milwaukee was that we were taking a painting class, an intensive study of watercolor. (“What do we do when they ask to see our work?” I said, and Jadey said, “We say it’s being shipped back.” As it turned out, no one ever asked.)

Especially in the first few days after our twin surgeries, Jadey and I looked so banged up that we questioned, out loud and at regular intervals, whether we’d made a mistake, and it crossed my mind (this part I did not express aloud) that we were like characters in a fairy tale, narcissistic hags grasping at our lost youth. But we weren’t, in the end, punished for overreaching; even a week after the surgery, the bruising had faded, the swelling had shrunk, and on the night before our return to Wisconsin, we joined Cheryl for dinner at a wonderful and very festive Mexican restaurant; we weren’t supposed to drink, but Jadey sneaked a few sips of Cheryl’s margarita. Upon our arrival home, we kept calling each other to compare notes on how many compliments we’d received, how rested people said we looked from the fresh sea air. Of all the unfortunate facts about plastic surgery, perhaps the hardest to accept is this: If it’s done well, it works. Once you’ve had it, you realize how many other people must have also, and while there are plenty of inept examples where the surgery is obvious, there are many more women and men, especially in the public eye, about whom we haven’t a clue, even as we admire their healthy and youthful glow.

I had learned in the book I’d read that the benefits of a rhytidectomy, as it is formally called, tend to last for five to ten years, at which point a repeat performance is recommended. That means that even by the most optimistic calculation, my face-lift has expired. I don’t plan to have another, not because my vanity has disappeared but because now Jadey and I prefer Botox treatments, an option that didn’t exist in the late nineties. Every three months, she flies to Washington, and Charlie’s private physician, Dr. Subramanium, performs the treatments on us in the privacy of his White House office; the procedure takes ten minutes and involves no anesthesia. I would like to think that part of the reason I stick so assiduously to this routine is that it’s a source of bonding for Jadey and me, a way for us to maintain our closeness, but this is only partly true. I also do it because I don’t want bloggers and late-night talk-show hosts to make fun of the way I look. That I routinely submit to having poisonous bacterium injected into my face is flabbergasting to me, but no more flabbergasting than my marriage to the president of the United States, my residence in the White House, my ridiculous title of first lady. As far as I know, Debbie Bell has never had plastic surgery of any kind.

Back in 1998, after I returned to Madison from Naples, Ella came home for spring break a few weeks later, and I went to pick her up at the airport; though I had security detail as Wisconsin’s first lady, I still occasionally drove. Ella’s spring break was two weeks long, and she and a bunch of friends had spent the first half in Turks and Caicos, at the vacation home of a classmate named Alessandra Caterina Laroche de Fournier (she went by Alex). The trip had become a little boring by the end, Ella said; she’d felt self-indulgent, and this week, she wanted to drop by the soup kitchen where she had volunteered during high school. I’d cleared my schedule in anticipation of her being home, and I told her that if she wanted to see any movies, or if she needed to shop for clothes, especially for her upcoming summer internship at Microsoft, I was flexible. In a neutral tone, she said, “Yeah, maybe.”