Skin Tight

30

Early on the morning of February nineteenth, Reynaldo Flemm, the famous Shock Television journalist, arrived at the Whispering Palms Spa and Surgery Center for the most sensational interview of his sensational career. A sleepy receptionist collected the $15,000 cash and counted it twice; if she was surprised by the size of the surgeon’s fee, she didn’t show it. The receptionist handed Reynaldo Flemm two photocopied consent forms, one for a rhinoplasty and one for a suction-assisted lipectomy. Reynaldo skimmed the paperwork and extravagantly signed as “Johnny LeTigre.”

Then he sat down to wait for his moment. On a buff-colored wall hung a laminated carving of one of Rudy Graveline’s pet sayings: to improve one’s self, improve one’s face. That wasn’t Reynaldo’s favorite Rudyism. His favorite was framed in quilted Norman Rockwell-style letters above the water fountain:

vanity is beautiful. That’s the one Reynaldo had told Willie about. Be sure to get a quick shot on your way in, he had told him. What for? Willie had asked. For the irony, Reynaldo Flemm had exclaimed. For the irony! Reynaldo was proud of himself for thinking up that camera shot; usually Christina Marks was in charge of finding irony.

Soon an indifferent young nurse summoned Reynaldo to a chilly examining room and instructed him to empty his bladder, a tedious endeavor that took fifteen minutes and produced scarcely an ounce. Reynaldo Flemm was a very nervous man. In his professional life he had been beaten by Teamsters, goosed by white supremacists, clubbed by Mafia torpedoes, pistol-whipped by Bandito bikers, and kicked in the groin by the Pro-Life Posse. But he had never undergone surgery. Not even a wart removal.

Flemm stiffly removed his clothes and pulled off his hightop Air Jordans. He changed into a baby-blue paper gown that hung to his knees. The nurse gave him a silly paper cap to cover his silly dyed hair, and paper shoe covers for his bare feet.

A nurse anesthetist came out of nowhere, brusquely flipped up the tail of Reynaldo’s gown and stuck a needle in his hip. The hypodermic contained a drug called Robinul, which dries up the mouth by inhibiting oral secretions. Next the nurse seized Reynaldo’s left arm, swabbed it, and stuck it cleanly with an I.V. needle that dripped into his veins a lactated solution of five percent dextrose and, later, assorted powerful sedatives.

The anesthetist then led Reynaldo Flemm and his I.V. apparatus into Suite F, one of four ultramodern surgical theaters at Whispering Palms. She asked him to lie on his back and, as he stretched out on the icy steel, Reynaldo frantically tried to remember the ten searing questions he had prepared for the ambush of Dr. Rudy Graveline.

One, did you kill Victoria Barletta on March 12, 1986?

Two, why would one of your former nurses say that you did?

Three, isn’t it true that you’ve repeatedly gotten into trouble for careless and incompetent surgery?

Four, how do you explain…

Explain?

Explain this strap on my fucking legs!

“Please quiet down, Mr. LeTigre.”

And my arms! What’ve you done to my arms? I can’t move my goddamn arms!

“Try to relax. Think pleasant thoughts.”

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait!

“You ought to be feeling a little drowsy.”

This is wrong. This is not right. I read up on this. I got a fucking pamphlet. You’re supposed to tape my eyes, not my arms. What are you smiling at, you dumb twat? Lemme talk to the doctor! Where’s the doctor? Jesus Christ, that’s cold. What are you doing down there!

“Good morning, Mr. LeTigre.”

Doctor, thank God you’re here! Listen good now: These Nazi nurse bitches are making a terrible mistake. I don’t wanna general, I wanna a local. Just pull the I.V., okay? I’ll be fine, just pull the tubes before I pass out.

“John, we’re having a little trouble understanding you.”

No shit, Sherlock, my tongue’s so dry you could light a match on it. Please yank the needles, I can’t think with these damn needles. And make ‘em quit fooling around with me down there. Christ, it’s cold! What’re they doing!

“I assumed they told you-there’s been a change of plans. I’ve decided to do the lipectomy first, then the rhinoplasty. It’ll be easier that way.”

No no no, you gotta do the nose first. Do the fucking nose.

“You should try to relax, John. Here, hold still, we’re going to give you another injection.”

No no no no no no no.

“That didn’t hurt a bit, did it? “

I wanna ask I gotta ask right now…

“Go ahead, push the Sublimaze.”

Did you kill…?

“W hat didhe say?”

Is it true you killed…?

“This guy looks sort of familiar.”

Did you… kill Victoria… Principal?

“Victoria Principal! Boy, is he whacked out.”

Well did you?

“Wh ere’s the mask? Start the Forane. Give him the mask.”

Willie hadn’t slept much, fretting about Reynaldo’s big plan. He had tried to call Christina Marks in New York, but the office said she was in Miami. But where? Reynaldo’s plan was the craziest thing Willie had ever heard, starting with the signal. Willie needed a signal to know when to come crashing into the operating room with the camera. The best that Reynaldo could come up with was a scream. Willie would be in the waiting room, Reynaldo would scream.

“What exactly will you scream?” Willie had asked.

“I’ll scream: WILLIE!”

Willie thought Reynaldo was joking. He wasn’t.

“What about the other patients in the waiting room? I mean, here I am with a TV camera and a sound pack-what do I tell these people?”

“Tell ‘em you’re from PBS,” Reynaldo had said. “Nobody hasslesPBS.”

The shot that Reynaldo Flemm most fervently wanted was this: Himself prone, prepped, cloaked in blue, preferably in the early stages of rhinoplasty and preferably bloody. That was the good thing about a nose job, you could ask for a local. Most plastic surgeons want their rhinoplasty patients to be all the way zonked, but you could get it done with a local and a mild I.V. if you could stand a little pain. Reynaldo Flemm had no doubt he could stand it.

Willie would burst like a fullback into the operating room, tape rolling, toss the baton mike to Reynaldo on the table, Reynaldo would poke it in Rudy Graveline’s face and pop the questions. Bam bam bam. The nurses and scrub techs would drop whatever they were doing and run, leaving the hapless surgeon to dissolve, alone, before the camera’s eye.

Wait’ll he realizes who I am, Reynaldo had chortled. Be sure you go extra tight on his face.

Willie had said he needed a soundman, but Reynaldo said no, out of the question; this was to be a streamlined attack.

Willie had said all right, then we need a better signal. Just screaming isn’t good enough, he had said. What if somebody else starts screaming first, some other patient?

“Who else would scream your name?” Reynaldo had asked in a caustic tone. “Listen to what I’m saying.”

The plan was bold and outrageous, Willie had to admit. No doubt it would cause a national sensation, stir up all the TV critics, not to mention Johnny Carson’s gag writers. There would be a large amount of cynical speculation among Ray’s colleagues that what he really wanted out of this caper was a free nose job-a theory that occurred even to Willie as he listened to Reynaldo map out the big ambush. The possibility of coast-to-coast media ridicule was no deterrent; the man seemed to relish being maligned as a hack and a clown and a shameless egomaniac. He said they were jealous, that’s what they were. What other broadcast journalist in America had the guts to go under the knife just to get an interview? Mike Wallace? Not in a million years, the arrogant old prune. Bill Moyers? That liberal pussy would faint if he got a hangnail!

Yeah, Willie had said, it’s quite a plan.

Brilliant, Reynaldo had crowed. Try brilliant.

However inspired, the plan’s success depended on several crucial factors, not the least of which was the premise that Reynaldo Flemm would be conscious for the interview.

Although the surgical procedure known as liposuction, or fat sucking, was developed in France, it has achieved its greatest mass-market popularity in the United States. It is now the most common cosmetic procedure performed by plastic surgeons in this country, with more than 100,000 operations a year. The mortality rate for suction-assisted lipectomy is relatively low, about one death for every 10,000 patients. The odds of complications-which include blood clots, fat embolisms, chronic numbness, and severe bruising-increase considerably if the surgeon performing the liposuction has had little or no training in the procedure. Rudy Graveline fell decisively into this category-a doctor who had taken up liposuction for the simple reason that it was exceedingly lucrative. No state law or licensing board or medical review committee required Rudy to study liposuction first, or become proficient, or even be tested on his surgical competence before trying it. The same libertarian standards applied to rhinoplasties or hemorrhoidectomies or even brain surgery: Rudy Graveline was a licensed physician, and legally that meant he could try any damn thing he wanted.

He did not give two hoots about certification by the American Board of Plastic Surgery, or the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, or the American Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeons. What were a couple more snotty plaques on the wall? His patients could care less. They were rich and vain and impatient. In some exclusive South Florida circles, Rudy’s name carried the glossy imprimatur of a Gucci or a de La Renta. The lacquered old crones at La Gorce or the Biltmore would point at each other’s shiny chins and taut necks and sculpted eyelids and ask, not in a whisper but a haughty bray, “Is that a Graveline?”

Rudy was a designer surgeon. To have him suck your fat was an honor, a social plum, a mark (literally) of status. Only a boor, white trash or worse, would ever question the man’s techniques or complain about the results.

Ironically, most of the surgeons who worked for Rudy Graveline at Whispering Palms were completely qualified to do suction lipectomies; they had actually trained for it-studied, observed; practiced. While Rudy admired their dedication, he thought they were overdoing things-after all, how difficult could such an operation really be? The fat itself was abundantly easy to find. Suck it out, close ‘em up, next case! Big deal.

To be on the safe side, Rudy read two journal articles about liposuction and ordered an instructional video cassette for $26.95 from a medical-supply firm in Chicago. The journal articles turned out to be dense and fairly boring, but the video was an inspiration. Rudy came away convinced that any fool doctor with half a brain could vacuum fat with no problem.

The typical lipectomy patient was not a grotesque hypertensive blimp, but-like Johnny LeTigre-a healthy person of relatively normal stature and weight. The object of their complaint was medically mundane-bumper-car hips, droopy buttocks, gelatinous thighs, or old-fashioned “love handles” at the waist. Properly performed, liposuction would remove localized pockets of excess fat to improve and smooth the body’s natural contour. Improperly performed, the surgery would leave a patient lumpy and lopsided and looking for a lawyer.

On the morning of Reynaldo Flemm’s undercover mission, nothing as sinister as a premonition caused Rudy Graveline to change his mind about doing the nose job first. What changed the doctor’s mind, as usual, was money. Because a lipectomy usually required general anesthesia, it was more labor-intensive (and costly) than a simple rhinoplasty. Rudy figured the sooner he could get done with the heavy stuff, the sooner he could get the anesthetist and her gas machine off the clock. He could do the rhino later with intravenous sedation, which was much cheaper.

That Rudy Graveline could still worry about overhead at this point, with his career crumbling, was a tribute both to his power of concentration and his ingrained devotion to profit.

He grabbed a gloveful of Reynaldo Flemm’s belly roll and gave a little squeeze. Paydirt. Fat city.

Rudy selected a Number 15 blade and made a one-quarter inch incision in Reynaldo’s navel. Through this convenient aperture Rudy inserted the cannula, a long tubular instrument that resembled in structure the nose of an anteater. Rudy rammed the blunt snout of the cannula into the soft meat of Reynaldo’s abdomen, then scraped the instrument back and forth to break up the tissue. With his right foot the surgeon tapped a floor pedal that activated a suction machine, which vacuumed the fat particles through small holes in the tip of the cannula, down a long clear plastic tube to a glass bottle.

Within moments, the first yellow glops appeared.

Johnny LeTigre’s spare tire!

Soon he would be a new man.

In the waiting room, Willie got to talking with some of the other patients. There was a charter-boat captain with a skin cancer the size of a toad on his forehead. There was a dancer from the Miami ballet who was getting her buttocks suctioned for the second time in as many years. There was a silver-haired Nicaraguan man whom Willie had often seen on television-one of the contra leaders-who was getting his eyelids done for eighteen hundred dollars. He said the CIA was picking up the tab.

The one Willie liked best was a red-haired stripper from the Solid Gold club up in Lauderdale. She was getting new boobs, of course, but she was also having a tattoo removed from her left thigh. When the stripper heard that Willie was from PBS, she asked if she could be in his documentary and hiked up her corduroy miniskirt to show off the tattoo. The tattoo depicted a green reticulated snake eating itself. Willie said, in a complimentary way, that he had never seen anything like it. He made sure to get the stripper’s phone number so that he could call her about the imaginary program.

The hour passed without a peep from Reynaldo Flemm, and Willie began to get jittery. Reynaldo had said give it to nine o’clock before you freak, and now it was nine o’clock. The halls of Whispering Palms were quiet enough that Willie was certain he would have heard a scream. He asked the ballet dancer, who had been here before, how far it was from the waiting area to the operating room.

“Which operating room?” she replied. “They’ve got four.”

“Shit,” said Willie. “Four?”

This was shocking news. Reynaldo Flemm had made it sound like there was only one operating room, and that he would be easy to find. More worried than ever, Willie decided to make his move. He hoisted the Betacam to his shoulder, checked the mike and the cables and the belt pack and the battery levels, turned on the Frezzi light (which caused the other patients to mutter and shield their eyes), and went prowling through the corridors in search of Reynaldo Flemm.

When the telephone on the wall started tweeting, Dr. Rudy Graveline glanced up from Johnny LeTigre’s gut and said: “Whoever it is, I’m not here.”

The circulating nurse picked up the phone, listened for several moments, then turned to the doctor. “It’s Ginny at the front desk. There’s a man with a minicam running all over the place.”

Rudy’s surgical mask puckered. “Tell her to call the police… No! Wait-” Oh Jesus. Stay calm. Stay extremely calm.

“He just crashed in on Dr. Kloppner in Suite D.”

Rudy grunted unhappily. “What does he want? Did he say what he wants?”

“He’s looking for you. Should I tell Ginny to call the cops or what?”

The nurse-anesthetist interrupted: “Let’s not do anything until we finish up here. Let’s close up this patient and get him off the table.”

“She’s right,” Rudy said. “She’s absolutely right. We’re almost done here.”

“Take your time,” the anesthetist said with an edge of concern. Under optimum conditions, Rudy Graveline scared the daylights out of her. Under stress, there was no telling how dangerous he could be.

He said, “What’re we looking at here?”

“One more pocket, maybe two hundred cc’s.”

“Let’s do it, okay?”

The wall phone started tweeting again.

“Screw it,” said Rudy. “Let it go.”

He gripped the cannula like a carving knife, scraping frentically at the last stubborn colony of fat inside Reynaldo’s midriff. The suction machine hummed contentedly as it filled the glass jar with gobs of unwanted pudge.

“One more minute and we’re done,” Rudy said. Then the doors opened and an awesome white light bathed the operating room. The beam was brighter and hotter than the surgical lights, and it shone from the top of a camera, which sat like a second head on the shoulder of a man. A man who had no business in Rudy Graveline’s operating room.

The man with the camera cried out: “Ray!”

Rudy said, “Get out of here this minute.”

“Are you Dr. Graveline?”

Rudy’s hand continued to work on Reynaldo Flemm’s belly. “Yes, I’m Dr. Graveline. But there’s nobody named Ray here. Now get out before I phone the police.”

But the man with the camera on his shoulder shuffled closer, scorching the operating team with his fierce, hot light. The anesthetist, the scrub nurse, the circulating nurse, even Rudy flinched from the glare. The camera-headed man approached the table and zoomed in on the sleeping patient’s face, which was partially concealed by a plastic oxygen mask. The voice behind the camera said, “Yeah, that’s him!”

“Who?” Rudy said, rattled. “That’s Ray?”

“Reynaldo Flemm!”

The scrub nurse said: “I told you he looked familiar.”

Again Rudy asked: “Who? Reynaldo who?”

“That guy from the TV.”

“This has gone far enough,” Rudy declared, fighting panic. “You better… just get the hell out of my operating room.”

Willie pushed forward. “Ray, wake up! It’s me!”

“He can’t wake up, you asshole. He’s gassed to the gills. Now turn offthat spotlight and get lost.”

The scope of the journalistic emergency struck Willie at once. Reynaldo was unconscious. Christina was gone. The tape was rolling. The batteries were running out.

Willie thought: It’s up to me now.

The baton microphone, Ray’s favorite, the one Willie was supposed to toss to him at the moment of ambush, was tucked in Willie’s left armpit. Grunting, contorting, shifting the weight of the Betacam on his shoulder, Willie was able to retrieve the mike with his right hand. In an uncanny imitation of Reynaldo Flemm, Willie thrust it toward the face of the surgeon.

Above the surgical mask, Rudy Graveline’s eyes grew wide and fearful. He stared at the microphone as if it were the barrel of a Mauser. From behind the metallic hulk of the minicam, the voice asked: “Did you kill Victoria Barletta?”

A bullet could not have struck Rudy Graveline as savagely as those words. His spine became rigid. The pupils of his eyes shrunk to pinpricks. His muscles cramped, one by one, starting in his toes. His right hand, the one that the held the cannula, the. one buried deep in the livid folds of Reynaldo Flemm’s freshly vacuumed tummy-his right hand twisted into a spastic nerveless talon.

With panic welling in her voice, the anesthetist said: “All right, that’s it!”

“Almost done,” the surgeon said hoarsely. “No, that’s enough!”

But Dr. Rudy Graveline was determined to finish the operation. To quit would be an admission of… something. Composure-that’s what they taught you at Harvard. Above all, a physician must be composed. In times of crisis, patients and staff relied on a surgeon to be cool, calm, and composed. Even if the man lying on the operating table turned out to be… Reynaldo Flemm, the notorious undercover TV reporter! That would explain the woozy babbling while he was going under-the jerkoff wasn’t talking about Victoria Principal, the actress. He was talking about Victoria Barletta, she of the fateful nose job.

The pain of the muscle cramps was so fierce that it brought viscous tears to Rudy Graveline’s eyes. He forced himself to continue. He lowered his right shoulder into the rhythm of the liposuction, back and forth in a lumberjack motion, harder and harder.

Again, the faceless voice from behind the TV camera: “Did you kill that girl?”

The black eye of the beast peered closer, revolving clockwise in its socket-Willie, remembering Ray’s instructions to zoom tight on Rudy’s face. The surgeon stomped on the suction pedal as if he were squashing a centipede. The motor thrummed. The tube twitched. The glass jar filled.

Time to stop.

Time to stop!

But Dr. Rudy Graveline did not stop.

He kept on poking and sucking… the long hungry snout of the mechanical anteater slurping through the pit of Reynaldo’s abdomen… down, down, down through the fascia and the muscle… snorkeling past the intestines, nipping at the transverse colon… down, down, down the magic anteater burrowed.

Until it glomped the aorta.

And the plastic tube coming out of Reynaldo’s naval suddenly turned bright red.

The jar at the other end turned red.

Even the doctor’s arm turned red.

Willie watched it all through the camera’s eye. The whole place, turning red.