Claire-Lise Kieffer
A life well lived
‘This one here would go quite nicely with your face,’ the surgeon was saying. ‘The Olivia Williams one.’
Julia held the iTab away from her, the software overlaying the Olivia Williams wrinkle onto her temporarily smooth skin. She looked distinguished, kind. Shallow, evenly distributed horizontal forehead wrinkles and a few seedlings of elevens—or ‘glabellar lines’, as the surgeon called them—between her eyebrows. She frowned thoughtfully—now that she could—and her camera reflection frowned with her. When she relaxed her face, the wrinkles resumed their place unaltered. She swiped for the next filter.
‘Oh this one, I like this one!’ she exclaimed. Abundant laugh wrinkles, a line on the bridge of the nose and two high, parallel elevens gave her a regal appearance.
‘Ah, the Meryl Streep.’ The surgeon’s tone was cautious. ‘A lot of our clients like the Meryl, but as I mentioned, I would recommend something that goes with your unique facial attributes. As you have a—lovely—rounded structure, something like the Olivia Williams or even the Hilary Clinton we saw earlier would suit you best.’
Julia puckered her mouth, and her faux-reflection drew a weave of vertical cheek lines that, admittedly, looked out of place. She swiped again, but she had viewed all the filters and was back to No Filter. The first part of the procedure that had smoothed her face had gone well. Even what she called her “bitch line”, the deep fold at the top of her nose that used to give her a permanently angry expression, had been completely resorbed. All these years, she had borne it like a cross made out of small but ever-accumulating failures: the times when she had forgotten her sunglasses, scolded the children, or tried to remember if she had locked the car, or worried about money, or increased her speed when walking past a homeless person, pretending to be absorbed in concerns of her own, or had a cigarette. These things don’t make you a bad person, they shouldn’t matter, and yet there they had been, branded into Julia’s face.
Now it was time for the second part of the treatment: the addition of her final, improved, tastefully aged visage. She remained motionless, staring at her temporary face for a long while. The surgeon didn’t prompt her; she charged by the hour. Suddenly, Julia seemed to become aware that she was not alone.
‘If only we could just look like this, am I right?’ she said and the surgeon smiled politely. The room was silent for a few more minutes. Only a hint of the hot city whirred outside. The room smelled disinfectant-clean. Julia had always liked the smell in medical clinics, its sanitary sanity.
‘I mean, doesn’t it sometimes feel like this dictatorship of the natural…’ Julia’s voice trailed off. ‘Why couldn’t I just stay wrinkle-free, is all I’m saying.’
‘Of course, that is an option,’ the surgeon said in a tone out of which judgement had been removed, well—surgically. She herself was sporting what Julia guessed was a light Alec Baldwin—short, angled elevens, wavy forehead lines. The signature mouth-corner brackets. It wasn’t what Julia would have gone for, but she supposed that, being in the trade, the surgeon wanted something edgy.
Julia pulled herself together. What was she thinking? Of course, she wouldn’t be one of those horrid wrinkle-free women. Her friends had warned her that this would happen. “When you see your baby face, Jules, you’ll be all like – bye, I’m outta here,” Sandra had said. Janet had concurred. They had met at Hebe’s wine bar, their regular, to show off their new frowns and laughter. ‘But stick to it, don’t you dare come back a bimbo!’ Andrea hadn’t had the procedure, though she was thinking about it too. They all had to admit it suited Sandra so well. No-one said: ‘you look ten years younger’—why not just slap a woman in the face? – instead, they all agreed: ‘Oh, you have aged super gracefully!’
Julia hadn’t expected to be quite so taken with her face devoid of all wrinkles. She really did look ten, if not twenty years younger, and when you think about it, what’s really so wrong with that? For the first time, she empathised with the wrinkle-free women she and her friends made fun of. Her cleaning lady Maria, for one. Maria with her slouchy cardigans, rounded spine and black, visibly dyed, hair with the long, white roots. And then the smooth baby face on top of that. What do these women think, that you can just slap it on and it will fool people? Or were they trying to save on the procedure, which cost a couple of grand, but less without the artificial wrinkles? You can alter your face, but your posture, voice, your whole attitude will give you away. It’s jarring. It is simply not done. She wouldn’t be able to face her friends, even.
Julia reminded herself that she had always successfully toed the thin line between looking her best and looking fake. At forty, when she had had her breasts done, she had gone up just one cup to a tasteful C, and she didn’t have them brought up to her neck, no, only a “credible lift”, as her then-surgeon had said. Now at fifty was not the time to let go of her lifelong ethos.
‘All right. I’ll go with the Olivia Williams, please.’ Julia reclined into the chair. ‘But could you go easy on the elevens?’ Hers was a life well lived, and soon she would have the wrinkles to prove it. AQ