Spitz was improving Jenny Julian's face when she brushed her fingers across his carmine velvet mask. For ten years he'd been her outlaw cosmetic surgeon, yet she'd never seen his face. The red velvet was a stage curtain between Spitz and the straight, unmodified world.
He smoothed the mask with a nervous hand. "I thought you weren't coming back," he said.
"The mole, just there, under my eye," she told him.
Spitz sighed, like a sleepy child. "This is the last time."
"No," Jenny said. She turned and he pulled her back with gentle pressure on her cheek.
"You said you'd found someone."
She bit her lip. "So I did," she murmured.
Spitz continued his work. "There's only so far you can go without people knowing," he said. Jenny felt the warm drip from the pipette as he applied new tissue. "Even someone like me has limits."
She opened her mouth. "Could you lengthen my incisors?"
Spitz's eyes, like dark olives, blinked through the mask. "That's bizarre."
"Something dangerous." Jenny smiled.
"You're hunting again, aren't you?" Spitz looked past her shoulder, his gaze fixed somewhere on the blank gray wall of the treatment room.
"I'm merely hunting the Renaissance and Reformation. I think I'll visit the Norton Simon."
Spitz peeled his latex gloves with a snap. Again, the childish sigh. "You were beautiful when you came in," he said. "I don't say that to everyone. To anyone."
Jenny crossed her legs and rested her chin in the palm of her hand. "I was not," she said. "I had a hideous pug nose."
"If I told you it was you all along, would you believe me?" He stepped toward her, then hesitated. The crepe rubber soles of his shoes squeaked on the linoleum floor.
She put her arms behind her head and eased back in the soft beige leather chair. "Lengthen my incisors," she said.
His shoes squeaked again as he walked away. "Tomorrow," he said. "I've got a full schedule."
"You always had time for me before," she called and lazily began to climb from the chair.
Spitz turned. He inclined his head slightly, the mask harlequin-like, and she imagined that underneath his face was a skull, no flesh at all, just those shiny dark eyes set in dry bone.
"You're like my hairdresser, always wanting to dictate the cut," she said.
"You don't have a hairdresser," Spitz replied.
"I did have one."
"That was then, this is now."
"Wasn't that from a book?"
Spitz chuckled and his larynx bobbed up and down. "You read that, too? You're showing your age." Then, he paused. "Jenny, you did say it was the end last time."
"You can't give it up, can you?"
He shook his head and for a moment, she thought he might peel off his mask.
"I'm worried about you," he said.
"My bills are always paid," she told him. She rose and strode by him, giving a brief squirt of pheromones from the implanted glands along her collarbone. She heard his small groan which meant either frustration or enjoyment, and she smiled, though she knew that she should not have dosed him.
"Tomorrow at nine," he told her. "Don't be late."
"Ah, another time, Spitz. I'm off to the Norton Simon," she said. "Perhaps I'll climb the Burghers of Calais."
In a room down the hall, a woman cried, "no, no, no, no, no." Sometimes, the procedures done by Spitz and his colleagues were painful.
"Where taste and artifice meet in pain," Jenny said as she exited the treatment area. "Isn't that a good advertisement?" Each time she visited Spitz, she tried to offer a new slogan, preferably one with masochistic overtones. Usually, he would laugh, but he merely turned away, so Jenny laughed for him.
The two auburn-haired receptionists laughed with her, but in Jenny's heart, there was only cold emptiness. Spitz hadn't wished her happy hunting. He hadn't wished her anything at all.
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