Unwifeable(32)

But we kept in touch, and when the opportunity for the free laser comes up, I am excited to try it. In his posh office now, he looks over my chart.

“You’ve had a pectus excavatum?” he asks. “Interesting. Can I see?”

I lift up my dress, and he gets a nice long look at my breasts and the surgery scar from when I was nine.

“Very nice,” he says, and I realize I have just shown my tits for the sole purpose of him wanting to see. I’m there for my ankle. Not my chest.

Pretty soon, he fires up the laser and goes to work on my ankle. It feels like I am being shot, and afterward, I stare down, and a huge red welt appears.

“That’s normal,” he says.

And I nod. But as weeks go by, it doesn’t get any better. It gets worse, in fact, and I think about how much the increasingly ugly tissue reminds me of the pectus excavatum scar he had unnecessarily asked to see.

The scar from my childhood still haunts me.

I was just nine years old when I stood naked for another creepy physician who conducted a full examination, breaking down what was wrong with me.

“Well, do you see right here?” the doctor pointed out to my mom, touching my undeveloped breasts. “Her chest, it’s concave. Now, you wouldn’t want her to be embarrassed when she goes swimming, would you?”

No, no. We wouldn’t want her to be embarrassed about that.

To counteract the very slight chest concavity that no one would have ever noticed in the first place, major surgery was required. In the next few weeks, I was anesthetized and laid out on the operating table, my chest was cut open, the ends of my ribs were removed, and my sternum was broken then straightened out, with a metal bar put temporarily in place.

I look at pictures of myself before the operation and it still blows my mind that this was done so that I could feel better about my body. Pictures of me before the surgery show a twinkling light in my eyes that just went dark.

My surgical scar after was hideous: bulbous, jagged, thick, inflamed, and deformed. It never fully faded. It just grew uglier, hardened and ropy, like I had been soldered back together by a drunk welder’s apprentice.

I’ve learned as an adult: Pectus excavatum surgery is not recommended if you have no symptoms, like decreased lung capacity. Failing the bathing suit competition at the Miss USA pageant is not actually a medical symptom.

“Who did this to you?” I’ve had other doctors say to me since.

I just shake my head when people do. Because I don’t want to talk about it.

Honestly, it wasn’t even the surgery or the ugly scar that fucked me up the most—it was the abandonment that came with it. That first night in the hospital, I was in so much pain, I kept crying out to my mom to comfort me. By that time, she was on heavy drugs for her OCD. She was passed out and couldn’t hear me, no matter how loud I yelled. I just kept calling for her.

“Mom . . . Mom . . . Mom.”

That experience stayed with me, psychically and emotionally. It was such an ugly slash and for the rest of my life, anyone who ever saw me naked seemed to react with this barely contained sharp exhale of disappointment. Like I had an Alien-style creature thumping out of my chest that I hadn’t told them about. “What’s—what’s this?” men would ask, touching it, mildly pissed, filled with buyer’s remorse.

For a long time, I wanted to write up a simple-to-read, handily illustrated pamphlet that explained the situation beforehand so that I would never have to hear that fucking exhale again.

That way, at bars, I could just slide my disclaimer on over: “Hello. We’re enjoying a drink together right now but in the event that you see me naked later, I want you to know exactly what you are in for, because I can’t bear to see the look of disappointment on your face.”

And now my old chest scar has new company. The ankle disfigurement never goes away.



* * *




WHEN VANITY FAIR’S Graydon Carter announces the opening of a new ultra-exclusive restaurant called the Waverly Inn, everyone in New York is abuzz. Press is not allowed to report (which, of course, is a surefire way to gurantee press), so the Sunday editor, Lauren Ramsby, wants me to go undercover.

“I want a nice, great, reported read,” she says. “Not just opinion, but tell readers what it’s like having spent a week there. Do they let in Wall Street VPs for the first seating? Do Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg come every Thursday? Is someone palming twenty dollars on the way in? Really just a fly-on-the-wall thing, but an aggregated, authoritative look at what’s going on.”

I have a week’s worth of expense budget to spend at the Waverly, but it’s seemingly impossible to get a reservation. Even getting the secret reservation number is a challenge. Corynne Steindler, a junior reporter for Page Six, finally hooks me up, but she warns I can’t say it came from Richard Johnson. When I call, a man answers and immediately asks who I am and where I got the number. “I’m a model?” I improvise. “I got it from . . . friends?” He hangs up.

One of the first nights there, I wait at the Starbucks around the corner until I hear from the paparazzi that Gwyneth Paltrow has just arrived. I show up a few minutes later and meet Mackenzie at the bar, where we work very hard to act unimpressed that SNL’s Maya Rudolph is incognito next to us in a bulky sweater and Paul Rudd’s ice-blue eyes are betraying his identity above his thick beard.