Whatsizface

Fisher himself is also nice-looking, a handsome man in his early forties. Blue-eyed and chestnut-haired, he has a bit of the early-seventies Aqua Velva hunk about him. I ask him, looking directly at the enviable cleft in his chin, if he's had any work done himself. Very little. A tiny bit of botox between his brows and some veneers on his teeth. He also had his nose done, to correct some football injuries. To my dismay, he is similarly conservative in his approach to others. Of the eight potential patients he saw that day, he refused to take on seven of them. Some were not candidates while others had unreasonable expectations about what plastic surgery can realistically do, even now.

"This is the Dark Ages. This is like 1904," he says. Future generations will be amazed by the inevitable advances, he predicts. For now he is more than willing to allow other doctors to use their patient populations as the guinea pigs for new and experimental treatments. He has not done a penile augmentation, for example ("scary business"), neither does he offer those silicone pectoral or calf implants.

"I want a simple life. All I've got to do is do a good job and tell the truth."

The only reason he agrees to give me unsolicited advice is that he knows I am a writer (indeed, the only way I could get an appointment with two top Beverly Hills plastic surgeons is that they know I am a writer). He remains notably uncomfortable with the charade. "If someone comes in here like this," he pulls his ears out from his head like Dumbo, "and all they want fixed is the mole on their chin, then that's all I'm going to mention." Assured of my thick skin, he eventually allows as how he might "clean some things up" that steal focus from my eyes.

We go into an examining room where he keeps his computer simulator. The process begins with taking two photographs -- the "befores." I look the way I always do, but it's embarrassing to see myself up on the monitor with another person sitting there. My profile looks careworn, simultaneously bald and hairy. My eyes are sunk into craters of liver-colored flesh, and my ear is a greasy nautilus, as if I'd just come from listening to a deep-fat fryer.

Fisher demonstrates his morphing tool by drawing a circle around my chin with the mouse. Pulling the cursor, he extends my jaw out like a croissant. It is a fabulous toy. I want to wrest the mouse from his control and really go to town, giving myself fleshy horns, pointy corkscrew ears. If he would only let me, I would pull out the flanges of my nostrils until they looked like the wings of Eero Saarinen's TWA terminal at JFK. "But your chin is perfect," he says, snapping it and me back to reality. "Three millimeters behind your bottom lip." Instead, he points out how the end of my nose droops down to the floor, while the arch of my nostrils is very high. (I write "too high" in my notebook before realizing that these are my words, not his.) He raises the tip, lowers my nostrils, and then straightens out the slope of the nose itself. It is subtle and aquiline. He then smoothes out the area under my eyes. In real life this would involve the removal of some fat and tightening up the skin. Finally, he points to the small vertical indentation between my brows, just like the one he had before botox. He recommends a small amount of the neurotoxin, just enough to smooth it out without robbing me of my capacity to emote. Of all the features that render me less than perfect, I've actually always sort of been attached to those that lend me an air of gravitas, covering up my shortcomings of character and intellect. I ask if it's all right to leave it as is. "Well," he shrugs, "it's okay if you're playing a lawyer or a judge." Instead, I get him to give me a slight Mick Jagger moue. "I don't like those lips, but I'll let you have them." He plumps up my mouth.

The photographs are printed out, the two images side by side against a dark background with no discernible seam between them. I am a set of twins. My original self seems a melancholic killjoy. His reengineered brother, on the other hand, looks clean and a little haughty. And how about that marvelous new nose! Pointy, sharp, a weapon. Despite that old stereotype about Jewish intellectual superiority, I think I appear cleverer as well ("perspicacious," as my ethnically cleansed self might say). Fisher's instinct about my new mouth was also right on the money. It gives me the beginnings of a snarl, like I've wedged a handful of Tic Tacs in front of my upper teeth.

But even my misbegotten new upper lip cannot dampen my spirits. I step out into the beautiful California dusk to catch a cab with a spring in my step. I'm feeling handsome, as though Fisher's changes were already manifest on my face and not just in the envelope of photographs I clutch. Reality soon sets in. The sidewalk of Santa Monica Boulevard simply ends without warning and I have to dart, terrified, across four lanes of traffic. I cannot find a taxi on the deserted leafy streets of Beverly Hills, and I have to walk all the way back to my hotel. "Good evening," the beautiful young doorman says to me when I arrive, an hour and a half later. He smiles in my direction, but his eyes are looking just above my left ear.

Next Page: The great Jewish immigrant faces of New York

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