Free Mimi by Lucy Ellmann Page A

always a tricky area, is now subject to scrutiny. It took all the plastic surgeons of Manhattan to keep up with the midriff demand: muffin-top lipos were selling like hot cakes, and this poor kid’s social life might dry up if I didn’t disguise her scar.
    Cheryl burst in as planned.
    “Cheryl,” I said sternly. “Don’t just barge in when I’m with a patient.” What a ham. This was a well-rehearsed routine of ours, designed to make the patient feel more important. Except, this time it was for real: the police had arrived. So I booked Miss Back Talk in for a pre-surgery checkup and joined the cops, who looked none too thrilled by their nebulous task. They were already skeptical about finding any evidence, and probably despised me for making them fill out forms. But they took a statement from me at least, and talked briefly to the dad in an empty consulting room. He gave me the gimlet eye as he left with them for further questioning at the station, with his family trailing along behind. I wondered if anything would come of it. But so what if they couldn’t prove anything? At least the guy had had a scare.
    As a result of my firing Jed, calling in the cops, and using a cane, Cheryl’s crush had now taken on a note of fawning . I teased her a bit, saying, “Ah well, Cheryl, not everything can be cured with a nip and a tuck, you know. Sometimes we have to call in the big guns.” Then, in a cloud of glory, left for my lunch with M. Z. Fortune, my corpsing advisor. I’d never been so thrilled to escape the office.
    In the taxi, my thoughts drifted back to Rosemary. I hadn’t known what I was doing. I ignored all the bad omens, persevering against the odds (and the eggs ) in service to my hare-like lust, blithely copping a feel in front of the German Expressionist paintings she took me to see, or horsing around under hailstorms at the beach in Montauk, where Rosemary’s troubled parents had a summer place. I’d been impressed that Rosemary played the cello, until I realized she wasn’t just out of tune but couldn’t count to save her life. The poor girl had no sense of rhythm at all! She could sort of disguise her difficulties when playing Bach solo cello suites, since she was on her own with them (though she played them like exercises—no sign of any exquisite melancholy). But you have to be able to count if you want to play Beethoven and Brahms cello sonatas: I would try to accompany her on the piano but she’d always come in too early or too late and then bust out crying.
    She had no notion of time. Very late for assignations too. In the end, I suspect the late and the punctual will never really hit it off. Opposites attract, sure, and couples sometimes compensate for each other’s deficiencies, but a few similarities come in handy too. The tidy and the messy just grate on each other’s nerves until one of them dies . You need at least some agreement on vital issues, like a shared interest in wine, and how much of it to drink a night, or beach versus museum vacations, or what time to go to bed. And punctuality. (I also insist that my girlfriends share my nostalgia for the labels on Epicure cans, those polished, inedible-looking fruits set against a black background: exquisite melancholy! The images may look unappetizing, but Epicure cans have seen humanity through many tough times.)
    Rosemary’s mom was an alcoholic; it was the dad I was fascinated by. For a man whose wife spent half the year in the Betty Ford Clinic, he seemed remarkably affable, and very welcoming towards me . In response, I exhausted myself trying to show him what a good guy I was. I worked hard as a start-up surgeon more for Rosemary’s father’s benefit than my own or Rosemary’s. I tried to please her; I tried to please him. Somehow it wasn’t enough to impress a girl, I wanted to impress a man too! Then, just when I had her dad where I wanted him, coming at me with the cigars and the bonhomie, Rosemary with her usual lack of