Face Value by Kathleen Baird-Murray Page B

had lined up a potentially interesting interview with the thirty-four-year-old hotshot surgeon, who everyone was raving about. Everyone who needed boob jobs and nose jobs and lipo and other bits of body remodeling, that is. Kate had kept her part of the bargain, arriving at plastic surgery central at the required time. (She could tell she was in the right place by the three women exiting the elevator clutching balls of muslin and ice to their faces to quell the droplets of blood from rushed Botox injections. Although, the Jackie O impersonations in the reception area—from her much-loved scarves and shades period—were also something of a giveaway.)
    JK3, as his friends referred to him, according to the press cuttings she’d read, would often delay a whole morning’s appointments if he was captivated by the beauty of the camellias in his garden. He was such a perfectionist that he liked to pick them at the first light of dawn (or so his personal assistant, Aurelie, told her), then lay them flat on specially cooled tissues, from where they would be lowered into a specially made icebox and transported ahead of him by courier to his office. Evidently the camellias were exceptionally captivating this morning. Kate’s mum used to do something similar with flowers when Kate was a kid, but without the couriers and the iceboxes. She’d pick roses fresh from the garden, wrap them in tissue soaked in water, then wrap them in a final layer of foil and make Kate give them to her teacher at the end of term. All the other kids would laugh at such a homemade gift. It was a testament to the wonders of modern therapy that JK3 had clearly exorcised his no-doubt similar childhood experiences and, in the true spirit of California, turned his negative into a positive.
    Not that Kate wasn’t enjoying the waiting time in his office. He had an impressive catalog of before and after pictures she could flick through that weren’t half as gut-wrenching as the programs she’d witnessed on TV with her mum. The afters were good: subtle, yet definite improvements on noses, chins, faces that had given in to gravity, or bodies that had caved in under the pressures of a lifetime of supersizing and crash-dieting. The press-cutting file was weighty, full of interviews mostly dating from his recent TV program, Radical Redux: The Surgeon Who Slims Celebs . They called him the Body Maker. Aurelie had, with just the flick of a few buttons on a remote control, summoned a plasma TV screen to magically appear from behind a wall of fake leather-bound medical journals, so that Kate could watch a DVD of interviews: JK3 and Oprah; JK3 and Letterman. He had also written his own books, not exactly DIY plastic surgery, but how to get the best from your surgeon ( Chapter 3: Always Pay Your Bills on Time! This man is operating on your face, don’t make him angry! was an especially memorable gem.) But two things—a large, leather-bound book on Michelangelo on his top shelf that didn’t seem to be a disguise for a plasma TV screen, and a signed photo of JK3 standing next to Pamela Anderson on prominent display—told Kate all she needed to know: JK3 was a jerk.
    Kate had researched that studying to be an aesthetic plastic surgeon in the United States took eight years. From then on, if you were any good you’d train at a public hospital putting accident victims back together, then transfer into the more lucrative private practice, usually just as your wife (archetypal Beverly Hills blonde, with torpedo tits and her first face-lift at age twenty-nine) had her first Cesarean birth and called him JK4. You’d attend the odd conference, cultivate some liaisons with distinguished older surgeons, and wait until one of them retired so you could take over their practice. To build a reputation as Hollywood surgeon of choice, you’d start frequenting movie premieres, throw lavish parties, and develop a celebrity following (current kudos was to find a celebrity politician,