When we left Dr. James J. Reardon last issue he had just siliconed four breasts and put a bent female nose to the grindstone. Now, at lunch, he is resecting excellent rack of lamb: gourmet postoperative care for himself. I wonder what he’d charge to carve a duck. Reardon’s face is simple, sketchy: like those quick courtroom drawings they show on TV. There are upstart, large teeth: they pressure the lips and give him, well, a handsome but rather oral look. His glasses magnify coming and going: each pupil is goggled, discrete: sent under separate cover, so to speak. 1 notice the eye-bags beneath, which Reardon, sometime soon, will have cut and reduced by a colleague. He is young: forty. Brash as a port-wine stain. Reardon, you see, is one of those plastic surgeons who advertise.
“Some think we’re preying on the public: bringing in people who don’t really need the surgery. Or didn’t even know they needed it until they saw something in the paper. It’s obviously nonsense. Cosmetic surgery has been available for a long time. We’re just making it known to the public.”
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