V.

"Which should give you a free-floating septum. We use scissors to finish the job." With dissecting scissors he undermined the septum along its sides and up over the bones as far as the glabella, at the top of the nose.

He passed a scalpel next into one of the incisions just inside the nostril and out the other, and worked the cutting edge around until the septum was separated at the bottom. Then elevated one nostril with a retractor, reached in with Albs clamps and pulled out part of the loose septum. A quick transfer of calipers from mask to exposed septum; then with a pair of straight scissors Schoenmaker snipped off a triangular wedge of septum. "Now to put everything in place."

Keeping one eye on the mask, he brought together the nasal bones. This narrowed the bridge and eliminated the flat part where the hump had been cut off. He took some time making sure the two halves were lined up dead-center. The bones made a curious crackling sound as he moved them. "For your turned-up nose, we make two sutures."

The "seam" was between the recently-cut edge of the septum and the columella. With needle and needle-holder, two silk stitches were taken obliquely, through the entire widths of columella and septum.

The operation had taken, in all; less than an hour. They cleaned Esther up, removed the plain gauze packing and replaced it with sulfa ointment and more gauze. A strip of adhesive tape went on over her nostrils, another over the bridge of the new nose. On top of this went a Stent mold, a tin guard, and more adhesive plaster. Rubber tubes were put in each nostril so she could breathe.

Two days later the packing was removed. The adhesive plaster came off after five days. The sutures came out after seven. The uptilted end product looked ridiculous but Schoenmaker assured her it would come down a little after a few months. It did.

III

That would have been all: except for Esther. Possibly her old hump-nosed habits had continued on by virtue of momentum. But never before had she been so passive with any male. Passivity having only one meaning for her, she left the hospital Schoenmaker had sent her to after a day and a night, and roamed the East Side in fugue, scaring people with her white beak and a certain shock about the eyes. She was sexually turned on, was all: as if Schoenmaker had located and flipped a secret switch or clitoris somewhere inside her nasal cavity. A cavity is a cavity, after all: Trench's gift for metaphor might have been contagious.

Returning the following week to have the stitches removed, she crossed and uncrossed her legs, batted eyelashes, talked soft: everything crude she knew. Schoenmaker had spotted her at the outset as an easy make.

"Come back tomorrow," he told her. Irving was off. Esther arrived the next day garbed underneath as lacily and with as many fetishes as she could afford. There might even have been a dab of Shalimar on the gauze in the center of her face.

In the back room: "How do you feel."

She laughed, too loud. "It hurts. But."

"Yes, but. There are ways to forget the pain."

She seemed unable to get rid of a silly, half-apologetic smile. It stretched her face, adding to the pain in her nose.

"Do you know what we're going to do? No, what I am going to do to you? Of course."

She let him undress her. He commented only on a black garter belt.

"Oh. Oh God." An attack of conscience: Slab had given it to her. With love, presumably.

"Stop. Stop the peep-show routine. You're not a virgin."

Another self-deprecating laugh. "That's just it. Another boy. Gave it to me. Boy that I loved."

She's in shock, he thought, vaguely surprised.

"Come. We'll make believe it's your operation. You enjoyed your operation, didn't you."

Through a crack in the curtains opposite Trench looked on. "Lie on the bed. That will be our operating table. You are to get an intermuscular injection."

"No," she cried.

"You have worked on many ways of saying no. No meaning yes. That no I don't like. Say it differently."

"No," with a little moan.

"Different. Again."

"No," this time a smile, eyelids at half-mast.

"Again."

"No."

"You're getting better." Unknotting his tie, trousers in a puddle about his feet, Schoenmaker serenaded her:

Have I told you, fella

She's got the sweetest columella

And a septum that's swept 'em all on their ass;

Each casual chondrectomy

Meant only a big fat check to me

Till I sawed this osteoclastible lass:

[Refrain]:

Till you've cut into Esther

You've cut nothing at all;

She's one of the best, Thir,

To her nose I'm in thrall.

She never acts nasty

But lies still as a rock;

She loves my rhinoplasty

But the others are schlock.

Esther is passive,

Her aplomb is massive,

How could any poor ass've

Ever passed her by?

And let me to you say

She puts Ireland to shame;

For her nose is retrousse

And Esther's her name . . .

For the last eight bars she chanted "no" on one and three.

Such was the (as it were) the Jacobean etiology of Esther's eventual trip to Cuba; which see:

Chapter Five

In which Stencil nearly goes West with an alligator

I