Nocturnes_ Five Stories of Music and Nightfall - Kazuo Ishiguro [44]
I’d prefer to play in my living room, but our apartment’s so cheaply made the neighbours would start complaining all the way down the hall. So what I’ve done is convert our smallest room into a rehearsal room. It’s no more than a closet really—you can get an office chair in there and that’s it—but I’ve sound-proofed it with foam and egg-trays and old padded envelopes my manager Bradley sent round from his office. Helen, my wife, when she used to live with me, she’d see me going in there with my sax and she’d laugh and say it was like I was going to the toilet, and sometimes that’s how it felt. That’s to say, it was like I was sitting in that dim, airless cubicle taking care of personal business no one else would ever care to come across.
You’ve guessed by now Lindy Gardner never lived next to this apartment I’m talking about. Neither was she one of the neighbors who banged the door whenever I played outside the cubicle. When I said she was my neighbour, I meant something else, and I’m going to explain this right now.
Until two days ago, Lindy was in the next room here at this swanky hotel, and like me, had her face encased in bandages. Lindy, of course, has a big comfortable house nearby, and hired help, so Dr. Boris let her go home. In fact, from a strictly medical viewpoint, she could probably have gone much sooner, but there were clearly other factors. For one, it wouldn’t be so easy for her to hide from cameras and gossip columnists back in her own house. What’s more, my hunch is Dr. Boris’s stellar reputation is based on procedures that aren’t one hundred per cent legal, and that’s why he hides his patients up here on this hush-hush floor of the hotel, cut off from all regular staff and guests, with instructions to leave our rooms only when absolutely necessary. If you could see past all the crêpe, you’d spot more stars up here in a week than in a month at the Chateau Marmont.
So how does someone like me get to be here among these stars and millionaires, having my face altered by the top man in town? I guess it started with my manager, Bradley, who isn’t so big-league himself, and doesn’t look any more like George Clooney than I do. He first mentioned it a few years ago, in a jokey sort of way, then seemed to get more serious each time he brought it up again. What he was saying, in a nutshell, was that I was ugly. And that this was what was keeping me from the big league.
“Look at Marcus Lightfoot,” he said. “Look at Kris Bugoski. Or Tarrentini. Do any of them have a signature sound the way you do? No. Do they have your tenderness? Your vision? Do they have even half your technique? No. But they look right, so doors keep opening for them.”
“What about Billy Fogel?” I said. “He’s ugly as hell and he’s doing fine.”
“Billy’s ugly all right. But he’s sexy, bad guy ugly. You, Steve, you’re … Well, you’re dull, loser ugly. The wrong kind of ugly. Listen, have you ever considered having a little work done? Of a surgical nature, I mean?”
I went home and repeated this all to Helen because I thought she’d find it as funny as I did. And at first, sure enough, we had a lot of laughs at Bradley’s expense. Then Helen came over, put her arms around me and told me that for her at least, I was the most handsome guy in the universe. Then she kind of took a step back and went quiet, and when I asked her what was wrong, she said nothing was wrong. Then she said that perhaps, just perhaps, Bradley had a point. Maybe I should consider having a little work done.
“No need to look at me like that!” she yelled back. “Everyone’s doing it. And you, you have a professional reason. Guy wants to be a fancy chauffeur, he goes and buys a fancy car. It’s no different with you!”
But at that stage I gave the idea no further thought, even if I was beginning to accept