American Wife

Kathleen Hicken. Debbie, who was at that point Charlie’s director of communications, said, “Between us girls, have any of you ever considered plastic surgery? I was in Ann Taylor the other day, and those dressing-room mirrors are not forgiving.”

“Debbie, you’re young still!” I said. She was about a decade behind Charlie and me—this would have meant she was then in her early forties—so I wanted to think this.

“See, but I keep hearing how easy the procedures are these days,” Debbie said. “I’m not talking about, you know, implants or a nose job, just—” She held her hands up on either side of her face and pulled back. “Eliminate a few wrinkles,” she said. She turned to me. “Would you do it?” (I should have known—oh, I was a terrible dupe, but I didn’t get it.)

“Doesn’t a face-lift take months to recover from?” Kathleen said.

Debbie shook her head. “Maybe it used to be like that, but doctors have made a ton of advances. If I schedule an appointment, Alice, will you come with me for moral support?” This struck me as an odd request, because I wasn’t close to Debbie. We knew each other well, she was part of Charlie’s inner circle, but she and I never spent time together one-on-one.

“I think I’ll pass, but I’ll be curious to hear what the doctor tells you,” I said. “I’ll bet you anything he turns you away for being far too youthful.”

That, it turned out, was Phase One. Phase Two was Jadey calling and saying, “I’m not supposed to tell you this, but Hank wants you to get a face-lift, so I’m supposed to suggest we go to Florida and get them together, like it’s my own idea, but then I thought about it, and I’m kind of intrigued.”

“Hank wants me to get a face-lift?”

“I know it’s real manipulative—”

“And he called you?”

“Debbie called me.”

“I’ll call you back in a second,” I said, and when I’d hung up, I dialed the direct line to Charlie’s office. His secretary Marsha answered, saying, “He’s meeting with the Board of Regents right now, but I’d be happy to—”

“Please tell him it’s urgent,” I said.

When Charlie picked up, he said in a breathless voice, “Ella—” and I said, “No, she’s fine, nothing bad happened, except apparently, Hank is going around telling people I need a face-lift.”

“I warned him you wouldn’t like this.”

“You knew?”

“It’s for TV, Lindy, that’s all. You know I think you’re beautiful, but he has the idea that when we’re on more of a national stage—”

“Are you planning to have a face-lift?”

“I don’t have to tell you there’s a double standard. Listen, they should have been more straightforward with you—”

“They?”

“We—we should have. Hank’s logic is that if you want to do it, do it now. You can’t have that kind of surgery in the middle of a campaign.”

“Where is this coming from? Did Hank run a poll on my appearance?”

Charlie hesitated, and I said, “Is he there with you now?”

“He’s in with the Regents, which is where I should be. It’s your decision, Lindy. I’m sorry if you’re offended. You’re still the prettiest of all my wives.”

“This is incredibly insulting.”

“When I get home tonight, I’ll show you how attractive I find you. Now I’ve gotta go before I get a woody just thinking about it.”

I suppose I was offended not only because the thought of Charlie’s staff discussing my appearance—and finding it lacking—was humiliating but also because the suggestion reinforced my own self-doubt. Although I’d never been insecure about my looks, it hadn’t escaped my attention that the lines at the corners of my mouth and across my forehead were deeper, that the skin on my neck was not as smooth as it had once been, and that when I appeared on television, these flaws were more obvious than in person. Still, I hadn’t thought the situation required more than some experimenting with makeup.

For three days I fumed, on the fourth day I had my assistant Cheryl go buy a book about plastic surgery, and on the fifth day I went to see a doctor. He was not the one who performed the procedure; a month later, Jadey and I did go to a clinic in Naples, Florida, to a surgeon reputed to be the best in the field, and afterward, we stayed for two weeks at a secluded house overlooking a canal. Unfortunately, the setting was wasted on us because we weren’t supposed to swim or expose ourselves to the sun; Cheryl, who was thirty, had accompanied us, and we encouraged her to drive to the beach and even snorkel one afternoon. Meanwhile, Jadey and I lay around reading, watching television, complaining, and making fun of ourselves. We’d been instructed to keep our heads elevated— Jadey was more bandaged than I was, though we were both simultaneously numb and tender, and my face became quite puffy—and six days after the procedure, we went to have the stitches removed from the incisions at our hairlines (before the operation, a nurse had complimented me on how beautifully my haircut would hide any mild scarring). Jadey and I made a pact to never tell anyone—our husbands knew, and Cheryl, but we’d say nothing to our other sisters-in-law or to Priscilla or our children. It was thinking of Ella, actually, that gave me pause: What a negative role model I would be if she knew, how vain and unaccepting of the aging process. Conveniently, however, she was away at Princeton, and the story we told everyone else in Madison and Milwaukee was that we were taking a painting class, an intensive study of watercolor. (“What do we do when they ask to see our work?” I said, and Jadey said, “We say it’s being shipped back.” As it turned out, no one ever asked.)

Especially in the first few days after our twin surgeries, Jadey and I looked so banged up that we questioned, out loud and at regular intervals, whether we’d made a mistake, and it crossed my mind (this part I did not express aloud) that we were like characters in a fairy tale, narcissistic hags grasping at our lost youth. But we weren’t, in the end, punished for overreaching; even a week after the surgery, the bruising had faded, the swelling had shrunk,