“Excuse me?”
“Are you the kind of person who can handle the truth?”
“I think so.”
“I bet all your friends say you look good. This is true, yes?”
“They’re my friends, so . . .”
“But I am not your friend. Not yet.” Krystal sighed. “I’m going to be honest with you. Your skin looks bad.”
For a moment, I was stung. Damn friends. Krystal was right. I sighed. “That’s why I’m here. I need to look better.”
Krystal tapped my face. “You have a little too much filler in the cheeks.”
Every dermatologist said this and then went on to inject just a little more.
“And rosacea!”
Yes, I had that as well. So far nothing new here.
But there was good news. “If you do everything I tell you I can fix your face. Your skin will be perfect. I can make it go back in age twenty years.”
Twenty years? That sounded like a tall order and probably not scientifically feasible. But I wasn’t ready to give up yet.
“And you will not need to use Botox or fillers again,” she added.
That jolted me. Botox and fillers are the twin posts on which “looking younger” rests. If there really were some face cream out there that worked like Botox, even I would have heard of it by now.
And then I realized I had.
Queenie had told me about it. How there were these people who got Upper East Side women to buy a whole bunch of products for thousands of dollars and they told them that they’d never need Botox or filler again.
Who would be so stupid as to believe that, I’d asked.
I was about to find out.
“I think I can help you,” Krystal said. She bent over a bit the way younger people do when they think someone is older than they really are and maybe can’t hear that well. My sight line was her cleavage. I quickly raised my eyes and stared into her eyes instead. “You have to promise me one thing.”
“What?” I asked.
“If I tell you what to do, will you do it?”
I hesitated, wondering if I could politely make an escape, but at that moment, the Greek girl threw a cape around my shoulders and a towel was wrapped around my neck and covered with plastic. The stool was turned so that I faced the mirror.
Caped and toweled, separated from my glasses, I was a sitting duck. I widened my eyes and braced for what was to come.
What’s Your Number?
“And now we will begin the treatment,” Krystal said. She worked quickly, covering one-half of my face in a clay-like goop.
When she was finished, she stepped back so I could take a look. She put her head next to mine, like we were two girls in a Snapchat photo.
“We do one side of your face first and then the other. So you can see the results before and after. Exciting, yes?”
“Yes. Very exciting.”
She sat down on her stool across from me. We smiled at each other.