The Sphinx

I was born with a nose, ten fingers and toes. I have baby pictures to prove it. I was a handsome baby and even won a beauty contest at age 1. It was a very nice nose, well proportioned to my face. Hereditarily, I come from a family of fantastic noses, if such is ever to be considered. But one doesn't think too much about their nose until they no longer have it. When I was seven, a malignant neoplasm formed in my nasal cavity and to prevent the cancerous tissue from spreading to the rest of my body, my brain especially, a daring young surgeon who looked something like Errol Flynn had his mom drank whisky while pregnant, performed a total rhinectomy. The first of it's kind in the state of Louisiana, they said. They also said in all the papers that he saved my life. He was a hero, according to his colleagues, and his sneering picture was in all the appropriate medical journals. "Dr. Nose," they called him in one such magazine. They never showed my picture though. I learned from a young age that no one wanted to look at me if they didn't have to. Or if they did, it was only because they had a thing for the macabre, the sort of degenerate people who are infatuated by gruesome things. 

This wasn't a time of prosthetics. This was 1962. Kennedy was still alive, man had yet to get to the moon, the Cold War was at its zenith, and there I was amidst all of it without a damn nose on my face. But rather than show the cavernous hole in the middle of my face which would surely subject me to all kinds of merciless teasing, my mom crotched me several masks that I wore everywhere I went. I grew accustomed to the scratchy feeling of fabric on my face. Sometimes I wore those cheap plastic Halloween masks, which my mother abhorred. The ones made in Japan. I was a werewolf in July walking through the grocery store. Or Satan in November at the malt shop. I was every character in the Wizard of Oz, apart from the witch and Dorothy. I was the Lone Ranger for a while. A cat. Zorro. My father didn't seem to care what mask I wore. He always said no one needs a damn nose anyway because they end up poking it where it doesn't belong. He said that it was a useless appendage. He never looked at anyone's face, though. He seemed always to be smoking a pipe and reading a newspaper, watching a TV, or half of him was swallowed by the engine well of some old clunker in the driveway. A Studebaker or a Ford that he would fix up just to sell to some eager high school kid. My father looked like a movie star covered in grease. 

For years there was never a time that I was without a mask. I joined the drama club and I starred in "The Phantom of the Opera" in high school. There was the one moment in the play when I horrified the beautiful girl who played Christine and the audience with my natural countenance. That is what sold the play, our teacher bragged proudly. That moment when my naturally morbid face was exposed. I added some scars for effect, but it wasn't the scars that frightened anyone, nor the liquid latex or my palid complexion. It was the absence of a nose. Something everyone takes for granted. A glorified hood ornament, my dad would say. It was that horrible cave in the middle of my face which was frightening and appalling and shocked anyone who dared to look. Of course, Julie Valentine, who played Christine, didn't fall in love with me for who I was on the inside, nor for my ability to sing, nor to love, nor my kindness. She simply pretended not to be revolted, but had nothing to do with me when the play was over so to avoid any conflict or revoltion. I imagine years later she was probably still frightened by what she saw, rather, what she didn't see. I imagine she had to get therapy. My God, how I loved her.

Fate had been cruel to me, no one could argue. But I was alive so I was told that I had no right to complain. I had everything else I needed. Arms, legs,  a penis, a brain, fingers, toes. And so I didn't complain. I may have sulked a little, or pined for what could have been, but never did I protest to anyone the tacit cruelty of my condition. Yet, sometimes I would cut noses out of magazines and paste them on pictures of me. How handsome I was then. I could have been an actor. I looked liked like Montgomery Clift. I could have been the Homecoming King, for certain, with Julie on my arm. Captain of the basketball team. Won a scholarship to Harvard or Yale. Student body president. With the right nose, a person can do anything.

There are things I grew accustomed to by the time I graduated from high school in 1973. Nicknames were one of them. While most of my classmates didn't even seem to notice me in the mask after a few months, others made a routine out of letting me have it as though the natural order of things obligated them to do so. I was the misfit, after all. The defective lifeform evolution would have to snuff out in someway. I suppose cruelty begets suicide in many cases and cruelty was the Darwinian way of handling me. The nickname that stuck was cleverly contrived out of my actual name of Ted Spinks. It was all too easy. It was too good to not use. They called me Ted the Sphinx. Rather than "Hello" or "How are you?" I got things like, "How flows the Nile today, Ted?" Or "Give my love to Cleo." To be cute they would sometimes just call me "Sphinxy." Kids were cruel, but parents were no better. When I didn't feel up to wearing a mask and was seen in the grocery store or in the park, a mom would invariably advise her staring and nearly petrified child that I was a world-class nose-picker, and that is what would happen to them if they didn't stop picking their nose. 

I was doomed. I suppose that is why I wrapped myself in bandages and went as a mummy that year for Halloween, my last year of high school. No one knew who I was. I suppose that is why I watched movies at the theatre every chance I got. To hide. To laugh about something. Laughter in the dark is bliss. The darkness was my sanctuary. I was everyone's equal then. I was not alone. No one was gazing at me. Everyone was staring at the screen. Arm around their companion. Shoveling popcorn into their mouths with buttery fingers. Slurping sodas through straws. I was just like them for that little while until the credits rolled and the theatre lights came back on. People hated me for how I disgusted them. Or they pitied me, bitterly, for the guilt I made them feel of having it good. Of having no obvious deformity. Of having a nose. 

You could have it worse, someone always said. There is worse things than having a hallway for a nose. You could be like the Elephant Man. Or that kid who came back from Vietnam with no legs. Somehow, that was supposed to make me feel better. It never did. The people they mentioned always had noses and I imagine that somewhere someone was telling them that it could be worse. They could not have a nose. They could be like Ted the Sphinx. And so, when it became evident to me that I was never going to be loved, or that my life would be one lived in the solitude of shame, I shut it all down and turned to books and read and read and read, thousands of books. I received a scholarship to college and degrees on top of degrees and became a doctor by 1982. A reconstructive surgeon. They said they couldn't give me a real nose, so I was dedicated to finding a way of getting one myself. The thought that I would have to operate on myself never really occured to me. But I became so confident in my abilities and my knowledge that it would in no way disway me if I had to. I had nothing to lose, after all. 

When explaining my success, my mother would inadvertently say that Ted always has his nose in a book, unaware of the irony of the statement. As though she were unaware that I had no nose. Had I corrected her, she would have scoffed and said that, "It was only a metaphor, Ted," though I was quite convinced that she didn't know what a metaphor really was, nor who I really was. They say there is no love like that of a mother's love, but in my experience, I don't agree. My mother treated me like a piece of furniture, beloved furniture, but furniture, nonetheless. I was some kind of table that she must keep under a tablecloth. How she would gasp when she saw me without my mask. Even now, a long way from home, I still can recall. I can still hear glass shattering and her shriek. 

I also recall the surgeon who took my nose. He said it was riddled with cancer and that it was an emergency procedure that saved my life. Years later, this vile charlatan committed suicide in a cheap Shreveport hotel when he was sued for medical malpractice and exposed as a fraud. He had performed many other "life-saving" operations, removing arms and legs and penises of patients he duped into believing they had a rare cancer when it could be proven that not a single patient he had treated and operated on actually had cancer. And when I asked my mom, why him of all doctors in Louisiana, and why she hadn't got a second opinion when he said he needed to remove my nose, she scoffed and said that he was so dashing and that she was sure still, despite all evidence to the contrary, that he told us the truth and that I had the malignant neoplasm in my nasal cavity just as he said. But there was no way of proving, one way or another, only suspicion that he cut the nose off of a seven year-old child's face just to get himself onto the cover of a medical magazine and in all the medical digests. I wonder if when he died his house was auctioned off and in some room there were all the parts he stole from people in formaldehyde-filled jars on various shelves. My nose next to a penis. Next to a vagina. Next to someone's perfectly good left foot. 

But I couldn't dwell on it anymore. What's gone is gone, they say. Everything happens for a reason - though that is hard to believe when you don't have a nose. For what reason is there for me to be without a nose, God? So after medical school in Baton Rouge, I moved to New York City, wearing the same mask I wore when I played The Phantom in high school, thinking of Julie Valentine as the train chugged along the tracks. And people stared on the train and they stared in the street, but they didn't know that I had no nose. They probably assumed I was covering some awful scar because their imagination was not as hideous as my reality, at least, so I thought. And I took an apartment uptown and it was a close walk to Central Park and Broadway. And people must have thought I wore the mask because I was a Phantom of the Opera fanatic, which ran on Broadway at the time. But regardless, New Yorkers don't stare at each other. Hell, they hardly notice each other at all, so I relished the relative comfort of quasi-anonymity. 

I was turned down by many prestigious hospitals because of my appearance. They claimed a masked surgeon doesn't evoke confidence in medicine or the institution, so I took a job as a surgeon in a clinic for the poor who didn't seem to mind that I suffered an inoperable condition and that I wore a mask to conceal it. In fact, they seemed to sympahtize with me the way the wealthy and prestigious who were overly-obsessed with image could not, so I was more at home. And after I got settled in at my job, I joined a group on the weekends of people like me. People who were missing things. Various but obvious parts of their body. The morbidly deformed, they could have called us, but they called us something much nicer which made us sound like a playful group of hopeful misfits. 

They didn't make me show them. Nor did I ask to see what was missing from them, if it wasn't already obvious. It was a support group like AA. It was comforting that they were there, like me, having gone through life without something everyone else takes for granted. And I thought that maybe I would fall in love with someone in the group, or who would eventually come along. Maybe the therapist who ran it, who could sympathize. Or Delores who was missing an eye. Or Rachel who was missing both breasts. Or Linda who was missing her vagina. Or Susan, who was the most attractive of them all, even without her ears which had been mauled off by a dog when she was six. The rest of the group were men, boringly missing arms or legs, which is almost stylish, if you ask me. But while the group was uplifting and satisfying, love was not to be. There was no love connection between myself and some commiserating member. 

I spent the next few years operating on people. Making them whole again. I was able to make several people from the group whole again and they thanked me profusely. I gave Angela a new chin and Keith a new pair of lips. I was even able to give Susan prosthetic ears so convincing that no one could tell they weren't hers, she bragged. They always came back for a meeting after they were repaired, so to speak, and they thanked everyone in the group and told us all to keep the faith, and that there are advancements in costhmetic and prosthetic surgery all the time, which I knew all too well. And Keith puckered his lips like a child and Susan showed off her ears and then they were gone, mixed back into the rest of society like they were never different at all. I would have liked to say that I found someone who loved me without a nose, but I never did. In all the coffee shops and diners I sat in my entire life, no one approached me or spoke to me as with any sort of feeling that I could be their companion. Though I was fit and tall and otherwise handsome, that sort of love alluded me. So I settled for a dog who I named Ruth, who didn't seem to notice that I didn't have a nose. 

I found a donor nose in the summer of 1985. I was 30 years-old. It was a perfect nose. It came off a man who had drowned trying to swim across the Hudson River. His family donated his body to NYU where I volunteered and all of his organs and tissues were to be used as they could be used to benefit others. His heart went to Wisconsin and his eyes to Florida. He ended up scattered all over the country and living on and giving others life. I can think of no better purpose than that. 

I would have liked to have performed the surgery myself, never trusting anyone, but it wasn't possible. It would have been too easy for me to have made an error that would have botched the nerves and the fusion of the blood vessels of the donor nose to those of my face. It was much more complicated than most other reconstructive surgeries. So the surgery was performed by Dr. Aya Abasi, who had been a colleague of mine for several years at the clinic. After several hours, I woke from the procedure and I couldn't feel or see anything. My face was wrapped in bandages as it was in the last year of high school at Halloween. I dreamt wild dreams while under the anesthesia. But when it was over, Dr. Abasi smiled as she took off her surgical mask and told me that it had gone as well as it could and there were no immediate or obvious complications. In a few weeks I recovered and I stood in front of the mirror for hours, maskless, regarding my new nose. There was hardly even a noticeable scar and I phoned Dr. Abasi to thank her. She invited me to have drinks at a bar near the clinic and I accepted and got dressed and took a cab to meet her. 

I was smiling the entire way to the bar. I told the cabbie that it was the best day of my life and I over-tipped him so much so that he joked it was his, too. Aya was sitting alone in the bar watching the Mets game. She was in a short gold dress and I realized I had never seen her in anything other than scrubs. She smiled when I came in and stood up and gave me the kind of hug I've always wanted to feel from somebody. The sort of show of affection I had never had because of how people saw me. And I must have given her a suspicious sort of look, though I was smiling as she complimented my looks and how well the operation turned out, because after a few drinks and a while of giggling at me as I wiggled my new nose like a rabbit, she told me something I needed to hear and something I will never forget. 

"For years I've known you, Ted," she said. "But for years we have never been anything more than colleagues. I've tried to talk to you many times. And although it is against my nature, I tried to flirt with you, unsuccessfully so. You've never been receptive to me in that way and I think I now know why. You weren't listening. You weren't feeling. You stopped doing all those things before I met you. We must first love ourselves and be able to give love before we can ever receive it. You cannot give to someone what they are incapable of receiving. I asked you to coffee, to dinner, but you always turned me down. But now that you have a nose, and now that you, in fact, do look much like Montgomery Clift, you are here. But I fell in love with your eyes, Ted. I don't give a damn about noses."

I laughed. I would have cried if it was not such a damn womanly thing to do. So I drank and laughed off the tears and held her hand as she laughed, too. All the while that I had not felt loved, I was loved. But I was so blind with self-pity and doubt that I could not see nor feel it. She was a beautiful woman. Heart and soul. It is so rare for someone to be so beautiful in both ways. And so patient. We were married back home in Louisiana. Julie Valentine owned the bakery in town that baked our wedding cake. She looked at me again like she had in the high school play, mesmerized that my nose looked so real and that I was a successful and handsome New York City surgeon. She apologized with her eyes. But it wasn't her fault. It was mine for allowing people's perceptions of me to change my opinion of myself. 

Aya and I honeymooned in her home country. We met her parents and we were wed there as well in the summer of 1986. In the sands of Egypt. In the shadow of The Great Sphinx. I looked up and smiled at the magnificent creation. Aya took my hand and grinned. "Had you not lost your nose, I never would have known you. We never would have met. You likely wouldn't have become a surgeon, or moved to New York, or got the same job in the same clinic. You wouldn't have been rejected by whoever rejected you, passed over by whoever passed over you. You wouldn't have ever met me. But it was meant to be. And it is the way it should be."

I kissed her there in the shadow of The Great Sphinx. I realized that my magnificent journey to becoming whole again had less to do the absence and addition of a nose than with the psychological acceptance of life as it was and as it now is. I would joke to an almond-eyed child one day, sure as I've been of anything, looking up to The Great Sphinx and warning her, "He was a world-class nose picker. And that is what will happen to you if you don't stop picking your nose!" She will smile and giggle, holding my hand. She will be for she has already been written in the stars. It all is as it should be. It was never any other way, even when I thought it was.