Maxine got up from the table. "Will you excuse me a minute? I've got to make a call."
Eppstadt caught the fire in Maxine's voice.
"No lawyers, Maxine. Please? We can do this in a civilized manner." Maxine didn't reply. She simply stalked off between tables, snarling at a waiter who got in her way. Eppstadt ate a couple of mouthfuls of rare tuna, then put down his fork. "It's times like this I wish I still smoked." He sat back in his chair and looked hard at Todd. "Don't let her start a pissing competition, Todd, because if I'm cornered I'm going to have to stand up and tell it like it is. And then we'll all have a mess on our hands."
"Meaning what?"
"Meaning ... " Eppstadt looked pained; as though his proctologist was at work on him under the chair. "You can't keep massaging numbers so your price looks justified when we all know it isn't."
"You were saying I'd been a gold-mine for Paramount. Just two minutes ago you said that."
"That was then. This is now. That was Keever Smotherman, this is post-Keever Smotherman. He was the last of his breed."
"So what are you saying?"
"Well ... let me tell you what I'm not saying," Eppstadt replied, his tone silky. "I'm not saying you don't have a career."
"Well that's nice to hear." Todd said sharply.
"I want to find something we can do together.
"But ... "
"But?"
Eppstadt seemed to be genuinely considering his reply before he spoke. Finally, he said: "You've got talent, Todd. And you've obviously built a loyal fan-base over the years. What you don't have is the drawing power you had back in the old days. It's the same with all of you really expensive boys. Cruise. Costner. Stallone." He took a moment, then leaned closer to Todd, dropping his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. "You want the truth? You look weary. I mean, deep down weary." Todd said nothing. Eppstadt's observation was like being doused in ice-cold water. "Sorry to be blunt. It's not like I'm telling you something you don't already know."
Todd was staring at his hand, wondering what it would feel like to make a fist and beat it against Eppstadt's face; over and over and over.
"Of course, you can have these things fixed," Gary went on chattily. "I know a couple of guys older than you who went to see Bruce Burrows and looked ten years younger when he was finished working on them."
Still idly contemplating his hand, Todd said: "Who's Bruce Burrows?"
"Well, in many people's opinion he's the best cosmetic surgeon in the country. He's got an office on Wilshire. Very private. Very expensive. But you can afford it. He does it all. Collagen replacements, lifts, peels, lipo-sculpture ... "
"Who went to see him?"
"Oh, just about everybody. There's nothing to be ashamed of: it's a fact of life. At a certain age it's harder to get the lovehandles to melt. You get laugh-lines, you get frown lines, you get those little grooves around your mouth."
"I haven't got grooves around my mouth."
"Give it time," Eppstadt said, a touch avuncular now.
"How long does it take?"
"I don't know. I've never had any of it done. If I went in there, I'd never get out again."
"Too much to fix."
"I think it's bad taste to jump on somebody else's self-deprecation, Todd. But I forgive you. I know it hurts to hear this. The fact is, I don't have to have my face out there fifty feet high. You do. That's what they're paying for." He pointed at Todd. "That face."
"If I was to get something done ... " Todd said tentatively, "about the lines, I mean?"
"Yes?"
"Would you make Warrior then?"
He had opened the door to Eppstadt's favorite word: "Maybe. I don't know. We'd have to see. But the way I look at it, you haven't got much to lose getting the work done anyway. You're a heart-throb. An old-fashioned heart-throb. They want to see you kick the shit out of the bad guy and get the girl. And they want their heart-throb perfect." He stared at Todd. "You need to be perfect. Burrows can do that for you. He can make you perfect again. Then you get back to being King of the Hill. Which is what you want, I presume."
Todd admitted it with a little nod, as though it were a private vice.
"Look, I sympathize," Eppstadt went on, "I've seen a lot of people just fold up when they lose their public. They come apart at the seams. You haven't done that. At least not yet." He laid a hand on Todd's arm. "You go have a word with Doctor Burrows. See what he can do for you. Six months. Then we'll talk again."
Todd didn't mention his discussion about Doctor Burrows to Maxine. He didn't want the decision process muddied by her opinion. This was something he wanted to think through for himself.
Though he didn't remember having heard of Burrows before, he was perfectly aware he was riving in the cosmetic surgery capitol of the world. Noses were fixed, lips made fuller, crow's feet erased, ears pinned back, laugh-lines smoothed, guts tucked, butts lifted, breasts enhanced. Just about any piece of the anatomy which gave its owner ego problems could be improved, sometimes out of all recognition. Traditionally of course, it had been women who were the eager and grateful recipients of such handiwork, but that had changed. One of the eighties muscle-men, who'd made a fortune parading a body of superhuman proportions some years before, but had begun to lose it to gravity, had returned to the screen last year looking more pumped than ever, his perfect abdominals and swelling pectorals -- even his sculpted calf muscles-surgically implanted. The healing had taken a little while, given the extensiveness of the remodeling. He'd been out of commission for five months -- hiding in Tuscany, the gossip went -- while he mended. But it had worked. He'd left the screen looking like a beaten-up catcher's mitt, and come back spanking new.
Todd began by making some very circuitous inquiries, the sort of questions which he hoped would not arouse suspicion. The word came back that the procedures were far from painless. Even legendary tough guys had ended up wishing they'd never invited the doctors to mess with them, the process had been so agonizing. And of course once you began, if you didn't like what you saw you had to let Burrows make some more fixes; wounds on wounds, pain on pain.
But Todd wasn't discouraged by the news. In fact in a curious way it made the idea of undergoing the procedures more palatable to him, playing as it did both into his machismo side and a deep, unexplored vein of masochism.
Besides, was there any pain on God's green earth as agonizing as reading Daily Variety and finding that once again you weren't in its pages? That other actors -- names sometimes you'd never heard of -- were getting the scripts, the parts and the deals that would once have dropped into your lap as a matter of course? There was no pain as sharp or as deep as the news of somebody else's success. If it was an actor older than himself that was bad enough. But if it was a contemporary -- or worse, somebody younger, somebody prettier -- it made him so crazy he'd have to go pop a tranquilizer or three to stop himself getting morose and foul-tempered. And even the happy pills didn't work the way they had in the old days. He'd taken too many; his body was too used to them.
So: what to do, what to do?
Should he sit on his slowly-expanding ass and start to avoid the mirror, or take the bull by the horns and get an appointment with Doctor Burrows?
He remained undecided for about a week. And then one evening, sitting at home alone nursing a drink and flipping the channels of his sixty-inch TV, he came upon a segment from the telecast of last year's Oscar ceremony. A young actor, whom he knew for a fact was not one of the smartest bunnies in town, was receiving his third Oscar of the night, for a picture he had -- at least according to the credits -- written, directed and starred in. The latter? Well there was no disputing that. He was in every other frame of the damn picture, back-lit and golden. He was playing a stuttering, mentally unstable poor boy from the Deep South, a role which he claimed he had based on the life of his father's brother, who had died tragically at the hands of a lynch mob that had mistaken him for a rapist. It was all perfect Oscar-fodder: the ambitious young artist bucking the star system to tell a tale of the human spirit, rooted in his own family history.