My Buddy and Botox

A few years ago, a close friend wrote a comic novel that attracted considerable media attention. Because the book dealt tangentially with the subject of cosmetic intervention ("gateway" drugs -- collagen and such -- as opposed to the hard stuff, by which I mean adjustments involving a scalpel), a reporter who showed up to cover the splashy book party quite reasonably asked my friend if she herself had sampled the goods. "Some Botox," she allowed cautiously.

I learned about this admission the next day, when it was mentioned in a gossip column. Why I was so shocked I cannot tell you. My friend spends most of her time in Los Angeles, for god's sake. To be of a certain age in L.A. -- she's just past 50 -- and not to have had some roadwork done is as likely a situation as belonging to the von Trapp family and being tone deaf.

My distress at having learned about my buddy and Botox after the fact precisely mirrored my reaction when, during our sophomore year at college, I overheard my best friend, Jill, talking about having lost her virginity the previous weekend. Why hadn't she told me? Was she going to tell me? Hadn't we agreed that we wouldn't go all the way without discussing it with each other first?

The overriding emotion in both cases -- making over and making out -- was abandonment mixed with betrayal. My friends had moved on, had become people I didn't quite know anymore. I could have hardly felt more adrift if they'd suddenly decided to change their names.

I have tried to keep quiet about my feelings, not so much because I'm embarrassed about them (although I am, a little) and not because they make me sound holier-than-thou (which I guess they do, and probably more than a little), but because revealing them draws me into relativistic debates from which there is no escape and certainly no victory.

"Do you use moisturizer?" my friend Laura asks by way of an opening salvo.

"Of course."

"Do you have your legs waxed?"

"Yes."

"Your eyelashes colored?"

"Well, yes."

"You've had electrolysis?"

"For years. You went too. Remember?"

"And what about facials? Don't you get facials?"

"Occasionally."

"Well," she says in a triumphant, case-closed, we-already-know-what-you-are-now-we're-just-dickering-about-the-price tone: "How is what you do any different from getting Botox?" Well, of course it is different. I'm trying to make the best of what I've got, not turn back the clock.

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