Gooood morning. Office of Doctor Eli Zilch.
You don’t end with a questioning tone. This is important. You have to end with an ambiguous lilt, the tone of which is impossible to indicate through punctuation on a page. The lilt substitutes for a question, a can-I-help-you, which, in my opinion, would be too subservient. No, you must lilt. We weren’t taking lunch orders. We were discerning the right kind of client. That was the impression, anyway. Most people able to pay the amount of cash we were asking needed to feel like not just anyone with that amount of cash could get into Zilch’s practice. Needless to say, anyone with that amount of cash could get in, but by the time I was done onboarding them, they would enter the waiting room as if they’d had to slay a dragon.
Zilch loved the drama that I brought to the position. But he also liked making sure we in the front office knew we were his inferiors, and part of that involved mandating things like a standard opening greeting, in addition to the fact that none of us were allowed to read the magazines in the waiting area even if the place was completely empty, or that the Perrier delivery was only for him and we needed to drink from the communal watercooler like cows at a trough. Honestly, I think Zilch enjoyed degrading women a little bit. But about the need for hierarchy and order, he and I were in perfect agreement. And so I brought in my own Perrier and my own soggy copies of People and Redbook from the magazine stand by the side of the toilet at home, even if they were exact doubles of the crisper editions not ten feet from the front desk.
I answered the phone like a pro, communicating with seven short words that I was the gatekeeper to the caller’s new set of life opportunities. I happen to know for a fact that Zilch was able to bump up his estimates at least 10 percent on my trademarked greeting alone. Also, I knew that if I drew out the greeting, I’d have the upper hand with patients. I set the tone for how they were to speak to me. Formal, respectful, protocolled. You needed to do this, because with the Bratvas and their mistresses it was a contest of wills before you even spoke a word.
You had to let the phone ring exactly thrice before you picked up. Anything less and the caller would feel you were desperate. Anything more, unprofessional. On the third ring, you slowly raised the phone from the cradle to your ear and inhaled with an audible mixture of impatience and authoritative leisure. Then you sort of drawled out an exhalation; you had to imagine you were exhaling a wordless but nonetheless extremely textural sound, sort of the way Paul Newman as Brick Pollitt in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof drawls the breath around his i’s in “We’re done with lies and liars in this house.” It’s hard to explain how to inflect a breath. In the acting world, they know what I’m talking about. But in short, you have to believe that you, like Newman, are a Jew playing an exasperated WASP.
Once you’ve inhaled and exhaled, only then do you say,
Goooood morning. Office of Doctor Eli Zilch.
And by then the caller is sufficiently on the defensive. But you can’t let up. Next you need to be unable to find an appointment for six weeks. You can’t get them in sooner even if the caller offers to pay up front. You can’t squeeze anybody in for any reason at all. Dr. Zilch is exceedingly busy. He’s as busy as a Texas oil magnate during an OPEC crisis. You give them the impression that Zilch is right now handling back-to-back beautifications, and these people will have to pay through the nose just for the privilege of waiting their turn. But here’s the thing, and this is why I really considered myself more than a receptionist from the get-go. Once you delay their procedure, then you start flipping pages of your month-at-a-glance calendar, clicking your tongue against the roof of your mouth, communicating that you’re magnanimously brainstorming how to help them with their beauty emergency. Flip, click, flip, click. Then you sigh and realize you have an idea. You don’t have an earlier appointment, but you could offer them a “little boost” to tide them over. “The latest,” you tell them. Sculptra or microdermabrasion, something like that. These procedures changed regularly depending on what the reps brought us. Whatever you have on hand, that’s what you offer them and that’s what “the latest” is.
No patient would imagine this, but it’s the add-ons that actually constitute the bulk of profits for all plastic surgeons. Aestheticians are paid peanuts and don’t need to carry insurance. Ninety-five percent of the profit they bring in goes straight to the office; maybe 3 percent for materials, and 2 percent for the aesthetician’s cut. Whereas the surgeries carry high overheads—more if Zilch had to rent out a room at Lenox Hill to perform them, which he did for anything requiring full anesthesia, which meant that any surgery that wasn’t a simple rhinoplasty (which could be done in “twilight” sleep) involved high insurance buffers and a suite of assistants. Add-ons, as you can see, were the cash cow.
The Sculptra salesperson had given all us front office ladies SCULPTRA™ tee shirts with the words spelled out in rhinestones across our breasts. We wore them to work and—on Dr. Zilch’s instruction—to our aerobics classes, lunches, and parents’ days at school. We were Zilch’s army, he said, and I was especially valuable because of all the contact I had with wealthy former Nazis and royal families in exile. Meanwhile I happened to know that those people had all their surgeries done in Switzerland and sometimes Istanbul, but a faygeleh can hope, and hope Zilch did.
Why don’t you wear a Sculptra tee shirt? I remember one of the front office ladies—probably Renee—once challenged him. Renee smelled of vodka and body odor, which reflected poorly on the entire office. I told her this once and she did not appreciate it.
Look at this face, Zilch said, swimming his hand up in
front of his chin like Vanna White unveiling a letter on Wheel of Fortune. This face is an advertisement for Sculptra. He was pushing sixty, but Zilch had that particular dewy masculinity to which every gay man raised on Rock Hudson and cinematic lighting aspired. He was a strangely robust pink, like when a winter sunset flares over a field of snow. His hair was permanently wet with pomade. He wore only taupe Canali suits and Gucci loafers.
Zilch was always going to Stamford, Connecticut, on the weekends to see his “friend” Alan, who was an insurance salesman at Aetna. Alan came into the office not infrequently to take Zilch to lunch. They seemed to exclusively discuss fashion and real estate with each other, and to ask us front office ladies a lot of too-interested questions about our children. You could tell how desperate they were to seem normal, to discuss our normal lives as if they had anything to say on the matter or could offer any useful perspectives. Sometimes they would mention a niece or a nephew and some cute thing they did, like sass them with the latest Valley girl lingo or win a junior tennis tournament. What Zilch and Alan didn’t understand was that in America the term “uncle” is an honorific backed up by almost no actual relation. It’s not like people still worked farms with extended families all bound together in a unit producing I don’t know what. Wheat? Anyway, an uncle doesn’t mean anything now, and yet you could tell Zilch and his boyfriend considered “uncle” to be one of their important identities.
Zilch and his boyfriend are another example of how lonely gay people are, even if they are rich.
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From Night Night Fawn by Jordy Rosenberg. Copyright © 2026 by Jordy Rosenberg. Published by One World, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
