At the foot of an escalator at T.F. Green Airport, a band of Jodie Sutphen's relatives unconsciously formed a half-circle behind her, a few feet of distance between them, leaving Sutphen looking like a soloist standing before her backup orchestra. She was the one with the most to gain that evening; she would get her husband back.

Sutphen had not seen her husband's face for one year; technically speaking, he had never seen hers. Never saw her face like this. Waiting to reunite with him, she stared up the escalator and anxiously flicked red fingernails against each other in an unconscious gesture. "I'm nervous," she admitted with a little laugh. She sounded surprised. She teared up when she spotted a stranger in military uniform. Her hands kneaded her granddaughter's shoulders.

She worried about readjusting at home in Warwick with Chet Sutphen after a year apart, and how a war might change the person she married six years ago. And of course there was her surgery, the results of which Chet had seen only in a low-resolution digital picture zapped across the world.

Jodie Sutphen was 45. The skin on her face was lustrous and tight. Most people probably would say she looked younger than her age. Perhaps they would even mistake the little girl clinging to her leg -- 5-year-old granddaughter Alexis -- as her daughter. In the vocabulary of cosmetic surgery, a language sprinkled with euphemisms, Sutphen had had some work done.

For Chet's return, Jodie dressed in a white pantsuit and blazer, mauve lipstick, a little blush and diamond earrings. She looked ready for a May breakfast. For a while she clutched six Mylar balloons, a welcome-home gift for a 48-year-old Army reservist who had been called overseas to help train Iraqi officers to run their own army.

The six-hour cosmetic procedure that Jodie Sutphen underwent four months before Chet's return is called "facial rejuvenation and enhancement." The operation was the latest step in her methodical campaign for youth. "I'm into anti-aging and I think it's a disease that's reversible like any other disease, so I do all these experiments," she said.

She follows vitamin and diet regimens, exercises six days a week, and bathes her skin in infrared light, which is supposed to excite the cells by stimulating their little mitochondria, to rejuvenate them.

She lost weight, from nerves, after Chet went to Iraq with the Army's 98th Division, of Rochester, N.Y. "I felt like my face was starting to sag a little bit. So I thought this was the time," she said, "just to do it; to rejuvenate myself while my husband was away and then surprise him with it." Chet wasn't around to talk her out of it. "This sounds so vain -- I didn't have him here to say, 'Oh, you're beautiful, don't be worrying about that.' So you dwell on yourself and you feel like you're aging. It intensifies because you're by yourself." Old age, she says, "is not a very good fate."

Her surgeon, Dr. Patrick K. Sullivan, is a trim and studious-looking man with a gentle voice and fondness for the way the French artist Auguste Rodin portrayed the human face. "Each surgeon has their own sense of facial shape," he says. Sullivan lived in Paris in the late 1980s and drew inspiration at the Rodin Museum; he enthusiastically recommends Rodin to any artist interested in the human form, whether they work in marble, bronze or flesh. The doctor has an office in Providence.

Sullivan explained that we often lose fat cells in the face with age. Then soft tissue can sag, making floppy jowls and giving a person a tired or sad look. Unlike the traditional yank-and-stitch face-lift, the "rejuvenation" procedure is deeper than skin deep; it mostly takes place in the tissue between the skin and the muscles.

In Jodie Sutphen's case, Sullivan slid sagging flesh -- fat cells and connective tissues -- higher up her cheeks. Using a tiny incision, he harvested a small amount of body fat from near her navel, and then used the fat to "sculpt" her jawline by injecting the living cells in tiny beads beneath the skin around her jaw, chin and mouth. The transplanted cells will stay there, alive, kept fed and happy by the plentiful blood vessels in the face. He worked on her neck, eyes and upper lip. To minimize scarring, he camouflaged his cuts under her hair, behind her ear, inside her lip, in the natural folds of the face.

The results restored self-confidence Sutphen hadn't known she'd lost. She told her husband of the procedure by phone and e-mail. Plastic surgery is nothing he'd consider for himself, but if that was what she wanted, then that was fine with him.

At the airport, seven Navy sailors passed, dressed in black and white. Jodie's hands shook. Her eyes sparkled wet. She squeezed and unsqueezed her granddaughter's hand. She said nothing when the escalator finally lowered a tall and fit Army officer in desert fatigues. His face and scalp were deeply tanned, his teeth seemed to glow white when he grinned. If Chet Sutphen was surprised by his wife's new look, he didn't show it. What he felt at seeing her, he later said, was "just an overwhelming peace."

"She's a beautiful woman and it's her spirit that drives our relationship," he would say. "I don't mean to sound disrespectful to the doctor or disrespectful to my wife's decision but I don't think it was something she needed. I think she looks fresher, I think she looks happier. But I don't know if she looks all that different."

They embraced at the bottom of the stairs and did not seem to notice that the escalator was dutifully lowering other travelers into them. People jumped around them like matadors.

At baggage claim, Jodie rested her head on Chet's arm. Her face was flushed. She let tension burn off in tears she did not bother to wipe. The airline had treated returning soldiers well, Chet Sutphen reported to the family. "They put four Heineken in front of each of us and told us, snap your fingers when you want more."

Granddaughter Alexis clutched Chet around the knee. He rubbed her tiny hand and said, "Every night I looked at the moon and I prayed for you, every single night." Relatives hunted for Chet's luggage. "It's a big black duffle bag, like from Job Lot," he told them.

Chet and Jodie talked about the mild weather. For such an extraordinary day, the scene was comfortable and commonplace. It hinted that for this couple, separation and war, and even age, had not harmed who they are.

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