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"  Need I remind you that February 14 is upon us\u2014the holiday celebrating true love and lovers like Tristan and Isolde, Romeo and Juliet, Captain Smith and Pocahontas, Brad and Angelina, Netflix and me? The day when De Beers diamonds declare &amp;quot;forever&amp;quot; and I drink all de beers in de fridge while decapitating pictures of ex-lovers who decamped for more down-to-earth types\u2014the ones who dress in Patagonia and Crocs, balance their checkbooks, cook with an oven, obey Suze Orman, thank God for Spanx, and carry dog-eared copies of Eat, Pray, Love, in the margins of which they&amp;#039;ve scribbled, &amp;quot;So true!&amp;quot; Call me bitter. I&amp;#039;ve earned it. A recent example: I had lunch last week with Paul, an ex who, when asked what he found most attractive in his wife\u2014a woman he married after leaving me for a second time\u2014replied, &amp;quot;She&amp;#039;s agreeable.&amp;quot; True story.  I bit my tongue and took comfort in the fact that I&amp;#039;m still a size four and that I have, according to my gynecologist, the vagina of a teenager.  As if on cue, my cell phone rang: Barry Manilow&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;Copacabana.&amp;quot; Ah, Michael!  &amp;quot;I love you,&amp;quot; I answered.  &amp;quot;Honey!&amp;quot; he screamed. &amp;quot;I love you, too!&amp;quot; Michael is the love of my life. A ringer for the actor Rupert Everett, and every inch as gay, he has a mad crush on my doorman. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m coming to New York next week!&amp;quot; he announced. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve got orchestra seats to Xanadu\u2014and you&amp;#039;re my dream date!&amp;quot; He&amp;#039;s seen it twice already.  I smiled across the table at Paul and said sexily, &amp;quot;Isn&amp;#039;t it a little early in the day to be asking me what I&amp;#039;m wearing?&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Ha!&amp;quot; Michael chortled. &amp;quot;I get it. I&amp;#039;m your new boyfriend. You are too much. Which loser are you catching up with now? Sit on your hands when the check comes. And no fucking for old time&amp;#039;s sake.&amp;quot;  Outside, Paul kissed me goodbye on the cheek. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m glad you found someone who makes you happy,&amp;quot; he said.  And I&amp;#039;m glad you found someone who agrees with you, I almost said\u2014but opted instead for, &amp;quot;It was nice seeing you.&amp;quot;  He turned around as he walked away, wishing me a happy Valentine&amp;#039;s Day, smiling the smile that I&amp;#039;d found most attractive about him. Small ouch.  I walk down the street behind a pair of lovers, their hands clasped. How does it happen that two hands attached to separate bodies reach for each other and intertwine? Such an intimate act, hand-holding. I&amp;#039;d always taken it for granted.  Valentine&amp;#039;s Day, a holiday in honor of a man whose Latin name, Valentinus, rhymes with penis and sounds a little too much like a social disease. While some speculate that St. Valentine was martyred for refusing to give up Christianity, others claim it was chocolate he couldn&amp;#039;t kick\u2014hence the custom of giving sweets to your sweetheart, or the one you wish would sleep with you. I myself am willing to trade my underwear for a box of champagne truffles from La Maison du Chocolat. Easy? Yes. Cheap? No. But willing to share.  My cell rings: &amp;quot;Mission: Impossible.&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s Emily, ELLE&amp;#039;s director of beauty. I&amp;#039;ve been expecting her call. &amp;quot;Agent Em?&amp;quot; I whisper, turning full circle on the sidewalk to be sure no operatives are trailing me. &amp;quot;Yes, Agent M,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to go undercover as a hand model to investigate the latest procedures in hand rejuvenation.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;I accept.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;I must remind you that\u2014&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;I know, I know: `Should you be caught or killed, Editor M [that&amp;#039;s Myers, Roberta Myers] will disavow any knowledge of your actions.&amp;#039; Got it.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Good. Further instructions await you at Fred&amp;#039;s, table 16. Good luck and Godspeed.&amp;quot;  Love this assignment. Fred&amp;#039;s is the restaurant at the top of Barneys, which is having a sale.  Though I&amp;#039;ve never seen her before, I recognize the hands immediately. Her campaigns include Revlon, La Mer, Harry Winston, Coach, Waterworks, Boucheron, and Sally Hansen\u2014it&amp;#039;s Christina Ambers&amp;#039; fingers that you see gracing the boxes, bags, rings. Recruited from Manhattan&amp;#039;s Parts Models agency, Ambers, a 12-year veteran, is here to teach me her trade so I can pull off my hand job.   &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s not something you can do just because you have nice hands and no knuckles,&amp;quot; says the half-Filipino, half-French beauty, inspecting my stubby, wrinkly, knuckly mitts. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s a skill. You have to be very patient. You have to stay as still as a still life. Sometimes I have to hold a position for three or four hours. Back in the day before digital, all those close-ups? If you breathed, you threw off the focus.&amp;quot; But what if my undercover work involves a commercial?   &amp;quot;My first TV spot was for K-Y Jelly,&amp;quot; Ambers says, adding hastily, &amp;quot;Just my hands. The direction that was given to me was, `Your hands are filling in for other body parts, so try and make it look that way.&amp;#039; How do I make it look sexy? I have to create emotions with my hands.&amp;quot;  She picks up the pepper grinder. &amp;quot;I play with the product,&amp;quot; she adds, feeling the object up and drawing appreciative smiles from the men at the next table. &amp;quot;This would totally obscure the product,&amp;quot; she says, holding it upright in her fist. &amp;quot;The client wouldn&amp;#039;t like that. A lot of the time, a client doesn&amp;#039;t know what they want until they see it. So you have to show it to them.&amp;quot;  She holds the grinder upright in her palm and gently wraps the fingers of her other hand upward around it from behind, leaving the front exposed. &amp;quot;See? It&amp;#039;s the angle. It&amp;#039;s not something everybody can do. I think a lot of photographers like the fact that my hands speak. And no attitude! The last thing people need is, like, attitude from a hand model!&amp;quot; Speaking with my hands, I applaud her lesson.  &amp;quot;I wish you could see my feet,&amp;quot;  Ambers says, sighing. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m known as the Heidi Klum of foot models.&amp;quot;  The waiter brings the check folded around a business card: Sadick Dermatology, 911 Park Avenue. My investigation destination!  I enter the stark, all-white office with its modern furniture, futuristic air, and plasma TV tuned to Martha Stewart and find a camera crew waiting.  &amp;quot;Hello, I&amp;#039;m Paula, from Fox News,&amp;quot; says a pixie brunette, extending her hand. &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re one of the models, right? I&amp;#039;m the producer.&amp;quot; She introduces me to the other models, Julia (&amp;quot;Today&amp;#039;s my sixty-first birthday, and I&amp;#039;m getting laser work done&amp;quot;) and Danielle (&amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m young, so I&amp;#039;m just here for a preventative&amp;quot;). I introduce myself as Holly: &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m a middle-aging secret agent on a secret mission to secretly investigate hand fillers.&amp;quot; Which may or may not have blown my cover.  If you were to guess how old Neil Sadick, MD, is, you&amp;#039;d be wrong, even if you were right. A cosmetic surgeon, he&amp;#039;s ageless in a way that not only defies time but explanation. Sadick&amp;#039;s smooth, clear, poreless visage is a testament to his skills\u2014either that, or he&amp;#039;s drinking Oil of Olay. I ask him to guess my age by looking at my hands. &amp;quot;Fifty-two,&amp;quot; he says, nearly a decade off. I can hardly keep from hurling one of my steel ninja stars into his skull. But Agent Em says I&amp;#039;m not supposed to do that anymore.  And it&amp;#039;s a good thing I didn&amp;#039;t, because Sadick was about to take 20 years off my hands. &amp;quot;Some of aging is genetic, but your hands have aged faster than your face due to ultraviolet light\u2014sun damage,&amp;quot; he explains. &amp;quot;People are careful to use sunscreen on their face, but they tend to neglect their hands, which are equally exposed.&amp;quot; As we grow older, our hands also lose volume, leaving tendons and veins more pronounced.  To spin back the hands of the clock, Sadick pulls out a syringe of Radiesse, the latest in plumpers. Averaging $800 to $1,200 per syringe and touted for its long-lasting effects (a year or more), Radiesse is a mellifluous marketing moniker for calcium hydroxyapatite\u2014microspheres of calcium that not only fill but also encourage collagen growth in the area.  Sadick empties one syringe into my left hand and one into my right. Ever adventurous and eager to test my torture threshold, I had only one hand numbed with lidocaine cream. Painwise, there isn&amp;#039;t much difference between the two. It doesn&amp;#039;t so much hurt as feel strange. &amp;quot;In each syringe we mix a very small amount\u20140.2 ccs\u2014of lidocaine,&amp;quot; explains Sadick&amp;#039;s assistant, Laura. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s the protocol to make patients more comfortable.&amp;quot;  The doctor makes about five injections per hand. It&amp;#039;s bizarre to watch the Radiesse balloon beneath my skin into marble-size balls that are then massaged into the hand to fill out the hollow areas between the tendons. At the same time, the process lessens the ropey appearance of my veins. Faster than a high five, the backs of my hands morph back into the hands I had in high school. Even the jaded cameraman is impressed. My fingers go untreated because &amp;quot;they don&amp;#039;t have the same vein pronounciation or volume loss,&amp;quot; says Laura. &amp;quot;For patients with fine wrinkling, we do Fraxel lasering of the hands and fingers to alleviate the crepeyness.&amp;quot;  I skip out of Sadick&amp;#039;s office, glad-handing strangers on the street. Eager to draw attention to my plumped paws, I go to Minardi Salon for its new manicure, the Double Entendre, so called because the process involves painting two colors on each nail, which gives the illusion of length and looks crazy-cool. I choose navy and silver, my high school colors, and walk home royally waving them dry.  The next morning, the swelling begins. I&amp;#039;m sorry, but &amp;quot;Your hands are going to blow up to the point where you will be in extreme discomfort&amp;quot; was not on the What to Expect list. Immediately, I&amp;#039;m dialing Dr. Sadick in a full-on I&amp;#039;m screwed panic because I&amp;#039;m either having an allergic reaction or Paula the Producer is actually a Russian agent packed with a peck of pickled Putin-poisoned peppers to pick me off. Damn this cold beauty war!  Sadick instructs me to come in, pronto. He holds my swollen hands. &amp;quot;Perfectly normal,&amp;quot; he says, squeezing them until I see ninja stars. &amp;quot;This will go down in a week.&amp;quot; Is it just my super-sensory spyglasses, or does the doctor look completely annoyed with me?  The swelling lasted for 10 days, during which my hands felt arthritic and I was unable to do any cleaning or laundry or writing of my story, though I was still somehow able to click on Perez Hilton and change the batteries in my vibrator. With so much time off my hands, I lunch with Mark Seltman, a professional hand reader with a big magnifying glass who looks at my lifeline and says, &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;ve got a long life ahead of you.&amp;quot; Whew! Dodged another bullet.  I ask Seltman, the author of Chiromania: Your Life Is in Your Hands, to tell me of the love he sees written in them. &amp;quot;See all these lines here?&amp;quot; he says, pointing to a series in the ball of my thumb. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s where your riches in love are. You have a collection of great friends.&amp;quot; Indeed, and I&amp;#039;ve slept with half of them.  &amp;quot;Were you ever married?&amp;quot; he asks. &amp;quot;If you haven&amp;#039;t been married, I wouldn&amp;#039;t be surprised if you married someone you already know.&amp;quot; He flips my hands over. &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re ripe and ready for it,&amp;quot; he deduces, adding, &amp;quot;This little finger, the way it curves in? The equivalent of Pinocchio&amp;#039;s nose is an inwardly curving pinky finger. That&amp;#039;s the trickster in you.&amp;quot;  Or the spy. Two weeks later, I undergo my debriefing with Dennis Gross, MD, a Manhattan dermatologist.  &amp;quot;Your hands look great now,&amp;quot; Gross says, examining them, but adds, &amp;quot;You have to be careful injecting the backs of the hands because if you hit a blood vessel or if there&amp;#039;s a lump that starts to encroach upon a blood vessel, it may cause a throbbing and swelling in the hands. I&amp;#039;m not talking about the short-term event that happened to you. This is a theoretical concern that if you start to impair circulation, swelling could be long-term.&amp;quot;  Which is why you should think twice before ridding yourself of those veins running across the backs of your hands. &amp;quot;One of the complications of sclerotherapy\u2014injecting the veins to collapse them\u2014is swelling, because circulation is very dependent on those veins that you see,&amp;quot; Gross says. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s not like spider veins in the legs. The very things you think you want to hide are functional vessels. They have a purpose. So screwing them up, blocking their ability to flow blood back into the body from the hands, can lead to swelling.&amp;quot;  I step out into the early evening of Manhattan in February. Holding out a renewed hand, I hail a taxi home, but like so many men, they pass me by, already taken. Riding the bus up Third Avenue, I feel sorry for my sorry self\u2014no one to hold my lonely hands.  And then I see him, in front of my apartment building, holding a red-beribboned box of chocolates. My heart swells, my eyes well....  &amp;quot;Happy Valentinus!&amp;quot; Michael says, hugging me, all warm in the frigid air.  &amp;quot;Chocolates for me?&amp;quot; I ask, jumping up and down.   &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s dinner and Xanadu for you, my dear,&amp;quot; Michael says, taking my hand in his. &amp;quot;The chocolates are for your doorman.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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