Anyway to programmatically hide a jQuery UI button?

Question

I'd like to do something like this, with jQuery UI Button:

$button.button();
// ...
$button.button('hide');
// ...
$button.button('show');

Similar to how enable/disable works. Hiding and showing the button manually ($button.hide(); $button.show();) is resulting in some really screwy formatting with the jQuery UI CSS...

Am I missing something simple here?