By then, the East River was edged with ice and smoking with mid-January cold. He surreptitiously examined Dr Kim for signs of pregnancy, and was unable to detect any beneath the baggy lab coat. She reached out and touched the nearly invisible scar near his tear duct. "Snug," she said. "Symmetrical."
"Congratulations." "Did you massage?"
"Faithfully. But I notice now that the thin skin under that eye has a crease I don't have on the other side. And both my upper lids are sagging. In the morning they feel like they're resting on my eyelashes. In the mirror I can see them sitting there in more or less random folds, like pieces of wet laundry."
She studied him intently, and rested her fingers on this skin, pressing through the lid onto his eyeball, so that his vision distorted and doubled. "You could do with a tuck," she admitted, "but it is not strictly necessary. You still have undisturbed function." She continued to finger his lids, so that he spoke in spaced accents, like a man under torture.
"It disturbs me," he brought out, "that they are rumpling up like that. I want something that may be too difficult for you."
Her touch changed quality, became tentative. "What would that be?"
"I want my lids to look like yours."
Her fingertips, resting on the inner corners of his eyes, stayed there. He thought he detected a slight tremor. "With an epicanthus?" she asked.
"If possible."
"It would be as you say difficult. The graft would have to come from a very sensitive area. The body has few sites where the skin is so delicate. The inside of the thigh, the - The colour match is never perfect."
"Couldn't you somehow tug the skin that is there into a fold? I feel like a rhinoceros lately, with heaps of extra skin. When I bend over, I can feel my face fall away from the bone. And all that under the chin - couldn't that be tightened up?"
Her fingers thoughtfully moved to his jaw, making delicate adjustments. "It is commonly done," she said, "but it is not as easy as cutting cloth. There is musculature beneath, and nerves and capillaries. It would be a long and strenuous operation." She settled back into a lotus pose, her hands folded, palm up, in her lap. He saw her face not only as a glowing oval but as a piece of seamless tailoring, layers of dermis precisely fitted to cheekbone and jawhinge and gelatinous eye-white.
"It could be several operations," Anderson suggested.
Little frown lines flitted into the smooth space between her eyebrows, and were quickly erased. "It is better for you if it is all done at once. One session, one recovery."
"I can take it if you can," he said, in the lowered, virtually hostile tone in which, with another woman, in other circumstances, he would make a proposition.
Dr Kim straightened in her chair, looked him in the eyes with her liquid, opaque own, and spoke more deliberately than ever. "I want to do it. If you want it done to you. Be aware," she said, "that there can sometimes be loss in sensitivity, even a certain stiffness of expression."
"I'll risk it," Anderson responded. "I hate my face the way it is." He had come to hate, though he did not want to scar their pure relationship with such a confession, the daily facts of life: shaving his face, combing his hair and enduring a haircut, putting himself into pyjamas and bed at night and getting himself out of them, rumpled and sweaty, in the morning. He was weary of the way whiffs of staleness arose to him from his lower regions, and of the way his crowned and much-patched teeth harboured pockets of suddenly tastable decay, as if all the deaths in the newspapers and all the years he had put behind him had been miniaturised and lodged in the crannies of his slimy mouth.
The operation was, as Dr Kim had predicted, arduous - for six hours she stood on her feet, cutting and tugging, injecting this and that section of his face as she moved to it, like a farmer planting her fields. She wore magnifying spectacles above the green paper mask; his face felt tranquil and lunar under her attentions. Even the work on his eyelids seemed to take place at a great anaesthetic distance, though he had rather dreaded it. No graft was necessary; she found as much spare skin around his nose as a puppy has at the back of its neck. When it was over, the two nurses gather around her as if to save her from fainting. He stayed the night at the hospital; the bed was taut and clean.
In the morning, from within his bandages he smiled, stiffly, to see the patients in the waiting-room start at the mummylike menace he presented. Through slits like those of Eskimo sunglasses he saw the East River far below, its black skin broken by the passage of a brimming garbage barge, and, at a faster clip, a tourist cruiseboat, circling the island. The blue-green CitiBank Building, the only skyscraper in Queens, thrust up like a cross. It was spring; the trees were in bud but still transparent; their leafing out would be a process as inevitable and graciously gradual as his own healing and emergence into beauty.
There were several visits weeks apart, during which she removed her brocade of stitches - more painful, oddly, than their insertion - and then a two-month followup. As if they had shared a rapture too keen to be repeated, these appointments were prophylactically cursory, hurried; she was always running late, and the traffic of patients at the clinic approached gridlock. Anderson's bruised and swollen face horrified him in the mirror. The reassurances of his girlfriend - a new one - that he was looking better and better every day meant nothing to him; they were the predictable rote of female flattery, its customary irritating strategems. Only Dr Kim could be trusted to provide him with the cool, unbiased truth. Verity was in her touch.
At his eight-month visit, she studied him from an arm's distance, and slowly pronounced, "It came out well. Your canthi still show, but the lids are very taut. The yellow bruising on the jaw will diminish" - di-min-ish, three even syllables, like a doll talking - "over time, as will the vertical red scars in front of your ears." She leaned forward and lightly stroked them, with bare fingertips. The halves of her lab coat parted, and he saw that she was pregnant again. She handed him a heavy plastic hand-mirror, and said, "You look. You tell me what you see still to be improved. I will go out of the room."
Her rapid rolling gait, in low black heels rather than the universal, deplorable white running shoes of hospital habit, took her out the door, her lab coat floating, her pinned-up hair from behind glistening like a rope of black silk. It was Christmas season, and a little one-piece creche unexpectedly stood on her desk. In the mirror he saw a face Oriental in its impassive expression, its smooth, hardened surface marred only by a few lingering welts. The faded blue eyes were the wrong colour, and his grey hair was gauzily receding, but otherwise he saw little to improve.
He had never been left alone in her office before. He got out of the examining chair, with its bothersome folding footrest, and walked to her desk. The creche was of plastic, but rather lovingly designed, with identical startled expressions on the baby, Mary, Joseph, the sheep, the ox and the shepherds. Next to it were tinted photographs of a toddler and a kindergarten-age child - a boy and a girl, both of mixed race - and an old man. Not old, exactly, perhaps no older than Anderson, but craggy, Caucasian, grinning, big-nosed, rather monstrously bumpy and creased.
"Oh!" Dr Kim's voice behind him sounded girlish in her surprise at finding him at her desk. She regained her level, professional, rather murmurous pitch. "That is my husband." Husbannnd, deliciously prolonged, the very concept come from some far and perfect world. Keeping his back turned, as if to hide his new face from her, Anderson touched his right tear duct. It was still there.
John Updike 2001