Anderson, something of an idler and a playboy, had spent too much time in the sun; these sunny hours, as his years on Earth passed 50, came back to him in the form of skin cancers, on his face and elsewhere tender and overexposed. His ophthalmologist, a conscientious man with a Bronx accent, was troubled by a keratosis near the tear duct of his right eye - "If it invades, you'll be crying for lack of tears" - and sent him to a facial plastic surgeon, a Dr Kim, who turned out to be a woman, a surprisingly young Korean American who even in her baggy lab coat evinced considerable loveliness. She was relatively tall, nearly as tall as Anderson, yet with the low waist and sturdy bow legs and rounded calves of Asian women. She moved with a kind of suppressed athleticism, her gestures a little swifter and larger than the moment demanded, so that her lab coat fell open and the white halves of it swung. She spoke a perfectly natural, assimilated American English, except that there was a soft, level insistence to it: the image came to him of a moon buggy, determinedly proceeding across uneroded terrain, in conditions of weak gravity. Her face was lean, widest at the cheekbones, and in colour a matte pallor, a tinged ivory, of a smoothness that made him ruefully conscious of his own spotted, blotched, scarred visage. Yet she was a doctor, he need not be embarrassed. He could repose under her examination as an infant does beneath a mother's doting gaze.
She examined him first with her naked eyes, then with a loupe, and lastly with an elaborate mechanism in which he rested his chin while lenses clicked in and out and arcs and spots of light overlaid his half-eclipsed view of her face, posed inches from his in a darkened room. He could hear her breathe, when he held his own breath. Finally she pushed the apparatus between them away and announced that, yes, she would operate, and saw no major difficulty. There were several types of lesion, actually, in the inner part of his socket and along his lower lid, but they could be excised without complication. "It looks as though you have at least a millimetre of unaffected tissue between the basal-cell carcinoma and the tear duct."
He was still seeing spots and fireflies. "What about the other eye?" he asked, less out of curiosity than a desire to hear her talk some more. There was a curious drone underlying her enunciation, a minor undertone which faintly persisted when the sentence was concluded.
"The other eye seems fine. No problems." Problemmmss.
"Isn't that odd, that one eye would and the other wouldn't, after being exposed to the same amount of sun? Or do you think I always scrunched up one eye, like Popeye?"
She smiled at so unscientific a query, and did not deign to reply. Instead she filled out a number of slips, which she gave Anderson as he left. When he stood beside her, he took pleasure in the inch or two that he was taller than she. Her black hair was parted in the middle and gathered behind into a pinned-up ponytail, like a handle to an exquisite jug.
"The front desk will make the appointment for the surgery," she said. "Only a light breakfast that morning, and not too much liquid. It will take a total of two hours." Hourrsss. She left the room ahead of him, hurrying to the next appointment, in another examining chamber, with that flighty, gliding walk of hers, her round calves gleaming below the swirling lab coat.
He could hardly wait - the carcinoma was marching toward the tear duct, for one thing - but the soonest appointment the front desk could give him was 10 weeks away. "Dr Kim is a very busy girl," the middle-aged receptionist told Anderson, having read his infatuation at a glance. Dr Kim was as priceless a part of the clinic, Anderson saw, as its 40th-storey view, this sparkling morning, of the East River and the twinkling low boroughs beyond.
She was pregnant. This fact had been invisible to him during their consultation, and even 10 weeks later it had to be drawn to his attention, by one of the attending nurses in the operating room. "I must say, Doctor," the nurse said, while Anderson's face was being prepped with Betadine and framed in antiseptic paper, "nobody would dream you were in your 33rd week. When I was that far along, I felt like a bumper car. I was a house."
There were two nurses, and the three women talked over Anderson's head as if it were a centrepiece of wax fruit. "The first one was like this, too," the doctor said, with her thrilling offhand thrum. "Nothing showing, and then bang." Bannggg.
Anderson tried to raise his head, to see Dr Kim's belly, but she was behind him, upside down in his vision, a glinting syringe in her hand. "It is very important," she told him, "that you keep your head still. Do you mind having your arms strapped down?"
"I don't think so. Let's try it."
"Some people panic," she explained.
Anderson had had facial surgery before, but not stretched out on an operating table. He had sat in a padded chair which tipped back while a preppy young man, wearing a white shirt and necktie as if boasting how small a role blood played in his procedures, carved away at this or that small keratosis. The only pain came with the injection of the painkiller, especially in the upper lip or the bridge of a nose. The tear ducts would overflow. But Dr Kim's needle, preceded by a swab smelling of cloves or cinnamon, slipped in imperceptibly. A nurse buckled light straps across his chest, and he relaxed into a bliss of secure helplessness.
The three women rotated around him. One of the nurses periodically took his pulse and inflated the blood-pressure cuff, while the other fed instruments to the surgeon. Dr Kim's bulging belly, now that he was aware of it, rubbed against the top of his head, or one of his ears, as she bent over and confidently broke his skin with tools he could scarcely imagine, since they approached his face along the periphery of his vision. There was a knife shaped as acutely as a sharpened pencil, but also a kind of exquisite corer, whose cut he experienced as a gentle punch, and a cauteriser, producing passing hisses and whiffs of smoke. The touch of her fingers in their latex gloves felt like fairy feet shod in slippers sewn from the skins of baby moles. There were fits of dabbing, to staunch the flow of blood, and sometimes a pinch of pressure and a tugging as the stitches in their several sizes, colours, and degrees of solubility were inserted, pulled taut, and closed with a knot that involved a rapid, mesmerising twirling of the angled forceps.