Conversational topics came and went among the women - Hillary Clinton's likely or unlikely, spunky or ridiculous challenge of Mayor Giuliani in the next Senate race, the hopelessness or hopefulness of the situation in Kosovo, the chemistry or lack of it between Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts in Notting Hill - and at moments Anderson attempted to insert, from within his wimple of sterile paper, his own opinion. "Too skinny," he said, of Julia Roberts. "And he stammers too much."
"When you talk," Dr Kim observed, "it makes all the muscles of your face move."
"I couldn't believe," the instrument handling nurse said, "when I was taking anatomy, how many muscles the face has. Eighty-four, I think the professor said, depending on what you count. I mean, are the throat and eyeball ones extra?"
Anderson felt the surgeon's hands and tools move to the lower lid, a ticklish, twitchy area.
The nurse handling his pulse and blood pressure asked above his head, "Are you tired, Doctor? It would kill me, standing this long on my feet in your condition."
"I never get tired operating," came the surprising avowal. "I totally forget myself." Mysselff. "I could go all night."
"Couldn't you sit on a stool?" Anderson asked gallantly, trying not to move his lips, like a ventriloquist.
"It never works for me," she deigned to answer. "I need to stand, to feel free in my arms." Her round, smooth armmms.
"Most barbers feel the same way," he said. "Standing with their hands up in the air all day, it would kill me."
"A bit more lidocaine," Dr Kim said in a perceptibly sterner voice. "Don't move or say even a single word." She was playing with him, Anderson thought. They were beginning to learn to play with each other.
When they parted - he with fleshcolour bandages dotting his eye socket and she, despite her protestations, wearing shadows of fatigue below her eyes - Anderson wished her well with her accouchement. Accouchement: he prolonged the French nasal seductively. She warned him he would have a black eye for a week and asked him to make an appointment at the front desk for removal of the stitches in one week and for a six-month check-up. The East River, broken into fragments by intervening Manhattan skyscrapers, glistened below. A barge full of orange scrap iron was being nudged toward the sea by two tugs, and its slow black wake was overlaid with the rapidly fanning white wake of a police launch. Next to his tear duct, little prickles of pain were beginning.
She removed his stitches in seven days, humming with pleasure at the beauty of her work, and then nearly a year passed before he saw Dr Kim again. She was still on leave with her baby when his checkup appointment came due, and in a kind of sulk he put off making another. His surgery had been slower to heal than he had expected, oozing for weeks, and an odd bump of gristly tissue on one side of the bridge of his nose was irritated for months by the nosepiece of his reading glasses. When the wounds finally settled, and the red spots blended into his face's patchwork of pink, there was still a new wrinkle - not exactly a wrinkle but a sort of raised tendon, a parenthesis of flesh near his tear duct. Anderson's girlfriend, one of a long and querulous series, thought it made him look slightly evil. When he pointed out this minor abnormality to a newly slender Dr Kim, she reached forward and gently prodded it, not once but several times. "You should have massaged," she said. "But now it may be too late."
"Too late?"
She smiled and reached out again, touching the offending bit of anatomy, and firmly caressed it with a small circling motion. "Like that," she said. "Two, three times a day for 30 seconds."
Her touch numbed his brain, but he clung to reason. "I can't believe that will do much good."
"Try it for six months. Be patient."
"Can't you fix it surgically?"
"It troubles you so? Cosmetically it is very minor, but the operation to change it would not be simple or certain of success." Successs. It was as if her voice were not quite hers, ventriloquistically projected from an ideal world elsewhere.
Anderson edged forward in the examining chair, as when fitting himself to the metal chin rest. "I'd like to try it," he said, "if you're willing."
"The insurance - "
"I have a very generous medical plan," he assured her. He imagined the operation -the fitful pressure of her sheathed fingers, like dancing fairy shoes; the painless sizzle of the cauterising instrument; the blithe topical chatter of the attending nurses; the rustle of the antiseptic paper on his face as he attempted to join in; the rub of her bulging stomach on his skull.
The experience, when it came on its scheduled day, was not quite as he had imagined it. She was not pregnant, the operating room was smaller, and there was only one nurse, who wandered in and out. The procedure this time involved more strenuous tugging and a series of stitches that extended to the verge of the anaesthetic's wearing off. But the intensity of the contact was undiluted. This time, he felt freer to use his eyes, and boldly watched her eyes, upside down in his vision. They appeared to brim from the chalices of her upper lids, underlined by the thin black smiles of her eyebrows. Elongate amber flecks like needles in an emulsion gave her irises a rayed, starry depth as her attention poured through the apertures of her contracted pupils, holes through which the world in all its brilliance passed. Whenever she blinked, the action seemed monstrous, like a crab's mouth.
When it was over, and she lowered the pale-green paper mask, her mouth seemed pleased. She pulled off her mushroom-shaped scrub cap and shook her head so that her hair tumbled free, its thick body squirming with waxy gleams. "It went very well," she said. "It is not easy, to persuade slack tissue to reconform." Reconforrrmmm - the `r's were so throaty and the `m's so prolonged he wondered if she was teasing him. But the professional manner she resumed was impeccable and impervious; she provided solemn instructions to go with the prescriptions she wrote, and a carefully spelled-out prediction as to the course of his healing. "This time, be sure to massage." She demonstrated little circles on the side of her own flawless, straight, taut, matte nose. As she moved, with her low-slung, hurried gait, through the motions of post-op routine, her unbound hair continued to hang and glisten down her back, still releasing, like muscles slowly relaxing, the shape of its coils. "These stitches will dissolve," she said. "Come back in six months."