As though he had heard this many times, Mr Newman shifted to go, and said, ‘I wore them every night for four weeks, I just can’t stand them.’

‘That’s what a lot of people say till they get used to them,’ the optometrist almost whined. ‘The eyeball naturally resents any foreign material touching it, but the eye is a muscle, and muscles …’

The man’s overbearing manner forced Mr Newman toward’ the door. ‘You don’t have to …’

‘I’m not selling you anything, I’m just saying …

‘I can’t stand them,’ Mr Newman said, shaking his head with real sadness. ‘When I put them in, every time I blink my eyes I get upset. It doesn’t seem natural to be sticking them into your eyes every morning and putting in that liquid every three hours … I … well, it just unnerves me. They seem to move in my eyes.’

‘But they can’t move …

‘Well they do.’ He spoke now with some of the terrible disappointment he had suffered during the weeks he had sat in his room trying to accustom his eyes to the touch of the lenses. He had walked alone at night with them in his eyes and once he had gone to the movies to find out if he could get his mind off them while he had them in. ‘I even went to the movies wearing them,’ he was saying, ‘I tried everything, but I just can’t take my mind off them when I’ve got them on. I mean you touch your eyelid and there’s no sensation under it. It … it unnerves me.’

‘Well,’ said the optometrist, closing his palm over the tiny cups and lowering his hand, ‘you’re the first one with that reaction.’

‘I’ve heard of others,’ Mr Newman said. ‘If these things ever get so millions of people use them you’ll find out there are people who can’t bear them.’

‘Well, enjoy your glasses anyway,’ the optometrist said, walking him to the door.

‘Thank you,’ Mr Newman said and opened the door.

‘See?’ the optometrist laughed, dropping one of the contact lenses to the floor. ‘Bounces like a ping-pong ball.’ He stood pointing at the lens which had bounced and was clattering to a stop on the floor.

Luckily he found a seat on the subway. It would have been beyond his strength to stand all the way to Queens tonight, In his spasm of excitement the odor of the packed passengers, to which he was peculiarly sensitive, would have sickened him. Even seated he felt weak. The new glasses lay in his pocket like a small living animal. As though racing with the homeward rush of the train he kept trying to imagine an alternative to wearing glasses, but the closer he came to his station the more inevitable became the realization that without them he would soon find himself unable even to leave his house. To relieve his anxiety he tried to summon up the image of the faceless woman in his recurring vision of happiness, but she faded as soon as she appeared and all he could see clearly and most constantly was the mirror over the sink in his bathroom.