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 ten 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 fortieth-story 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 ten 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 thirty-third 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 centerpiece 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.