“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 flesh-color 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 checkup. 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, he then noticed 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 thirty 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?”