So there I stood, looking at him sleeping as soundly as always. One bare foot stuck out from under the covers at a strange angle—so strange that the foot could have belonged to someone else. It was a big, chunky foot. My husband’s mouth hung open, the lower lip drooping. Every once in a while, his nostrils would twitch. There was a mole under his eye that bothered me. It was so big and vulgar-looking. There was something vulgar about the way his eyes were closed, the lids slack, covers made of faded human flesh. He looked like an absolute fool. This was what they mean by “dead to the world.” How incredibly ugly! He sleeps with such an ugly face! It’s just too gruesome, I thought. He couldn’t have been like this in the old days. I’m sure he must have had a better face when we were first married, one that was taut and alert. Even sound asleep, he couldn’t have been such a blob.

I tried to remember what his sleeping face had looked like back then, but I couldn’t do it, though I tried hard enough. All I could be sure of was that he couldn’t have had such a terrible face. Or was I just deceiving myself? Maybe he had always looked like this in his sleep and I had been indulging in some kind of emotional projection. I’m sure that’s what my mother would say. That sort of thinking was a specialty of hers. “All that lovey-dovey stuff lasts two years—three years tops,” she always used to insist. “You were a new bride,” I’m sure she would tell me now. “Of course, your little hubby looked like a darling in his sleep.”

I’m sure she would say something like that, but I’m just as sure she’d be wrong. He had grown ugly over the years. The firmness had gone out of his face. That’s what growing old is all about. He was old now, and tired. Worn out. He’d get even uglier in the years ahead, that much was certain. And I had no choice but to go along with it, put up with it, resign myself to it.

I let out a sigh as I stood there watching him. It was a deep sigh, a noisy one as sighs go, but of course he didn’t move a muscle. The loudest sigh in the world would never wake him up.