“If you like.” She went over to the front door, picked up the pears and apples and carried them to the sink. Listening to the sound of running water and the clinking of dishes, he tried to concentrate on the ugly electrical sockets and the angular telephone buttons, but the memory of her pubic region only intensified in his mind. His head throbbed with the image of her buttocks crowded with colored petals, overlying that of the man and woman having sex, with which he’d covered page after page of his sketchbook.

When she came and sat down next to him, carrying plates of the peeled, sliced fruit, he had to bow his head so that she wouldn’t see the look in his eyes.

“I don’t know if the apples will be any good…” He trailed off.

After a while, she broke the silence. “You know, you don’t have to come and visit me.”

“Oh?”

“The doctor said I wasn’t to do any kind of job where I would be left alone with my own thoughts,” she continued in a low voice, “so I’m thinking of trying somewhere like a department store. I even had an interview last week.”

“Really?”

This was surprising. “Would you be able to put up with a wife who was always like that, zoned out on psychiatric medication every day, completely dependent on you for her livelihood?” This was something Mr. Cheong had said to him during one of their phone calls, slurring as if he were drunk. Now it turned out that prediction had been off; she wasn’t as far gone as all that. Turning his upper body toward her, though with his eyes still fixed on the ground, he finally got to the point.

“How about working at your sister’s store instead?” As he carried on talking he felt his arousal subside a little. “Ji-woo’s mum pays a decent wage—you know what a good person she is—and she’d much rather see it go to you than to a stranger. She’s your sister, which means you can trust each other, and she’d like for the two of you to spend more time together. Besides, the work wouldn’t be as tough as at a department store.”

Slowly she turned to face him, and he saw that her expression was as serene as that of a Buddhist monk. Such uncanny serenity actually frightened him, making him think that perhaps this was a surface impression left behind after any amount of unspeakable viciousness had been digested, or else settled down inside her as a kind of sediment. He reproached himself for having used her as a kind of mental pornography, when she simply had an innocent wish to be naked. All the same, he was unable to deny that the image of her naked was now stamped indelibly on his brain, burned into him like a brand.

“Have some pear.” She held the plate out to him.

“You have some too.”