“You think I couldn’t see from this close?” the woman said. “Knock it off.”
My husband had apparently decided to keep talking to me instead of her. “This is exactly the kind of thing I can’t handle.” He massaged the bridge of his nose with his fingers, looking genuinely pained. “Look, just tell her I feel bad about the spitting, okay?”
“Um,” I started, before the woman could open her mouth. I chose my words carefully to sound as polite as possible. “People often misunderstand him—because of the way he looks—but he’s not the kind of person to spit at someone deliberately.”
“How should I know?” The woman’s expression had grown even more ominous, as though she were trying to squash my husband’s reptile eyes through the power of her gaze. “I assume you’re married. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves, acting like this, and at your age.” She looked at us closely from head to toe.
My husband was staring off over the woman’s head. I looked down at my feet, unable to meet her eyes.
“Where do you live?” she asked.
I told her it was nearby, and the woman grimaced even more. “Give me the address,” she said.
“Our address?” I raised my head in surprise. I didn’t understand how that was relevant.
“Of course. It’s only fair, since you know where I live. There’s no telling what people like you will stoop to otherwise,” she said loudly.
“Really,” I said, entreating, “I assure you, it won’t happen again.” I bowed my head, desperately trying to bring a peaceful end to the situation. But when I looked to my husband, he’d quietly moved himself over to the shade of the boundary wall and was decidedly in spectator mode, as though he were watching TV.
“What do you think you’re doing, trying to sneak away over there?” The woman’s anger seemed to have reached a climax. She put her dustpan and brush down on the ground. “I’ve had enough,” she said, and took her phone out of her pocket. “I’m calling the police.”
“Wait, please. Let me clean it up,” I said, pulling a handkerchief out of my bag and crouching down to the ground. Under the searing sun, the asphalt was as hot as a frying pan over low heat. I found the remains of a gob of phlegm to the side of the utility pole, and wiped it off carefully, collecting it in my handkerchief, then rubbed at the spot repeatedly.
I got up and bowed my head deeply again, asking her to accept my apology. When I raised my head, the woman was staring at me with a blank expression. Flustered by the change in the quality of her gaze, I bowed and apologized yet again. But the woman still wouldn’t respond.
Wasn’t this enough? I was considering getting back down and scouring the area again when the woman quietly said, “Look at yourself. It wasn’t even yours.”
I still wasn’t sure what she meant. She picked up the dustpan and brush. “I’m done with this. Leave it. But don’t come past my house again,” the woman commanded, and then shooed us as if she were chasing away some animal.
My husband had started to walk away. I rushed around the corner after him.
“What a disaster,” my husband said, as though he’d had nothing to do with it. “The old cow had it in for you. Bad luck.”
I looked down at the handkerchief I was still holding in my hand. I had the strange sensation that my body was tangled with my husband’s, or maybe cleaved to it. Until the woman had pointed it out, I had been feeling that the phlegm wrapped in the handkerchief belonged to me.
I looked over at my dawdling husband.
“Oh!” I exclaimed before I could stop myself.
My husband’s features seemed to have slipped down his face toward his chin.
Then, as though reacting to my voice, they hurriedly moved back to their original position.
“What’s the matter, San?” Surprised at my surprise, my husband peered at me. His face was his usual, somehow fishlike face. “What just happened?”
For a long moment I was speechless. Eventually my husband seemed to get bored, and said, “You know, you’re starting to show your age, San.” Then he ambled around the corner and disappeared.
When I paid careful attention, I could see that my husband’s face changed nimbly in response to whatever situation he was in. When we were with people, it stayed looking the way it always looked, keeping up appearances, but once it was just the two of us, the position of his eyes and nose would take on a slightly haphazard placement. The difference was a millimeter or two, an indeterminate change, like the outline of a caricature dissolving and spreading in water.
I started finding excuses to make him look in the mirror when his face was slacking. Hey, you missed a spot shaving, I’d say, or, You should check out that thing by your nose. The moment he faced the mirror, his features, which had been sitting in approximate positions, would snap back into their original arrangement, as if they were lining up for inspection. At first I thought it was creepy, but seeing it every day, I started getting used to it, even finding it impressive.
The only time it still threw me off was when my husband’s features would imitate mine. I assumed it did this because it saved effort to draw on a face that was close at hand. Either way, I noticed a clear pattern in that his features were most likely to become careless while he was watching a variety show with his nightly highball.
I was on my laptop at the dinner table, fresh from a bath, when my husband started talking about how his ex-wife was acting strange.
I finished my nightly survey of potential rival refrigerators up for auction, and closed the laptop.
“How do you mean, strange?”
I’d never asked him not to talk to her, and I’d had an inkling they’d been in contact, but it was the first time he’d brought her up so openly. Before we were married, he’d told me his ex-wife was happily with another man.
“She keeps sending me weird emails,” my husband said, during the next ad break. Over the back of the couch I could see his upper back, which was starting to get fleshy, and the short hair covering the back of his head. This was the one he’d split up with after only two years because he’d gotten tired of not being able to be himself with her. That was definitely different, I thought, than leaving someone because you stopped being attracted to them.
“How are they weird?” I stood up and went to the kitchen to get the barley tea I’d brewed during the day.
“I don’t even know how to describe them.”
“But you said strange. What makes you say that?”
“They’re kind of garbled, I guess.”
“Are you going to reply?” I said.
“I already did.” He was doing something with the TV remote. He said he’d written her back with vague generalities, and she’d responded with an even more incomprehensible message.
“Do you think she wants to get back together with you?” I asked blandly.
My husband said nothing.
Was his face staying in line just now, when he was thinking about his ex-wife? I wondered vaguely as I drank the cold barley tea. Another variety show came on.
I left the apartment to go to the dry cleaner’s and spotted Kitae sitting on the bench in the dog run. She was sitting with her spine straight, neck long as usual, but her back seemed to be missing some of its usual vitality.
I leaned against the fire door and pushed it open to enter the dog run, and she waved at me quietly.
“No Sansho today?” I said, noticing that the ever-present polka-dotted cart was nowhere to be seen.