What would you say if I shaved off my mustache?" Agnes, who was on the living room couch flipping through a magazine, laughed and replied, "That might be a good idea."

He smiled. Small islands of shaving cream sprinkled with little black hairs were floating on the water's surface in the bathtub, where he had been lingering. His beard was heavy and grew back quickly, which meant he had to shave twice a day if he didn't want to have five o'clock shadow. Upon waking, before his shower, he quickly performed this task in front of the mirror, as a series of mechanical gestures, without ceremony. In the evening this unpleasant chore became a moment for relaxation, he'd be careful to use the shower to run the bathwater, so the steam wouldn't cloud the mirrors surrounding the tub. He'd prepare a drink, kept within arm's reach, then lavishly spread the shaving cream on his chin, going back and forth with the razor, making sure not to come too close to his mustache, which he would later trim with a scissors.

For better or for worse, this evening rite had an important place in his daily equilibrium, like the one and only cigarette he allowed himself after lunch, ever since he'd stopped smoking. Since the end of his adolescence, the calm pleasure that he drew from this ritual hadn't changed, his work schedule had even accentuated it, and when Agnes affectionately made fun of the sacred aspect of his shaving sessions, he answered that they were, in fact, his form of Zen exercise. It was the only time he had left for meditation, self-knowledge, and the spiritual world, given his trivial but consuming activities as a young, urban professional. "Yuppie," Agnes would chide, tenderly mocking him.

He'd finished, for the time being. With half-closed eyes and all of his muscles relaxed, he scrutinized his face in the mirror. It amused him to exaggerate his expression of misty beatitude, then to change his look into efficient and deter- mined virility. A trace of shaving cream stuck to the corner of his mustache. He'd only talked about shaving it off as a joke, the way he sometimes talked about cutting his hair-usually fairly long and combed back-very short. "Very short? How disgusting." Agnes inevitably protested. "Besides, with your mustache and leather jacket, you'd look like a fag."

"But I could also cut off my mustache.""

"I like you better with it," she concluded. Actually she'd never known him without one. They had been married for five years.