‘Maybe I’ll stop waxing.’ I nudged him, smiled, assumed a pose that would usually prompt him to say, ‘Aren’t you cute.’

He shrugged. ‘If you like.’

He switched off the lamp.

I laid my head back on his chest, then grasped one of the newly sprouted hairs. When I yanked it out, he gasped.

The Heart-throb (2)

That film did have one fan. My mother. She tracked down a bulk lot of DVD copies on eBay for $4.99.

‘There he is! The heart-throb!’ she’d say to Tom when we visited. She’d then cuddle him vigorously until he found a way to eel out of her grip.

She liked to make us watch the film with her. She had, she told us, many favourite lines; she proved this by speaking along with Tom’s character from start to finish.

‘I’m a dreamer, Veronica. And I think you’re a dreamer too,’ said my mother, blowing smoke rings. ‘You’re with me in every word I say and every breath I take.’

She closed her eyes.

‘Come with me, and we’ll be the people we were always meant to be.’

Alexandre Boulet Must Die

‘You should have warned me.’

‘You could have read the book.’

‘I know, I meant to, but – God, Tom, it’s a little graphic, don’t you think?’

I’d brought him flowers, a big bouquet of white blooms. (‘Nothing too feminine,’ I’d told the florist.) It was the night I saw The Hair, and we were back in his dressing room after the show. There were little explosions of blood all over his frilled shirt.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back to life tomorrow. And the next night. And for the Saturday matinee. I’m resurrected eight times a week.’

I didn’t say anything else but wondered what it must be like, to run out of luck over and over; to make all the same choices, even though you know how it ends.

The Company of Monsters

Once, he said, he’d been in a show whose chorus was a company of monsters, all in different masks. Before each performance the actors took a mask from a hamper full of them. After the show all the masks were thrown back in. The smell, Tom said – the smell inside those masks. God it was awful. All that trapped breath from all those different bodies. A different face every night. And you never knew who you’d be, or who had been you the night before; or who, tonight, was inside the face that you would wear tomorrow.

Break Character

It was a Friday night. It had been a good day at work – sunny weather, happy clients. I was maybe a little drunk, after two or three vodka sodas. I’d had pizza on my own, on the couch, and was still there, in a tracksuit, waiting for him to come home.