I met Victor in my last year of college. He was the professor of my medieval history class. Victor is French, and so he didn’t have any hang-ups about going out with a student. After graduation I moved in with him and got a job giving tours at the Metropolitan Museum. Though the life we live together now feels like the only one I know, there are moments when I still imagine another life, with different things in it. A life with someone who is not Victor, and who is nothing like him.

On the steps down to the subway I passed a man coming up wearing a gas mask. It wasn’t the kind Victor was talking about. This one was fancier, with circles over the nose and mouth and on each cheek, the one on the left twice the size of the others, like a goiter. The man was wearing a red silk tie and a suit that looked like it had just been unwrapped from the dry cleaner.

The sight of him was unnerving, and people stopped to stare. Some probably hadn’t heard the news that morning, and the ones that had were wondering if there had been an update. There had been warnings before about the possible need for the masks, but this was the first time they were actually being distributed, and obviously it set everyone on edge. When I went down to the subway platform, there were a few people who’d already gone to the distribution centers and were carrying their masks in cardboard boxes. I thought about going to pick ours up, but I was late for work and the first tour of the day is always my favorite. The light comes in softly through the skylights, illuminating the Madonnas and the saints.

There were only five people in my morning tour: a couple from Texas, a mother and daughter from Munich, and a cellist named Paul. He had beautiful hands. I noticed them when he touched his forehead. Everyone was feeling a little nervous, and we spent the first few minutes talking about the news in the hushed tones used in museums. When the group is small, I usually ask the visitors what they’re interested in and try to tailor the tour to their tastes. The man from Texas had a gold ring on his pinkie and said he was a big fan of Renoir. He pronounced it Rin-Waa, and his wife smiled in agreement.

Paul was interested in the museum’s photography collection, so I started off in the room with the Walker Evanses. I’ve always been struck by his photographs, their sparse and formal beauty. Here were these people caught in grim and hopeless lives, and he photographed them with the same precise detachment he would an old signboard. There’s something breathtaking about it, the lack of compassion in favor of cold clarity. There were a couple of photographs by Diane Arbus at the other end of the room, and I decided to show them to the group to give them a sense of the other end of the spectrum, someone who seemed to identify with her subjects on a terrifying level. Not only does Arbus seem to feel their unhappiness, I explained, but what’s more, they—the twins and the triplets, the misfit children, the odd couples, the tramps, the queens and freaks—seem to regard her with distraught looks, as if they recognize something darker and more haunting than their own lot. Sometimes, on a good day, that happens: as you talk, you find things you didn’t know you had to say.