Victor must have felt it too, because despite the grim uncertainty of the news and the future threat of scarcity, the meal he’d prepared was a feast. We ate Japanese style, sitting on cushions around the coffee table, the television turned down low behind us. There was duck cooked with apricots and raspberries, and salad with pomegranate seeds. He turned off the lights, lit candles, and opened a bottle of wine from the region where his family comes from in Languedoc. I told him about the scene at the distribution center. He stopped eating and stared at me the way he used to when I was a student and would sit in his office scratching my bare knees. In the middle of a sentence he leaned across the corner of the table and kissed me. His tongue was in my mouth, and he slipped his hand under my bra. When I pushed my hand against the hardness under his jeans, he groaned and rolled on top of me. He unbuckled his belt, and I inhaled sharply when he pulled off my pants and I felt him against my stomach, felt my spine crack, and my ribs pressing into the floorboards.

We ate dessert flushed and damp with sweat. It had been a long time since we’d done something like that. Despite Victor’s interest in the passion of the Middle Ages, his campaign in favor of friction and conflict, even he would have to admit that our own relationship was closer to the stable average of which he was so critical. We’d been living together for five years, and our days and nights had taken on a certain familiar order dictated by my hours at the museum and Victor’s at the university, and the great, silent country of hours that Victor spent at work in his study.

The candles were burning deep, their centers already liquid.

Victor shared out what was left of the wine into our glasses, and even though I was already feeling a little drunk, I swallowed mine down in a couple of gulps. We turned up the news again and listened, but there wasn’t any new information, just the same images, over and over, of people trying on gas masks and walking around with them as if they were testing the feel of new shoes. Neither of us was tired, or maybe we didn’t want the evening to end, didn’t want to go to sleep and wake up to whatever the world would bring us tomorrow, so we decided to play a game of Scrabble. Victor is obsessed with the game and must know every three-letter word in the language. It helps that his English is impeccable. My ear is so used to his accent that there are times when I almost forget that most of Victor’s life took place in another idiom, with different expressions for pleasure and pain, in sentences to me foreign and incomprehensible. Sometimes I come across Victor exclaiming aloud to himself in French, and I am reminded of this other life, for a moment thrown off guard, and forced to add a third, secret Victor to the Victors I already know.