“If there’s a choice, I’d like the kind with the eyeholes and the snout. The anteater one,” Victor said, going to the door for the newspaper.

“I don’t think this is a time to be picky.”

“True,” said Victor, already absorbed in reading.

It was November, and outside the air was crisp and seemed to carry the promise of snow. What I miss about living in the country is the morbid beauty of the autumns. In the city the leaves just turn brown and scatter. Once I took Victor back to the farm where I grew up, and it rained the whole time. We tramped around in the mud and I tried to show him how to milk a cow, but he couldn’t stand the smell of the hot milk. When we finally left, he said that one had to have a sense of humor to grow up in a place like that. I didn’t explain to him how the dogs used to come into the house smelling of the fields.

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.