Before Victor I always dated men my own age. It’s hard to remember what they were like now, the smoothness of their skin, and how when I took my clothes off they seemed almost grateful. It’s even hard to remember what it felt like to be the person they loved, for whom the world was still opening. A person who is not, in some form, a refraction of Victor. When I first met him, I was practically a kid. He struck me as strong and utterly remarkable, a man against whose finished form I could lean to feel the pleasure of a permanent shape.

While I was eating lunch, one of the other guides, Ellen, who was thin and had a long neck, came into the staff room. She’d already picked up her mask, and put it on as a joke. She got right up in my face like the Texan in front of the Arbus, and peered down at me through the eyeholes. I let out a playful scream, but the truth was that the way she looked, like a giant praying mantis, gave me the creeps. Ellen started to bark with laughter, the sound trapped and muffled by the rubber mouthpiece. Then she pushed the mask back onto her head and finished the rest of her tuna-fish sandwich with the eyeholes staring blindly up at the ceiling. Sometimes Ellen and I talk about our relationships. Her boyfriend rock-climbs, calls her Lou, and got arrested for scalping tickets to Riverdance. She says I’m lucky to have a man with such refined taste, who has dedicated his life to the pursuit of ideas.

Victor’s sense of humor is also unusual. He’s a medievalist, which already suggests something about his tastes, but add to that the fact that he wrote his dissertation on the penal system in thirteenth-century Burgundy, and you begin to have a real sense of what a person like Victor might find funny. When we first started dating, I found the blackness of his humor charming. It drew attention to the difference in our ages, leaving me free to take on the role of the naive, uncorrupted youth. Soon Victor will be forty-five. When he doesn’t shave, some of the hairs in his beard come in silver, and sometimes, lying with my cheek against his, a sense of gratitude still comes over me and I love him more than ever. I have the feeling then that Victor is standing between me and some distant harm, and that his presence is what shields me from it. I curl myself up in his arms like a cat, and when he asks why I’m being so affectionate I only smile and rub my eyelid against the pleasant roughness of his chin.