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.

While Victor went to get the Scrabble board I cleared our plates, piling them in the sink with the dirty pots and pans in which the remains of our dinner were already congealing. The sight of them gave me a vague nauseated feeling. On the way back to the living room I passed the boxes with our gas masks where I’d left them sitting by the door. I picked them up and carried them over to the sofa, one under each arm, and while Victor was setting up the board I opened them. I pulled one out of the wrapping, and the instructions fluttered to the floor.

“Look,” I said, holding it up. It was the kind Victor had asked for, the basic kind everyone was getting with large round eyeholes and a short trunk over the mouth.