“Let me see.” Victor turned it over in his hands and examined it. He pulled the bands back and slipped it over his face, then turned and regarded me calmly through the clear plastic lenses. He looked ugly and menacing, a strange creature I’d never seen before who was Victor nonetheless, and I felt a flash of anger rise to my cheeks. Without thinking, I leaned forward and blasted each eyehole with a shot of breath, fogging his view. For a moment neither of us moved. Victor continued to sit in silence, and I watched as the clouds of breath slowly evaporated, revealing his distant, dull pupils. Then, at last, when his view had cleared entirely, he winked.

“Take it off,” I demanded. Victor was motionless, as if the mask had made him demented. “Take it off.” My heart was beating fast. I felt a fierce urge to kick him, but I was sitting down. Before I could do anything, he slipped it off his face and laid it on the floor.

“It stinks of rubber,” he said. Then he went about choosing his seven letters. I watched his face in silence, surprised at myself.

Victor put down lemur for the first word, to which I added nut, and then Victor did geek and I did guns. Everything was fine for a while, the little crux of wooden letters expanding like some kind of self-multiplying message, garbled at first but, if you looked carefully enough using the right decoder, possessing its own intelligence, its subtle eloquence, neck sprouting from geek and lick from neck like some kind of confused desire trapped in the language with nothing to do but try desperately to spell its want. Maybe it was just the wine, but as we played I started to think that if we tried hard enough, we could figure out what it was that we were trying to say to each other after all these years, after all the pages read and the meals eaten and the silences kept, and then he put down positron, and all of a sudden I realized that I wanted to tell Victor that I was thinking of leaving him.

Victor won, as he often does, and as he was dumping the letters back into the drawstring pouch, I began to cry. At first Victor didn’t notice, but at last he glanced up, and a look of surprise crossed his face.

“It’s only a game,” he joked.